EDITION
To Donald L. McCabe and the other founders of the International Center for Academic Integrity
CHAPTER 1 Cheating Academic Integrity: Lessons from 30 Years of Research
Tricia Bertram Gallant1 and David A. Rettinger2
1University of California, San Diego
2University of Mary Washington
To cheat means to “act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage” (Oxford Languages). Most readers will bristle at the thought of being lied to or being treated unfairly. This bristle instinct seems to be biological. In 2003, Brosnan and de Waal published a study in Nature showing that capuchin monkeys are exquisitely sensitive to unfairness, including the famous video of one experimental subject throwing cucumbers at the experimenter after witnessing an unfairly generous reward of grapes to another monkey. So, while it seems clear that both humans and monkeys detest unfairness, cheating in school persists. How can this be the case?
Stephens (2019) argued that cheating persists because it is natural and normal; that is, the propensity to cheat (deceive or trick), despite our instinct to avoid unfairness, was developed as a method for survival. This evolutionary development is even exemplified in our contemporary colloquial language such as in the English phrase “cheating death”.
It is within this vein that this book is written. The authors in this book illustrate not only how students cheat academic integrity by their decisions, choices and behaviors but also how instructors and higher education institutions cheat academic integrity by their decisions, choices and behaviors. In other words, through this book, we will learn that cheating occurs because of them (the students) and because of us (the faculty and staff).
It is imperative that we, as educators, understand the complex relationship between forces that can serve either to cheat academic integrity or to promote and support it. While cheating may be normal and natural, it is still “unethical and evitable” (Stephens, 2019). It is unethical because left unaddressed, cheating creates tears in the fabric of higher education. Cheating undermines raison dêtre, which can be stated simply as facilitating, assessing, and certifying learning. Given the essential role that higher education plays in twenty‐first century economics, democracy, health and sustainability, we cannot afford to idly watch the fabric be torn or participate in the tearing ourselves. The good news is that there is no need to do so. The last 30 years of research has taught us that cheating is evitable; we can do things to mitigate and minimize it.
This book, along with its companion piece (a special issue of the Journal of College and Character, volume 23(1), published in February 2022), illuminates a positive way forward that is not only good for our students but also for our shared goals of growing and certifying knowledge as well as developing ethical citizens and professionals. Both this volume and the special issue were created to celebrate and learn from 30 years of research on academic integrity, a research agenda that can be largely credited to the initial research agenda of Donald McCabe and the formation of the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) in 1992. Together, these two volumes provide researchers, instructors, staff, and administrators with a scholarly perspective on the causes and context of cheating as well as the internal and external factors that serve to either promote and support academic integrity or to cheat academic integrity.
INTRODUCTION OF EACH CHAPTER
The last 30 years of research on academic integrity was vast, so we start at the beginning with two chapters that look at what we know about the prevalence of cheating during this time. First, in Trends in Plagiarism and Cheating Prevalence, Curtis makes an important declaration that may surprise our readers: The prevalence of cheating and plagiarism may have decreased, not increased, over the last 30 years. Curtis posits this may be a result of an increase in preventative measures taken by higher education institutions to enhance awareness of honor and integrity as well as skills in writing with integrity. Despite this good news, though, Curtis warns us that there are threats to integrity not yet realized, including rippling effects of the COVID pandemic and emerging technologies that will require substantive changes to forms of assessment less we be assessing how well machines, rather than our students, are demonstrating knowledge and abilities.
Lancaster picks up on Curtis' idea of “rippling effects” in his piece on contract cheating. Lancaster notes that while the term contract cheating was coined in 2006 and the behavior (arranging for someone else to complete your academic work) existed long before then, the explosion of research on contract cheating really did not occur until 2017. Since that time, our understanding of contract cheating has expanded exponentially. We now know, for example, that friends and families are the most likely providers of contract cheating services, and that remote instruction substantially increased the use of commercial contract cheating providers, especially amongst those that brand themselves as legitimate “homework help sites”. Lancaster foreshadows the challenging road ahead for academic integrity with the emerging technologies, such as automated writing and problem solving programs achievable through artificial intelligence. Like Curtis, Lancaster suggests that we must approach education very differently now and in the future from a learning perspective, but Lancaster also adds from a cybersecurity or safety perspective.
So, why are we here, still worrying about cheating and threats to the integrity of the academic enterprise after 30 years of research and hundreds of years of practice? The next two chapters try to answer that question.
First, readers are drawn into the psychological research on cheating as explored by Anderman and colleagues, particularly the research into academic motivation and academic integrity. This chapter reminds us that cheating is rather natural, a normal and expected phenomenon brought on by individual human factors like how and to what we attribute the cause of events (attribution theory), how our goal orientations influence our behaviors (achievement goal theory), how our behaviors are also shaped by what we see happening around us in our environment and by our peers (social‐cognitive theory), how our expectations for success or self‐efficacy influence our choices and behaviors (Situated Expectancy‐Value Theory), and finally, how our needs for autonomy, competence and belonging may dictate how we respond when these need resolution is frustrated (self‐determination theory). Anderman and colleagues’ review of the research educates us that while these theories explain why cheating is a normal outgrowth of education and development, the research and theories also help us identify solutions to minimize cheating and enhance integrity and learning. Readers interested in crafting their own research agendas to explore academic motivation and academic integrity are provided suggestions for moving the knowledge forward, and those interested in evolving their own teaching to enhance academic integrity may pick and choose from the nine practical suggestions offered in the chapter.
Next, Waltzer and Dahl use insights from psychological theories and research to posit a bold new hypothesis that students do perceive cheating as “wrong”, and they act in concordance with this moral judgement the majority of the time. However, when students do cheat, which the authors argue is rare, it happens for one of three psychological causes: 1) students perceive the behavior incorrectly based on the facts available to them; 2) students evaluate the act as cheating but still consider it a better option than an alternative; or 3) students decide the act is cheating but yet acceptable in some circumstances. Waltzer and Dahl use the literature of the last 30 years to level out support for their hypothesis as well as to suggest the resulting implications for research and practice. For example, when do students see cheating as acceptable or not? Do notions of cheating develop or change over time? What types of interventions could be designed to simultaneously target student perceptions, evaluations, and decisions about cheating?
