The Perception and Acceptance 1 Running head: THE PERCEPTION AND ACCEPTANCE

The Perception and Acceptance of Cheating Elizabeth C. Hoey University of Delaware

The Perception and Acceptance 2 The Perception and Acceptance of Cheating College can be a stressful period in the academic lives of young adults, especially when finals are close at hand. During a time when research papers, final projects and the semesters notes pile high on students desks and summer is just out of reach, some students may consider cheating to alleviate the stress they feel. Are non-Honors students more likely to cheat than Honors students? What about performance goal oriented students and learning goal oriented students? Though cheating is never considered right, it may be considered more wrong for some students than others. This study examines students perception, acceptance and attitude toward cheating based on a hypothetical situation in which we manipulated Honors Program status and learning goal orientation. Much research has been conducted on implicit theories of intelligence, goal orientation and their relation to one another. Implicit theories of intelligence were introduced by Hong, Chiu, Dweck & Wan (1999), when participants were tested to examine the relationship between entity versus incremental theory and effort versus ability attributions. Goal orientation, defined by learning goals and performance goals, was described by Elliott and Dweck (1988). The two concepts were linked in an experiment with middle school students when incremental theorists were positively associated with learning goals (Blackwell, 2007). While these studies focus on math achievement to measure the success of their variables, this experiment studies cheating. For the present study, participants answered a 20 question survey regarding a hypothetical story about a fictional character in order to measure participants perception and acceptance of cheating depending on the characters Honors Program status and goal orientation. In this factorial design, we manipulated the characters goal orientation and Honors Program status. After reading the story, participants answered 20 questions which measured perception,
Comment [YUN3]: fix Comment [YUN4]: This point deserves a full paragraph why is our study interesting? Comment [YUN2]: Better Comment [YUN1]: Misleads reader?

The Perception and Acceptance 3 attitude and acceptance of the characters cheating as well as their own implicit theory of intelligence. Participants theories of intelligence are anticipated to relate to their attitude towards cheating such that entity intelligence theorists will be more likely to sympathize with the cheating character, especially when the character is non-Honors performance goal oriented. Incremental theorists are expected to exhibit opposite tendencies in that they will not sympathize with the cheating character, especially when the character is Honors learning goal oriented. Also, participants with performance goals will be more likely to sympathize with cheating behavior because cheating is a means to achieving a good grade. Though this variable was not measured among the participants, students with entity theories of intelligence tend to show performance goal orientation (Blackwell 2007). Another hypothesis worth investigating is that honors students will find it more acceptable for a performance oriented non-Honors student to cheat than any other combination of independent variables.