Title: Why Do People Cheat?
Course: Academic Integrity

Let's Make Some Assumptions

Our approach relies on two starting assumptions:

- Cheating behavior is motivated; people cheat for reasons.
- It is more effective to remove the reasons to cheat than to remove the means to cheat.

Let's explore these in a bit more detail.

Cheating behavior is motivated.

Students do not arbitrarily decide to cheat one day. It is motivated activity in the service of accomplishing a goal. We will spend some time on this page discussing what those goals could be. Our starting assumption also implies that cheating isn't random. It is tied to specific needs. Students cheat because they see this behavior as the most effective way to meet those needs.

Let's take a moment to consider why we test and grade students. The basis of grading is to measure the amount of learning and progress they have made, or to demonstrate mastery of skills. However, grades have become not a means to truly assess a student's mastery of the knowledge and skills, but instead, a means to an end. Grades and test scores can determine what classes a student can get into, what colleges they'll get admitted to, what majors and programs will accept them, and in short, what their future will be. Education has arguably become less about the learning and more about the grade.

This is not to say that assessments and grades don't have their place, nor is that last statement in the previous paragraph true across the board. So how can we approach grading and assessment in a way that puts the students' learning and work back in the front and center? There aren't necessarily easy answers to that, but it's a question to keep in mind as you work through this module and approach your own assessments.

It is more effective to remove the motivation to cheat than to remove the means to cheat.

Our students are endlessly inventive and creative. And, as Walsh notes in Ethical Collaboration, students are fully capable of working together to enable efficient distribution of resources, strategies, and answers. We can try to remove the means to cheat, but we will never get ahead of students by only focusing on the means. It's an asymmetric fight where students have superior numbers. Instead, lets mitigate what makes cheating seem like the most effective strategy. This does not mean there aren't tools available to help prevent cheating, and we'll discuss some of those. However, cheating prevention should supplement a broader strategy for academic integrity, not be the entirety of it.

So what motivates cheating? The end result of cheating is that a student can be certain that they have completed an assignment "correctly." Either they found an answer sheet, they snuck information into the test, they used someone else's words that they trust more than their own—regardless of the form of cheating, the end result is to provide students a predictable, guaranteed outcome. If cheating ultimately increases certainty, then we can frame the motivations that lead people to cheat as types of uncertainty, or risk.

So let's take a look at some of the types of risks that students see in their performance and how that can lead to cheating behaviors.

Types of Risk

Risk 1: I'm worried my GPA will drop if I don't cheat.

The more a single assignment determines a student's success in the course, the greater risk that assignment represents. If a final exam can lower a grade from a 95% to a 65%, it constitutes a significant risk from a student perspective. For example, a comparison between two sets of university students found that 55% of one group reported cheating while 23% of the other group reported cheating. The difference between the groups? According to Cheating Lessons Part 2 from The Chronicle of Higher Education, the first group's coursework heavily relied on large final exams with few other tests to demonstrate learning.

Students will take precautionary steps when an assignment can "make or break" their grade.

Risk 2: I'm worried I'll let someone down if I don't cheat.

Yes, that's right. Students can receive conflicting demands—loyalty to teammates or friends, "fairness" in a classroom context, their personal definition of work ethic, their sense of compassion, social pressure—and depending on those demands, they might decide cheating is the most ethical option. This also plays into peer pressure. The risk in this case is against their sense of self and values. Carrell, Malmstrom, and West identified a "peer effect" in their paper Peer Effects in Academic Cheating, where cheating students create more cheating students. Also, they noted that students were inconsistent (from the researchers' perspective) in whether they chose to report violations to the honor code or not. Perhaps consistency can be found if we view those decisions from the perspective of students weighing competing ethical and social demands.

Students can choose their loyalty to friends or family over the rules of a class.

Risk 3: I'm worried that I can't keep up if I don't cheat.

Students who believe that their abilities are innate instead of cultivated run into a logistical and existential problem when the difficulty of the courses starts to exceed their "natural" abilities. We know that praising kids for being smart can inadvertently encourage cheating. And those students who lack self-efficacy beliefs about their own capabilities may see cheating as the only viable option as their course work increases in complexity. Whether high performing or low-performing, students can feel pressured to find ways to get an edge over.

Students can use cheating as a way to "stay competitive" in academics.

Risk 4: I feel unprepared for the upcoming exam.

This might be the most obvious in that students who don't feel prepared, or feel underprepared, are more likely to turn to cheating than a student who has spent the time studying and feeling confident in their knowledge. Students may not have studied for a variety of reasons, some of which might be beyond their control. For example, a student who has spent the evening in an emergency room with their toddler may feel underprepared for an upcoming exam, especially one that makes up a significant portion of their final grade. Likewise, a student who joined the course late or was unable to get the textbook in time may also feel that they are working from a disadvantage and seek out ways to make up for inadequate (real or perceived) preparation.

A similar problem is that some students will be unprepared because they didn’t study well. The painful bit about this is that they could be putting so much work into studying and just not seeing any results. You think of a studious, diligent student, and you probably imagine a textbook open, highlighters everywhere, pages of notes being poured over, reading through everything over and over. And it turns out that this is a really ineffective way of studying.

Students will be more likely to cheat to compensate for their lack of preparation.

Risk 5: I am at a disadvantage compared to other students

Students will cheat if they feel the social contract has been broken. This could be unfairness— odds are unfairly stacked against them from the beginning. "Unfairness" is another big word that encompass a lot, but we can start with assessments.

1. Uncertainty about your grading standards represents risk, like with the high stakes assignments we talked about previously.

2. Or, if students believe that the class learning materials and activities have not prepared them for an assessment, they will find other ways that feel more guaranteed.

3. The perception of chaos can also lead people to cheat. If it feels like the system in which they are pushed to interact with is broken, why should they be beholden to its rules?

Students will be more inclined to cheat when they feel that they need to even unfair odds.

Risk 6: It's too much work.

Similar to number 3, this is driven by feeling overwhelmed or incapable of handling the workload. Students who feel inadequately prepared for the course may feel motivated to take "shortcuts" to achieve their goals, especially when the work is competing with other priorities in their lives. Work, other courses, friends, family obligations, and other factors can help contribute to the feeling that they are overloaded, especially when they are having to learn how to navigate new, unfamiliar environments, knowledge, and situations.

Students can turn to cheating when they feel they've bitten off more than they can chew.

Risk 7: When am I ever going to need this?

How often have students said some variation of, "But I'll never use this again, anyway?" If a student doesn't feel that the results of the work being asked of them aren't worth their time and won't pay off later, they'll find ways to prioritize other items over it, which may lead them to finding other means of getting the results without putting in the work. If a student perceives the assignment to be "busy work," they place less value on it than something that will benefit them in the future.

Likewise, a student may feel that if they do need that information later, it's likely they can simply look it up again. The internet has brought more ability than ever to find the latest, up-to-date information (along with an onslaught of misinformation). The need to have a head full of memorized facts and data can feel less important than the ability to "Google" it.

Students may turn to cheating when they perceive the work as having no lasting value to them.

A final note about student risk

Ultimately, students who cheat are weighing the perceived risks of cheating vs. rewards and the rewards of cheating outweigh the risks of getting caught. Further, if students believe there is no real harm in cheating but that there is something more to be gained from doing so, they will turn to cheating to achieve their ends. If, however, students see that they are harming themselves (even if they don't get caught), their peers, instructors, and even community, they will be less likely to cheat. On the next page, we're going to start addressing some strategies for addressing those risks.