The PACES-1 Study

PACES-1 Instruments and Sample

The PACES-1 Survey is a seven-page survey that includes 139 questions in seven parts. Part 1 addresses students’ definition of cheating and the frequency with which they have engaged in cheating activities. Parts 2 through 5 investigate psychological and situational factors that might affect a student’s decision about cheating. Part 6 addresses deterrents to cheating and students’ perception of their effectiveness. Finally, Part 7 addresses student demographics.

The survey was completed by 643 undergraduate students in engineering and pre-engineering courses at eleven institutions in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Saudi Arabia, including large public universities, small private universities, and community colleges.

Findings of the PACES-1 Study

• Many factors that influence students’ decisions about cheating vary by context (e.g. exam cheating and homework cheating). The overall variance explained by statistical models accounting for the factors related to exam and homework cheating was different by context: the adjusted R reached 36% for exam cheating, while the same estimate reached only 14% for homework cheating. The amount of variance explained for predicting variables within each model also differed. For instance, seniors were more likely to report cheating on exams than were other students; however, this difference by college level was not evident in the context of homework. In addition, past cheating in high school and being on scholarship both were strong predictors of self-reported cheating on exams but not on homework. Similarly, situational variables predicted exam cheating well but were not even significant in predicting homework cheating..
• Despite these differences, there are still strong similarities across some factors (primarily psychological factors) that influence students’ decision to cheat in exam and homework contexts. For example, a strong sense of moral obligation (described by Ajzen as “personal feelings of … responsibility to perform, or refuse to perform, a certain behavior”) and a propensity to experience shame (described by Tangney and Dearing as a moral emotion that results from negative experiences and self-hatred) were unilateral deterrents to cheating across contexts. This emphasizes the importance of understanding how psychological constructs, such as moral obligation and shame, inform student decisions about cheating.
• There is a clear relationship between students’ attitude toward a behavior (i.e., their definition of the behavior as “cheating,” as “unethical but not cheating,” or as “neither”) and their self-reported propensity to engage in that behavior. For example, only 35% of the students who defined permitting another student to look at your answer during a quiz or exam as “cheating” admitted to engaging in that behavior at least once. On the other hand, 67% of those who defined it as “unethical but not cheating” and 78% of those who defined the behavior as “neither” admitted to doing it at least once. This trend is similar for other behaviors, and it suggests that students who have a more permissive attitude towards a behavior are, not surprisingly, more willing to engage in that behavior.
• Students were able to rationalize cheating behavior using instructor-based neutralizations such as “the instructor did an inadequate job” or “the instructor assigned too much material” more commonly than neutralizations based on course material. This correlates well with students’ belief that it is primarily the instructors’ or the institution’s responsibility to limit cheating and not the students’. This is significant because it indicates that an individual instructor can minimize cheating in his/her class. As such, practical pedagogical methods to help students avoid the pressure of cheating need to be identified and widely disseminated.

Implications of the PACES-1 Study

This research underscores the need to carefully consider context in issues related to cheating, and it suggests that the most successful deterrents to cheating may involve helping educators explain what cheating is, rather than focusing on what they can do to prevent it. This research also shows that attitude towards a behavior and moral obligation, both psychological constructs, influence actual behavior. As such, it supports the use of a psychological model of the decision-making processes and the resulting behavior to examine cheating and illustrates the need for a common model that is flexible enough to account for differences in context.