By SCOTT MARTINDALE
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
One in three college students believe cheating can be justified in certain circumstances, including by rationalizing that a class is unreasonably difficult or a teacher is incompetent, according to a University of Missouri
study that sheds new light on why teens across Orange County and beyond continue to be caught in high-profile cheating incidents.The study found that the most common way students justify cheating is through "denial of responsibility," such as by saying that they "accidentally" plagiarized, that they had too much to do and too little time, or that an exam was beyond the scope of the course.
Of the 169 students who reported that cheating was justified in certain circumstances or offered justifications for it despite insisting it was never justified, the following are the students' rationales, broken down by category:
- 41 percent: Denial of responsibility (accidentally plagiarizing, too much to do/too little time, beyond scope of course)
- 35 percent: Denial of injury (no great harm despite being explicitly prohibited)
- 24 percent: Condemning the condemners (deflecting blame onto the teacher for being incompetent, etc.)
- 21 percent: Self-fulfillment (better understand a concept for future applications, or for thrills)
- 5 percent: Appeal to higher loyalties (helping out a close friend in need, or life or death situation)
- 3 percent: Denial of the victim (no one hurt)
(Note: Percentages do not add up to 100 because students were allowed to cite multiple rationales.)
The findings, presented at a conference last week in the United Kingdom, are based on an anonymous survey of 420 undergraduate students.
"It is important to be realistic about cheating," the study said. "Even though a majority of students indicate that cheating is never justified, other students appear willing to cheat at the drop of a hat. Instructors still need to keep in place reasonable measures to detect cheating, and to take appropriate action when it occurs."
About 36 percent of students said cheating was justifiable in certain circumstances, according to the study. And while the majority of students (61 percent) said cheating was never acceptable, 6 percent of those same students cited situations later in the survey that would justify cheating.
Damn this blog interface to hell. It ate my long, carefully crafted story. OK...here goes again.
ReplyDeleteI can kinda get behind the "condemning the condemners" excuse because the one class in which I "cheated," the instructor was incompetent.
Basically, I was in an overflow section of intro to sociology, and the college imported a practicing sociologist to teach the class. The guy couldn't teach his way out of a wet paper bag, and he clearly preferred women and minorities to white males (no, really...it was pretty obvious). It didn't take long for me to realize that this class was going to be a waste of time.
Shortly after I realized the instructor was an idiot, he assigned us the task of applying for welfare. My friend in the class and I made a good-faith effort to find the local Social Security office, but we couldn't find it and, in desperation, wrote up a joint paper in which we described a fictional visit to another Social Security office. Wow...we larded that story with fictional details...but the instructor didn't even twitch. He just assigned us a "B" for doing the paper together rather than as individuals.
For the next site visit assignment, we decided the hell with it--we weren't even going to bother. So instead of going to the laundromat and taking notes on what we saw, we just wrote up another fictional narrative. In this one, we reported seeing Elvis. Again, we got a "B" for writing a joint paper instead of individual papers.
Had the instructor been competent, we wouldn't have faked our papers, but since (a) the instructor couldn't lead a group in silent prayer and (b) no white guy could receive an "A" (again, it's true), there was no use in putting forth effort for that guy.
Was withdrawing from the course an option?
ReplyDeleteWay to defend your snowflakery, Mindbender.
ReplyDeleteIt's profs like you who seem to be the ones to defend the flakes when they give the same rigamarole in grievance hearings.
I would love to see a breakdown of those stats by major and program...
ReplyDeleteSimilar reasoning, I met a dishonest car salesman, therefore, it's ok for me to steal cars.
ReplyDeleteThey forgot to include "I know my institution won't do a damn thing about it if I get caught" in the rationales...
ReplyDelete(And Mindbender, if any part of that sociology course involved recognizing your own bloody privilege, that B was a gift of epic proportions.)
@ honest_prof -- Withdrawing wasn't an option. By the time the class went into the terlet, the withdrawal date had passed, and at the SLAC I attended, withdrawing wasn't really an option anyway because of credit-per-semester issues.
ReplyDelete@ The_Myth -- Yeah, whatevs. Nice personal attack based on insufficient evidence. You don't know me; you just know the anecdote I told, which indicates little-to-nothing about my current mindset and clearly indicates that I never did anything similar at any other time. *slow clap*
So...just to clarify: were I attending a grievance hearing where a student used the "my instructor is incompetent" defense, I'd not support the student. I'd also dismiss the claim as snowflakery--unless I actually knew that the instructor was incompetent, in which case I'd come here to CM and bitch about the idiot that I have to work with. Capiche?
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ReplyDelete@ drunk... -- I'll not take offense at the implication that I never realized "white male" offers me a privileged position in American society.
ReplyDeleteIn that class, I sat up front. I took notes. I did the readings. I wrote the class papers. I tried to understand the material and participate in discussions. In other words, I did everything a student is supposed to do, and for my efforts, I received frowns. It was a dispiriting experience.
I don't think we should pass judgment here, especially if there was no withdraw option. I confess if I was trapped in this kind of course with no options, I would also have gotten "creativity" in my behavior.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious if you felt the bias against you was the same to all white males in the class. This was obvious to others? Not questioning, but perhaps the instructor just disliked you for unknown reasons.
@ honest_prof -- It's possible the prof just didn't like me for some other reason, but as I recall, comments/questions from any of the white males in class weren't well-received. Somehow, we were always wrong or at least not quite right. When the women and Hispanic males spoke, though, the instructor almost invariably praised their contributions.
ReplyDeleteMindbender's confession aside, how many snowflakes CLAIM they had no recourse but to cheat when, in fact, they had plenty of time or resources to actually do their assignments? Most of the plagiarism I see stems from students waiting until the last minute or not reading what they should have, or believing they had no options but to cheat because of their own negligent behavior. I'd like to see how many cases actually ARE based on true professorial incompetence versus perceived blame so that snowflakes can once again deflect responsibility onto someone else with the "it's not my fault" whine.
ReplyDelete"So instead of going to the laundromat and taking notes on what we saw, we just wrote up another fictional narrative. In this one, we reported seeing Elvis. Again, we got a "B" for writing a joint paper instead of individual papers."
ReplyDeleteHow hard could it have been to do this assignment honestly? Did you have trouble finding a laundromat, too?
If he gave you a B, despite his alleged bias against white males and even though you submitted an obviously fake report, how bad of a grade could you have gotten by just swinging by a laundromat and scribbling down a few cursory observations?
SchmittyRKD - I think you're missing the point. What's being described here isn't "cheating"; it's "deliberately showing contempt for the assignment and the professor in a nakedly obvious way". I wouldn't have had these students on the carpet for cheating, but I would have marked them down some for not doing part of the assignment (the data-collection part). As long as they then analyzed their fictional data by the methods they were supposed to, they would have got the grade they deserved for analysis. B sounds about right, since apparently Dr. Mindbender was at every class, doing the readings and taking notes, so probably had a good idea of what analytical methods were required and how to apply them.
ReplyDelete@ Schmitty -- I'd been to the laundromat in question often enough that I knew exactly who to find there and how the customers would behave. The contents (other than Elvis) were drawn from memory and, although exaggerated for comedic/contemptual effect, were accurate.
ReplyDeleteOkay, I guess I can see it as a legitimate form of protest.
ReplyDeleteDo you think the incompetent prof knew you were faking these two assignments, or at least the second one?
@ Schmitty -- No, I think he was utterly clueless on the true origins of both.
ReplyDeleteJust curious: was it cheating when I was in Catholic high school --
ReplyDeleteand the nun blew her top because of students talking --
and made the whole class write out the Gospel of Luke (the longest one) over the weekend --
and I wrote out two pages' worth at the front of the gospel and two pages' worth at the back --
and padded the middle with random Biblical nonsense interspersed with sentences like this? "You'll never read this." "You're not going to spend any time at all checking these." "You think I'm such a Girl Scout that you'll just assume I wrote out the whole thing." "You have no idea how much I can get away with because I'm quiet and smart."
Was it wrong to fake this assignment?
Because it sure felt good.
And no, she didn't check.
As for the original post about cheating, the statistics are interesting. I've heard most of the listed excuses from my students more than once, but no one's ever tried the "Self-fulfillment" angle with me:
ReplyDelete21 percent: Self-fulfillment (better understand a concept for future applications, or for thrills).
Examples, please, from your own Archives of Plagiarism, folks!
(Maybe my own cheating on the Gospel of Luke punishment was for the thrill of defiance, though I would have classified it as teacher incompetence at the time.)
Eskarina--
ReplyDeleteI don't think it was incompetence as far as not checking the assignment was concerned, because she was merely asking you to copy something, which required no analysis. She eyeballed each assignment by making sure it seemed long enough, but didn't read through each one.
The incompetence is theological--because dishing out the Bible as punishment is no way to foster a student's appreciation of it, or God.
Let us not drag la lengua italiano through the mud here. The word is spelled as follows: 'capisce'. Ha capito?
ReplyDeleteEskarina, I love that story!
ReplyDelete