cheating behaviours, the internet and education undergraduate students

Cheating behaviours, the Internet and Educationundergraduate studentsjcal_424 136..145

J. Trushell, K. Byrne & R. SimpsonCass School of Education, University of East London, Stratford Campus, Water Lane, London E15 4LZ, UK

Abstract This paper describes an illuminative small-scale study that piloted an initial survey instrumentintended to investigate correspondences between 47 undergraduate Education final year stu-dents’ use of information and communications technology (ICT), including the Internet, and –within the context of their adoption of tactics intended to impress lecturers or to exploit thehidden curriculum – students’ engagement in cheating behaviours such as plagiarism. Thestudy disclosed that 0.23 of the sample had reported single instances of cheating behaviours andthat 0.21 of the sample had reported multiple instances of cheating behaviours.Analysis of datadiscerned correspondences between these cheating behaviours and personal factors. However,indicators of ICT capability and the Internet did not correlate significantly with cheating behav-iours. Those students who had reported multiple instances of cheating behaviours were foundto rate their ICT capabilities higher than their peers but had a tendency to report less frequentuse of the Internet for coursework. Inferences are tentatively drawn for further research and foracademic practices.

Keywords cheating behaviours, Internet, lecturer impressing strategies, rules of the game.

Introduction

Student cheating in higher education (HE) has a long ifnot honourable history and, throughout the 20thcentury, research has focused on those factors associ-ated with cheating among HE students (Whitley 1998,p. 236). Brimble and Stevenson-Clarke (2005) haveobserved that contemporary students are exposed to ‘analmost daily media litany of fraud, bribery, insidertrading and other forms of unethical behaviour in the“real world” ’ (ibid. 22). Exposure of students to suchdishonest and unethical behaviour has provoked a fearthat:

cheating will become (has already become?) normativebehaviour for today’s students who are arguably under

more pressure than ever before to achieve high grades inorder to secure . . . well-paid employment (Brimble andStevenson-Clarke op. cit.).

Cheating in North American HE has been shown to bemost common among students enrolled on BusinessStudies programmes: Meade (1992) reported that cheat-ing was reported by more students enrolled on BusinessStudies (87%) than by those enrolled on Engineering(74%), Science (67%) and Humanities (63%). Hender-shott et al. (2000) reported that cheating was less com-monly witnessed among students on Educationprogrammes (42.6%) (ibid. 591).

These general contextual factors provide the ‘ethicalcontext (climate and culture)’ (McCabe et al. 2006,p. 302) for educational institutions. Educational institu-tions provide more specific contextual factors including‘deterrence-based variables’such as the ‘perceived like-lihood of being reported for cheating and the perceivedseverity of penalties’ (ibid. 296). The contextual factor

Accepted: 27 March 2011Correspondence: John Trushell, Cass School of Education, Universityof East London, Stratford Campus, Water Lane, London E15 4LZ, UK.Email: [email protected]

doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2011.00424.x

Original article

136 © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (2012), 28, 136–145

with the strongest association with student cheatinglevels has been reported to be institutional-contextual,i.e. students’ perceptions of peers’ cheating behaviours(Christensen Hughes & McCabe 2006, p. 54). Generaland institutional-contextual factors are considered to bemore important than personal factors – e.g. younger stu-dents cheat more than older students and male studentscheat more than female students (McCabe et al. 2001,pp. 227–228) – and it is vital that the university imple-ments ‘innovative and creative ways . . . to developmore responsible students’ (McCabe 2005, p. 29) whodemonstrate academic integrity. McCabe has contendedthat ‘it takes a whole campus community – students,faculty and administrators – to educate a student’ (ibid.29) and cites Boyer’s College: The UndergraduateExperience in America (Boyer 1987) in which it isstated:

If high standards of conduct are expected of students,colleges must have impeccable integrity themselves.Otherwise the lessons of the “hidden curriculum” willshape the undergraduate experience (ibid. 184).

Perry (2010) has proposed a typology of students predi-cated on students’ understanding of institutional prac-tices including academic integrity and the hiddencurriculum. Those students who do not possess suchunderstanding may become ‘accidental infringers’(ibid. 99) or – ‘by commonsense or good fortune’ – ‘donot commit academic misconduct’ (ibid. 99), but somestudents who do possess such understanding may delib-erately infringe, potentially ‘with negative impact onother students’ (ibid.). Some academics may be lenientwith minor infringements – perceived as ‘ “acceptable”lecture impressing strategies’ (Norton et al. 2001,p. 275) or as strategies to minimize the possibility offailure or to enhance ‘the probability of good marksthrough perceiving a “hidden curriculum” ’ (Pio 2004,p. 75) – as these are considered to be lapses in academicintegrity. However, most academics are harsh with pla-giarism, which is perceived as a crime or as an unorigi-nal sin (Park 2006, pp. 472–473). Correspondingly,much of the literature concerning academic misconduct‘seems to [have] an undue emphasis on detection, levelsof offending and punishment’ (Perry op. cit. 98) tocounter the knowing infringers.

This emphasis has been increased by the current per-ceived challenge to academic integrity posed by a ‘pla-giarism plague’ attributed to the Internet (Campbell

2006, p. 1), which has provided ‘a rich resource forresearchers and journalists looking for headline stories’(Perry op. cit. 97). The Internet has been perceived as‘exacerbating the long-standing problem of student pla-giarism’ (Scanlon & Neumann 2002, p. 374), that‘access is no longer for the knowing few but is there forthe majority’ (Underwood & Szabo 2003, p. 469) and,thus, ‘more students than ever plagiarize material fromdifferent sources, especially the Internet’ (Dahl 2007,p. 174). There is a discernible pessimism that students‘have no honour and need to be watched’ and that their‘teachers are too busy or incompetent to teach studentshow to behave responsibly’ (Ledwith & Risquez 2008,p. 372).

Furedi (2003) minimized the role of the Internet infacilitating academic misconduct and, instead, indictedthe prevailing ‘instrumentalist orientation towards edu-cation’ whereby ‘students are not expected to readbooks’ in universities that are ‘fast forgetting themeaning of real university study’ (ibid. 16). There is aperception that ‘virtually 100 per cent of studentsuse word processors and utilize the Internet for course-work’ (Oblinger & Hawkins 2006, p. 12), and this hasprompted the question as to whether ‘students haveguidance in applying the principles of academichonesty and respect to the digital world?’ (ibid. 13).McCabe (op. cit.) has contended that an appropriateresponse to Internet plagiarism is not ‘simply subscrib-ing to a plagiarism detection service’ but ‘to implementstrategies that will help offending students understandthe ethical consequences of their behaviour’ (ibid. 30),i.e. effective academic integrity policies and practices.Such policies would potentially benefit the accidentalinfringers and those fortunate students who avoidinfringements.

This pilot study was undertaken in a university,which both promotes academic integrity as the basisfor academic practices by such means as a university-wide Academic Integrity Policy embodied in an ‘Aca-demic Integrity Week’ and by the inclusion in eachprogramme of elements that explicitly promote aca-demic integrity and that require coursework to be sub-mitted via an electronic plagiarism detection service.The study investigated the incidence of self-reportedlapses in academic integrity and academic malpracticesuch as plagiarism and considered such factors as useof information and communication technology (ICT)and the Internet by students in this institutional context.

Cheating behaviours, the Internet and students 137

© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Methodology

Data for this illuminative small-scale study were col-lected by an initial pilot survey of final-year under-graduate students enrolled on the study programmes ofEarly Childhood Studies (EC), Education Studies (ES)and Youth and Community Work (YC), who were sub-mitting their final dissertations.

Surveys have commonly been used to collect dataconcerning students’ assessment and Internet use (New-stead 2004; Selwyn 2008) including cheating and pla-giarism (Scanlon and Neumann op. cit., Underwoodand Szabo op. cit.). Surveys involve the paradoxicalrequirement that respondents ‘be honest about their owndishonesty’ (Newstead et al. 1996, p. 240), but McCabehas remarked that his experience of 15 years of researchinto academic integrity has demonstrated that ‘manystudents [are] quite willing to admit their transgres-sions’ (McCabe 2005, p. 26). Such surveys guaranteerespondent anonymity to elicit honesty (see Nortonet al. 2001; Sheard et al. 2003, Underwood and Szaboop. cit.) for, as McCabe has remarked, when studentsare ‘concerned about the anonymity of their responses’,it is ‘harder to get [them] to be honest about their dis-honesty’ (op. cit. 28).

Respondents to this survey were guaranteed anonym-ity and the survey was distributed as a pen-and-paperdocument rather than electronically in order to reassurestudents that there would be no recording of identities asonline surveys produce lower levels of responses andlower rates of self-reported academic malpractice(ibid.). This guarantee of respondent anonymity limitedthe study insofar as there would be no possibility ofcompiling outcomes of the survey with complementarydata, e.g. students’ biographies.

The survey in this study comprised sections of itemsthat provided nominal and ordinal data. A short intro-ductory section identified such background variables asage, gender and programme of study – but with a guar-antee of anonymity – and provided nominal data.

A longer central section collected ordinal data in twosubsections. The first subsection sought to establish stu-dents’ engagement in online activities including theInternet (adapted from Selwyn op. cit.) featuring itemswith four markers of frequency, i.e. ‘Always’, ‘Some-times’, ‘Hardly ever’ and ‘Never’. The second subsec-tion sought to establish students’ perceived capability(adapted from Trushell et al. 1998) by Likert scales

(1–5) with three generic applications – word processors,spreadsheets and databases – featuring items with threevalidity indicators, i.e. ‘Ability to enter text or data’ (1on the scale), ‘Ability to manipulate text or data withfrequent reference/guidance’ (3 on the scale) and‘Ability to manipulate text or data with occasionalreference/guidance’ (5 on the scale).

A final section adapted the rules of the game concern-ing students’ essay strategies and cheating behaviours(Norton et al. op. cit. 269): the section required studentsto respond to 18 items concerning ‘ “acceptable” lectureimpressing strategies’ and seven items concerning‘cheating behaviours’ (ibid. 275). The list was notexhaustive or definitive – for instance, no item con-cerned the removal of pages from library books andjournals, a practice more common among students onLaw programmes in North America (Evensen 2004,p. 383) – but was intended to include the more commontactics and malpractice.

The nominal and ordinal data provided by thesurvey were not amenable to analysis by inferentialstatistics but could be examined by descriptivestatistics. These data were analysed by seeking corre-spondences between students’ background variablesand students’ use of ICT with students’ adoption oftactics to exploit the hidden curriculum and engage inmalpractice.

The survey was distributed for completion byundergraduate students when their dissertationswere submitted at the close of the academic year 2009/2010. Participants were informed that a copy of areport of the study would be made available for consul-tation, by Internet, at the start of the subsequent aca-demic year.

Findings

Respondents to the survey modestly comprised 47 stu-dents: 27 students on EC, seven students on ES and 13students onYC. The student respondents were predomi-nantly female – 42 female students and five male stu-dents – and more than three-quarters of the respondentswere aged 30 years or under: 30 students were aged21–25 years; eight students were aged 26–30 years; fivestudents were aged 31–35 years; and four students wereaged 36 years and over.

These data are presented in two sections: first, datacollected by the rules of the essay writing game items;

138 J. Trushell et al.


and, second, data concerning personal factors, i.e. ICTand Internet use.

Rules of the writing game

The rules of the essay writing game items requiredstudents to report instances of engaging in ‘lecturerimpressing strategies’ – e.g. putting greater effort intofirst assignments on a course (0.85 of respondents) andusing references that were interesting and up-to-date(0.72 of respondents) – and ‘cheating behaviours’.‘Lecturer impressing strategies’ were common occur-rences but instances of ‘cheating behaviours’ were lesscommon occurrences (see Table 1).

There were 326 instances of ‘lecturer impress-ing strategies’ and 49 instances of ‘cheating behav-iours’. Notably, the more common of these ‘cheating

behaviours’ were putting a theorist’s name againsta student’s own argument, comment or criticism inorder to make it look erudite (ten students) andinventing publications to include in the essay (eightstudents).

Interrogation of the data indicated that the 49instances of ‘cheating behaviours’ were attributableto 21 students (i.e. 0.45 of the sample). This result isconsistent with the reported levels of cheatingamong North American students of Education(42.6%) (Hendershott et al. op. cit.). Further analysisof students’ reported instances of ‘cheating behaviour’facilitated further categorization of students intotwo groups (see Table 2), those who had reported asingle instance of ‘cheating behaviour’ and thosewho had reported multiple instances of ‘cheatingbehaviour’:

Table 1. Reported ‘rules of the game’ played.

As an undergraduate, have you ever . . . Confirm(proportionof sample)

Put your greatest effort into getting a high mark for the first submitted essay in a course? 0.85Used up-to-date/interesting references/lots of references/contradictory references in your essay? 0.72Tried to reflect your lecturer’s opinions/views/style as closely as possible? 0.66Made your essay visually exciting? 0.64Tried to include information not covered in the lectures/obscure references? 0.47Avoided writing anything controversial in the essay? 0.40Avoided criticizing your marker’s views and/or research in the essay? 0.38Handed the essay in before the deadline to create the impression that the assignment was

mastered without difficulty/to show eagerness?0.38

Asked a lecturer for help so s/he will approve of you and think you are a keen student? 0.36Chosen an essay title nearest to the lecturer’s subject or research area? 0.36Used big words/technical terms/jargon to impress your lecturer? 0.34When feeling confident, argued a position, regardless of your lecturer’s views in order to appear

insightful/clever, etc.?0.34

Chosen the easiest title to give you a good chance of getting a high mark? 0.23Written a lot/written big/made the essay look longer/exceeded the word limit? 0.23

* Put a theorist’s name against your own point/criticism/comment to make it look erudite? 0.21Found out who would mark the essays so that you could choose the title set by an easier marker? 0.19

* Invented studies/research/papers to include in the essay? 0.17* Avoided putting simple/basic textbooks in the bibliography even though you have used them? 0.15

Chosen an unpopular essay title so that your answer is distinctive? 0.15* Paraphrased a material from another source without acknowledging the original author? 0.15

Chosen a difficult title in the hope of being given extra credit? 0.13* Copied a material for coursework from a book or other publication without acknowledging the

original author?0.13

* Presented a false bibliography? 0.13* Changed the dates of old research to make it look like up-to-date research? 0.11

Got to know the lecturers socially in order to favourably influence them? 0.09

* indicates ‘cheating behaviours’.



• Eleven students reported a single instance (0.23 of thesample).

• Ten students reported multiple instances (0.21 of thesample).

Notably, there was restricted engagement in three formsof ‘cheating behaviours’ – changing dates, copyingmaterial and paraphrasing material without acknowl-edging the original author – which were reported onlyby those students who reported multiple instances of‘cheating behaviours’.

The responses to the items indicating engage-ment in ‘lecturer impressing strategies’ and ‘cheatingbehaviours’ were converted into indices adaptingprocedures outlined in Norton et al. (op. cit. 279):means of ‘Yes’ responses for 18 ‘lecture impressingstrategies’ was calculated to give an index and means of‘Yes’ responses for seven ‘cheating behaviours’ wascalculated to give an index. These indices are not mea-sures but indicators of ranges of strategies and behav-iours in which respondents reported engaging (seeFig 1).

A correlation for nonparametric data, appropriate toordinal data, was calculated between the indices: thecorrelation was moderate (r 0.483, P. 0.01) indicating arelationship. Such significance does not necessarilyimply a relationship of any practical importance, e.g.agreement, but may indicate an area that merits furtherinvestigation.

Further analysis of the incidence of ‘lecture impress-ing strategies’ disclosed that:

• students who reported no ‘cheating behaviours’engaged in a total of 145 ‘lecture impressing strate-gies’, i.e. 5.58 strategies per student; and

Table 2. Reported cheating behaviours by student.

Student Cheating behaviours

Theorist’sname

Inventedstudies

Basictexts

Falsebibliography

Changeddates

Paraphrasedmaterial

Copiedmaterial

EC1 ✓

EC2 ✓

EC3 ✓

EC4 ✓

YC1 ✓

EC5 ✓

EC6 ✓

EC7 ✓

ES1 ✓

YC2 ✓

EC8 ✓

EC9 ✓ ✓

EC10 ✓ ✓ ✓

EC11 ✓ ✓ ✓

EC12 ✓ ✓ ✓

ES2 ✓ ✓ ✓

YC3 ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

YC4 ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

YC5 ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

YC6 ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

ES3 ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

EC, Early Childhood Studies; YC, Youth and Community Work; ES, Education Studies.

Fig 1 Strategy and cheat indices.



• students who reported cheating behaviours engagedin a total of 181 ‘lecturer impressing strategies’, i.e.8.62 strategies per student.

Personal factors

Potential relationships were investigated between stu-dents’ self-ratings of capabilities with generic applica-tions – spreadsheets and databases – and the indices for‘lecturer impressing strategies’ and ‘cheating behav-iours’. An index was constructed from the sums of stu-dents’ self-ratings for spreadsheets and databases toindicate range. Correlations between this generic appli-cation index and the strategies index (r 0.078) and thecheating index (r 0.069) were not significant.

Further analysis was undertaken for students’ self-ratings for generic applications by subsamples ofstudents who had reported no ‘cheating behaviours’andthose who had reported ‘cheating behaviours’, andthese analyses disclosed that the latter group had higher

proportions of ‘5’ ratings with all applications (seeTable 3).

Students’ reported use of the computer online indi-cated that e-mail correspondence was the most commonand that the search for information concerning theirstudies or assignments was the second most common(see Table 4).

Analysis of the correlation of the item ‘Look forinformation about university studies/assignments’ withother items disclosed that was a moderate relationshipwith ‘Send/read e-mails’ (r 0.437). There were twofurther weak relationships with two other items:

• ‘Look for products/services/gathering product infor-mation’ (r 0.305, P. 0.05).

• ‘Buy goods/services online’ (r 0.327, P. 0.05).

The correlation of the item ‘Participate in online educa-tional courses/lessons’ with other items was also analy-sed and only one moderate significant relationship was

Table 3. Reported capabilities with applications by ‘cheating behaviours’.

Rated capability No reported ‘cheating behaviours’ (n = 26) Reported ‘cheating behaviours’ (n = 21)

Word processor Spreadsheet Database Word processor Spreadsheet Database

5 0.69 0.31 0.23 0.86 0.52 0.434 0.19 0.23 0.19 0.09 0.24 0.243 0.04 0.27 0.23 – – 0.052 0.08 0.15 0.31 0.05 0.24 0.141 – 0.04 0.04 – – 0.14

Table 4. Reported use of Internet by respondents.

Internet activity How frequently (proportion of sample)

Always Sometimes Hardly ever Never

Send/read e-mails. 0.81 0.13 0.04 0.02Look for information about university studies/assignments. 0.66 0.30 0.02 0.02Look for products/services/gathering product information. 0.49 0.45 0.04 0.02Look for news/current affairs information. 0.45 0.45 0.04 0.06Browse/surf the Web for no particular purpose. 0.38 0.38 0.13 0.11Buy goods/services online. 0.36 0.38 0.15 0.11Maintain a blog/space on Bebo, Facebook, Myspace, etc. 0.36 0.34 0.13 0.17Look for information about leisure/interests/hobbies. 0.34 0.55 0.06 0.04Participate in online educational courses/lessons. 0.30 0.38 0.15 0.17Online banking/management of personal finance. 0.21 0.43 0.11 0.26Legally download software, film, images or music. 0.19 0.28 0.28 0.26Use Internet newsgroups, chat rooms, instant messaging. 0.13 0.34 0.26 0.28Play games online. 0.09 0.17 0.28 0.47



found with the item ‘Use Internet newsgroups, chatrooms, instant messaging’ (r 0.424, P. 0.01).

Potential relationships were investigated betweeneach of the items and the indices for ‘lecturer impress-ing strategies’ and ‘cheating behaviours’. The correla-tion between ‘Look for information about universitystudies/assignments’ and the strategies index (r -0.176)and the cheating index (r -0.270) was negative and notsignificant. The correlation between ‘Participate inonline educational courses/lessons’ and the strategiesindex (r 0.122) and the cheating index (r 0.033) was notsignificant.

Further analysis of students’ reported use of the Inter-net to ‘Look for information about university studies/assignments’ indicated, intriguingly, that greaterproportions of the students who reported no ‘cheatingbehaviours’ used the Internet ‘Always’ or ‘Sometimes’for coursework and assignments (see Table 5). Studentswho reported engaging in ‘cheating behaviours’ alsoreported lower use of the Internet for university studies/assignments.

Thus, an interesting tension could be discerned: stu-dents who reported no ‘cheating behaviours’ had lowerratings for ICT capability than those who reported‘cheating behaviours’; but students who reported no‘cheating behaviours’ tended to make greater use of theInternet for assignments ‘Always’ while students whoreported ‘cheating behaviours’ tended to make less use‘Always’ but higher use ‘Sometimes’.

Additionally, the ages and genders of students werecategorized by engagement in ‘cheating behaviours’

(see Table 6). Two-thirds of the students who hadreported ‘cheating behaviours’ (14 of the 21) were aged21–25 years and, when subcategorized by single ormultiple ‘cheating behaviours’, four-fifths of studentswho had reported multiple cheating behaviours wereyounger (i.e. aged 21–25 years). This trend is consis-tent with the reported personal factor that younger stu-dents cheat more than older students (McCabe et al.2001, p. 227). Almost a quarter of female studentsreported ‘cheating behaviours’ (0.24) while all malestudents in the survey reported instances of ‘cheatingbehaviours’, consistent with the reported personalfactor that male students cheat more than female stu-dents (ibid. 228).

Students’ self-ratings of capabilities with ICT –word processors, spreadsheets and databases – indi-cated that students tended to rate their capabilities withword processors more highly than those with spread-sheets or databases. Consistent with the reported ubiq-uity of student use of word processing facilities(Oblinger and Hawkins op. cit.), over three quarters ofall respondents (0.77) rated their abilities as ‘5’.However, only two-fifths of respondents (0.4) ratedtheir abilities as ‘5’ with spreadsheets, and less than athird of respondents (0.32) rated their abilities as ‘5’with databases. Thus, as observed by Oblinger andHawkins, an impression of broad ICT competence slipswhen ratings for use of applications other thanword processors are considered (ibid. 12). Correlationsfor parametric data for all respondents’ ratingsdemonstrated that there was a moderate significant

Table 5. Reported use of Internet forassignments by ‘cheating behaviours’.How frequently No reported ‘cheating

behaviours’ (n = 26)Reported ‘cheatingbehaviours’ (n = 21)

Always 0.77 0.52Sometimes 0.23 0.38Hardly ever – 0.05Never – 0.05

Table 6. Subsamples by reported ‘cheating behaviours’.

Reported ‘cheating behaviours’ Age in years (proportions) Gender (proportions)

21–25 26–30 31–35 >36 Female Male

No ‘cheating behaviours’ (n = 26) 16 (0.62) 6 (0.23) 3 (0.12) 1 (0.04) 26 (1.0) –Single ‘cheating behaviour’ (n = 11) 6 (0.55) 1 (0.09) 1 (0.09) 3 (0.27) 10 (0.91) 1 (0.09)Multiple ‘cheating behaviours’ (n = 10) 8 (0.8) 1 (0.1) 1 (0.1) – (0.1) 6 (0.6) 4 (4]



relationship between spreadsheets and databases (r0.783, P. 0.01) and a weak significant relationshipbetween word processors and spreadsheets (r 0.350, P.0.05). Investigation of these factors could be attemptedby a subsequent study with a sample less skewed interms of age and gender.

Interpretation

This illuminative small-scale study piloted an initialsurvey instrument intended to investigate the corre-spondence of undergraduate students’ use of ICT,including the Internet, with students’ adoption oftactics intended to impress lecturers and engagementin cheating behaviours such as plagiarism. The modestsample of 47 Education undergraduate studentsimposes limitations on the inferences that may bedrawn insofar as the study was restricted in terms ofacademic disciplines and students.

The study did disclose that the 47 students reported326 instances of ‘lecturer impressing strategies’and 49 instances of ‘cheating behaviours’. Studentscomprising 0.45 of the sample had reported engag-ing in ‘cheating behaviours’ and this proportion wasconsistent with 42.6% of Education students who hadparticipated in a North American study and hadreported cheating (Hendershott et al. op. cit.). The cor-respondence between these proportions would beinconsistent with perceptions that cheating has become‘normative behaviour’ for students (Brimble andStevenson-Clarke op. cit.) or that there has been anincrease in the number of students who ‘plagiarizematerial from different sources, especially the Internet’(Dahl op. cit.).

Further comparison of the responses of the 0.45 ofstudents who had reported ‘cheating behaviours’ andthe 0.55 of students who had reported no ‘cheatingbehaviours’ disclosed that:

• students who reported no ‘cheating behaviours’engaged in a total of 145 ‘lecture impressing strate-gies’, i.e. 5.58 strategies per student; and

• students who reported cheating behaviours engagedin a total of 181 ‘lecturer impressing strategies’, i.e.8.62 strategies per student.

Thus, a correspondence was inferred between incidenceof ‘cheating behaviours’ and ‘lecturer impressing strat-

egies’ and further analysis of indices of ‘lecturerimpressing strategies’ and ‘cheating behaviours’ dis-closed a moderate correlation (r 0.483, P. 0.01). Thiscorrelation indicates a relationship between ‘lecturerimpressing strategies’ and ‘cheating behaviours’. A ten-tative recommendation could be made that lecturersshould consider exercising caution with students whoadopt such strategies: leniency concerning ‘lecturerimpressing strategies’ may inadvertently increase theprobability of ‘cheating behaviours’.

Further analyses of an index of the personal factors ofstudents’ ICT capabilities with generic applications –constructed from self-ratings of capabilities withspreadsheets and databases – and the indices for ‘lec-turer impressing strategies’ and ‘cheating behaviours’disclosed correlations that were not significant. Aninvestigation of items concerning students’ use of theInternet – ‘Look for information about universitystudies/assignments’ and ‘Participate in online educa-tional courses/lessons’ – disclosed that there were nosignificant correlations between these items and theindices of ‘lecturer impressing strategies’ and ‘cheatingbehaviours’.

These poor correlations are not consistent with anysignificant relationships between ICT capabilities orbetween specific uses of the Internet and ‘lecturerimpressing strategies’ and ‘cheating behaviours’.

Nevertheless, detailed analysis of students’responses indicated, intriguingly, that those studentswho had reported multiple infringements tended to ratetheir ICT capabilities higher than their peers, yetreported searching the Internet less frequently forinformation pertinent to their coursework. There aretwo inferences to be tentatively drawn. The first infer-ence is that higher ICT capability could facilitate the‘cheating behaviour’ of plagiarism drawing upon theresources of the Internet. The second inference is thatstudents who report multiple instances of ‘cheatingbehaviour’ may search the Internet less frequently butthat indicators of frequency do not capture the pertinentdata: those students who commit multiple instances of‘cheating behaviour’ may search the Internet in a quali-tatively different manner, for instance, seeking out lessaccessible resources, e.g. websites on which under-graduate and postgraduate coursework and evenacademic publications are located. Thus, further inves-tigation of students’ use of ICT should address thisqualitative aspect.



Finally, much research has concerned thosestudents who engage in ‘cheating behaviours’ suchas plagiarism – consistent with an ‘emphasis ondetection, levels of offending and punishment’ (Perryop. cit. 98) – but the data and analyses of this studywould indicate the presence of an intriguing numberof students who reported committing a single in-stance of ‘cheating behaviour’. This raises the issueof whether these students were ‘accidental infringers’(ibid. 99) who acquired belated understanding ofinstitutional practices – including academic integrityand the hidden curriculum – or were deliberate infring-ers who were detected and punished. The essentialguarantee of respondent anonymity limits this studyin the compilation of complementary data concerningstudents.

Accidental infringers – and ‘blameless innocents’(ibid.) who also lack understanding of institutionalpractices but commit no infringements ‘by common-sense or good fortune’ (ibid.) – are those students forwhom educational institutions’ academic integrity poli-cies and practices are essential. Deliberate infringerswho are loath to sacrifice individual advantage – andwho may include among their number infringers whowere previously undetected or were treated leniently –could be considered to be unoriginal sinners (Park op.cit. 472) beyond redemption and best proscribed byhigh-profile deterrence.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their gratitude to the editorand to two anonymous referees for their constructivecomments.

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cheating behaviours, the internet and education undergraduate students

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