Cheating in College: Why Students Do It and What Educators Can Do about It

2. Where to Begin: Academic Dishonesty among High School Students

15 chapter two Where to Begin Academic Dishonesty among High School Students As noted in chapter 1, our work has primarily focused on the college level. However, about a decade ago, we made the decision that to better understand what we were observing among college students, we needed to develop some understanding of the experience they brought with them from high school. Because the available research on the level of cheating among high school students was limited (e.g., Brandes 1986; Schab 1991), we decided to generate some of our own data. In this chapter we discuss what we have learned about the attitudes and beliefs concerning academic integrity and dishonesty that college students carry with them from high school to their higher education experience. Work Begun by Others We begin by summarizing what we know about high school students’ attitudes and cheating behavior from notable work in this area. For example , Davis and his colleagues (1992) did some important empirical work, but their research focused more on the relationship between cheating and individual attributes than on the institutional perspective that is of more interest to us. In addition, although they did discuss high school cheating, their primary focus was on college cheating. Indeed, their data on high school cheating were obtained from a sample of college students at 35 schools (including 13 private schools and 8 two-year colleges) whom they surveyed concerning their cheating experiences in both high school and college. These researchers reported, as we corroborate later, that students admit to cheating at even higher rates in high school than in college. For example, using the college attended by The authors acknowledge Joseph Gaspar, a doctoral student at Rutgers, for his assistance in preparing the literature review for this chapter. 16 cheating in college students as their unit of analysis, Davis et al. found self-reported levels of high school cheating ranging from a low of 51% to a high of 83%, compared with self-reported levels of cheating in college ranging from 9%, reported by a sample of women at a small liberal arts college, to 64%, reported by a sample of men at a regional university. Much of the other literature available in 1999, when we started surveying high school students, focused primarily on such variables as willingness to cheat (e.g., Coles, Hunter, and See 1989), the seriousness of cheating as perceived by both faculty and students (e.g., Evans and Craig 1990), and the role of moral reasoning (e.g., Bruggeman and Hart 1996). Bruggeman and Hart found self-reported levels of cheating among high school students that fell well within the range reported earlier by Davis and coauthors: in the Bruggeman and Hart survey, 70% among 90 students attending a religiously affiliated high school versus 78% reported by 131 students attending a private but secular high school in the same region. Evans and Craig (1990) did not attempt to quantify the level of cheating , but their survey is important. They administered a 109-item Likerttype survey to 1,763 students and 107 teachers in four middle schools (grades 7 and 8) that fed two senior high schools (grades 9 through 12) in a single school district in Washington State. As defined by the authors , the survey covered four domains: problem awareness and seriousness , knowledge of cheating, causal attributions for cheating, and “a subject’s beliefs about the efficacy of various strategies designed to prevent or reduce cheating” (Evans and Craig 1990, 45). Much of what the authors described as the major findings of their survey is not surprising. For example, they reported that both students and faculty were sensitive to (aware of) the incidence of cheating—a result that has received widespread support in other work, including our own. Another of their findings that we have also observed in our own work was that students were more likely than teachers to attribute the presence of cheating to such factors as their classrooms and teachers, as well as themselves— for example, students saw part-time work as a more significant correlate of cheating than did teachers. But both groups were skeptical about the ability of various strategies to reduce cheating, including the use of honor codes. We were not surprised to learn that students and teachers who had never “lived” under such a code would be skeptical about its effectiveness. But we have also seen students and teachers who, when introduced to an honor code environment, grow to understand...