By Karen
Sternheimer

Did you know that turning in a class assignment copied
directly from your textbook without quotes is a form of plagiarism? A student
who did this in one of my classes claimed not to.

Each year I encounter some form of academic dishonesty, the
most common being copying from another source, directly or paraphrased, without
quotes or attribution. The most egregious example: a student copied directly
from a book I wrote. (In this case,
imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery).

Why do people cheat? And how can sociology illuminate—and
potentially reduce—this behavior, particularly in academia?

Donald
McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers University, has studied academic cheating
for decades. In his research, McCabe found that this is a very common behavior
and certainly nothing new. In his 2001 article, “Cheating
in Academic Institutions: A Decade of Research,” McCabe and co-authors
Linda Klebe Trevino and Kenneth D. Butterfield found that several social
factors help explain academic dishonesty.

They note that perceptions of peer behavior are among the
most important factors that explain why people cheat. Students might think that
if everyone else is cheating not only is it acceptable,
but maybe even
necessary to remain competitive. Whether it is a curved assignment or
competition for graduate admissions, fear of falling behind can be a powerful
motivator for even
the best students to cheat.

Rather than simply based on individual morality, McCabe,
Trevino and Butterfield describe a host of institutional factors that
contribute to cheating. Institutions that make the rules and consequences clear
have less cheating. Having an honor
code may also reduce the likelihood that students cheat, but having a
culture that discourages cheating may be as good if not better.

Professors play an important role too: if few penalize or
report cheating, students will have fewer disincentives. Reporting cheating
can require extra paperwork for faculty, and that extra work may not seem
worthwhile if administrators do little to punish those accused of cheating.

Of course technology
enables new forms of cheating, and requires new forms of detecting academic
dishonesty. New
technologies are being developed to catch twenty-first century cheating
techniques too. At our university we can use turnitin.com, a
site for finding matches with papers in their database and the internet in
general. I require students upload all written work to the site, and have found
incidents of cheating, despite warning them that the site is for an academic
integrity check.

While it may seem obvious that cutting and pasting from the
internet is a form of cheating, I found that this occasionally was happening
among my students. This year I started including the instruction “cutting and
pasting from the internet or anyone else’s work is forbidden.” To my surprise,
this instruction has dramatically reduced the practice. As McCabe, Trevino and
Butterfield found in their research, providing specific details on what
constitutes cheating is important, since some students seem not to know what is
fair game.

Institutions matter in other ways; some directly promote
cheating. Earlier this year, a
report came out claiming that teachers helped students cheat on standardized
tests. As educators are increasingly evaluated based on these scores, some
teachers clearly feel pressure to help their students to prevent reprisals for
poor student performance. Another news report last year claimed that some
teachers had someone
else take their teaching certification exam.

Cheating is about more than an individual’s value system or
character; it takes place within important social contexts. Thinking
sociologically we can come up with some possible ways to reduce cheating.
McCabe, Trevino and Butterfield provide a list of suggestions, which include
reducing the focus on grades in the classroom and institutions and instead
concentrating on learning, eliminating strict curves, providing fair testing
situations and fostering mutual respect.

In my experience, I have noticed students are more likely to
cheat when they are underprepared academically and feel that even their best
work is inadequate. For student athletes, who might have other serious time
pressures, cheating might be a way to try to remain academically eligible. International
students, for whom English is a new language, may also struggle both
academically and with their new cultural environment. McCabe
suggests that this too is an institutional problem, as universities
actively recruit these students without providing the support they may need to
do well on their own.

Understanding that cheating is a social process, what
sociological factors do you think might reduce cheating?