Convenience Theory

 

Leming (Cite) administered the Rotter Internal-External Scale to 153 college undergraduate students at a major east coast university to test for any correlation between high/low-risk conditions of detection and actual cheating. The results showed that students cheated more under low-risk conditions and that women cheated significantly more than men did under low-risk conditions. Sanction threats (a high-risk condition) were found to reduce cheating only for women. Cheating behavior was not found to be related to academic ability; however, under the high-risk condition, high ability students cheated significantly less than they did under the low-risk condition.

Singhal (Cite) surveyed 364 students and 80 faculty, at an American university, on academic dishonesty. The data showed that students with a GPA of less than 2.5 cheated almost as often as those with GPAs of over 2.5. Of the 65 percent of faculty who caught students cheating, only 21 percent of them reported the cheating. Fifty-six percent of the students admitted to cheating in college whereas only three percent admitted to having been caught. Sixty-eight percent of the students believed cheating was the direct result of competition for grades and 48 percent said monitoring of exams prevented them from cheating. Singhal proposed that increased awareness by faculty of student cheating and their acknowledgement of it in the classroom would lead to a reduction of cheating. In their 1989 study, Michaels and Miethe found that students cheat because: of the pressure to get better grades, they view cheating as not very serious conduct, they perceive the gains to outweigh the risks, and because they consider friends as being somewhat tolerant of the behavior (Cite).