Causes for Cheating: Unclear Expectations in the Classroom

A survey was submitted to faculty, teaching assistants, and students as part of a larger study on undergraduate cheating in an introduction to computing course at Georgia Tech. This course was chosen because it is taught by a variety of professors and relies heavily on teaching assistants. The goal of this survey was to emulate earlier work done at M.I.T. and determine whether these groups held similar beliefs about what actions constitute cheating. The survey presented scenarios and asked the respondent to rank these scenarios as “not cheating”, “trivial cheating”, or “serious cheating”. Each respondent was involved with the course, either as a student, teaching assistant, instructor, or administrator. The results showed that the first difficulty in studying cheating is defining it. Not only were there wide discrepancies between the three groups, there was also wide deviation within the groups. The members of the administration agreed on only one of the nine scenarios. Students and teaching assistants were generally closer in their responses, but still differed considerably. One limitation of this study was the limited response pool: only four administrators were involved in the course. Nonetheless, the significance of the deviations demonstrates the three groups are not successfully communicating their beliefs. The results further indicate a need for clear leadership in the definition of which actions and behaviors constitute cheating.