The whys of cheating are plentiful — there are almost as many reasons for cheating as there are students who do it. And according to national statistics, there are a lot of students doing it.
In 1999, Donald McCabe of Rutgers University, one of the nation’s leading researchers on academic integrity, directed a national survey of 2,100 students on 21 different college campuses to determine the extent of cheating. More than 75 percent of student respondents admitted to cheating in some form.
According to Director of Student Judicial Affairs Chris Loschiavo, the University has not participated in any of the recent studies on academic integrity, but it did engage in one of McCabe’s earlier studies in 1992 and 1993. Loschiavo said the past survey found that about 80 percent of students at the University admitted to cheating.
However, the number of students who own up to cheating in surveys is in sharp contrast with the number of academic dishonesty cases that are processed through the Office of Judicial Affairs.
From 2002 to 2003, there were 202 academic dishonesty cases at the University, while enrollment totaled 18,421. That means 1.1 percent of the student population was caught cheating.
Regardless of how many students cheat and get away with it, most students know cheating is a cardinal sin in the academic community. So what factors motivate students to do something they know is wrong?
Teaching Effectiveness Program Director Georgeanne Cooper said students may cheat for a variety of reasons.
“Some do it just to see if they can get away with it, some do it because they feel pressure to do well, maybe even people cheat to gain some illusion of self-worth or avoid the shame of failure,” Cooper said.
Cooper added that she has dealt with academic dishonesty both as a teacher and as a parent. She specifically recalled one instance where she suspected her daughter of cheating on a math test.
“When I asked her about it, her answer was pretty cavalier: ‘Mom, it’s just a math test,’” Cooper said.
TEP Faculty Consultant Laurie Jones Neighbors also deals extensively with the issues surrounding academic dishonesty. She said students are motivated to cheat during extreme conditions, such as when their computer crashes the night before a paper is due and the student has to make a choice between not turning in the assignment and turning in something they didn’t write.
“It’s not like students are ‘Ha ha ha, I’m cheating,’” Neighbors said. “Students I find who do intentional cheating are in desperate circumstances.”
But perhaps the biggest factor pushing students to cheat is the pressure cooker known as college life.
“Between trying to fit in all the credits, and trying to make sure you get a good internship or job, and dealing with your parents — there’s a million stresses,” sophomore Allie Major said.
According to the University Counseling and Testing Center’s 2002-03 report, stress is a big part of students’ lives. In fact, 42.4 percent of the students who turned to the counseling center for aid did so in part because they “don’t handle anxiety well.”
Counseling Center Senior Staff Psychologist Ron Miyaguchi said the temptation to cheat doesn’t really come up in his sessions with students, but many students he sees have scrambled priorities, which could result in them choosing to cheat.
“Students are typically in the mindset of short-term goals — for example, my goal is to get an ‘A’ in this class,” he said.
Academic Learning Services Instructor Amy Nuetzman also said students focus too much on the short term and fail to recognize how demanding college classes are. They’re fine for the first few weeks of the term, but when homework deadlines, paper deadlines and test deadlines start piling up, many students think the only way to dig themselves out is by cutting corners, Nuetzman said.
“A lot of students have told me that they are short on time actually writing the paper and they feel like they just have to whip it out,” Nuetzman said.
But the final part of the equation explaining why students cheat is the fact that many students don’t realize they’re cheating.
“A lot of students don’t understand the standards the University holds them to,” said Hilary Berkman, director of the Office of Student Advocacy.
She added that some instances of cheating are clearly intentional, such as purchasing a paper off the Internet, but other academic transgressions, such as failing to cite a paper properly, are often unintended.
“Academic dishonesty isn’t black and white,” she said. “The cases we see can be very complicated in that maybe the student hasn’t done everything correctly, but that isn’t necessarily an act of dishonesty.”