Recent articles in The Chronicle and other publications report a seemingly relentless increase in the level of cheating among college students. Media reports also highlight how the Internet and other technologies are presenting new opportunities for cheating. Yet, while most institutions have invested significant resources to deal with other student-affairs concerns -- abuse of alcohol and drugs, violence, sexual harassment, and more -- few have devoted the same attention to academic dishonesty.
Research supports the conclusion that cheating on campuses is pervasive. Linda K. Trevino, a professor of management at Pennsylvania State University; Kenneth D. Butterfield, an assistant professor of management at Washington State University; and Don McCabe, a professor of organization management at Rutgers University at Newark, have conducted surveys, involving about 13,000 college and university students over the past decade, in which students report a high degree of academic dishonesty.
For example, more than three-quarters of the almost 2,000 students whom they surveyed at nine large public institutions in 1993 admitted to one or more instances of serious cheating on tests or examinations, or to having engaged in serious academic dishonesty on written assignments. The percentage of students cheating on tests dramatically increased over the 39 per cent of students whom William J. Bowers found had engaged in cheating on those same campuses in 1963. Although the degree of serious cheating on written work did not increase significantly, many students now define plagiarism much more leniently than students did 30 years ago -- perhaps masking an actual increase.
Why do college and university students cheat so much? In responding to surveys, the students themselves most often blamed the pressure to succeed -- the need to meet the expectations of their families, graduate schools, and prospective employers. Several students even justified cheating by noting the need to maintain a minimum grade-point average to retain their financial-aid awards. The research of Trevino, Butterfield, and McCabe, however, suggests an additional explanation: that a major factor determining whether a student will cheat or not is the academic culture of the specific institution that he or she attends.
Unfortunately, the culture of academic integrity on many campuses seems to have declined. The reasons are numerous: “Traditional” values have eroded in our more tolerant, and perhaps permissive, society; many campuses have become larger and more complex, losing the sense of shared culture, trust, and individual accountability that they once may have encouraged; part-time faculty members have taken on a greater role at institutions, while the influence of full-time professors on student life has declined. If one adds to all those factors a greater skepticism among students about authority in general, one can see why campuses have had difficulty finding a new moral balance.
Surveys of college and university students reveal that many now live in environments where other students cheat regularly, where faculty members either don’t notice or don’t want to notice, and where students who cheat face trivial penalties -- if any. In such a climate, many students conclude that they would be foolish not to cheat “a little bit.” Why should they care when no one else seems to?
In contrast, at the fewer than 100 institutions where traditional academic honor codes are in place -- where students pledge not to cheat and where they play a major role in the judicial process -- significantly fewer incidents of cheating occur. For example, on campuses with honor codes, fewer than one in 14 students surveyed in the 1995-96 academic year acknowledged cheating repeatedly on tests and examinations, compared with one in six at institutions without honor codes. At the nine larger public institutions surveyed in 1993, almost one in three students admitted to cheating regularly on tests.
Honor codes, in and of themselves, are not the only means to mitigate cheating at colleges and universities. The success of honor codes appears to be rooted in a campus tradition of mutual trust and respect among students and between faculty members and students. Of course, such cultures usually take significant time and effort to develop and maintain, and many institutions simply aren’t ready for honor-code systems.
But some of the elements that make honor codes successful are critical in establishing a climate that supports academic honesty. Student involvement is one of the key elements, but it is certainly not the only one. Faculty members and administrators must also work with student leaders to create and maintain a culture of academic integrity. All three groups should collaborate to develop a coherent strategy for minimizing cheating and making academic integrity a central goal.
Over the past two years, we have been actively involved in the efforts of the Center for Academic Integrity, based at Duke University, to help institutions develop such strategies. The center, with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has organized a variety of meetings to bring together diverse constituencies -- students, faculty, administrators, and educational-policy makers -- to discuss academic integrity. Based on information gained from those meetings, the center has developed “The Fundamental Values of Academic Integrity” -- a statement that we hope will catalyze a national dialogue about, and response to, the issues associated with academic dishonesty on our campuses. Every college and university president in the country will receive a copy of the statement in the coming weeks.
Our research and the center’s recommendations make it clear that many colleges and universities have not done enough to confront the problem of cheating.
For instance, a recent survey of almost 200 campuses, conducted by McCabe and Andy Makowski, a first-year medical student at Loyola University Chicago, suggests that as many as one in four institutions do not have clear, written academic-integrity statements, policies, or procedures. In addition, many institutions that do have policies in place don’t make them readily accessible to faculty members, students, or others. Often, searches of an institution’s World-Wide Web site fail to uncover its academic-integrity policy, even though the faculty and student handbooks are on line.
Some of the other fundamental issues that institutions must address include:
* Inadequate administrative support for academic policies and procedures. Both students and faculty members tell of instances in which their efforts to report a case of alleged cheating have been thwarted, perhaps by an institution’s or department’s desire to avoid negative publicity, or by unwillingness to devote resources to such reporting. When McCabe surveyed 800 faculty members in 1992 about why they ignored possible cheating violations, they frequently cited such institutional failures -- as well as the excessive bureaucracy that they often would have to navigate to pursue allegations of cheating.
* Inequitable systems to adjudicate suspected violations of policy. A number of faculty members and students talk with disdain about the unevenness with which cases of alleged cheating are handled on their campuses. Often, different procedures are followed by different divisions or schools at the same institution -- and sometimes even within the same division or school. Such situations lead many faculty members to handle cases of cheating on their own, or to ignore them.
* Few programs that promote academic integrity among all segments of the campus community. Most institutions do little more than inform their students that a policy on academic integrity exists, sometimes accompanied by a brief discussion of its major points. Many don’t draw attention at all to their policies, or fail to advise their part-time faculty members about them. Only a handful of institutions have worked to promote a dialogue on integrity and its relationship to broader ethical issues, such as civility and cultural relativism.
* Lack of awareness of new educational trends affecting academic integrity on campuses. The first step in dealing with issues of academic dishonesty is often defining for students what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate behavior. An outdated policy -- one that doesn’t include new ways to define academic integrity in light of changing situations -- is of little value to students. For example, the growing emphasis on collaborative learning certainly requires faculty members to be much clearer about what constitutes unauthorized collaboration in their classes.
* Little guidance about how new technology raises new questions about cheating. Despite the emergence of the Internet as a primary research tool for students, many faculty members and institutions have been silent on its proper use in academic endeavors. Research suggests that, in the absence of any guidance, students will make assumptions about appropriate use that are most convenient for them -- assumptions that often differ substantially from the views of faculty members or the institution. For instance, some students seem to view almost anything that they discover on the Internet as general knowledge that does not require citation.
* No regular assessment of the effectiveness of policies and procedures to encourage academic integrity. Few institutions take such steps. That is why the Center for Academic Integrity, with support from the John Templeton Foundation, also plans to develop practical assessment tools that individual campuses can tailor to their specific needs. The center is now working with 12 higher-education institutions to design and test protocols; the results will be available by the end of next year. The tools will include guidelines that allow an institution to assess the effectiveness of the efforts of each of its major constituents -- students, faculty members, administrators, the president and other senior executives, and governing boards -- to promote academic integrity.
The center’s guidance will set the stage for a new and needed dialogue about academic integrity among all such campus constituents. Each institution should carefully examine the center’s statement, and develop ways to integrate the recommendations into its own goals.
The process of searching for improvements in academic integrity won’t be easy, and it will generate difficult debate. But such debate will, in fact, be a welcome sign: that we are, at long last, giving adequate consideration to an issue that threatens the fundamental nature of academe.
Donald L. McCabe is a professor of organization management at Rutgers University at Newark, and the founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity. Patrick Drinan, dean of arts and sciences at the University of San Diego, has also served as a president of the center.
http://chronicle.com Section: Opinion & Arts Page: B7
