Should student do cheating or not ?

         Cheating is dishonest behaviour intended to gain academic advantage. Examples of cheating include looking at someone’s test, getting information for someone else during a test, giving someone else information or allowing someone to copy from your test or bringing a ‘cheat sheet’ into a test. Cheating same as plagiarism. Plagiarism means using another’s work without giving credit card. Understanding student cheating is particularly important given trends that show cheating is widespread and on the rise. In 1964, Bill Bowers published the first large-scale study of cheating in institutions of higher learning. Bowers surveyed more than 5,000 students in a diverse sample of 99 U.S. colleges and universities and found that three fourths of the respondents had engaged in one or more incidents of academic dishonesty. This study was replicated some 30 years later by McCabe and Treviño (1997) at 9 of the schools who had participated in Bowers’s original survey. Although McCabe and Treviño observed only a modest increase in overall cheating, significant increases were found in the most explicit forms of test or exam cheating.

     As we know that some students do cheating because their behaviour, they prefer depends on their friends when doing a test or an exam. In general, student understanding of appropriate citation techniques seems to have changed, and selected behaviors that students may have classified as plagiarism in Bowers’s (1964) study do not appear to be considered plagiarism by many students today. For example, although most students understand that quoting someone’s work word for word demands a citation, they seem to be less clear on the need to cite the presentation of someone else’s ideas when the students present them in their own words. The reason why the student do cheating because they want to finish their work easily and they do not want to take any difficulties. In spite of Bowers’s (1964) conclusions about the powerful influence of institutional context on student decisions to cheat, between the 1960s and 1990 most of the research on student cheating focused on the role of individual factors related to cheating behavior. This stream of research revealed that factors such as gender, grade point average (GPA), work ethic, Type A behavior, competitive achievement striving, and self-esteem can significantly influence the prevalence of cheating (e.g., Baird, 1980; Eisenberger & Shank, 1985; Perry, Kane, Bernesser, & Spicker, 1990; Ward, 1986; Ward &Beck, 1990). With few exceptions, the thrust of this research has centered on one of the most basic ethical decisions faced by college students—to cheat or not to cheat on their academic work. Research shows that all too often these pressures lead to decisions to engage in various forms of academic dishonesty (e.g., Bowers, 1964; McCabe, Treviño, & Butterfield, 1999). Research also shows that these transgressions are often overlooked or treated lightly by faculty who do not want to become involved in what they  perceive as the bureaucratic procedures designed to adjudicate allegations of academic dishonesty on their campus (e.g., McCabe, 1993;Nuss, 1984; Singhal, 1982). Students who might otherwise complete their work honestly observe this phenomenon and convince themselves they cannot afford to be disadvantaged by students who cheat and go unreported or unpunished.

     Another reason do cheating that can bring impact to effect of honor codes on students. Although Bowers (1964), McCabe and Treviño (1993), and others have documented the powerful effect of such codes, how and why they work when students on code campuses face the same grade pressures as their peers else where is not well understood. Gaining additional insight into this question was the subject of a qualitative study of college cheating reported by McCabe et al. (1999). McCabe et al analyzed data from more than 1,700 students at 31 U.S. colleges and universities, approximately half of which employed an honor code. Data for this study were collected in the form of open-ended comments made by students at the end of a larger survey on college cheating. Many of these comments corroborated the importance of the institutional–contextual factors found to be related to academic integrity by McCabe and Treviño (1993,1997). Contextual influences on cheating that were emphasized by students included the degree to which the code is deeply embedded in a culture of integrity; the degree to which a school has a supportive, trusting atmosphere; competitive pressures; the severity of punishments; the existence of clear  rules regarding unacceptable behavior; faculty monitoring; peer pressure to cheat or not to cheat; the likelihood of being caught or reported; and class size. In particular, the results suggest that students at honor code schools view academic integrity in a very different way from their noncode counterparts. The code students were less likely to cheat, were less likely to rationalize or justify any cheating behavior that they did admit to, and were more likely to talk about the importance of integrity and about how a moral community can minimize cheating. Although students at both types of schools report that they cheat and feel many different sources of pressure to cheat, honor code students apparently do not succumb to these pressures as easily or as often as noncode students.

      Other perspectives said that cheating is wrong. Since cheating is obviously wrong, arguments against it (it provides an unfair advantage,  it hinders learning). Asking why cheating is wrong may seem a silly question or a gratuitous provocation. Indeed, since “just about everyone agrees that cheating is bad and that we need to take steps to prevent it” (Kohn,2007), no question seems warranted and no argument seems needed. Talk about cheating is then a matter of outrage: “students STOLE a password and then they used it to CHEAT” (Lingen, 2006), “plagiarism is WRONG no matter  what  the extent”  (Parmley,  2000).  A.  J.  Ayer  would have said that  a claim that cheating is wrong is just writing ‘cheating’  followed by some special  exclamation mark  Lingen and Parmley prefer capitals. A common view is that cheating is forbidden and cheaters break  a rule. For instance, the focus of Burkill and Abbey  (2004) on “regulations”  and on “penalties” for “ignoring  academic conventions” indicates that to them the main reasons for students  to  avoid cheating are obedience to rules and avoidance of penalties. However, Alfie  Kohn (2007)  draws  attention to those “cases where  what  is regarded as cheating actually consists of a failure to abide by restrictions that may be arbitrary and difficult to defend”. Breaking a rule is  illegitimate only if  the rule is  legitimate.  Either  the rule has a rational  justification and this rather than breaking a rule makes cheating wrong, or the rule is arbitrary and there is no reason to endorse it. In other words, cheating should be forbidden because it is wrong,  not wrong because it  is forbidden. Obviously, the wrongness of cheating should be an ethical  not  a bureaucratic question. As Drake (1941) pointed out, cheating can be frustrating to the instructors, who may “interpret such behaviour as a direct affront to themselves.” When Johnston (1991) found out that students had cheated she felt betrayed: “how could they do this to me?”. While this may explain better than genuine arguments why teachers dislike cheating it does not show that cheating is wrong. It is interesting to note that this is generally not offered as an argument in articles looking at cheating in a ‘cold’ objective way but can be found in more personal papers, such as that of Johnston. This seems to acknowledge that this is both a real reaction of the ‘victims’ of cheaters and not perceived as a valid argument against cheating.                                                                                                                                                    

     Since everything else depends on it,  the question of  the wrongness  of cheating is the most important question. CHEATING AND GRADES. It is a wide-spread error in issues of cheating to assume that cheating is obviously wrong (Bouville,2007b; 2008b; 2008c). In particular, if one does not know why cheating is wrong one cannot set policies that  would solve the problem. LIMITS OF THE ARGUMENT OF UNFAIR ADVANTAGE. Hall et al. (1995) found that a deep approach to learning  correlated negatively with SAT scores; students who merely learned by rote and who minimized their involvement or tried to get good grades without caring about what they learnt obtained higher scores than students who sought a deeper understanding of what they were taught. In other words, students who had good work habits and a sound mindset that would help them succeed in the long run received lower  SAT scores — students most likely to succeed are treated as least desirable. Cheating undermines feedback. Passow et  al. (2006) argue that “acts of academic dishonesty undermine the validity of measures of student learning”. If teachers do not know that there is something the students do not understand (if they cheat it may seem that they understand) then it is impossible for them to know whether to accelerate or slow down, on what to focus, or how to re-design their lectures next year — in the long term, cheating hurts the students. It also prevents teachers from providing students with relevant feedback.  One should remark that this argument is more relevant to homework than to exams (especially final exams) because the latter are used more for grading or ranking and less for feedback, making cheating on homework worse than cheating on finals. Similarly, cheating on entrance exams would not be wrong at all since these are not meant to provide any feedback at all. In other words, this argument forces us to hold as worst the instances of cheating that would generally be seen as mildest. This is not surprising since feedback (either way)  is not  genuinely seen as of prime importance;  that  grades matter more is clearly reflected in the far  greater  importance given (by both students  and teachers) to exams compared to homework. Cheating undermines learning. A more important issue with cheating is that it can directly get in the way of learning. For instance, students who copy homework assignments instead of doing them themselves will not learn what  they should. Likewise, having a book in one’s lap does not have the same didactic impact as studying for an exam. For cheaters to be punished because cheating hinders learning. Cheating on this assignment must hinder learning. One should remark that it may be the absence of cheating, rather than cheating,  that hinders learning. For instance, Stephens (2005) found that “only 18 percent [of high school students] believed that ‘working on an assignment with other students when the teacher  asked for  individual  work’ was cheating”. This is because “students regarded this forbidden collaboration as furthering their knowledge and understanding, and therefore saw it as an act of learning

rather than a form of cheating” (also see Kohn, 2007).

      Cheating is disliked to a great extent because it breaks a rule and because teachers take it as a personal offense. However, for cheating to be wrong one must justify the rule forbidding cheating. And the fact that  the teacher dislikes what  a student did does not necessarily mean that the student  did something wrong. There can be an unfair advantage only when grades are used as proxies to estimate how students will  fare in the future. The argument of unfair advantage is thus limited in its scope mostly entrance exams and other ‘high stake’ tests. Taking cheating to be essentially a matter of unfair advantage means that education is essentially a fight of all against all or it means that cheating can occur (or matter) only in a few specific situations.

References :

Bowers, W. J. (1964). Student dishonesty and its control in college. New York: Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University.

Davis, S. F., Grover, C. A., Becker, A. H., & McGregor, L. N. (1992). Academic dishonesty: Prevalence, determinants, techniques, and punishments. Teaching of Psychology, 19, 16–20.

Baird, J. S. (1980). Current trends in college cheating. Psychology in the Schools, 17, 515–522.

Eisenberger, R., &Shank, D. M. (1985). Personal work ethic and effort training affect cheating. Journal

of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 520–528.

McCabe, D. L. (1992). The influence of situational ethics on cheating among college students. Sociological Inquiry, 62, 365–374.

McCabe, D. L. (1993). Faculty responses to academic dishonesty: The influence of student honor codes. Research in Higher Education, 34, 647–658.

McCabe, D. L., & Pavela, G. R. (1997). Ten principles of academic integrity. The Journal of College and University Law, 24, 117–118.

McCabe, D. L., &Treviño, L. K. (1993). Academic dishonesty: Honor codes and other contextual influences. Journal of Higher Education, 64, 522–538.

McCabe, D. L., &Treviño, L. K. (1997). Individual and contextual influences on academic dishonesty: A multicampus investigation. Research in Higher Education, 38, 379–396.

McCabe, D. L., Treviño, L. K., & Butterfield, K. D. (1999). Academic integrity in honor code and non-honor code environments: A qualitative investigation. Journal of Higher Education, 70, 211–234

Bouville,  M.  (2007b)  Cheating  and  neutralization.  Available  at http://www.mathieu.bouville.name/ education-ethics/Bouville-neutralization-empiricism.pdf.

Drake, C. A. (1941) Why students cheat, Journal of Higher Education 12, 418–420.

Name : Danar Priyambodo

Final Project