Faculty Perceptions of Academic Dishonesty

Abstract

One need not search far for evidence that academicdishonesty is ubiquitous in our society. Indeed, newspaper accounts ofcheating by students, teachers, and administrators appear on a fairly reg-ular basis, and HBO recently premiered a movie, Cheaters (May 20,2000), based on a Chicago high school's cheating scandal. In the re-search literature, academic dishonesty has been the subject of researchfor decades, addressing a wide variety of issues and questions, includingwhat academic dishonesty is, how prevalent it is, who cheats, why stu-dents cheat, what the faculty reactioii is, and what the institutional re-sponse is. For a review of much of this research, see Cizek (1999),Crown and Spiller, (1998), and Whitley (1998).One of the main issues that emerges from the literature relates to in-consistencies in the definition of academically dishonest behaviors andthe lack of consensus and general understanding of academic dishonestyamong all members of the campus community. According to Robertsand Rabinowitz (1992), Our ability to alter the environment in whichcheating takes place will be determined by our understanding of howpeople (both faculty and students) perceive cheating and its seriousness