Cheating after the test: who does it and how often?

Abstract

Self-reports suggest >50% of university students cheat at some point in their academic career (Christensen Hughes JM, McCabe DL. 36: 49-63, 2006), although objective values of academic misconduct (AM) are difficult to obtain. In a physiology-based department, we had a concern that students were altering written tests and resubmitting them for higher grades; thereby compromising the integrity of our primary assessment style. Therefore, we directly quantified the prevalence of AM on written tests in 11 courses across the department. Three thousand six hundred and twenty midterms were scanned, and any midterm submitted for regrading was compared with its original for evidence of AM. Student characteristics, test details, and course information were recorded. On a department level, results show that this form of AM was rare: prevalent on 2.2% of all tests written. However, of the tests submitted for regrading, 17.4% contained AM (range: 0-26%). The majority of AM was conducted by high-achieving students, (60% of offenders earned>80%), and there was a trend toward women being more likely to commit AM ( = 0.056). While our results objectively show that this type of AM is low, we highlight that large competitive courses face significantly higher prevalence, and high-achieving students may have gone underreported in previous literature. Vigilance should be employed by all faculty who accept tests for regrading.

High‐Tech Cheating: What's the Solution?

“…The proliferation of technologies to enable cheating indicates the desire to engage in these academically dishonest behaviors, but why do students feel the need to cheat in the first place? It is easy to assume that cheating would stem from low academic achievement, but, in fact, high‐achieving students cheat more often than lower‐performing students (Ottaway, Murrant, and Ritchie, 2017). One of the biggest motivators to cheat is the pressure to succeed academically.…”

Linking facts with judgment: a critical thinking component in introductory calculus physics for engineering students

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Qualitative content analysis of lab report discussion in introductory physics for engineering and technology students

“…Academic misconduct has always been an issue when instructors are required to maintain fairness. In fact, a recent finding showed that it is the high achiever that would have a higher tendency to cheat, a break from the traditional viewpoint that low achievers would cheat more often 1 . City University of New York has a writing intensive requirement and physics lab report writing would be acceptable for meeting that writing requirement 2 .…”