Page title

Combatting Cheating

Main page content

Written by
Robert Prentice, Professor of Business Law at UT Austin & Fellow of the UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers

It is unfortunate that this site already contains a post on student cheating (“The Value of an Index Card” by Kirsten Gardner). Although cheating is an uncomfortable topic for professors to address, it is also a significant problem and cannot be ignored.

Why do students cheat? Well, the obvious reason is that they believe they need a good score on a specific test to get a particular grade in the course so they can raise their GPA in order to qualify for an interview with Investment Bank A, which will lead to a job offer and ultimately to a lucrative career and an apartment on the Upper East Side of New York City. Etcetera.

On occasion, that naked self-interest is enough to do the job. This is especially true if students think they will likely get away with the cheating. Even the subconscious impact of taking an exam in a dark room decreases the feeling of being observed, often leading students to cheat more, whereas adding light or a mirror or even a drawing of a pair of eyes increases the subconscious feeling of being observed. Monitoring students reduces cheating says a study by Covey and colleagues. It changes their cost-benefit calculus, whether consciously or unconsciously.

However, keep in mind that most students, like most people generally, have a positive impression of their own moral character. They think of themselves as good people and wish others to similarly think positively of them. According to psychologist Albert Bandura: “Because individuals have to live with themselves, they strive to preserve a self-view as decent, self-respecting people. There is no self-view more personally devastating than self-loathing.” Therefore, to do something bad like cheating, they must distance their good image from their bad acts through what Bandura calls mechanisms of moral disengagement.

Many of these mechanisms are forms of rationalization—an excuse people give themselves not to live up to their own standards. Several of the most common rationalizations, according to psychologist Vikas Anand and colleagues, are often invoked by students.

One is denial of injury, where a student says to herself: “I know I shouldn’t do this, but nobody is really being hurt. If no one is hurt, how can it be bad?”

Another is condemning the condemner, where a student says to himself: “I know I shouldn’t do this, but my professor has no right to criticize me because he is so unreasonable (or incompetent or stupid).”

Another is selective social comparison, where a student says to herself: “I know I shouldn’t cheat, but most other students in this class cheat way more than I do.”

Another favorite rationalization is social weighting, where students might say to themselves: “I know I shouldn’t do this, but I study harder than anyone else in this class and am still getting a ‘B’ so I deserve to cheat in order to get the ‘A’ that I deserve.”

The final and most significant factor to discuss is conformity bias, the tendency people have to take their cues as to how to act from the people around them. The evidence indicates students, like everyone else, are impacted by the actions (or perceived actions) and the standards (or perceived standards) of those around them. The more binge drinking students believe occurs at a university, the more likely these students are to binge drink themselves, because, “hey, everybody is doing it!” If informed that there is less binge drinking than they’ve thought, students tend to binge drink less themselves, matching their perception of the local social norm.

One study found that the most significant factor in determining the level of cheating in a school is, as with binge-drinking, how much cheating students believe their peers are doing: “Academic dishonesty not only is learned from observing the behavior of peers, but … peers’ behavior provides a kind of normative support for cheating” (McCabe & Treviño).

In one striking study, students who saw cheating by another student were more likely to cheat themselves, especially if the cheating student was wearing a sweatshirt from their same school. Cheating actually went down if the observed student was wearing a sweatshirt from a rival school. We take our behavioral cues from our in-group, not from an out-group member. “Across almost two decades of research into cheating, students’ perceptions of peer behavior consistently emerged as the most influential variable affecting cheating” (Bradley).

Final tips:

  • The best way to reduce cheating is, ironically, to reduce cheating (or at least convince students that there is less cheating going on). Reducing cheating will neutralize and perhaps even reverse the impact of the conformity bias.
  • As a professor, exhibit the qualities you know you should—competence, dedication, kindness, caring, and hard work. That behavior will undermine some of the most common rationalizations for cheating.
  • Don’t hire private detectives to follow your students around, but do engage in a reasonable amount of diligence in policing exams.
  • Listen to Hemingway and hold exams in a clean, well-lighted place.
  • Finally, put your school’s honor code or some other statement of honest intention on any exams and have students sign it before they begin. This will put ethics in their frame of reference, which has a tendency to reduce cheating.

 

References

Vikas Anand, et al., “Business as Usual: The Acceptance and Perpetuation of Corruption in Organizations,” 18 Academy of Management Executive 39 (2004).

Dan Ariely, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves (2012).

John M. Bradley, “Empowering Employees to Prevent Fraud in Nonprofit Organizations,” (2014).

David Callahan, The Cheating Culture: Why Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead (2004).

Mark Covey et al., “Self-monitoring, Surveillance, and Incentive Effects on Cheating,” 129 Journal of Social Psychology 673 (1989).

Don McCabe and Linda Treviño, “Academic Dishonesty: Honor Codes and Other Contextual Influences,” 64 Journal of Higher Education 522 (1993).

H. Wesley Perkins, “College Student Misperceptions of Alcohol and Other Drug Norms among Peers,” in Designing Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention Programs in Higher Education 177-206 (U.S. Dept. of Education ed. 1997).