Students scoring high on measures of courage, honesty less likely to cheat

F4

By Lauren La Rose
THE CANADIAN PRESS

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

Speak Up

TORONTO - Students who are less likely to cheat earned top marks when scored on measures of courage, empathy and honesty, according to new research.

Enlarge Photo

Researchers at Ohio State University's Newark campus examining the psychology behind students who don't cheat conducted two studies that included a total of 456 undergraduates at the school.

Students were asked about their courage, honesty and empathy including questions about academic dishonesty, such as whether they had cheated on tests or assignments in the past six or 12 months.

Questions posed in the courage section included asking participants if they had the strength to face the future, whether they get involved in causes and if fear keeps them from pursuing their goals.

The study found students who scored high in the areas outlined were less likely to report cheating in their past or the intention to cheat in the future.

What's more, students who reported less cheating were also less likely to believe their peers committed academic dishonesty.

Items from each area -- courage, empathy and honesty -- received a standard score to combine the three scales and determine a median split. Respondents who scored above the median were deemed "academic heroes" by the researchers.

"The heroes are less likely to provide excuses for themselves, and one of the common excuses is 'Everyone is doing it,' or for some reason or another, 'I am entitled to do it,'", said study co-author Sara Staats, professor emeritus of psychology at Ohio State-Newark.

"I think that the basic honesty of the heroes extends a little bit to other people in that they may think that they're more honest than others, but they don't see other people as extremely dishonest or willing to cheat."

Staats, assistant psychology professor Julie Hupp and psychology student Heidi Wallace were to present their findings Saturday and Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Boston.

Donald McCabe, professor of management and global business at Rutgers University, has done extensive work in Canada and the U.S. looking at the occurrence of academic dishonesty. He said the findings concerning students' perception of cheating are on par with his own research.

"Even at schools that have extensive cheating based on what other students are telling me, there's always a group of students who will wonder why I'm bothering to do this survey on their campus because they never see any cheating and they don't think anybody else cheats," he said from Newark, N.J.

"As a result of that, if they're hanging out in groups or cliques that don't cheat, therefore they don't see a lot of cheating."

But both McCabe and Deborah Eerkes, director in the office of student judicial affairs at the University of Alberta, expressed reservations about researchers using the term "academic heroes" to describe students who are less likely to cheat.

"To me, those are the people who have met the requirements of what they're doing, and to call that heroic is I think to minimize our basic expectations of students," said Eerkes, who also serves as a discipline officer and manager of the academic integrity program.

"We expect them to perform on these assignments and other things without cheating, so when they do that, that's great, and I don't want to minimize that, but at the same time, I'm not sure they should be called heroes."

When asked about future intentions to cheat, researchers said while 47 per cent of students said they didn't intend to cheat, 24 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that they would. The remaining 29 per cent said they were uncertain as to whether or not they would cheat, a segment that Staats said should be a target for faculty and administrators.

"(For) people that assert that they are definitely going to cheat and people who assert that they are not at all going to cheat, it might be difficult to influence their behaviour, but people who assert they're uncertain suggests a population that might be more amenable to interventions."