The E³ Team, a group of engineering educators and educational researchers, have worked collaboratively since 2000 to understand the underlying causes of academic dishonesty in engineering undergraduate populations. The team was especially motivated by decades of others’ work showing that, when surveyed, engineering students were among those most likely to report frequently cheating. This site summarizes some of the team’s more important findings from three major studies that surveyed a total of 1300 engineering and humanities undergraduates at eleven institutions. The site also describes the next phase of the team’s research.

Research Motivation

The E³ project has been motivated by research over the past 40 years which has clearly demonstrated that

• engineering undergraduates self-report rates of academic dishonesty and cheating that are higher than rates reported in nearly all other disciplines.
• students who cheat in college are more likely to make unethical decisions as professionals

Together these findings suggest that high levels of cheating in college may be a precursor to unethical behavior among practicing engineers. Also, affecting the decision-making process of engineering students may have a positive impact on the integrity of professionals.

Project Goals

The long-term project goals include quantifying the frequency of cheating among engineering undergraduate students and to clarify their perceptions and attitudes about cheating. Also, the team identified variables that influence engineering student's decisions about engaging in unethical behaviors in the classroom and the workplace and to identify the relative influence of the variables. Using this information, the team has developed and tested a theoretical predictive model of the decision-making process used by engineering students when they are considering cheating. This theoretical model is then used to formulate practical interventions that could be used by engineering educators to improve engineering student's decisions about cheating, to validate the interventions, and to widely disseminate the interventions to the community of engineering educators.