Global Courant
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What do students think about cheating? Are they more or less indifferent? Are they judgmental, or can cheating be accepted to some extent?
The purpose of my research was to address something that has not been widely researched, namely how students talk to each other about cheating. The majority of fraud research has been conducted in the form of surveys. A qualitative research design was chosen using so-called ‘peer interviewers’, which means that students are interviewed by students.
Thor GrennessUsing peer interviewers is appropriate when the topic is sensitive, controversial or generally difficult to talk about.
What were the most important findings?
“Cheating is cheating,” we believe. Not all students experience it this way. Is it cheating to help a fellow student get a better grade? No, some say, it should rather be considered a good deed. It only becomes cheating when breaking the rules benefits you.
Moreover, cheating can be assessed. Some forms of cheating are serious, such as copying something written by a fellow student, while others, such as entering formulas into the calculator, are acceptable.
The article continues below the advertisement“I mainly introduce formulas to reduce stress, it is not certain that I will use them.”
Circumstances also play a role. “Cheating is not that dangerous when it concerns a two-credit course, and not a bachelor’s or master’s thesis.”
Collaborating on homework is also not considered serious cheating, while plagiarism is considered serious. But it is unclear what the term plagiarism means.
Many do not consider plagiarism as cheating, but only as a violation of academic rules. Cases of plagiarism reported in the media show that although it is emphasized that students receive training in the use of sources and referencing procedures, there is obviously room for improvement. The issue of enforcing violations is therefore not unproblematic.
What motivates students to cheat varies. If the exam is viewed as a competition, cheating can prevent you from losing. “If you don’t cheat, you lose!”. At the same time, this competition becomes unfair when those who cheat “win.”
If the perception is that “everyone cheats,” a “cheating culture” can develop, damaging the school’s reputation. Because who wants to accept students from a school where everyone cheats?
The article continues below the advertisementAt the same time, it is frightening to think that ‘cheating pays’, that cheating will not only get you better grades, but also better jobs after college. This becomes even more frightening when the research shows that students who cheat can carry their cheating behavior into their professional lives.
The research
Whose: Tor Grenness (2022)
What: If you don’t cheat, you lose: An exploratory study of business students’ perceptions of cheating behavior.
Where: Scandinavian journal for educational research
Many were concerned that cheaters had not learned what they should have learned and were being given jobs for which they were not qualified.
The research shows that students can be both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated. While intrinsically motivated people see learning primarily as an end in itself, extrinsically motivated people see knowledge as a means – the goal may be to get a good job. A so-called meta-analysis documents that extrinsic motivation is positively correlated with cheating, and that cheating is more common in Business Schools than in the Humanities (Krau et al., 2020).
The fact that students at business schools are often extrinsically motivated is also evident from a Swedish study (Bengtson and Teleman, 2020).
Some students were also skeptical about the common morality among fellow students. The school and teachers cannot simply assume that students share their intuitive moral views.
What can be done to reduce fraud?
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Cheating appears to be the result of both individual factors, i.e. motivation and morality, but also contextual factors: culture. The most effective measure will be a combination of measures aimed at both.
Teachers can contribute by focusing more on knowledge acquisition and less on exams, but perhaps the most important contribution can be made by the schools themselves. Because students appear to overestimate the extent of cheating behavior – ‘everyone cheats’ – an important message is that the vast majority of students don’t cheat and that no one benefits from deception.
The primary task should not be to catch cheaters, but to contribute to an environment in which cheating is considered unacceptable. The message to students should be that cheating represents a serious breach of trust, not only towards the school, but also towards fellow students who do not cheat.
The solution to the fraud problem therefore does not lie in exposing as many cheaters as possible, but in preventing a culture of cheating from developing. This should be a priority task for the top management of the schools.
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“If you don’t cheat, you lose!”
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