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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 51, NO. 2, MAY 2008

Faculty and Student Classroom Influences on

Academic Dishonesty
Melissa A. Broeckelman-Post
AbstractThis study examined the influence that faculty and
students have on academic dishonesty. Results showed that
instructors who employ more safeguards against academic dishonesty and who discuss plagiarism, collaboration, and source
attribution are more likely to observe students engaging in academic dishonesty behaviors. This study also found that students
are less likely to report engaging in serious plagiarism if the
instructor spends time discussing plagiarism and are more likely
to believe that copying sentences is a serious form of academic
dishonesty if the instructor discusses source attribution. Finally,
results showed that students engagement in academic dishonesty
is most influenced by whether they believe their peers are engaging
in academic dishonesty. These findings suggest that instructors
should talk more about their expectations for academic honesty
and use safeguards that deter cheating and plagiarism. These
findings also suggest that institutions should seek opportunities
to have students talk with other students about the importance of
academic honesty.
Index TermsAcademic honesty, cheating, classroom practices,
engineering education, plagiarism.

I. INTRODUCTION

S allegations of academic dishonesty increasingly plague

educational institutions, universities have begun to implement a variety of measures to educate students about academic
expectations andtodeterplagiarists.Muchattentionhasbeenpaid
to academic integrity initiatives, such as honor codes [1][3], the
use of plagiarism detection software such as turnitin.com [4][7],
teaching citation techniques [8], [9], and institutional approaches
for promoting academic honesty [10][12]. However, little has
been written that quantitatively assesses whether specific classroom practices affect the likelihood that students will engage in
particular types of academic dishonesty.
Many universities, including the one at which this study was
conducted, require instructors to include a statement about plagiarism or academic misconduct on their syllabi and encourage
instructors to talk with students about these issues. However,
adherence to these rules is rarely monitored nor are the regulations always followed. Moreover, considering the complexity
involved in defining acts of academic dishonesty and disagreements among scholars and academic practitioners about what
constitutes plagiarism, the faculty and the students they teach
need to have meaningful dialogue on these topics so that they
can reach a shared understanding. Classroom practices, such
as including a syllabus statement about academic misconduct,
talking about expectations for academic honesty on the first day
of class, clarifying expectations for academic integrity on each

Manuscript received December 11, 2006; revised September 27, 2007.

The author is with Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701 USA (e-mail:
mb128405@ohio.edu).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TE.2007.910428

assignment, and others, could potentially help lead to such a

shared understanding, even if for only that particular class.
The purpose of this study was to examine whether faculty
safeguards against and discussions about academic dishonesty
affect student engagement in and faculty observation of academic dishonesty behaviors. This study also examined whether
student behaviors are influenced by their perceptions of their
peers behavior.
II. REVIEW OF LITERATURE
A. Prevalence of Academic Dishonesty
Few people would argue that academic dishonesty is not a
problem on college and university campuses. In his academic
integrity studies of 50 000 undergraduates on over 60 campuses,
McCabe found that an average of 70% of students admit to
cheating on tests or written assignments [1]. Wadja-Johnson,
Handal, Brawer, and Fabricatore surveyed graduate students and
found that 28.7% admit to cheating, but 75.2% admit to some
form of academic dishonesty when asked about specific behaviors [13]. However, considerable disagreement exists about
what should count as academic dishonesty and what the best
approaches for deterring plagiarism and cheating might be.
Some believe that high levels of academic dishonesty are an
indicator of an overall erosion of moral values in this society.
For example, Callahan argued in The Cheating Culture: Why
More Americans are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead that cheating
has become increasingly acceptable in the United States and is
no longer seen as a way to get ahead but, rather, as necessary
for keeping up and for staying on the right side of the growing
wage gap between the haves and the have-nots [14]. Likewise, such high stakes are associated with getting good grades in
college (e.g., not having to pay tuition to retake a class, keeping
scholarships, selection into honor societies, admission to the
right graduate/medical/law school, higher paying jobs, etc.) that
good grades, at any cost, often become the goal. Bennett pointed
out that major plagiarism is increased by a fear of failure but can
be mitigated by a fear of punishment [15]. These perspectives,
like much of the literature on academic dishonesty and ethics,
imply that plagiarism and cheating are intentional actions undertaken by students either because of a cost benefit or because
of the students lack of ethical values. Although important to
acknowledge that this assumption is true in some cases, one is
unfair and inaccurate to believe that behaviors that can be classified as plagiarism are always intentional acts of deception.
B. Lack of Knowledge About Academic Expectations
Instead, many cases of academic dishonesty are unintentional violations of textual practices that result from a lack of un-

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BROECKELMAN-POST: FACULTY AND STUDENT CLASSROOM INFLUENCES ON ACADEMIC DISHONESTY

derstanding of specific academic expectations. As Overbey and

Guiling [8] and Park [9] indicated, most students do not clearly
understand what constitutes plagiarism. In a study by Sutherland-Smith, 77% of the students said that they knew what plagiarism was, but 70% of the students who claimed that knowledge could not identify plagiarized passages or attribute sources
properly [16]. Moreover, of the students interviewed in the same
study, two-thirds believed that citing Web sources in the text was
unnecessary if those sources were included in the reference list,
and 83% thought that cutting and pasting directly from the Internet was permissible. Likewise, Landau, Druen, and Arcuri
found that admonishments to plagiarize are rarely effective, but
providing feedback to students on their own work about source
citation can help reduce plagiarism [17]. These studies indicate
that a lack of understanding of the expectations for source citation is often the underlying cause of plagiarism.
This problem is exacerbated for international students. Handa
and Power [18], Holmes [19], and Sutherland-Smith [20] all
noted that understandings of plagiarism, beliefs about the ownership of ideas and text, and expectations for source citation
vary greatly among cultures. An easy assumption is that international student plagiarism is the result of a lack of language
skills; however, Handa and Power argued that even for international students for whom English is their first language, Western
expectations for source citation are new and require a complete
paradigm shift. They argued that instructors need to be very explicit when instructing students about their expectations for documenting sources and need to take a workshop-based approach
to helping students develop critical reading, writing, summarizing, and paraphrasing skills.
Howard pointed out that plagiarism and cheating are considered subcategories of academic dishonesty, which implies a
lack of ethics and morals [21], [22]. Yet, many behaviors that are
considered plagiarism are a result of a lack of knowledge about
conventions or an attempt to understand difficult ideas and learn
the language of academic discourse. The attempt to learn academic discourse through mimicry is often the underlying cause
of patchwriting, which is described by Howard as copying from
a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one synonym for another ([21],
p. xvii). Furthermore, Valentine warned that equating plagiarism
with following or not following rules based only on the features
of a text means that instructors are sometimes labeling students as
honest or dishonest because of what they do or do not know
[23]. Knowledge and ethics are separate constructs and should
not be treated as though they are the same.
C. Need for an Institutional Approach
Macdonald and Carroll explained that holistic institutional approaches are needed to address academic integrity. They argued:
Looking to the underlying causes of plagiarism rather
than just the symptoms is perhaps the key to ensuring
that a holistic approach to plagiarism is adopted, where the
emphasis is on promoting good scholarly, academic practices rather than focusing on potential problems and channeling all the institutions energies into deterring through
detection and punishment [10, p. 244].

207

Stearns articulated the important role that instructors have in

fostering an ethical academic culture by developing positive student-instructor relationships through interpersonal competence
and immediacy, arguing that instructor classroom behavior
shapes the college environment [24]. She said, The first step
is to discuss academic integrity with students, including definitions and rationales of the importance of integrity. Stearns
suggested that studying faculty discussions about academic
integrity would be interesting from a classroom climate perspective; however, this study will investigate the possibility
that such discussions might also help students more clearly
understand the expectations for what constitutes appropriate
academic work.
Indeed, many of the practices suggested by the articles cited
previously are similar to teaching behaviors included in the
model of clarity [25]. Talking with students about expectations
for academic conventions, such as paraphrasing and source
citation, is one way that teachers can be clear. Since teacher
clarity has been linked to increased learning of course material
[26], [27], such discussions could possibly help students better
understand and practice academic honesty in their work. Such
discussions might also help instructors more clearly understand
and articulate their own expectations and heighten their awareness of the importance of academic honesty. These assumptions
generated the following research questions:
RQ1: Is there a relationship between the number of safeguards employed and the number of academic dishonesty
behaviors observed by instructors?
RQ2: Is there a relationship between the number of times
that instructors discuss plagiarism, collaboration, and
source attribution and their observation of students engaging in these behaviors?
RQ3: Is there a relationship between whether students instructors discuss academic plagiarism, improper source
attribution, and collaboration and whether students report
engaging in those behaviors?
RQ4: Is there a relationship between students perception
of others academic dishonesty behaviors and their selfreported engagement in those behaviors?
III. METHOD
With the help of the computer services office, the e-mail addresses of 700 faculty members, 1000 graduate students, and
2000 undergraduate students were randomly selected from the
entire population at a large Appalachian region public university. E-mails were sent to these potential participants inviting
them to take an online survey, and responses were received from
123 faculty, 96 graduate students, and 248 undergraduate students. Though this is a moderately low response rate, it is similar to the response rates obtained by McCabe on other campuses
[28], and the sample was fairly representative of the university
population in terms of college, sex, year in school, faculty rank,
etc. [29].
For the purposes of this study, faculty and graduate students
were asked questions about which safeguards they employ to
reduce cheating in their classes, how many times they discuss
their policies concerning academic dishonesty, and whether they
had observed specific academic dishonesty behaviors in classes

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 51, NO. 2, MAY 2008

TABLE I
SAFEGUARDS EMPLOYED BY FACULTY AND GRADUATE TEACHING ASSISTANTS

TABLE II
CORRELATIONS BETWEEN FACULTY DISCUSSION ABOUT AND OBSERVATION OF DISHONESTY BEHAVIORS

that they taught in the past three years. Undergraduate and graduate students were asked questions about whether they had engaged in specific academic dishonesty behaviors during the past
year, whether their instructors had discussed particular types of
academic dishonesty, whether they believed specific behaviors
were serious forms of academic dishonesty, and what frequency
did they believe other students engaged in academic dishonesty.
All questions were based on questions administered by McCabe
at other universities and were used with his permission.
IV. RESULTS
A. Faculty Observations
Faculty and graduate students were asked which safeguards,
if any, they employ to reduce cheating in their classes (see
Table I). Items 211 were added to obtain a sum of measures
taken.
Next, a correlation analysis was conducted to examine if a relationship existed between the number of safeguards employed
in classes by faculty and graduate teaching associates (GTAs)
and whether they observed each type of academic dishonesty.
Categories for types of academic dishonesty were based on categories created by Broeckelman and Pollock (2006), based on a
factor analysis of faculty and student responses about the seriousness of specific cheating behaviors [29]. Significant positive
correlations were found between the number of safeguards em,
ployed and the observation of academic misconduct (
), collaboration (
,
), and copying
,
). No relationship was found
sentences (
between the number of safeguards employed and the observa,
).
tion of library misconduct (
Second, pair-wise correlations were run to find if a relationship exists between the number of times faculty discuss
plagiarism, collaboration, and lack of source attribution and
how often they observe students engaging in those behaviors.
For each of these behaviors, instructor responses as to whether
they discussed each behavior on individual assignments, in
their syllabus, at the start of the quarter, or at other times were

added to obtain a sum total of the times when each behavior

was discussed. Responses about instructors discussion of
attribution of written sources and attribution of Internet sources
were summed into a single variable of source attribution.
Table II shows the correlation coefficients. Instructors who
discussed plagiarism were significantly more likely to observe
,
). Instructors who
copying sentences (
discussed attribution of sources were significantly more likely
,
)
to observe academic misconduct
and copying sentences (
,
). Instructors
who discussed collaboration were significantly more likely
,
) and
to observe copying sentences (
,
). Though all significant
Collaboration
correlations were relatively small, correlations were strongest
between discussions of specific behaviors and the observation
of those same behaviors.
B. Student Self-Reported Behavior
To rule out the possibility that the increased observation of
behaviors discussed is related to an increased number of incidences instead of increased vigilance, examination of relationships between students reports of instructor discussions, and
self-reports of academic dishonesty are necessary.
Students self-reported behaviors that were classified as academic misconduct-level plagiarism and copying sentences-level
plagiarism were summed into a single number of plagiarism behaviors (Table III). The same summations were conducted for
the perceived seriousness of plagiarism behaviors. In Table IV,
although all correlations for students engaging in plagiarism
were negative, the only significant correlation was between instructors who discussed plagiarism and students who engaged
,
in academic misconduct-level plagiarism (
). For students attitudes toward plagiarism, the only significant correlation was between the perceived seriousness of
copying sentences-level plagiarism and instructor discussion of
,
).
source attribution (
A similar correlation was run for collaboration. The relationship between instructors discussing collaboration and student

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209

TABLE III
ITEMS INCLUDED IN EACH BEHAVIOR CATEGORY

TABLE IV
CORRELATIONS BETWEEN STUDENT SELF-REPORTS OF ENGAGING IN PLAGIARISM AND FACULTY DISCUSSION OF PLAGIARISM AND ATTRIBUTION

engagement in collaboration was not significant (

,
), but the relationship between instructors discussing
collaboration and student perceived seriousness of collaboration
,
).
was significant at the 0.05 level (

C. Perceived Peer Behavior

Finally, correlations were run to determine if a relationship
existed between students perceptions of others behavior
and their own reported engagement in academic dishonesty
behaviors. Students were asked to indicate how frequently they
thought particular dishonesty behaviors occurred on campus
,
).
using a five-point Likert scale (
Those responses were correlated with the summed total of behaviors in that same category in which they reported engaging.
Positive significant correlations were found between perceived
frequency of plagiarism and the students own engagement in
,
),
academic misconduct-level plagiarism (
,
),
copying sentences-level plagiarism (
and any plagiarism (
,
). Significant positive
correlations were also found between perceived and self-re,
)
ported engagement in collaboration (
,
).
and falsification of laboratory data (
No relationship was found between perceived and self-reported
falsification of research data, which is not surprising since
these questions were asked of undergraduate students who are
unlikely to be conducting their own research.

V. DISCUSSION
A. Faculty Observations
An investigation of research question one indicated that instructors who employ more safeguards against academic dishonesty are more likely to observe academic dishonesty. Likewise, analysis of data for research question two showed a positive relationship between instructors talking about academic dishonesty and observing those behaviors. These findings suggest
that instructors who employ safeguards and talk about their expectations for academic dishonesty are more vigilant and, thus,
more likely to catch cheating when it happens. Alternately, these
findings might suggest that instructors who have observed academic dishonesty are more likely to employ safeguards and talk
about academic dishonesty with their students.
Hard, Conway, and Moran found that one of the reasons students cite for engaging in academic dishonesty is the belief that
faculty do nothing to prevent academic dishonesty, leaving students with the belief that they have no choice but to cheat so
that they can keep up with cheating classmates [31]. Although
the significant correlations were relatively small, these findings
suggest that it is worthwhile for instructors to use safeguards and
talk about academic dishonesty in their classes. Instructors who
do so might be more likely to catch academic dishonesty, which
would raise the perception that academic dishonesty is taken seriously. These findings might also reduce academic dishonesty
behaviors, both because of the deterrence and education value
of such safeguards and discussions. Furthermore, this finding
suggests that faculty and GTAs should be instructed on ways to

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use specific academic dishonesty safeguards and to talk about

academic expectations with their students.

B. Student Self-Reported Behavior

This recommendation is further supported by the analysis
of student responses. Analysis of research question three indicated a significant negative relationship between students selfreported engagement in academic misconduct-level plagiarism
and the students reports of the instructors discussion of plagiarism. A significant positive relationship was also found between
students perceived seriousness of copying sentences-level plagiarism and students reports of instructors talking about source
attribution, and between faculty discussion of and student perceived seriousness of collaboration.
While these are relatively small correlations, there are three
points worth noting here. First, the relationships among the faculty discussion of academic dishonesty, student behaviors, and
perceptions of others academic dishonesty are only significant
within specific categories of academic dishonesty behaviors.
Speaking broadly about the importance of academic honesty has
little effect, but discussing specific expectations for behavior,
especially in relation to particular assignments, is much more
effective. Such explicit discussions also serve to help educate
students about expectations for academic practices to help them
avoid unintentional academic dishonesty and might deter students who intentionally cheat or plagiarize.
Second, this data was collected prior to the uncovering of series of potentially plagiarized masters theses and the release of
a study that showed higher than average levels of academic dishonesty at the same university. Since academic dishonesty was
not a serious campus concern at the time, many of the instructor
discussions of expectations for academic honesty were unlikely
to be very specific or in-depth. Now that awareness of the importance of academic honesty has been heightened across campus,
repeating this study to find out if more detailed discussions and
increased vigilance toward academic dishonesty have stronger
negative correlations with student engagement in cheating behaviors would be interesting.
Third, safeguards and discussions about academic honesty
expectations are good teaching practices and cost nothing to implement as one component of a university-wide effort to curb
academic dishonesty. This study showed that talking about plagiarism was correlated with one-fifth less academic misconductlevel plagiarism by students. Though this effect size is small,
when multiplied across the approximately 20 000 students enrolled at this particular institution, this finding represents a large
number of students who did not plagiarize because their instructors talked about academic honesty. These results are evidence
enough to recommend that instructors talk with their students
about their specific expectations for academic honesty, ideally
in relation to each assignment given in the class. Additionally,
this study suggests that close interpersonal student-faculty relationships, such as relationships between advisors and advisees,
might provide a particularly good opportunity for discussing
academic honesty and clarifying the academic conventions expected for work done in a graduate and professional context.

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 51, NO. 2, MAY 2008

C. Perceived Peer Behavior

Analysis of the final research question found significant
positive relationships between self-reported engagement in
academic dishonesty and perceptions of others academic
dishonesty for academic misconduct-level plagiarism, copying
sentences-level plagiarism, any plagiarism, collaboration, and
falsification of laboratory data. All but one of these correlations
was higher than the correlation between instructors talking
about plagiarism and student engagement in academic misconduct-level plagiarism. Clearly, students are influenced more
by what they believe peers are doing than by what happens
in the classroom. This finding is consonant with Festingers
Social Comparison Theory, which explained that people often
look to others to validate their own attitudes and beliefs [32].
This finding also suggests that creating a perception that other
students are not cheating and plagiarizing is an important factor
for reducing academic dishonesty and for creating a campus
culture of academic honesty. Exploration of opportunities to
have students talk with one another about the importance of
academic honesty is necessary. A first step might be to invite
student leaders, such as the student senate, resident assistants,
and leaders of student organizations and clubs, to talk with
other students about the importance of academic honesty and
to help plan academic integrity initiatives.
In summary, this study shows that relationships between students and instructors in a classroom setting and between students across campus have great potential for decreasing levels
of academic dishonesty and increasing the understanding of how
to adhere to academic expectations for honest work. This study
also suggests that an important first step in changing academic
behaviors and understandings is engaging in deliberate conversations about academic expectations and institutional value.
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Melissa A. Broeckelman-Post received the B.A. degree in English and the

Graduate Certificate in technical writing and professional communication, and
the M.A. degree in speech communication and rhetoric from Kansas State University, Manhattan, in 2004 and 2005, respectively.
She is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree at the School of Communication Studies, Ohio University, Athens. She serves as the Academic Honesty
Advisor at the Russ College of Engineering and Technology, Ohio University.
Her research interests include the ways in which academic communities understand and define academic dishonesty, the development of academic integrity
education and culture change initiatives, changes in discourse about academic
integrity over time, instructional communication, and dialogic pedagogy.