Human Nature | 020 Community and character | 02145 Cheating

02145 Cheating

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Most graduate faculty members have good intentions. They also have professional discretion which they use in dealing with misconduct cases in their classrooms. Standards, however, vary from instructor to instructor, opening the door for student serial cheaters to escape notice. Donald McCabe has studied misconduct for decades. He reports that more than 40% of faculty report that they have ignored cheating. More than half of faculty have never reported cheating to anyone else.

A significant proportion of faculty pay less attention than they should to their own practices in writing up the results of their research. According to a study in Nature, "up to 20% of published papers contain some degree of self-plagiarism." This is not simply a matter of professors padding their resumes. As Nature goes on to note, "duplicate [papers] have also been shown to cause meta-analyses to overestimate the effiicacy of drugs".
Questionable conduct appears to have become for many experienced researchers a sign of exquisite adaptation to one’s environment. What do we know about graduate student conduct? Not much, but the studies that have been published are not reassuring. According to a 2001 study by Wajda-Johnston et al.* , more than one quarter of surveyed graduate students reported they had cheated in graduate school with greater levels reporting such conduct as occurring in their early years. When probed about specific dishonest acts, with particular definitions provided, the proportion reporting such conduct was closer to three quarters.
* Valerie A. Wajda-Johnston, Paul J. Handal, Peter A. Brawer, & Anthony N. Fabricatore, Academic Dishonesty at the Graduate Level, Ethics & Behavior, 11(3), 287-305 (2001). Source: Donald L. McCabe, Linda Klebe Trevino, Kenneth D. Butterfield, Cheating in Academic Institutions: A Decade of Research, Ethics & Behavior, 11(3), 219-232 (2001). http://integrity.unc.edu/research.html
Author: Gary Comstock
Maintained By: Gary Comstock
Last Updated: 2007-06-17