When incoming college freshman march off to their new schools for the first time this fall, it’s likely many of them will have cheated at some point on their road to higher education.
A new study performed by researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln found fairly high numbers of high school students enacted in some form of academic dishonesty during their academic careers, and in many cases, students don’t consider the things they’re doing as wrong.
The study is based on data from a survey of 100 high school juniors from the Midwest.
The survey asked the students about their personal perceptions of cheating and how widespread acts of academic dishonesty were.
Classroom tests were one area where students showed a particular willingness to cheat.
Of the students surveyed, 89 percent said looking at the answers on another person’s test counted as cheating, but 87 percent still said they’d done that at least once.
Kenneth Kiewra, an educational psychology professor at UNL and one of the authors of the study, said this seems to indicate that students are still deciding to cheat even though they understand certain actions count as academic dishonesty.
A study like this could help educators better understand how students think about cheating, Kiewra said, and find ways to cut down on the practice.
Other behaviors didn’t receive quite as much negative stigma though. Only 47 percent of students said giving test questions to someone who hadn’t taken a test yet was cheating, and around seven out of 10 students said they passed along test questions.
Students were less comfortable sharing test answers though, with 84 percent saying giving out answers was dishonest. Kiewra said this could be tied to the different amounts of effort students need to expend.
“Even if you know all the questions it still requires some effort to uncover the answers,” he said. “Cheating that still requires the student to put forth some effort was viewed as less dishonest than cheating that required little effort.”
Homework was another area students showed a tendency to cheat, said Ya-Shu Yang, a graduate student at the University of Connecticut who worked on the study with Kiewra.
Around 91 percent of students said they’d done individual homework with a partner, but only 23 percent thought that was cheating.
Sophie Swanson, a junior Spanish major at UNL, said she was surprised by how many high school students cheated according to the study and by what things count as cheating.
“Looking off at someone else’s test or something would obviously be bad, but working together on homework seems like it should be OK,” she said. “I remember working on homework with other people a lot and no one in high school ever thought it was that bad.”
With research showing a high number of high school students could be cheating, Kiewra said it’s important for teachers to make sure students understand what counts as cheating, and enforce the rules when students get caught.
“Based on our findings, teachers should spell out what constitutes cheating,” Kiewra said. “If a third of students are taking credit for ideas of others, then it’s time to make cheating actions clear.”