A Little Too Much Help from Their Friends
J. McGrath Cohoon and Allison E. Rogers
University of Virginia

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under
grant number EIA0089959. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations
expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views
of the National Science Foundation.
Direct communications to J. McGrath Cohoon, University of Virginia, Curry School of
Education, 405 Emmet Street South, Charlottesville VA 22904-4265
434-924-8992
jmcohoon@virginia.edu
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A Little Too Much Help from Their Friends
Academic dishonesty among college students is a common form of deviant
behavior that is related significantly to institutional and classroom environmental factors.
The present study examined student and faculty perceptions of cheating’s prevalence and
consequences, and their reactions to it. Interviews and focus groups with 325 faculty and
students at 18 computer science departments were analyzed for consistency between
student and faculty perceptions and the effect of student-instructor relationships. Data
from a multi-mode survey of 1716 faculty provided additional evidence about prevalence.
The results extend previous research by examining the issue in the context of computer
science, a discipline where cheating has been reported to be particularly common. Our
observations corroborate previous findings about the conditions that affect college
student cheating, student and faculty concern about cheating, and responses to cheating.
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A Little Too Much Help from Their Friends
Interviewer: “Is cheating an issue?”
Student: “Well, I don’t even want to get started on that. … I mean, of course,
people are passing around the code.”
This exchange with one of 325 undergraduates and faculty at computer science
departments across the U.S. illustrates both the prevalence of academic dishonesty and
the sensitivity of the issue. Cheating appears to be especially common in the discipline of
computer science (CS), where conditions provide both means and incentives. As a result,
cheating in CS is a matter of serious concern for many faculty, and even more so for
students.
This paper describes student and faculty perceptions of cheating’s prevalence and
consequences, their reactions to it, and the effect of student-instructor relationships. The
data demonstrate the following:

Cheating is a serious concern for many students.

Some students do not consider cheating to be wrong.

Student complaints about cheating were more prevalent in departments where
students also complained about faculty behavior.

There were no obvious gender differences in student concern with cheating.

Faculty varied as to whether they accepted policing as part of their role.

Reports of cheating varied by CS department.

Within departments, students and faculty generally had similar perceptions
about the prevalence of cheating.
These findings corroborate previous results about the conditions that affect college
student cheating, student and faculty concern about cheating, and responses to cheating.
While academic dishonesty may be prevalent particularly in CS, the circumstances
surrounding it are similar to those found in other disciplines.
Background
Although reported rates vary, there is general agreement that cheating is and has
been quite common among undergraduates (Crown and Spiller 1998). For example, a
national study of 6096 undergraduate students at 31 of the nation’s most selective
universities found that a startling 67.4% of students reported cheating at least once as
undergraduates (McCabe 1993). Another multi-institution study found a 61.2% cheating
rate in 1994, increased from the 54% rate the same researchers found ten years earlier
(Diekhoff, LaBeff, Clark, Williams, Francis, and Haines 1996). On the lower end of
prevalence, only 11.6 percent of 280 undergraduates at two liberal arts universities
reported having cheated in specified classes (Pulvers and Diekhoff 1999), but these
students were not asked if they had ever cheated during college. The different definitions
of cheating, as well as possible changes over time may account for much of the variety in
rates reported.
Findings from a long-standing multi-institution program of research on academic
dishonesty showed that peers and other contextual factors are most influential when it
comes to cheating (McCabe, Trevino, and Butterfield 2001). Whether fellow students
cheat, whether fellow students disapprove of cheating, and student perceptions of how
severe cheating penalties are all had significant effects on student cheating. These studies
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also found that faculty are reluctant to report cheating, that cheating is an important issue
for students, that student relationships with faculty may discourage cheating (Stearns
2001), and that gender differences within similar majors are small.
The comparison of gendered cheating within similar majors is significant because
it is an open question whether gender is a discriminating factor in academic dishonesty.
In the past, research found significant gender differences in cheating. However, most
recent research finds no such difference (Crown and Spiller 1998). It has been
hypothesized that gender differences in cheating are due to socialization (Ward and Beck
1990), and that the change in gendered cheating behavior in recent years is due to
“converging role requirements among males and females in collegiate settings” (Crown
and Spiller 1998). The source of this convergence may be women’s increasing
participation in male-dominated disciplines (McCabe and Trevino 1996) rather than
changes in how men and women are socialized. As more women enter disciplines such as
business, science, and engineering, they experience similar conditions to those
experienced by men, and their cheating behavior becomes more like that of men.
Cheating may be more common among students in computer science than it is
among students in the average discipline. This expectation is based on CS being a
traditionally male major; these male majors often have the highest rates of student
cheating according to McCabe and Treviño (1996). Certainly, CS has a reputation for
tough grading, a feature that has been associated with cheating (Diekhoff et al. 1996;
McCabe, Trevino, and Butterfield 2001). Also, CS is often considered an engineering
discipline, and students in these fields appear to be among the most frequent cheaters
(Harding, Carpenter, Montgomery, and Steneck 2001).
We use data from interviews, focus groups, and surveys to examine cheating in
undergraduate computer science in light of these previous research findings.
Methods
Qualitative data was collected as part of a three-year study of departmental factors
in gendered attrition from undergraduate computing majors. During the winter and spring
of 2001, we conducted on-site, semi-structured interviews with chairpersons and faculty
Table 1. Characteristics of Study Institutions
Public
Population
74%
Interview Sites
65%
36%
16%
39%
5%
1%
2%
342
41%
29%
24%
0%
6%
0%
401
210 departments at
210 institutions
18 departments at 17
institutions
Carnegie Classification
R1 and R2
D1 & D2
C1 & C2
LA1 & LA2
ENG
BUS
CS Average Enrollment 1994-2000*
N
* Enrollment is based on the 71 departments that provided this information
4
at 18 CS departments. Focus groups were conducted with undergraduate students in 16 of
these departments.
The departments were selected from mid- to large-size CS departments located in
the contiguous US. These colleges and universities produced the majority of CS
baccalaureates in the latter 1990s. Interview sites were selected for variety in gender
composition, geographic location, and institutional type. A comparison of characteristics
for interview departments and departments in the study population is presented in Table
1.
Participants included 182 volunteer computer science undergraduates in sexsegregated focus groups. These groups explored how students coped with positive and
negative features of majoring in computer science. One hundred forty-three faculty
volunteers were interviewed individually regarding both their interactions with and their
observations of students in their department.
In addition to the interviews and focus groups, survey data were collected from
the chairperson and samples of faculty at all 209 departments that met our selection
criteria for size and/or quality. Sixty-eight percent (n=1716) of the eligible faculty
responded, and 159 of the 209 chairpersons responded.
Results
According to participants in these interviews and focus groups, cheating is
common among CS undergraduates. Cheating was mentioned by at least one person at
fourteen of the eighteen CS departments visited. When students spoke about cheating,
they usually expressed their distress over the behavior of classmates, and mentioned their
own behavior only occasionally. In general, students experienced their peers’ cheating as
discouraging because it seemed to put non-cheaters at a disadvantage. Struggling to earn
good grades in a difficult academic environment, and concern about how cheating would
affect their future careers made cheating an important issue for both the men and women
undergraduates in this study. Student responses to the situation ranged from trying to
avoid involvement with the dishonest actions of others, to occasional cheating when they
felt there was no other way to earn the grades that would keep them in the major, to
joining in with organized groups of cheating students. These concerns and reactions
seemed equally common for the men and women who participated in this study.
However, cheating appeared to be most prevalent in departments where students had
numerous complaints about faculty behavior.
Many faculty members also had concerns about student cheating, but their
responses to it were varied. Some faculty did nothing because they did not consider it
their responsibility to seek out and punish transgressors. Other faculty took preventive
measures of various types. And some faculty aggressively sought to uncover cheating by
using methods such as plagiarism detection software, and responded to cheating directly
or through their institution’s honor court.
Examples of these observations follow in the words of interview and focus group
participants.
Student perspective
When asked about discouraging experiences, the majority of student groups gave
the unanticipated response of including cheating among classmates as one item on a list
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that included academic issues, personal issues, and the image of the discipline. Students
usually volunteered this information in answer to an open-ended question about
experiences that discouraged their persistence in the computer science major.
Cheating discouraged students for several reasons. According to students in the
focus groups, cheating produced inequities in the effort they had to put into their work,
and gave cheaters an unfair competitive edge. They predicted that it would cheapen their
credentials and put them in the uncomfortable position of having unqualified co-workers.
Cheating was hard for students to avoid, and institutional responses sometimes raised the
specter of false accusations. For these reasons, students found cheating to be a negative
feature of their experience as computer science majors.
Several students gave examples of how cheating by classmates created inequity in
the amount of effort students put into their work. The two that follow illustrate how angry
honest students feel about this situation they saw as unfair.
I busted my ass in that class! I worked so hard, and I missed an A by one
point. … Then, this girl that I knew … had the programs from last
semester. … I just wanted to slap the crap out of her. … Cheating is, I
just cannot stand it!
[I]t’s frustrating to know that I’ve spent all this time, and this person
sitting here next to me or these five people sitting next to me … just
cheated on the test … and they’re coming out and having the same
degree as you did, and they did nothing. Or they did half of what you did.
The unfairness that angered these students was a common theme in student discussions of
cheating.
Although the average faculty member reports expecting only seven hours of
weekly homework per course, students believe their workload is much heavier. Student
estimations started at six to ten hours per assignment, but ranged as high as 30-40 hours
per assignment. And they certainly believed that they were working harder than their
peers in other majors. For example, one student saw his experience as a CS major to be
“the single most brutal process I have ever experienced in my life.” He went on to report
some public conversations he overheard about CS.
One guy was saying to the other guy, "Oh yeah, my roommate is in CS ###
and he is on the verge of cracking up. He can't stand it. It is the hardest
thing he has ever done". The other one [said], "Yeah all the CS majors
are crazy; it is the hardest subject in the whole school."
In another focus group, one student reported a similar experience with being a CS major
when he described one of his introductory courses.
I took that class with this notorious professor named [professor name]
and he was just really mean. He's brutal. He wouldn't help the students
at all and he discouraged asking questions, and he'd make fools of people
if they asked a question that was maybe trivial. So in that class, it started
with maybe 80 people, and over half of them were gone by the end of the
semester.
Under these conditions, it is no wonder that students who struggle to complete their work
honestly feel angry or frustrated when their classmates take unauthorized shortcuts.
Not only do honest students think they work more than dishonest students to
complete their assignments and prepare for tests, but they also believe that the amount of
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work they must do increases as a result of cheating. Some students reported that faculty
raised expectations in response to the ease with which cheaters completed tasks. One
student described the situation in the following way.
You constantly have these people who are ruining the curve, and it’s
really, really hard! Plus the computer science department steps up the
programs to accommodate these people that are cheating, and then people
who don’t have this network [of students who share the work] are …
stuck.
Again, in an environment where the mean grade point average is 2.8, and difficult
material and long hours are salient features, cheating is believed to give some students an
unfair competitive edge.
Not only are students concerned about the immediate consequences of cheating,
but they also foresee penalties in their future. One student predicted a cheapening of her
credentials and the effect it could have on her job prospects when she said,
It ends up making the school look bad if a company hires from [school
name] and [the new hires] don’t know what the hell they’re doing. And
then you happen to go there a year later to get a job … It doesn’t make
everybody else look good.
In her opinion, academic dishonesty results in incompetent graduates who give graduates
from her program a bad reputation. Even if she did get a job in a company where an
incompetent former cheater was employed, another student predicted that coworkers
would pay the cost of cheaters’ inadequate learning.
These people are going to have great grades, and they’re going to get an
awesome job. And then we’re going to be working with them, and we’re
going to be picking up the slack.
From these descriptions, it is clear that students feel they are paying now, and will pay
later for the academic dishonesty of their classmates. They certainly did not consider
cheating to be a victimless crime. For this reason, some students ostracized the cheaters
by refusing to help even to the extent allowed by standards of academic honesty. For
example, one woman told how no one was willing to help a flagrant cheater.
THE woman that we were talking about, she habitually cheats. She takes
credit for other people's work. And so if you help her, she's going to turn
around and be like, "Oh, I did this project all by myself, and I am so
wonderful." … And so the women I know won't help her.
This student and other women in her program responded to behavior they considered
unacceptable by avoiding the perpetrator, and thereby protected themselves from being
charged with cheating.
However, cheating in computer science may be an offense that is difficult to
avoid. The computers, networks, labs, and other aspects of the physical environment
made even unwilling students tacit or reluctant participants.
Everyone there [in the computer lab] is helping each other like, “Has
anyone got it yet?” I tried my hardest not to say word-for-word answers. I
try to give broad, but the computers are side by side. There’s no way you
can… They’re just going to go right there and type it.
Under these conditions, it would take a serious and unpopular effort to prevent other
students from copying an assignment. This student tried to avoid having other people
7
copy her work, but said she was not very successful due to the conditions in which she
worked.
If students do manage to avoid cheating, they may still face the intensely
unpleasant experience of false accusations. Several students bitterly reported such
incidents and their aftereffects. One woman spoke about how plagiarism detection
software labeled her as a cheater, but she asserted that she had not turned in the program
that had her name on it. This incident had cast a shadow on her undergraduate career.
Another student described how a false accusation changed the way he felt about
programming.
[I]f I program again, I’m worried that it’s going to match somebody
else’s, and … I’m not comfortable in programming anymore.
Given that programming is a fundamental skill of computer scientists, his hesitation
could affect seriously his education and subsequent career.
Not all students were very concerned about cheating, or took action to avoid it.
Some focus groups did not raise the issue at all, and in other focus groups there was
disagreement about whether cheating was a problem. Several students, some claiming
that plagiarism was a matter of cultural background, simply considered unauthorized
collaborative efforts to be a time-saver, or at most, a necessary evil.
One student argued that cheating on assignments was perfectly fine.
It’s a shortcut. Why figure this out yourself when you can just get it and
it’s done? I mean, you’re not hurting anybody; you’re just saving yourself
time.
From this perspective, plagiarizing code is simply an efficient means of completing
assignments. Why re-invent the wheel? Another student made the point that ignoring
existing resources conflicts with what CS students are taught and with significant
movements within the discipline.
You're trying hard to distinguish between copying and Open Source
distribution; it's kind of hard to distinguish which one is good or not.
In the context of an industry where software re-use is considered good practice, some
students felt that strict enforcement of institution-wide honor codes was inappropriate.
They pointed to the value of group work as a realistic simulation of their future work
environment. For example,
A friend of mine got an Honor Code violation for talking to someone over
the phone about code. And that is utterly ridiculous. I mean, if you can't
communicate any idea about what you're learning in CS or how to help
someone out … you may as well be in a complete vacuum.
The students in this group thought that their department’s enforcement of an institutional
honor code that failed to recognize conditions in computer science went too far. As an
example, they spoke about an incident when 75 percent of the students in one course
were charged with an honor code violation. In the opinion of these students, there is a
“difference between enforcing and Gestapo, and ours is Gestapo.”
It is clear that not all students thought cheating as defined by their institution was
wrong. Yet, even among those students who did think it was wrong, some cheated
anyway. In their case, the need for good grades served as justification.
Sometimes the discouraging part of being in computer science, like you
want to learn, but at the same time, you have to keep up the grade.
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Sometimes you have no choice on tests; you have to cheat in some ways.
… I want to learn, but you have to have a good grades or else they’ll kick
me out.
Cheating to maintain adequate grades has been reported by numerous researchers.
However, the relationship they found between cheating and grades was negative –
students who cheated were likely to have both grades and other measures of academic
ability lower than non-cheaters had (Crown and Spiller 1998). The data from our study
do not support this finding. Instead, we saw that the average grade was higher in
departments where cheating was more prevalent (measured as fewer faculty who believed
cheating was under control, r= -.38, significant at the .05 level (1-tailed)). Thus, it could
be that the weaker students are more likely to cheat, but that doing so makes it possible
for students to maintain their grades.
Student perspectives on academic dishonesty might vary with their cultural
background. Certainly, one student claimed that her own view was based on accepted
behavior in her homeland.
I’m from Ukraine … [where cheating is] not a negative thing at all.
People [there] expect students to want to “cheat.”
This student did not believe that her department would honestly enforce their stated
policy on plagiarism. No matter that the policy and its sanctions had been explained to
her, she strongly doubted that anyone, even faculty or administrators, would take it
seriously.
Additional signs that cultural context may play a role in academic dishonesty
come from students reporting on the behavior of their international classmates. Although
hesitant to accuse or seem politically incorrect, students in several focus groups claimed
that international students gave each other academic support to a degree that crossed the
line into cheating. In the next quote, a U.S. citizen simply accepted the situation and
decided to take advantage of it himself.
The Russians had the Computer Science department on lock. And if
anybody here who disagrees with me (laughter), tell me because the
Russians have all the tests, all the answers. … They have everything and
they work as a good unit. Indians too, and the Asians. Everybody has
their own niche. And like me, … I'm the only black guy in there, and it just
leaves me out, you know. I have to join a circle. ... I joined up with the
Russians in [an advanced programming class], and they helped me
through the class. They gave me all the exams from last semester. I'm not
saying; I'm taking the fifth on the cheating part, but they gave me all the
exams from the last semester. They gave me all the notes. They had
everything, and they distribute it to all their friends, the whole circle. And if you're not in a niche, or a group, or maybe you don't cross the
barrier [into a group], you're going to fail.
This student and others in his department identified organized cheating with different
groups of international students. He chose to participate in their marginal activities, and
perhaps activities that violated his department’s code of academic integrity. Students who
did not join the cheating behavior complained about the well-organized efforts that this
student admired.
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Despite these student self-reports and complaints about cheating among
international students, the data for this study showed no measurable relationship between
cheating and non-citizen groups of students. Departments with more international
students were no more likely to report problems with cheating than were departments
with few international students. It seems that many students cheat, but when international
students are a visible group, students who were not a member of the group believed that
international students were doing the most cheating of anyone. Thus, it is possible that
having a visible group of different students made their actions stand out, despite there
being no real difference between their behavior and the behavior of other students.
An alternative explanation for the disagreement between reports of cheating
among international students and our observation that departments with many
international students report no more difficulty with cheating than departments with few
international students focuses on the organized nature of their cheating. Other research
has found increased incidence of cheating among members of sororities and fraternities
(Harding, Carpenter, Montgomery, and Steneck 2002). Thus, it could be that membership
in a group of any kind increases the likelihood of cheating.
Faculty perspective
Faculty varied on whether they felt their responsibilities included policing
cheating. Some faculty ignored cheating, others adjusted their courses to inhibit it, and
several employed systematic detection efforts so that cheaters would be caught and
prosecuted.
One example of a faculty member who did not consider policing as her
responsibility came from a woman who taught large classes.
We just don’t have the resources to really make sure that everyone learns
everything. You have 100 students in the class, the onus is on them to
actually do the homework rather than just copy it from or get the file from
a friend, do some minor modifications and submit it. Certainly you have
no idea whether the students are just cloning their homework, or whether
they’re actually doing it.
The additional task of tracking down transgressors was not feasible when existing
demands were already high.
As an alternative to policing, some faculty designed their courses to minimize the
likelihood of cheating. A few faculty members reduced the size of assignments in order
to reduce students’ workload, which they believed had been an incentive to cheat. Others
made it difficult to get credit if the student could not demonstrate the required
knowledge, for example, by only grading work done in class. Another instructor
minimized cheating by basing exams on programs written as homework.
On the mid-term, you bring your program to class. And there is a very
worthwhile question on the exam, or possibly two, that asks you to make
small changes in your program, or answer a question with respect to your
program. And if you haven’t written that code, you won’t be able to do it.
This method of test construction was intended to encourage honesty without taking extra
steps to check for it.
Avoiding the additional work of finding and charging cheaters might be a matter
of necessity, or it might result from first hand experience with a system that does not
10
work. An example of the latter motivation came from a long-time instructor who now
gives many assignments but allows students to help each other. He redefined what it was
to cheat because of an incident where he got no support from the university
administration when dealing with cheating.
Years ago, when I first started here, there was this huge problem of
cheating, and I had a case where eight students copied an entire major
term project assignment from each other. It went all the way up through
the levels of appeals. [The students] lied to me, to the department head, to
everybody all the way to the top of the college. They finally were found
guilty since there’s no possible way that they couldn’t be. And I was asked
to reduce their grades by the equivalent of, say 5 points or something,
down from a B to a B-.
His outrage over the incident led this professor to change the structure of his course to
minimize cheating. But he was no longer willing to use his institution’s formal
mechanism for charging academic dishonesty.
When an incident of cheating arises, many faculty take the matter into their own
hands and penalize the students with the grade they assign. This instructor split the grade
between those who turned in identical assignments.
I never accused anybody of cheating because there’s no way you can
prove it. So we just divided the grade up. If they wanted to change it to
90%/10%, fine with me, I don’t care.
Other instructors fail both students.
I'll give them one warning. But then the second time - and I have this in
my syllabus, is they'll get an F on the assignment, you know. And then the
third offense, they'll get an F in the course. So I take a pretty hard line on
it.
These approaches were passive, but there were also computer science faculty who took a
very active approach to deterring and detecting academic dishonesty. For example, one
faculty member described the extent to which he goes.
I announce … We will run your programs through the plagiarism
detection. When I give the quizzes, I have [the students] record their ID,
which row they were in, how far from the left they were, and the ID of the
person to their right. And that lets me reconstruct the seating pattern in
the room. I pick [the quizzes] up in that order, and then the TAs are
instructed to look for students who are sitting side by side and have the
similar pattern of wrong answers.
He enlisted his teaching assistants and used plagiarism detection software in his
aggressive efforts to deter and detect cheating. Some of his methods may have been
uncommon, but use of the software for detecting plagiarism is increasing both in and out
of CS as this next quote illustrates.
systems like MOSS, which attempt to detect similarities among submitted
programs. And so it's very easy to get a list of output, just go down and
check a few of them. And we had a very large numbers of these honor
court violations, which go through a whole internal process that's
adjudicated by a student/faculty panel, requires instructor time. So there
have been - there's been quite a bit of that in the past.
11
Contextual and other influences
In most of the departments where cheating was mentioned during interviews, it
was considered to be a problem. Even so, when they responded to a survey item about
conditions in the largest undergraduate course they taught, a strong majority (81 percent)
of the faculty in the average interview department reported that cheating had been
deterred. There was only one of the visited departments where less than half the faculty
reported that cheating had been deterred in their course. Thus, in 94 percent of the visited
departments, more than half of the faculty members believed cheating had been deterred.
This result for the interview departments is equivalent to the 93 percent found for all
departments that responded to the survey. Thus, although cheating is a salient concern,
most faculty in the vast majority of departments believe that they have it under control.
Students and faculty within a department generally had similar perceptions about
the prevalence of cheating. In the three departments where students and faculty did not
agree, it was because faculty believed that cheating was controlled but students reported
problems. This difference in perception could reflect either student’s better knowledge of
what fellow students do, or it could reflect students’ greater concern over the issue of
cheating.
Among the interview departments, student complaints about cheating were
slightly more prevalent in departments where they were dissatisfied with faculty
behavior. The behaviors that students criticized ranged from lack of interest in students,
or discouraging students, to being unsupportive, inaccessible, unapproachable, unhelpful,
or inflexible. This observation fits with research that found that the student-instructor
relationship had an effect on whether students engaged in acts of academic dishonesty
(Stearns 2001).
Although complaints about faculty behavior were more common in the women’s
focus groups than in the men’s focus groups, there were no obvious gender differences in
student concern with cheating. Complaints about cheating were about as common among
the male students as they were among the female students.
Regardless of the nature of faculty behavior that students criticized, there were no
cases where students justified cheating by referring to these types of faculty behavior.
There were also no links between complaints about the quality of teaching and reports of
cheating. It seems that cheating prevalence was related to the quality of student-faculty
relationships, but that students may not have perceived this relationship. Even in the
department where a student described being sexually harassed, all the references to
cheating were complaints about the behavior of other students, not student response to
faculty behavior. From the student perspective, a relationship between faculty behavior
and cheating only existed with regard to faculty not taking adequate precautions to
prevent cheating.
Discussion
Having described academic dishonesty among undergraduate CS majors, we will
discuss briefly how people in the discipline define and respond to this deviant behavior.
Then we will consider what their definition and response suggest about factors that
influence cheating.
Most of the computer science students in this study clearly considered violations
of academic honesty to be an offense against them. In the same way they might respond
12
to the theft of their belongings, students spoke about the negative consequences, the loss,
they suffered due to the actions of some classmates. The form in which they expressed
their grievance (if they expressed it) was always directly with the students involved even in institutions with honor codes, students never mentioned going to the honor
committee or to the instructor about their classmates’ offenses. In most cases, the only
response to cheating that students reported was avoidance in order to escape being
entangled in dishonest behaviors themselves. In at least one case, attempts to avoid
contact with those engaged in deviant behavior were intended both to minimize students’
own risk and to punish the cheaters.
The lack of student response to cheating may be one reason Michaels and Miethe
(1989) considered the possibility that cheating in college was normative, not deviant.
Certainly, the prevalence of the behavior suggests that this could be the case. In the data
reported here, there were several students who made the case that cheating was entirely
acceptable and expected in their social group. Even some faculty seemed to have no
strong opinion that cheating violated norms for acceptable student behavior. However,
academic dishonesty still qualifies as deviant because it is condemned officially and
subject to social disapproval by the majority of people. It generally is thought of as
conduct that ought not occur (Black 1984).
Faculty did not discuss directly whether they viewed academic dishonesty as a
violation of norms, but their behavior indicated that many faculty members did not
consider academic dishonesty to be an offense against them. Several faculty obviously
thought of cheating as a victimless crime, that students were hurting only themselves if
they did not learn the course material. Under these circumstances, faculty members were
not inclined to exert any social control over students’ cheating.
Alternatively, there were faculty members who focused on prevention or
detection. To prevent cheating, they altered their course requirements or their procedures
for testing and grading. They also warned students of the consequences of being caught
cheating. Other faculty attended to the environmental conditions that they thought led
students to cheat by reducing students’ heavy workload. And finally, there were faculty
who aggressively attempted to uncover violations of academic honesty. They employed
surveillance, particularly in the form of detection software.
When faculty uncovered cheating, the consequences were always penal, although
frequently without involving a higher authority. Instead of bringing in a third party to
resolve their grievance against a student accused of cheating, faculty preferred to handle
the matter directly by meting out their own punishment, often in the form of grading
penalties.
Overall, the most striking difference observed between students who cheated and
students who did not cheat was their perception of academic dishonesty as a victimless
crime. This difference also appeared to distinguish between faculty who acted to deter or
detect cheating and faculty who took a laissez faire approach. This distinction may help
explain how it is that honor codes generally decrease the incidence of cheating (McCabe
and Trevino 1996). It may be that having peers responsible for enforcing the norms
against cheating makes it more difficult for students to maintain the opinion that cheating
causes no harm to others. In the same way that positive student-faculty relationships
reduce cheating, it may be that putting a human face on the standards for academic
honesty makes it more likely that students will do their own work.
13
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