One of the most important studies is McCabe and Treviño’s (1993) survey of more than 6,000 students at 31 academic institutions, which was conducted in the 1990–1991 academic year. This project was the first major, multicampus investigation of institution-level variables that influence cheating behavior since Bowers’s (1964) seminal work. Major variables investigated in this study included the existence of an honor code, student understanding and acceptance of a school’s academic integrity policy, perceived certainty that cheaters will be reported, perceived severity of penalties, and the degree to which students perceive that their peers engage in cheating behavior. This final variable, peer behavior, was found to show the most significant relation with student cheating in this study. Based on social learning theory (Bandura, 1986), McCabe and Treviño hypothesized such a relation, although they were somewhat surprised by its strength. Indeed, they concluded that the strong influence of peers’ behavior may suggest that academic dishonesty not only is learned from observing the behavior of peers, but that peers’ behavior provides a kind of normative support for cheating. The fact that others are cheating may also suggest that, in such a climate, the non-cheater feels left at a disadvantage. Thus cheating may come to be viewed as an acceptable way of getting and staying ahead.
McCabe and Treviño’s (1997) study of almost 1,800 students at nine mediumto large-size universities in the 1993–1994 academic year examined the relative influence of contextual and individual factors on cheating behavior, and the results pointed to the primacy of the institutional context in influencing cheating behavior.
The contextual factors (peer cheating behavior, peer disapproval of cheating behavior, and perceived severity of penalties for cheating) were significantly more influential than the individual factors (age, gender, GPA, and participation in ex-tracurricular activities). Peer-related factors once again emerged as the most significant correlate of cheating behavior.
McCabe and Treviño (1997) also found in this study that cheating tends to be more prevalent on these larger campuses. This is reflected in Tables 1 and 2, which summarize some of the quantitative data obtained in their 1990–1991 and 1993 studies. The tables also show data obtained in a replication of their 1990–1991 study that was conducted on the same 31 campuses in the 1995–1996 academic year. These data reflect the number of students who admit to the various forms of academic dishonesty. In Table 1, a serious test cheater is defined as someone who admits to one or more instances of copying from another student on a test or exam, using unauthorized crib or cheat notes on a test or exam, or helping someone else to cheat on a test or exam. Although other test cheating behaviors were also evaluated (e.g., learning what was on a test from someone who took the test in an earlier class section), the behaviors included in our serious test cheating statistic are behaviors a majority of students agree constitute cheating. The serious cheating on written work statistic was constructed in an identical fashion and includes four be behaviors: plagiarism, fabricating or falsifying a bibliography, turning in work done by someone else, and copying a few sentences of material without footnoting them in a paper. As the 1963 versus 1993 comparison suggests, cheating is prevalent and test or exam cheating has increased dramatically over the last 3 decades.
A distinguishing characteristic of the original McCabe and Treviño (1993) study was its investigation of the influence of academic honor codes on student integrity, an investigation that was extended in McCabe et al. (1999). Earlier work (e.g., Bowers, 1964) suggested that honor codes were associated with lower levels of cheating. However, there is evidence of a slight deterioration in the relation between honor codes and cheating between 1990–1991 and 1995–1996. You can find more about exam cheating here:
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