Academic Dishonesty and Testing: How Student Beliefs and Test Settings Impact Decisions to CheatResearch shows that academic dishonesty in post-secondary education runs
particularly high among students in the specific disciplines of engineering,
business, and nursing. The authors were interested in how student attitudes
towards specific environments for testing might contribute to the prevalence or
likelihood of cheating on tests and exams. I
It was hypothesized that while there
would be no difference in their beliefs or attitudes regarding the acceptability of
cheating behaviors in unproctored versus proctored settings, students would be
more likely to engage in cheating behavior in an unproctored setting. Technology
continues to transform the world around us at a rapid pace, allowing faculty to
incorporate more technology into the classroom and to educate more students
remotely via hybrid and online classes. While these opportunities have their
benefits, they also present new challenges. The opportunity for cheating on tests
increases, especially when exams are delivered in unproctored environments. An
instrument was created to investigate the attitudes and behaviors of first- and
second-year undergraduate engineering students while taking tests in both
proctored and unproctored environments. In all, 734 students were surveyed from
four different institutions of higher education. Students provided both qualitative
and quantitative responses to questions related to their beliefs and attitudes
toward cheating in today’s socially shareable society. Results indicated that both
students’ attitudes and behaviors vary as a result of tests being delivered in a
proctored versus unproctored environment.
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