The role of faculty in reducing academic dishonesty among engineering students

ABSTRACT

University faculty are frequently tasked with promoting academic honesty among students. However, there is little reliable evidence about whether faculty actions can prevent academic dishonesty. The purpose of this study is to examine whether more severe punishments from faculty can reduce academic dishonesty among students. We analyze nationally representative, longitudinal and matched data on engineering undergraduates and faculty from 33 universities in Russia, and document extremely high and increasing rates of dishonest academic attitudes among students, especially among the higher achieving students. In the first two years of study the proportion of students tolerant to academic dishonesty increases by 5 percentage points. We then show that despite the tide of increasing academic dishonesty among students, more severe punishments from faculty significantly and substantially improve student attitudes towards academic dishonesty. Taken together, the findings emphasize the importance of strengthening the role of faculty in promoting academic honesty among students.

KEYWORDS:

• Dishonesty
• cheating
• faculty
• engineering students
• Russia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

Support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1 Incentives are misaligned because university funding is based in large part on the number of enrolled students (Abankina et al. 2016), and university staff are therefore hesitant to give students failing grades that will lead to their dropping out of university (Terentyev et al. 2016).

2 Students tend to rationalize dishonest behavior by adopting a neutralization technique called ‘condemnation of the condemners’: which is an attempt ‘to turn the argument back on any who might disapprove of the cheating’ (Brent and Atkisson 2011; Sykes and Matza 1957). One of the main justifications that students give for academic dishonesty is faculty-driven (Brent and Atkisson 2011; Jensen et al. 2002; McCabe 1992).

3 The SUPER-test is an international comparative study aimed at measuring gains in academic and higher order thinking skills among university students and identifying factors that affect skill gains (see Loyalka et al. 2019b and Loyalka et al. 2019a). It was organized by researchers at Stanford University in collaboration with partner institutions in Russia, China, and India. The data on academic dishonesty were from Russia.

4 In Russia, students study together in the same study group (roughly 15–25 people) within a particular major throughout their university studies; the study group is administratively assigned to each student in the first year of study.

5 Approximately 26% of first year students (344) attrited from universities between the baseline and endline phases. These students were not surveyed in 2017.

6 We followed the same sampling procedure as for the dataset A.

7 Faculty members of one university did not participate in the study, so the multi-level and multivariate analyses were conducted on the data from 33 universities.

8 We measured SES by asking students to list several items of value in their parents’ home. We then applied a polychoric principal component analysis to create a proxy for socioeconomic status (Kolenikov and Angeles 2009).

9 Unified State Exam is a series of subject-specific standardized tests in Russia that students pass at the end of high school in order to both graduate from high school and enter higher education institutions.

10 We include the option ‘Do not know’ as an indicator of the tolerant attitude towards academic dishonesty for the following reason. We assume that the students who chose this option experienced the lack of information about the context to choose an appropriate punishment. This difficulty may be a result of relying on ‘situational ethics’ (LaBeff et al. 1990), in other words, ‘a student justifies his or her cheating based on some aspect of the situation’ (Murdock et al. 2007, 142). Appealing to ‘situational ethics’ is associated with more tolerant attitudes towards academic dishonesty (McCabe 1992).

11 The scale in faculty questionnaire included the same options as in student questionnaire: (1) Do nothing, (2) Warn the student, (3) Lower the grade, (4) Give the student a failing grade, (5) Give the student a failing grade and inform the department about the incident, (6) Do not know. Similarly, a dichotomized version of this variable is used in the analysis, where 1 = apply severe punishment (includes options ‘Give the student a failing grade’ and ‘Give the student a failing grade and inform the department about the incident’) and 0 = do not apply severe punishment (includes all other options, including ‘Do not know’).

12 For this value-added type specification, we used the 2015 first year student responses from dataset A to create a department-level, baseline aggregate measure of first-year student attitudes towards academic dishonesty.

13 These two variables are highly correlated: the majority of PhD holders are either full professors (21%) or associate professors (75%).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research University Higher School of Economics: [Grant Number Basic Research Program, grant #27].