Probability Of Cheating Research Articles

A Simple and Efficient Secret Sharing Scheme Secure against Cheating

In (k,n) threshold scheme, Tompa and Woll considered a problem of cheaters who try to make another participant reconstruct an invalid secret. Later, some models of such cheating were formalized and lower bounds of the size of share were shown in the situation of fixing the maximum successful cheating probability to e. Some efficient schemes in which size of share is equal to the lower bound were also proposed. Let |S| be the field size of the secret. Under the assumption that cheaters do not know the distributed secret, these sizes of share of previous schemes which can work for e > 1/|S| are somewhat larger than the bound. In this paper, we show the bound for this case is really tight by constructing a new scheme. When distributing uniform secret, the bit length of share in the proposed scheme is only 1 bit longer than the known bound. Further, we show a tighter bound of the size of share in case of e < 1/|S|.

Luck or cheating? A field experiment on honesty with children

We run an experiment to study the relationship between honesty, age and self-control. We focus on children aged between 5 and 15 as the literature suggests that self-control develops within such age range. We ask each child to toss a fair coin in private and to record the outcome (white or black) on a paper sheet. We only reward children who report white. Although we are unable to tell whether each child was honest or not, we speculate about the proportion of reported white outcomes. Children report the prize-winning outcome at rates statistically above 50% but below 100%. Moreover, the probability of cheating is uniform across groups based on child’s characteristics, in particular age. In a second treatment we explicitly tell children not to cheat. This request has a dampening effect on their tendency to over-report the prize-winning outcome, especially in girls. Furthermore, while this effect in boys is constant with age, in girls it tends to decrease with age.

Estimating the Prevalence of Sensitive Behaviour and Cheating with a Dual Design for Direct Questioning and Randomized Response

Randomized response is a misclassification design to estimate the prevalence of sensitive behaviour. Respondents who do not follow the instructions of the design are considered to be cheating. A mixture model is proposed to estimate the prevalence of sensitive behaviour and cheating in the case of a dual sampling scheme with direct questioning and randomized response. The mixing weight is the probability of cheating, where cheating is modelled separately for direct questioning and randomized response. For Bayesian inference, Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling is applied to sample parameter values from the posterior. The model makes it possible to analyse dual sample scheme data in a unified way and to assess cheating for direct questions as well as for randomized response questions. The research is illustrated with randomized response data concerning violations of regulations for social benefit.

Cheating by economics and business undergraduate students: an exploratory international assessment

Today’s economics and business students are expected to be our future business people and potentially the economic leaders and politicians of tomorrow. Thus, their beliefs and practices are liable to affect the definition of acceptable economics and business ethics. The empirical evaluation of the phenomenon of cheating in academia has almost exclusively focused on the US context, and non-US studies usually only cover a narrow range of countries. This paper presents a comprehensive, cross-country study on the magnitude and determinants of cheating among economics and business undergraduates, involving 7,213 students enrolled in 42 universities located in 21 countries from the American (4), European (14), Africa (2) and Oceania (1) Continents. We found that the average magnitude of copying among economics and business undergraduates is quite high (62%) but there was significant cross-country heterogeneity. The probability of cheating is significantly lower in students enrolled in schools located in the Scandinavian, and the US and British Isles blocks when compared with their Southern European counterparts; quite surprisingly this probability is also lower for the African block. On a distinctly different level, however, students enrolled in schools in Western and especially Eastern European countries reveal statistically significant higher propensities towards committing academic fraud.

Who Cheats? Who Loots? Political Competition and Corruption in Japan, 1947–1993

When do politicians resort to corrupt practices? This article distinguishes between two types of corruption by politicians: illegal acts for material gain (looting) and illegal acts for electoral gain (cheating). Looting generally involves a politician “selling” influence while cheating involves a politician “buying” votes. Individual‐level analyses of new data on financial scandals and election law violations in Japan show that the determinants of cheating differ from the determinants of looting. Most notably, political experience and electoral security increase the probability of looting, but electoral insecurity combined with intraparty competition increases the probability of cheating.

Investigating the probability of student cheating: The relevance of student characteristics,assessment items, perceptions of prevalence and history of engagement

Academic dishonesty is a fundamental issue in terms of the educational integrity of higher education institutions. Accordingly, there is a growing pool of literature that examines this issue. This study adds to this literature by investigating factors that may influence student engagement in academic misconduct. We examine the influence of the type of assessment items, age, gender, nationality, discipline and level of study and the students' self-reported history of cheating. Drawing from a survey of 1,057 students across four major Queensland universities, we find that a student's age, gender and nationality are useful in explaining the probability of a student cheating. Our key finding, however, suggests that the likelihood that a student will engage in any given cheating behaviour is most strongly influenced by the extent to which the student engages in other forms of cheating, supporting the notion of "once a cheat always a cheat". We conclude that more needs to be done to combat a culture of acceptance of academic dishonesty and to minimise defensive misconduct by students who otherwise might not engage in such behaviour. We suggest that university administrators devote increased resources to this issue and develop mechanisms for managing and curtailing the level of academic misconduct. A failure to do so may result in a further undermining of the academic integrity of the Australian tertiary sector.

Editorial Vol 3, No 2

Just days after farewelling delegates from all over the world who attended the 3rd Asia-Pacific Conference on Educational Integrity: Creating a Culture of Integrity, held at the University of South Australia, I am delighted to welcome you to Volume 3, Issue 2 of the International Journal for Educational Integrity. I am very pleased that since my entreaties in the last issue of the journal for high quality, original and relevant submissions, there has been a marked increase in the quality of manuscripts submitted for review.&#x0D; &#x0D; This current issue provides an international and inter-disciplinary view of academic integrity. Contributors represent universities in Australia and the United States, as well as diverse disciplinary perspectives, including human pathophysiology, mathematics, health sciences, accounting, finance and economics. Each of the papers in the current issue examines a particular issue of academic integrity and contributes an original viewpoint.&#x0D; &#x0D; Michael Kremmer, Mark Brimble and Peta Stevenson-Clarke, from the Griffith Business School at Griffith University, in Brisbane, Australia, report on data from a survey of 1 057 students across four major Queensland universities which investigated factors that may influence student engagement in academic misconduct. They found that a student's age, gender and nationality are useful in explaining the probability of a student cheating. The key finding, however, suggests that the likelihood that a student will engage in any given cheating behaviour is most strongly influenced by the extent to which the student engages in other forms of cheating, supporting the notion of 'once a cheat always a cheat'.&#x0D; &#x0D; Steve McKillup and Ruth McKillup, from the Faculty of Sciences, Engineering and Health at Central Queensland University, Australia, describe an original strategy for pre-empting plagiarism, called the 'hypothetical condition' essay. For this type of essay, the instructor invents a fictitious but entirely plausible physiological condition or concept which students must evaluate and discuss. The hypothetical condition essay was trialled with a second level undergraduate human pathophysiology class in 2007. No cases of plagiarism were detected and grade distribution was comparable with previous offerings of the course. The hypothetical condition essay also appeared to foster originality and critical thought, and the authors suggest that the concept of this type of assessment could be applied in many fields.&#x0D; &#x0D; Ken Randall, Denise Bender and Diane Montgomery, from the University of Oklahoma Schusterman Center, in the United States, used Q method analysis to understand the opinions of students and faculty in health sciences programs regarding what they consider to be key aspects of academic integrity. Thirty-eight students and faculty sorted statements on academic integrity to represent their reactions to the condition of instruction, "What are your thoughts about values in your academic program?". The key finding was that although cheating occurs even in health sciences programs such as occupational and physical therapy, students and faculty appear to share a notable degree of common ground as it relates to their opinions on academic integrity.&#x0D; &#x0D; The final paper in this issue, by Sven Trenholm from Herkimer County Community College in New York, is based on a survey of all listed Fall 2006 State University of New York (SUNY) Learning Network (SLN) mathematics faculty, and focusses on assessment in math e-learning. The study compared the practice of assessment in proctored math e-learning courses with that of assessment in unproctored math e-learning courses and sought to identify the most popular strategies for assessing math e-learning courses.&#x0D; &#x0D; It is clear from the diverse papers in this issue, and those presented recently at 3APCEI, that academic/educational integrity is more than an emerging field of inquiry. It is genuinely inter-disciplinary and wide-ranging in the forms of research being undertaken. The streams at the conference and pre-conference workshop provide some indication of this diversity: institutional approaches to educational integrity, policies relating to academic integrity officers, research, teaching and learning, contextual factors, specific student groups, transnational issues, emotional work and ethics in theory and practice.&#x0D; &#x0D; I encourage all readers of the IJEI, including teachers, researchers, writers and students to continue to explore the multi-various aspects of academic integrity from both a practical and theoretical perspective and to contribute manuscripts for review. In particular, we welcome contributions from scholars working in countries where educational integrity is only just beginning to emerge as an area of inquiry. Please send all submissions directly to me at tracey.bretag@unisa.edu.au&#x0D; &#x0D; Tracey Bretag,&#x0D; Editor, International Journal for Educational Integrity&#x0D; December 2007

Academic Cheating in Austria, Portugal, Romania and Spain: A Comparative Analysis

The empirical evaluation of academic cheating has been almost exclusively focused on the US context. Little is known about cheating in European universities. This article aims to contribute further evidence on this highly relevant phenomenon afflicting higher education throughout Europe. Based on a large sample of undergraduate students of Economics and Management in Austria, Portugal, Romania and Spain, the authors estimated an econometric model and controlled for a variety of factors most likely to influence the probability of cheating (e.g. student characteristics, location, grades). It was found that (1) the likelihood of copying increases when the expected benefit from copying is positive; (2) in copying-favourable environments, the students' propensity to copy tends to be higher; (3) the greater and more serious the perceived sanctions, the fewer the incentives students have to perpetrate dishonest behaviours; (4) in schools where ‘codes of honour’ exist, the propensity to copy among students is lower; and (5) the propensity to copy seems to be influenced by the countries' education systems and social factors – for instance, Portuguese students are less prone to fraudulent behaviour, whereas Spanish students are more likely to cheat than their Austrian counterparts; no significant difference was found between Austrian and Romanian students.

Equilibrium (dis)honesty

This paper analyzes the production of fraudulent financial statements in a model featuring the main characteristics of the US corporate information market. Main players are managers, shareholders, auditors and the auditors’ public supervisor. It is shown that, in the overall equilibrium, not only managers at the head of bad firms, but also some of those running good firms may resort to dishonest reporting. The probability of cheating appears to be positively related to the frequency of good firms. Pushing too far the supervisor’s incentives to fight fraud might prompt more good firms’ managers to provide dishonest reports.

The Determinants of Cheating by High School Economics Students: A Comparative Study of Academic Dishonesty in the Transitional Economies

Secondary school students in six transitional economies, Belarus, Croatia, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine, along with students in the USA, were surveyed about academic cheating. Regardless of geographic location, a substantial majority of all students reported that they had cheated on an exam or course assignment. In general, however, the percentages of students who reported that they had cheated and that they would assist others to cheat were higher in the transitional economies than in the USA. A bivariate probit regression model was estimated to determine the factors that contribute to the probability of cheating. The results indicated that the most consistently significant determinants were personal beliefs about the ethics and social acceptability of cheating and various attributes of the classroom environment.With the exceptions of Lithuania and Ukraine, students in each transitional economy had a higher probability of cheating relative to students in the USA, ceteris paribus. The relative differences ranged from 8.9% for Belarus up to 17.1% for Croatia. For Russia, the difference was a relatively high 15.4%. These and other results suggest that researchers must be extremely careful in making cross-national comparisons of student outcomes in the transitional zone if cheating trends are ignored.

On Cheating Immune Secret Sharing

The paper addresses the cheating prevention in secret sharing. We consider secret sharing with binary shares. The secret also is binary. This model allows us to use results and constructions from the well developed theory of cryptographically strong boolean functions. In particular, we prove that for given secret sharing, the average cheating probability over all cheating vectors and all original vectors, i.e., 1/n 2^n ∑ _c=1...n ∑ _α ∈V n ρ _c,α , denoted by øverlineρ , satisfies øverlineρ ≥ \frac12 , and the equality holds if and only if ρ _c,α satisfies ρ _c,α = \frac12 for every cheating vector δ _c and every original vector α . In this case the secret sharing is said to be cheating immune. We further establish a relationship between cheating-immune secret sharing and cryptographic criteria of boolean functions.This enables us to construct cheating-immune secret sharing.

Secret Sharing Schemes with Detection of Cheaters for a General Access Structure

In a secret sharing scheme, some participants can lie about the value of their shares when reconstructing the secret in order to obtain some illicit benefit. We present in this paper two methods to modify any linear secret sharing scheme in order to obtain schemes that are unconditionally secure against that kind of attack. The schemes obtained by the first method are robust, that is, cheaters are detected with high probability even if they know the value of the secret. The second method provides secure schemes, in which cheaters that do not know the secret are detected with high probability. When applied to ideal linear secret sharing schemes, our methods provide robust and secure schemes whose relation between the probability of cheating and the information rate is almost optimal. Besides, those methods make it possible to construct robust and secure schemes for any access structure.

Constructions and Bounds for Unconditionally Secure Non-Interactive Commitment Schemes

Commitment schemes have been extensively studied since they were introduced by Blum in 1982. Rivest recently showed how to construct unconditionally secure non-interactive commitment schemes, assuming the existence of a trusted initializer. In this paper, we present a formal mathematical model for unconditionally secure non-interactive commitment schemes with a trusted initializer and analyze their binding and concealing properties. In particular, we show that such schemes cannot be perfectly binding: there is necessarily a small probability that Alice can cheat Bob by committing to one value but later revealing a different value. We prove several bounds on Alice's cheating probability, and present constructions of schemes that achieve optimal cheating probabilities. We also analyze a class of commitment schemes based on resolvable designs.

Lower bounds for robust secret sharing schemes

A ( k, n, ε) robust secret sharing scheme permits a secret to be shared among a set P of n participants in such a way that only subsets of P of size at least k can recover the secret, but any subsets of less than k participants have absolutely no information on the secret. Moreover, any coalition of less than k participants, called cheaters, has probability of successful cheating less than ε. In this paper we provide new bounds on the information distributed to participant in any ( k, n, ε) robust secret sharing scheme which relate the size of the shares, the size of the secret, the probability of cheating, and the probability of guessing.

Fully Parallelized Multi-prover Protocols for NEXP-Time

A major open problem in the theory of multi-prover interactive proofs is to characterize the languages which can be accepted by fully parallelized multi-prover protocols with an exponentially low probability of cheating. In this paper we solve this problem by proving that any language which can be accepted by a sequential multi-prover protocol can also be accepted by a single-round multi-party protocol, and thus the multi-prover round hierarchy collapses to its first level: MIP(poly)=MIP(1)=NEXP-time.

Subquadratic zero-knowledge

article Free AccessSubquadratic zero-knowledge Authors: Joan Boyar Odense Univ., Odense, Denmark Odense Univ., Odense, DenmarkView Profile , Gilles Brassard Univ. of Montreal, Montreal, P.Q., Canada Univ. of Montreal, Montreal, P.Q., CanadaView Profile , René Peralta Univ. of Wisconsin at Milwaukee Univ. of Wisconsin at MilwaukeeView Profile Authors Info & Claims Journal of the ACMVolume 42Issue 6Nov. 1995 pp 1169–1193https://doi.org/10.1145/227683.227686Published:01 November 1995Publication History 11citation490DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations11Total Downloads490Last 12 Months17Last 6 weeks9 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF