Academic Dishonesty 1

Cheating is in the Eyes of the Beholder

Academic dishonest is not only a problem with kids but adults follow in the same

footsteps. The researchers in my article decided to test whether or not students in two different

learning situations were academically dishonest. The overall findings were staggering. The

group being researched were students majoring in criminal justice. Before reading the article, I

felt the study would find those in this field would be more inclined to take the moral high ground

but that was not the case. The overall numbers were staggering when looking at exactly how

dishonest they were and why they didn’t believe they were wrong.

The overall questions were how prevalent was cheating, what techniques did they use,

and what was their overall definition of cheating. The groups consisted of one in class group and

one group of online students who were defined as career working students. The method of

collection in this study was a questionnaire. The group was comprised of 119 students that

responded to a number of questions about the frequency of academic cheating. The questions

ranged from knowing someone who cheated to how often do you lookup information during a

test. The response that surprised me was when the students were asked an open question about

how to cheat. In their program the tests are in a secured server so to get around this, students

would use a second computer to research the answers. The last questions they asked was about

using notes or teacher made PowerPoints. Over 70% of online students said this was not

cheating compared to only 46% of the classroom students.

These findings seem to agree with where my thought process was before reading the

article in its entirety. There are advantages to taking an exam online as opposed to in class. I

believe it then falls on the instructor to be aware of this and make changes on their end. For me

this will help guide where I want to go in the future when offering exams online. If I know
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students will use the information they have it may lead me to do more open ended questions.

This will allow me to see that they not only can use the notes, but they understand the content

that is contained within them.

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Burgason, K. A., Sefiha, O., & Briggs, L. (2019). Cheating is in the eye of the beholder: an
evolving understanding of academic misconduct. Innovative Higher Education, 44(3),
203–218. https://doi-org.login.library.coastal.edu:8443/10.1007/s10755-019-9457-3