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In the Zone This Month: October 2009

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Everyday Heroes: Good News Regarding Academic Integrity and Cheating

by Sara Staats

Not all students self-report cheating. Research suggests that about 25% of students assert that they have not cheated in the past year. Some cheating students may not admit to cheating even in anonymous conditions, but not all students cheat. Even if the number of students who do not is only about 20% , that represents a group large enough for study and for use as models of academic integrity. We need to spend more time and effort in understanding and supporting these true and brave-hearted students who refrain from cheating even when outcomes are crucial for their future careers and they are aware of a high level of successful academic misconduct in others. My colleagues and I have labeled these noncheating students as one sort of everyday heroes and have tried to describe them in a series of studies (Staats, Hupp, & Hagley, 2007; Staats et al., 2009).

Let me comment on the idea of an everyday hero. First, the concept of hero is pervasive across time, culture, and age with children in kindergarten able to identify heroes (White & O’Brien, 1999). The concept of hero is very large and incorporates everyday people as well as the heroes of legend and persons who give their lives in rescuing others. For example, when we ask students to identify their heroes, my mom or a significant other was often given as an example (Staats, Wallace, Anderson, Gresley, Hupp, & Weiss, 2009). When asked to identify individual heroic acts, persons offered examples of long-term commitment to others or ideals as well as single, acute, dramatic acts. The Ohio State Newark hero studies focus on this type of everyday hero who we have identified as possessing high amounts of bravery, empathy, or concern for others and honesty. We conceive of bravery, empathy, and honesty as relatively stable personality traits but that different situations offer different constraints and affordances for this constellation of traits used to define heroes. Heroes are seen as brave, caring, and true across situations, but bravery may be highlighted in war, empathy in organ donation, and honesty in the classroom. In a series of studies, we have found that college students who are high in bravery, empathy, and honesty report less cheating and less intent to cheat in the future than those who are low in these three personality traits. The idea of a multitrait approach offers the following threefold opportunity to influence persons and their behavior toward reducing academic misconduct:

• Advocating for academic integrity
• Increasing bravery and concern for others
• Promoting honesty

Many students who cheat do not always cheat

A considerable research indicates that cheating is widespread in schools and is increasing (McCabe & Trevino, 1997; Whitley & Keith-Spiegel, 2002). Often as many as 75% of students self-report engaging in cheating. However, this does not mean that 75% of students are cheating on every exam or assignment but rather that most students report cheating in the recent past. In one of our samples of college students enrolled in an introductory psychology class, we found that most students reported cheating at least once in the past 12 months, slightly over 10% of students indicated that they had cheated more than six times in the past 12 months on an assignment, and 5% indicated that they had cheated more than six times on an exam in the past 12 months. Most, if not all students have observed other students cheating successfully. Students report more cheating on assignments than on exams and they believe that other students cheat more than they do themselves.

Cheating must not be ignored

Reducing academic misconduct is important because cheating not only harms students who do not cheat, but diminishes education and may also contribute negatively to character development leading to misconduct in extra- and post-curricular activities (Blankenship & Whitley, 2000). The institution and the wider culture is diminished by academic misconduct. Active prevention, prosecution, and punishment are important and must be continued. Efforts directed at prevention and prosecution are often time consuming and stressful if not frightening and frequently do not receive the administrative support that is needed (Keith-Spiegel, Tabachnick, Whitley, & Washburn, 1998). For example, although a majority of students report cheating at least once during the academic year, few cases of academic misconduct are pursued in an academic year, thus making the personal rewards for cheating very likely and punishment very unlikely.

What administrators can do to promote academic integrity

In most of our research, we have asked students about their intent to cheat in the next 30 days as well as several questions concerning their past cheating. On a five-point Likert scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree, we anchored the midpoint with 3 = uncertain. Across a half-dozen studies, we have found that 20-30% of college undergraduates indicate that they are uncertain as to whether or not they will cheat in one of their classes in the next 30 days. These undecided students are different from those who either plan to cheat or say they would never cheat. They offer a much greater chance for influencing positive behavior or for behavior modification than those students who either strongly agree or strongly disagree that they will cheat. One can conceive of these uncertain students as similar to undecided voters or more dramatically as students struggling with issues of right and wrong who are seeking a guiding light. There is a particular opportunity and duty to influence and lead these students toward academic integrity. One approach might be using students with high marks in bravery, empathy, and honesty as models and discussing the idea of everyday academic heroes as it might apply in the classroom. One might ask students why academic integrity matters.

The Center for Academic Integrity (www.academicintegrity.org) is a useful source for those engaged in advancing ethical classroom behavior. This center sponsors an excellent annual conference and includes positive psychology approaches to academic integrity as well as a wide variety of approaches and experiences relating to academic misconduct. Here are some suggestions:

• An academic integrity statement can be presented at new student orientation, included in class syllabi, and regularly reinforced in classrooms.
• A culture of integrity may be nurtured by having a committee on academic integrity or restructuring existing committees on academic misconduct in such a way that the advancement of virtue and integrity are given equal weight. The value of knowledge and skill acquisition must be a central goal rather than the necessary marker of knowledge provided by a standardized test. We need standardized measurement of excellence, but the measure is not excellence itself and single method measurements are always limited.
• Situational factors contribute greatly to cheating and need to be minimized. However, an emphasis on knowledge, mastery, and integrity is as important as proctoring exams, clearly delineating when individual rather than group effort is required, and including frequent in-class measures of skill acquisition in addition to take-home assignments.
• We know that most students have cheated at least once in the past year and they have been seen getting away with it. We must not allow the easy and false generalization that “everybody does it all the time.” There are a goodly number of students who do not cheat. We certainly need to point out the inaccuracy and overgeneralization that everyone does it all the time as well as other rationalizations and guilt-neutralizing techniques that students may use to defend academic misconduct (Agnew & Peters, 1986).

Reporting cheating is not easy for faculty, let alone students, and the process of dealing with academic misconduct can vary from unfair to prohibitively unwieldy and slow. Reporting also provides bad press for an institution. The situation may be compounded by the possibility that an intervention will result in more cases of reported academic misconduct (cheaters being punished) and this might lead some to stop the intervention before evidence of its effectiveness is obtained. One hopes that evidence would be based on more than one method and include student self-report data as well as information on the number of cases tried.

A recent search of PsychINFO using “cheating” as a keyword yielded 1,032 entries. A search using the keywords “academic integrity” yielded 77 entries, most of which were recent. The good news includes the fact that others are interested in academic activity and that positive approaches to increasing academic integrity are in progress. Virtue is often not easy, but let us remember that many students possess bravery, are concerned for others, and are honest. We must not minimize the number of students, faculty, and administrators who exemplify academic integrity. We might also remember that just doing one’s job honestly day after day as expected is worthy of approbation and support. Some even see it as a little bit heroic.

Sara Staats, PhD, is professor emeritus, Psychology, The Ohio State University at Newark.

References

• Agnew, R., & Peters, A. A. R. (1986). The techniques of neutralization: an analysis of predisposing and situational factors. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 13, 81-97.
• Blankenship, K. L., & Whitley, B. E. (2002). Relation of general deviance to academic dishonesty. Ethics and Behavior, 10, 1-12.
• Center for Academic Integrity: Clemson University. www.academicintegrity.org
• Keith-Spiegel, P., Tabachnick, B. G., Whitley, B. E., Jr., & Washburn, J. (1998). Why professors ignore cheating: Opinions of a national sample of psychology instructors. Ethics and Behavior, 8, 215-227.
• McCabe, D. L., & Trevino, L. K. (1993). Academic dishonesty: Honor codes and other contextual influences. Journal of Higher Education, 64, 522-538.
• Staats, S., Hupp, J. M., & Hagley, A. M. (2008). Honesty and heroes: A positive psychology view of heroism and academic honesty. Journal of Psychology, 142, 357-372.
• Staats, S., Hupp, J., Wallace, H., & Gresley, J. (2009). Heroes don’t cheat: An examination of academic dishonesty and students’ views on why professors don’t report cheating. Ethics and Behavior, 19, 171-183.
• Whitley, B. E., & Keith-Spiegel, P. (2002). Academic dishonesty: An educator’s guide. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

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