Choosing Not to Cheat: A Framework to Assess Students’ Rationales for Abiding by Academic Integrity Policies

Authors

Kenneth H. Kolb, Furman UniversityFollow
Kyle C. Longest, Furman UniversityFollow
Alexa J. Singer, Florida State UniversityFollow

Abstract

Writing intensive first-year seminars are well situated within the curriculum to teach about issues like cheating and plagiarism. Although most research on academic integrity focuses on how—and how much—students cheat, we take a different approach. We assess whether participation in writing intensive first-year seminars produces measurable changes in students’ rationales for choosing not to cheat. Relying upon data collected via pre and post-test in-depth interviews, we propose a framework to measure these changes that is grounded in students’ accounts of how they negotiated real-life opportunities to cheat on campus. In general, we find that writing intensive first-year seminars produce no positive qualitative changes in students’ rationales for choosing not to cheat. In the conclusion, we offer a new perspective on the possible consequences of creating “cheat proof” tests and assignments on students’ ethical development.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Kolb, Kenneth H.; Longest, Kyle C.; and Singer, Alexa J. (2015) "Choosing Not to Cheat: A Framework to Assess Students’ Rationales for Abiding by Academic Integrity Policies," International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Vol. 9: No. 1, Article 9.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.20429/ijsotl.2015.090109