The goal of Academic Dishonesty: An Educator's Guide is to provide college and university faulty with a concise handbook covering the full spectrum of issues related to academic dishonesty. To do so, we present research and theory on academic dishonesty and strategies for preventing, confronting, and managing the problem.
The book is divided into three sections. The first section reviews the existing published literature about academic dishonesty among college and university students and how faculty members respond to the problem. Chapter 1 addresses the issues of why academic dishonesty is an important problem in academia, the prevalence of the problem, the rationalizations some instructors use to minimize its importance or deny its existence, and some of the real difficulties involved in confronting the problem. In Chapter 2, we focus on definitions of academic dishonesty and how and student and faculty differ in their perceptions of what behaviors constitute academic dishonesty. This chapter also describes the reasons and justifications students give for their dishonest acts, some of the institutional and student characteristics associated with academic dishonesty, and a theoretical model that helps to explain the conditions under which cheating is most likely to occur.
The second section of the book presents practical advice designed to help college and university instructors and administrators deal proactively and effectively with academic dishonesty. Chapter 3 offers techniques for fostering academic integrity in the classroom, Chapter 4 presents techniques that are helpful in preventing academic dishonesty from occurring, and Chapter 5 presents methods of detecting academic dishonesty. Chapter 5 also discusses the difficult problem of confronting and dealing with students suspected of cheating. The last part, Chapter 6, considers the broader question of academic integrity as a system-wide issue within institutions of higher education.
Because our topic is academic dishonesty, we may appear to be taking on an adversarial "us against them" attitude toward students. That is definitely not our perspective. We know that a great many students value their educations and work diligently to learn. These are the students who make our jobs joyful. Indeed, part of our own interests in the nature, prevention, detection, and remediation of academic dishonesty stems from our commitment to the welfare of honest students. Cheaters do hurt themselves, but they do not only hurt themselves: they also degrade the education of and affront the integrity of their honest peers. We believe that the best way to pay our respects to honest students is to be actively involved in maintaining a climate of integrity in the classroom and throughout the entire campus. We have written this book to help others serve their students, their colleges and universities, and the academic community in that way.
As we were completing this book, we found an article describing the problem of academic dishonesty in high schools and were struck by the similarities of the problem in the high school and college/university contexts. Although we are college instructors and wrote this book with the college and university context in mind, we believe that the principles we describe are also applicable to the high school environment. We are aware that implementing our suggestions in the high school environment raises issue, such as the fact that almost all high school students are minors, that college and university faculty and administrators do not face. Nonetheless, appropriate academic integrity policies can be developed and implemented in high schools with positive educational effects. We hope that our book can provide some ideas that high school faculty and administrators find to be useful.
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Last Modified: August 10, 2001