A matter of competence, integrity or (dis)honesty? How academic faculty understand and manage student cheating

Abstract

Academic plagiarism and cheating have received increasing attention in recent years, but the schools traditional rules and regulations on how to punish this type of infraction has not been updated in relation to how society treats other types of foul play. Previous research has traditionally studied cheating from two perspectives: moral and legal. The aim of this study was to document a third perspective, namely a learning perspective. Firstly an instrument that could measure the three perspectives was made. Then by using this instrument, the study aimed to investigate possible relationship between the perspectives, and how serious, how much observed and reported given cheating scenarios was. The participant in this study (N = 132) was a mix of academic staff (e.g. professors, associate professors and administrative employees), recruited from universities and academies all over Norway. The results suggest that the instrument made is both valid and reliable. The learning, along with the moral and legalistic perspective, influences how serious academic staff regards different kinds of cheating incidences. This study did not however, based on too little variation in the responses, manage make any conclusions about what effect these perspective have on how cheating is observed and reported.