Academic dishonesty
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Academic dishonesty or academic misconduct is a form of cheating that occurs in an educational setting, usually committed by students. It can include:
- Plagiarism - The adoption or reproduction of ideas or words or statements of another person without due acknowledgment.
- Self Plagiarism - The submission of the same work for academic credit more than once without permission.
- Fabrication - The falsification of data, information, or citations in any formal academic exercise.
- Deception - Providing false information to an instructor concerning a formal academic exercise, e.g. giving a false excuse for missing a deadline or falsely claiming to have submitted work.
- Cheating - Any attempt to give or obtain assistance in a formal academic exercise without due acknowledgment.
- Sabotage - Acting to prevent others from completing their work. This includes cutting pages out of library books or willfully disrupting the experiments of others.
Academic dishonesty has been documented in most every type of educational setting, from elementary school to graduate school, and has been met with varying degrees of approbation throughout history. Today, most instructors consider academic dishonesty to be highly injurious to the cause of learning, and usually take great pains to ensure honesty among students.
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[edit] History of Academic Dishonesty
Academic dishonesty dates back to the first tests. Scholars note that cheating was prevalent on the Chinese civil service exams thousands of years ago, even when cheating carried the penalty of death for both examinee and examiner.[1] Before the founding of the MLA and the APA at end of the 19th century, there were no set rules on how to properly cite borrowings from others' writings, which may have caused many cases of plagiarism out of ignorance."[2].
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, cheating was widespread at college campuses in the United States, and was not considered dishonorable among students.[3] It has been estimated that as many as two-thirds of students cheated at some point of their college careers at the turn of the century. Fraternities often operated so-called Essay mills, where term papers were kept on file and could be resubmitted over and over again by different students, often with the only change being the name on the paper. At that time, college students, usually white privileged men, were expected by their parents and by society to live the life of the young gentleman, and were required to fulfill a number of social obligations (make connections with the future elite, find a suitable mate, become independent) that were considered far more important than grades. Accordingly, cheating was commonly used by students to put more time towards fulfilling their social obligations at the expense of their academic ones. As higher education in the U.S. trended towards meritocracy, however, a greater emphasis was put on anti-cheating policies, and the newly diverse student bodies tended to arrive with a more negative view of academic dishonesty.
[edit] Academic Dishonesty Today
Academic dishonesty is endemic in all levels of education. In the United States, studies show that 20% of students started cheating in the first grade [4] Similarly, other studies reveal that currently in the U.S., 56% of middle school students and 70% of high school students have cheated.[5]
The first scholarly studies in the 1960s of academic dishonesty in higher education found that nationally in the U.S., somewhere between 50%-70% of college students had cheated at least once.[6] While nationally, these rates of cheating in the U.S. remain stable today, there are large disparities between different schools, depending on the size, selectivity, and anti-cheating policies of the school. Generally, the smaller and more selective the college, the less cheating occurs there. For instance, the number of students who have engaged in academic dishonesty at small elite liberal arts colleges can be as low as 15%-20%, while cheating at large public universities can be as high as 75%.[7] Moreover, researchers have found that students who attend a school with an honor code are less likely to cheat than students at schools with other ways of enforcing academic integrity.[8]
While research on academic dishonesty in other countries is minimal, anecdotal evidence suggests cheating could be even more common in countries like Japan.[9]
[edit] Types of Academic Dishonesty
Cheating in academia is divided into several subcategories.
[edit] Plagiarism
- Further information: Plagiarism
Plagiarism is the adoption or reproduction of ideas or words or statements of another person without due acknowledgment. This can range from borrowing without attribution a particularly apt phrase, to paraphrasing someone else's original idea without citation, to wholesale contract cheating. When plagiarizing, students will often turn to the internet, due the ease of copying and pasting from websites such as Wikipedia. Other more old fashioned forms of plagiarism such as paper mills and passing off obscure articles or chapters of books of others as original work also still occur. Plagiarized papers are often riddled with gross inconsistencies such as referencing non-existent sections of the essay, changes in spelling and grammar customs, or the argument changing in mid-paragraph. Plagiarism is generally considered the most common form of academic dishonesty in higher education in the U.S.
[edit] Self Plagiarism
Self Plagiarism is the submission of the same work for academic credit more than once without permission. Contrary to popular belief, a paper submitted by a student to a professor can become the property of the school, and cannot be copied from without attribution. Even academics have been found engaging in self plagiarism through copying passages from their already-published texts.
[edit] Fabrication
Fabrication is the falsification of data, information, or citations in any formal academic exercise. This includes making up citations to back up arguments or inventing quotations. Fabrication predominates in the natural sciences, where students sometimes fudge numbers to make experiments "work". It includes data falsification, in which false claims are made about research performed, including selective submitting of results to exclude inconvenient data to generating bogus data
[edit] Deception
Deception is providing false information to an teacher/instructor concerning a formal academic exercise. Examples of this include taking more time on a take-home test than is allowed, giving a dishonest excuse when asking for a deadline extension, or falsely claiming to have submitted work. This type of academic misconduct is often considered softer than the more obvious forms of cheating, and otherwise honest students sometimes engage in this type of dishonesty without considering themselves cheaters.
[edit] Sabotage
Sabotage is when a student prevents others from completing their work. This includes cutting pages out of library books or willfully disrupting the experiments of others. Sabotage is usually only found in highly competitive, cutthroat environments, such as at extremely elite schools where class rankings are highly prized.
[edit] Cheating
- Further information: Cheating
Cheating is any attempt to give or obtain assistance in a formal academic exercise without due acknowledgment. Cheating can take the form of crib notes, looking over someone's shoulder during an exam, or any forbidden sharing of information between students regarding an exam or exercise. Many elaborate methods of cheating have been developed over the years. For instance, students have been documented hiding notes in the bathroom toilet tank, in the brims of their baseball caps, or up their sleeves. Also, the storing of information in graphing calculators, pagers, cell phones, and other electronic devices has cropped up since the information revolution began. While students have long surreptitiously scanned the tests of those seated near them, some students actively try to aid those who are trying to cheat. Methods of secretly signaling the right answer to friends are quite varied, ranging from coded sneezes or pencil tapping to high pitched noises beyond the hearing range of most teachers. Cheating differs from most other forms of academic dishonesty, in that people can engage in it without benefiting themselves at all. For example, a student who illicitly telegraphed answers to a friend during a test would be cheating, even though the student's own work is in no way affected.
Punishments for academic dishonesty vary according to the age of the party involved and the nature of the infraction. In high school, a standard penalty for cheating is a failing grade; in college, it can result in expulsion. In rare instances, college professors have been fired when it was discovered that they plagiarized during college or graduate school.[citation needed] All parties involved in the dishonesty—not just the individual whose grade is increased by it—can be punished.
Several notable U.S. colleges have strict honor codes with penalties that include suspension or even expulsion. For example, Duke University, Princeton University, and the University of Virginia have honor codes which specifically state that any student caught lying, cheating, or stealing will be asked to leave the University.
The scientific peer review process places considerable reliance on the moral integrity of the participants, and therefore academic dishonesty often goes unnoticed. If found out, however, the penalties can be severe -- it can be the end of the perpetrator's career.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Ann Bushway and William R. Nash, "School Cheating Behavior," Review of Educational Research 47, no. 4 (Autumn 1977), 623.
- ^ Sue Carter Simmons, "Competing Notions of Authorship: A Historical Look at Students and Textbooks on Plagiarism and Cheating," in Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in the Postmodern World ed. Lise Buranen and Alice M. Roy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 42.
- ^ Ibid., 45
- ^ Bushway and Nash, 623.
- ^ Wilfried Decoo, Crisis on Campus: Confronting Academic Misconduct (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 23.
- ^ William J. Bowers, Student Dishonesty and its Control in Colleges (New York: Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University, 1964), 155.
- ^ Emily E. LaBeff, et. al., "Situational Ethics and College Student Cheating," Sociological Inquiry 60, no. 2 (May 1990), 192.
- ^ Donald L. McCabe and Linda Klebe Trevino, "Academic Dishonesty: Honor Codes and Other Contextual Influences," The Journal of Higher Education 64, no. 5, (September-October 1993), 532.
- ^ L.M. Dryden, "A Distant Mirror or Through the Looking Glass?: Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in Japanese Education," in Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in the Postmodern World, ed. Lise Buranen and Alice M. Roy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 75.
