{"title":"Choosing Not to Cheat: A Framework to Assess Students’ Rationales for Abiding by Academic Integrity Policies","authors":"Kenneth H. Kolb, Kyle C. Longest, Alexa J. Singer","doi":"10.20429/IJSOTL.2015.090109","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Writing intensive first-year seminars are well situated within the curriculum to teach about issues like cheating and plagiarism. Although most research on academic integrity focuses on how—and how much—students cheat, we take a different approach. We assess whether participation in writing intensive first-year seminars produces measurable changes in students’ rationales for choosing not to cheat. Relying upon data collected via pre and post-test in-depth interviews, we propose a framework to measure these changes that is grounded in students’ accounts of how they negotiated real-life opportunities to cheat on campus. In general, we find that writing intensive first-year seminars produce no positive qualitative changes in students’ rationales for choosing not to cheat. In the conclusion, we offer a new perspective on the possible consequences of creating “cheat proof ” tests and assignments on students’ ethical development.","PeriodicalId":332019,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2015-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"5","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"The International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.20429/IJSOTL.2015.090109","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 5
Abstract
Writing intensive first-year seminars are well situated within the curriculum to teach about issues like cheating and plagiarism. Although most research on academic integrity focuses on how—and how much—students cheat, we take a different approach. We assess whether participation in writing intensive first-year seminars produces measurable changes in students’ rationales for choosing not to cheat. Relying upon data collected via pre and post-test in-depth interviews, we propose a framework to measure these changes that is grounded in students’ accounts of how they negotiated real-life opportunities to cheat on campus. In general, we find that writing intensive first-year seminars produce no positive qualitative changes in students’ rationales for choosing not to cheat. In the conclusion, we offer a new perspective on the possible consequences of creating “cheat proof ” tests and assignments on students’ ethical development.