Cheating

Cheating is usually defined as deliberately engaging in dishonest or fraudulent behavior for one's own gain. When applied to academic dishonesty, cheating often falls into the category of plagiarism, that is, the use of another's work without giving appropriate attribution. Sometimes the plagiarism is characterized as a breach of copyright or an infringement upon another's intellectual property rights. In all cases, cheating and or plagiarism are breaches of expected norms of academic behavior in both the K-12 setting and the university setting.

In law, cheating, although it is fraudulent behavior and academically dishonest, does not rise to the level of a legal cause of action. Most litigation pertaining to cheating and plagiarism is brought because of procedural violations when bringing the cheater to task or for claims of retaliation for other misdoings.

A study of law school students and plagiarism, perhaps the most common form of cheating, concluded that one should consider why students cheat and plagiarize. There are several compelling reasons. For example, law school students, for whom competition is extremely keen, cheat to maintain high academic standings. In an ongoing national study of undergraduate students by the Center for Academic Integrity at Rutgers University, nearly 50,000 undergraduate students at 60 institutions were surveyed over a period of over four years. The results are cause for concern. Of the nearly 50,000 students who participated, 70% admitted to some cheating. Further investigation revealed that those institutions that have strong honor codes have far fewer reported incidents of student cheating. Longitudinally, over a period of nine years, these studies show that honor codes and engaging students in resolving affairs of academic dishonesty decreased serious cheating by one fourth to one third.

Some cheating via plagiarism seems to occur because students are not familiar with the arts of note taking, topic organization, and writing. These students are careless, which results in unintentional plagiarism. A prime example would be the student who incorporated material into his or her work but failed to mention where the material was acquired. In addition, procrastination and poor organizational skills sometimes lead to ill-fated attempts to write papers quickly by cutting and pasting. The practice of cutting and pasting from the Internet, an increasingly common phenomenon on homework assignments, is a problem, because many students do not know to what [Page 153]extent material may be copied. Absent clear instructions, most students have concluded that this is not a serious issue. Some students tend to weave sentences from different sources on the Internet into their term papers without appropriate citations. In 1999, only 10% admitted to this practice, while that number rose to nearly 40% in 2005. Unfortunately, today, a majority of students do not believe that this method of cheating is a serious issue.

Most incidents of cheating that involve plagiarism involve students who have not learned proper writing skills. Students who repeatedly demonstrate an inability to use quotation marks properly, to indent large quotes, or even to use proper attribution where due may merely give a general citation at the beginning and/or the end of their entire written thought.

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