Academic offences and e‐learning: individual propensities in cheating

Abstract

It has been argued that the use of Information and Communications Technologies has made academic dishonesty easier but this does not necessarily mean that it is more prevalent. The study presented here investigated the attitudes to, and extent of, self-reported involvement in Internet supported dishonest academic practices. Multiple linear regression analyses showed that Internet experience, acceptability of cheating and assessment of risk predicted an individual student's acceptance of acts such as plagiarism as a legitimate way to achieve academic goals. There was a complex interrelationship among gender, frequency of Internet usage, and maturity of students. Academic offences tended to be more acceptable to males, but also to active Internet users, who were often female: that is females who joined the Internet culture were more prone to plagiarise than their non-active peers. New undergraduates were more likely to err than students in later years of their degree. These results show that there are a number of interrelated factors impacting on individuals' willingness to commit academic offences.

Ethical Guidelines for Conducting Experiments and Writing Scientific Reports in Psychology

“…Researchers in the United Kingdom, meanwhile, found that over 50% of the students they surveyed considered that plagiarizing information from the Internet was "acceptable" (Szabo & Underwood, 2004). Intriguing results include the fact that plagiarism is more frequent among men than women (Underwood & Szabo, 2003;Owens & White, 2013), and more common among frequent Internet users and students at lower levels than higher levels of the educational system (Underwood & Szabo, 2003). The latter result may be because more experienced students have learned and developed competencies for conducting research and writing scientific reports, and likely received more extensive training in the ethical aspects of scientific research during their formal academic careers.…”

Academic dishonesty in online education.

“…The quiz instructed participants to answer the questions using only the information in the excerpt; the researcher encouraged them to do their best and said that those with the highest scores would have the chance to enter a drawing for a $400 Visa gift card at the end of the survey. Immediately upon completion of the reading quiz, participants completed an amended form of Underwood and Szabo's (2003) Cheat QTR questionnaire and answered questions concerning their attitudes about the seriousness of certain cheating behaviors. They also answered a single item querying whether they used any resource other than the excerpt on the quiz to obtain answers to those 10 questions.…”

“…Some of the same factors can predict if students will cheat in their online classes, as seen in Kennedy, Nowak, Raghuraman, Thomas, and Davis's (2000) examination of faculty and student views of cheating in online courses. However, there are new considerations, and who cheats in online courses (Grijalva, Nowell, & Kerkvliet, 2006;Lanier, 2006) and how they cheat (Etter, Cramer, & Finn, 2006;Underwood & Szabo, 2003) This study explored cheating in online learning and how academic dishonesty may be undermining the ideas about and standards for higher education as set forth by the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (Bureau of Education, 1928) and the American Council on Education (1937) and leading to graduates who are not prepared to be good citizens in today's society. The purpose of this study was to determine if online and face-to-face students have the same attitudes about cheating, the accuracy of undergraduates' self-reports of cheating, and if the same types of undergraduate students report cheating in online classes as in prior studies of face-to-face classes.…”

“…Whether they are accurate or not in their self-reporting of cheating will be determined by their answers on the quiz and their answers on the amended Cheat QTR (Underwood & Szabo, 2003).…”

“…Underwood and Szabo (2003) investigated the willful involvement of students in cheating practices related to the Internet. They hoped to identify predictive characteristics of students who would cheat using the Internet, including students' perceptions of their peers' cheating behaviors and their instructor's responses to cheating behaviors, Internet use and experience, and gender.…”