Academic dishonesty

Academic dishonesty or academic misconduct is any type of cheating that occurs in relation to a formal academic exercise. It can include

• Plagiarism: The adoption or reproduction of original creations of another author (person, collective, organization, community or other type of author, including anonymous authors) without due acknowledgment.
• Fabrication: The falsification of data, information, or citations in any formal academic exercise.
• Deception: Providing false information to an instructor concerning a formal academic exercise—e.g., giving a false excuse for missing a deadline or falsely claiming to have submitted work.
• Cheating: Any attempt to give or obtain assistance in a formal academic exercise (like an examination) without due acknowledgment.
• Bribery: or paid services. Giving certain test answers for money.
• Sabotage: Acting to prevent others from completing their work. This includes cutting pages out of library books or willfully disrupting the experiments of others.
• Professorial misconduct: Professorial acts that are academically fraudulent equate to academic fraud.

Academic dishonesty has been documented in most every type of educational setting, from elementary school to graduate school, and has been met with varying degrees of approbation throughout history. Today, educated society tends to take a very negative view of academic dishonesty.

[edit] History

In antiquity, the notion of intellectual property did not exist. Ideas were the common property of the literate elite. Books were published by hand-copying them. Scholars freely made digests or commentaries on other works, which could contain as much or as little original material as the author desired. There was no standard system of citation, because printing—and its resulting fixed pagination—was in the future. Scholars were an elite and a small group, who knew and generally trusted each other. This system continued through the European Middle Ages. Education was in Latin and occasionally Greek. Some scholars were monks, lived in monasteries, and spent much of their time copying manuscripts. Other scholars were in urban universities connected to the Roman Catholic Church. ^{[citation needed]}

Academic dishonesty dates back to the first tests. Scholars note that cheating was prevalent on the Chinese civil service exams thousands of years ago, even when cheating carried the penalty of death for both examinee and examiner.^[1] Before the founding of the MLA and the APA at end of the 19th century, there were no set rules on how to properly cite quotations from others' writings, which may have caused many cases of plagiarism out of ignorance."^[2]

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, cheating was widespread at college campuses in the United States, and was not considered dishonorable among students.^[3] It has been estimated that as many as two-thirds of students cheated at some point of their college careers at the turn of the 20th century.^[4] Fraternities often operated so-called essay mills, where term papers were kept on file and could be resubmitted over and over again by different students, often with the only change being the name on the paper. ^{[citation needed]} As higher education in the U.S. trended towards meritocracy, however, a greater emphasis was put on anti-cheating policies, and the newly diverse student bodies tended to arrive with a more negative view of academic dishonesty. Unluckily, in some areas academic dishonesty is widely spread and people who do not cheat represent a minority between the class.

[edit] Academic dishonesty today

Academic dishonesty is endemic in all levels of education. In the United States, studies show that 20% of students started cheating in the first grade^[5] Similarly, other studies reveal that currently in the U.S., 56% of middle school students and 70% of high school students have cheated.^[6]

Students are not the only ones to cheat in an academic setting. A study among North Carolina school teachers found that some 35 percent of respondents said they had witnessed their colleagues cheating in one form or another. The rise of high-stakes testing and the consequences of the results on the teacher is cited as a reason why a teacher might want to inflate the results of their students.^[7]

The first scholarly studies in the 1960s of academic dishonesty in higher education found that nationally in the U.S., somewhere between 50%-70% of college students had cheated at least once.^[8] While nationally, these rates of cheating in the U.S. remain stable today, there are large disparities between different schools, depending on the size, selectivity, and anti-cheating policies of the school. Generally, the smaller and more selective the college, the less cheating occurs there. For instance, the number of students who have engaged in academic dishonesty at small elite liberal arts colleges can be as low as 15%-20%, while cheating at large public universities can be as high as 75%.^[9] Moreover, researchers have found that students who attend a school with an honor code are less likely to cheat than students at schools with other ways of enforcing academic integrity.^[10] As for graduate education, a recent study found that 56% of MBA students admitted cheating, along with 54% of graduate students in engineering, 48% in education, and 45% in law.^[11]

Moreover, services such as iWillDoYourHomework.com offer to prepare any kind of homework of high school and college level and take online tests for students. While administrators are often aware [1] of such websites, they have been unsuccessful in curbing cheating in homework and non-proctored online tests, resorting to a recommendation http://www.ohiomatyc.org/web_documents/newsletter_fall_09.pdf] by the Ohio Mathematics Association to derive at least 80% of the grade of online classes from proctored tests.

While research on academic dishonesty in other countries is minimal, anecdotal evidence suggests cheating could be even more common in countries like Japan.^[12]

[edit] Types

[edit] Plagiarism

Main article: Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the adoption or reproduction of original intellectual creations (such as concepts, ideas, methods, pieces of information or expressions, etc.) of another author (person, collective, organization, community or other type of author, including anonymous authors) without due acknowledgment, in contexts where originality is acknowledged and rewarded.^[13] This can range from borrowing without attribution a particularly apt phrase, to paraphrasing someone else's original idea without citation, to wholesale contract cheating.

Texts with anonymous or collective authors, such as articles in Wikipedia, may also be the object of plagiarism. Also, plagiarism is distinctive from copyright infringement: texts from the public domain may also be plagiarized. Plagiarism is especially damaging in professional contexts that acknowledge and reward originality - such as science, education, arts, journalism, engineering etc. It is less relevant in professional fields that do not rely on originality - such a law making.

When plagiarizing, students will often turn to the Internet, due the ease of copying and pasting from websites. Other more old fashioned forms of plagiarism such as paper mills and passing off obscure articles or chapters of books of others as original work also still occur. Plagiarized papers are often riddled with gross inconsistencies such as referencing non-existent sections of the essay, changes in spelling and grammar customs, or the argument changing in mid-paragraph.

[edit] Fabrication

Fabrication is the falsification of data, information, or citations in any formal academic exercise. This includes making up citations to back up arguments or inventing quotations. Fabrication predominates in the natural sciences, where students sometimes fudge numbers to make experiments "work". It includes data falsification, in which false claims are made about research performed, including selective submitting of results to exclude inconvenient data to generating bogus data.

Bibliographical references are often fabricated, especially when a certain minimum number of references is required or considered sufficient for the particular kind of paper. This type of fabrication can range from referring to works whose titles look relevant but which the student did not read, to making up bogus titles and authors.

There is also the practice of dry-labbing—which can occur in chemistry or other lab courses, in which the teacher clearly expects the experiment to yield certain results (which confirm established laws), so the student starts from the results and works backward, calculating what the experimental data should be, often adding variation to the data. In some cases, the lab report is written before the experiment is conducted—in some cases, the experiment is never carried out. In either case, the results are what the instructor expects. ^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Deception

Deception is providing false information to a teacher/instructor concerning a formal academic exercise. Examples of this include taking more time on a take-home test than is allowed, giving a dishonest excuse when asking for a deadline extension, or falsely claiming to have submitted work. This type of academic misconduct is often considered softer than the more obvious forms of cheating, and otherwise-honest students sometimes engage in this type of dishonesty without considering themselves cheaters. It is also sometimes done by students who have failed to complete an assignment, to avoid responsibility for doing so.

[edit] Sabotage

Sabotage is when a student prevents others from completing their work. This includes cutting pages out of library books or willfully disrupting the experiments of others. Sabotage is usually only found in highly competitive, cutthroat environments, such as at extremely elite schools where class rankings are highly prized. Poor behavior and the low level disruption of other students learning, is extremely common in all educational settings. Some medical-school librarians have noted that important articles—required reading for key courses—are frequently missing from bound journals—sliced out with razor blades, scalpels, or other sharp blades. Other journals will be marked up in crayon. ^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Cheating

The use of crib notes during an examination is typically viewed as cheating

Cheating can take the form of crib notes, looking over someone's shoulder during an exam, or any forbidden sharing of information between students regarding an exam or exercise. Many elaborate methods of cheating have been developed over the years. For instance, students have been documented hiding notes in the bathroom toilet tank, in the brims of their baseball caps, or up their sleeves. Also, the storing of information in graphing calculators, pagers, cell phones, and other electronic devices has cropped up since the information revolution began. While students have long surreptitiously scanned the tests of those seated near them, some students actively try to aid those who are trying to cheat. Methods of secretly signaling the right answer to friends are quite varied, ranging from coded sneezes or pencil tapping to high-pitched noises beyond the hearing range of most teachers. Some students have been known to use more elaborate means, such as using a system of repetitive body signals like hand movements or foot jerking to distribute answers (i.e. where a tap of the foot could correspond to answer "A", two taps for answer "B", and so on).

Cheating differs from most other forms of academic dishonesty, in that people can engage in it without benefiting themselves academically at all. For example, a student who illicitly telegraphed answers to a friend during a test would be cheating, even though the student's own work is in no way affected. Another example of academic dishonesty is a dialogue between students in the same class but in two different time periods, both of which a test is scheduled for that day. If the student in the earlier time period informs the other student in the later period about the test; that is considered academic dishonesty, even though the first student has not benefited himself. This form of cheating—though deprecated—could conceivably be called altruistic.

[edit] Professorial misconduct

Professorial misconduct includes improper grading of students' papers and oral exams, deliberate negligence towards cheating or assistance in cheating. This can be done for reasons of personal bias towards students (favoritism) or a particular viewpoint (intellectual dishonesty), for a bribe, or to improve the teacher's own perceived performance by increasing the passing rate. It is still occasionally done for matters of ego or to procure sexual favors (sexual harassment).

[edit] Impersonation

Impersonation is a form of cheating whereby a different person than the student assigned an assignment or exam completes it. Unlike in Cheating, the academic work is totally 'outsourced' to another person or organization, usually for pay [2].