Academic dishonesty
A study among North Carolina school teachers found that 35 percent of respondents said they had witnessed their colleagues cheating in one form or another.
[19] The first scholarly studies in the 1960s of academic dishonesty in higher education found that nationally in the U.S., somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of college students had cheated at least once.
[26] In addition, colleges and universities are increasingly turning to online proctoring services to oversee tens of thousands of exams per year.
[30][31] In Canada, individual post-secondary institutions discourage academic misconduct with the help of policies and guidelines published by the university itself,[3][32] though research into the topic has lagged behind that of other countries.
[37] A large-scale study in Germany found that 75 percent of the university students admitted that they conducted at least one of seven types of academic misconduct (such as plagiarism or falsifying data) within the previous six months.
For instance, students have been documented hiding cheat sheets or notes in the bathroom toilet tank, in the brims of their baseball caps, up their sleeves, along their thighs or in their cleavage.
[48] This is a relatively new form of cheating, seemingly gaining traction in the 1940s when an increasing amount of advertisements for ghostwriters could be seen on university campuses and in newspapers.
[51] Plagiarism, as defined in the 1995 Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary, is the "use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work".
[52] In academia, this can range from borrowing without attribution a particularly apt phrase, to paraphrasing someone else's original idea without citation, to wholesale contract cheating.
[54][55][56][57][58] The 18th century new morals were institutionalized and enforced prominently in the sectors of academia (including academic science, education, engineering etc.)
and journalism, where plagiarism is now considered academic dishonesty and a breach of journalistic ethics, subject to sanctions like expulsion and other severe career damages.
[65][66] Because ChatGPT generates human-like text, it can increase actions of ghostwriting, such as students using direct information from their sources without giving proper citations.
"[70] In the academic context, sabotage occurs when one commits acts to disrupt another person's work with the intention of preventing them from completing it successfully.
[71] This takes place when data or results from research or a piece of academic work is disseminated or shared while the author(s) expectation was for them to remain confidential.
Researchers have studied the correlation of cheating to personal characteristics, demographics, contextual factors, methods of deterring misconduct, even stages of moral development.
There is some evidence in research to suggest that individuals with "type A" personalities who often attempt to obtain high degrees of success, are most likely to be reported on for academic misconduct (cheating).
The writer Thomas Mallon noted that many scholars had found plagiarism in literature (Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Reade being two notable examples) to often be perpetrated in a way similar to kleptomania (a psychological disease associated with uncontrollable stealing, even when it is against the interests of the thief).
[80][81] Richard Fass puts forward the possibility that business scandals in the real world make students believe dishonesty is an acceptable method for achieving success in contemporary society.
"[20]: 70 Conversely, other scholars consider that with the recent rise in corporate ethics related dismissals in the business world, this approach to cheating may be losing its appeal, if it ever really had any.
[84] The federal government of the United States has mandated high-stakes testing as part of the No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002.
[85] Research has identified a number of demographic characteristics that appear to be important influences on cheating, including age, gender and grade point average.
Students who speak English as a second language have been shown to commit academic dishonesty more and are more likely to be caught than native speakers, since they will often not want to rewrite sources in their own words, fearing that the meaning of the sentence will be lost through poor paraphrasing skills.
A study found a correlation between how harsh or unfair a professor is perceived as and academic misconduct, since students see cheating as a way of getting back at the teacher.
[101] The sharing of academic files, contract cheating and the unauthorized receipt of assistance from classmates and other sources have increased due to the transition to online course delivery.
The case of S. Walter Poulshock, a 1960s early-career historian whose work was found to contain wholly fabricated material, was exposed in 1966 with the American Historical Review providing a warning on the topic.
[106][107] Nonetheless, his book was never removed from the shelves of many university libraries and (together with his related thesis) was still being cited in 2013, 47 years after it was intended to have been withdrawn by its publisher.
In response to these concerns, in the middle of the twentieth century, many schools devised mixed judicial panels composed of both students and faculty.
[20]: 184 Starting in the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court began chipping away at the in loco parentis doctrine, giving college students more civil liberties such as the right of due process in disciplinary proceedings (Dixon v. Alabama Board of Education, 1961).
[112] Recently, Donald L. McCabe and Linda Klebe Trevino, two experts in the field of academic dishonesty, have proposed a new way of deterring cheating that has been implemented in schools such as the University of Maryland.
One professor wrote in an article in The English Journal that when he peeked in on an unproctored class taking a test and saw several students up and consulting with one another, he decided that they were not cheating, but were using non-traditional techniques and collaborative learning to surmount the obstacles teachers had put in their way.
