Session 1330 Students’ perceptions of both the certainty and the deterrent effect of potential consequences of cheating

Extensive research indicates that cheating among undergraduate students is a serious problem. A recent study by McCabe reported that as many as nine in ten engineering undergraduates admit to one or more incidents of cheating in college and up to 23% admit to repetitive examination cheating. Several consequences of cheating, including personal shame, embarrassment, and institutional sanctions, have been studied and proposed as possible deterrents. For instance, McCabe examined the role of peer disapproval of cheating and found that the frequency of selfreported academic dishonesty was lower when respondents perceived that their peers disapproved of such misconduct. Franklyn-Stokes found shame/embarrassment at being caught copying from a neighbor during an examination, copying another student’s coursework, or fabricating references of a bibliography to be a deterrent to cheating. She also reported that fear of punishment or of being found out was a factor but was not one of the main reasons students listed for not cheating. A study by Cochrane examined the effects of perceived certainty and severity of shame, embarrassment, and formal sanction threats on the self-reported prevalence of involvement in a variety of forms of academic dishonesty. Of particular interest are his findings regarding two specific forms of cheating: looking at another’s answers on an examination and falsifying information for a term paper. He reported that “the only form of threat that appears to enter into and influence the rational calculus of prospective cheaters is their own sense of shame associated with acts of academic dishonesty.” He “failed to find any evidence of deterrent effect for ... embarrassment [and] ... formal sanction threats on student’s levels of academic dishonesty” and reported that “cheaters and noncheaters were equally unaffected by the threat of any embarrassment...”