A Canadian researcher is poised to release an update to a 2002-03 study looking into academic dishonesty in Canadian universities.
While the study results are not yet available, University of Guelph’s Julia Christensen Hughes said her anecdotal, initial impression was that cheating in Canadian universities is on the rise.
Christensen Hughes said this kind of research is important because credibility and integrity are crucial for university reputations.
“The degrees that we confirm, the research findings that we publish, for those activities to have credibility or currency within society, there has to be a high degree of trust that the degrees were earned and the research results are true,” she said.
The earlier and updated studies are co-authored by Donald McCabe, founding president of the U.S. Center for Academic Integrity. The updated study will span from 2012-14 based on data collected from members of 10 anonymous university communities.
A second-year Carleton University psychology student, who requested to remain anonymous, said he has cheated at least once a semester since beginning his undergraduate degree.
“I understand the importance of academic honesty but I don’t think, in a larger picture, my grades have anything to do with academic dishonesty,” he said. “I have an upper hand and it’s not fair, but I’m not telling anybody else to not do it.”
Christensen Hughes said students taking stand-alone ethics courses, and embedding ethical content into other courses, is a more effective response to cheating than approaching the issue from an administrative standpoint. University is the perfect place to wrestle with ethical dilemmas before applying them later in life, she said, and more research is needed about why cheating occurs.
Not all members of the academic community agree with this approach. A 2013 editorial published by the University of Ottawa’s independent student newspaper, the Fulcrum, responded to Hughes’ earlier study.
“Researchers in education should not look for underlying cultural or societal attitudes that drive students to cheat,” the editorial said. “Instead, they should shift their focus to help prevent cheating and identify it when it happens.”
The new study will likely offer conclusions and recommendations for universities to combat the problem, Christensen Hughes said.
The anonymous Carleton student said he cheats, and still sleeps at night, because it works. The structure of modern universities lends itself to academic dishonesty, he added.
“There’s no focus on actual learning, the focus is completely on test performance,” he said. “When it becomes this separated between institution and individual, then it’s fairly easy to ignore the moral dilemma of cheating because you’re one of [thousands] . . . what do they even care?”
Carleton did not keep records of academic dishonesty until 2007.
The earlier study, which will be the foundation for the 2012-14 study, deemed cheating in Canadian universities to be a serious problem, and suggested students and professors often disagree on what is considered academic dishonesty.
As noted in the earlier study, little published material exists on the state of cheating in Canadian universities, and statistics available are often unreliable.
