Take Highly Competitive Courses? You're More Likely to Cheat
I was shocked to learn that a student in an honors chemistry course cheated on the final exam. When I asked my son about it, he said, "Everybody cheats. It's because of the competition for high grades."
While that idea threw me, I was stunned to learn that my honest-to-the-Mom-she-gave-you-too-much-change child knew about it and possibly even contemplated it himself.
Now, in addition to this cheating charge following this student to college and on into the workforce, a new study says that high achievers in competitive courses tend to cheat in college. Sure. They learned it in high school, according to newswise.com.
The study found that academic misconduct was widespread on test reassessments.
Accurate statistics for academic misconduct are difficult to report due to the reliance on self-reporting by students, the website reports. "It has been thought that lower-level students were more likely to cheat because they had more to gain in the form of higher grades. However, researchers from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, found that the opposite was true in students who submitted tests for regrading. Regrading—submitting an unaltered exam for another look by the professor—is a common practice offered to students who think their original grade was not accurate," newswise.com points out.
Researchers scanned more than 3,600 original exams from 11 undergraduate physiology-based courses to determine how frequently academic misconduct was committed. They examined 448 resubmitted tests for additions or deletions of text or additional markings that were not present on the original exams. The researchers found 78 cases of cheating, almost half of which were submitted by “repeat offenders”—students who had cheated on more than one test during the study period.
The difference between male and female cheaters was insignificant. Two-thirds of the cases of academic misconduct were identified in one highly competitive course.
“Our results point to high-achieving students as a specific group who may be more likely to commit these acts and show no indication that men are more frequent offenders than women, which goes against much of the existing [academic misconduct] literature,” the researchers wrote.
So do we push and push our kids to achieve, so they can get into a better college or have a better life, or do we try to let them do the best they can so they don't feel compelled to cheat? It's a tough one.
.
While that idea threw me, I was stunned to learn that my honest-to-the-Mom-she-gave-you-too-much-change child knew about it and possibly even contemplated it himself.
Now, in addition to this cheating charge following this student to college and on into the workforce, a new study says that high achievers in competitive courses tend to cheat in college. Sure. They learned it in high school, according to newswise.com.
The study found that academic misconduct was widespread on test reassessments.
Accurate statistics for academic misconduct are difficult to report due to the reliance on self-reporting by students, the website reports. "It has been thought that lower-level students were more likely to cheat because they had more to gain in the form of higher grades. However, researchers from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, found that the opposite was true in students who submitted tests for regrading. Regrading—submitting an unaltered exam for another look by the professor—is a common practice offered to students who think their original grade was not accurate," newswise.com points out.
Researchers scanned more than 3,600 original exams from 11 undergraduate physiology-based courses to determine how frequently academic misconduct was committed. They examined 448 resubmitted tests for additions or deletions of text or additional markings that were not present on the original exams. The researchers found 78 cases of cheating, almost half of which were submitted by “repeat offenders”—students who had cheated on more than one test during the study period.
The difference between male and female cheaters was insignificant. Two-thirds of the cases of academic misconduct were identified in one highly competitive course.
“Our results point to high-achieving students as a specific group who may be more likely to commit these acts and show no indication that men are more frequent offenders than women, which goes against much of the existing [academic misconduct] literature,” the researchers wrote.
So do we push and push our kids to achieve, so they can get into a better college or have a better life, or do we try to let them do the best they can so they don't feel compelled to cheat? It's a tough one.
.
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