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At the start of last semester, I asked my under-graduate students if they had the self-control to avoid using their computers during class for non-class-related activities. So they promised that if they used their laptops, it would be only for course-related activities such as taking notes. However, as the semester drew on, I noticed that progressively more and more students were checking Facebook, surfing the web and emailing. At the same time that they were Facebooking more and more, they were also cheating more and more on their weekly quizzes -- and in a class of 500 students, it was hard to manage this deterioration. As my students' attention and respect continued to degrade, I became increasingly frustrated.
We got to the point in the semester where we covered my research on dishonesty and cheating. After discussing the importance of ethical standards and honour-code reminders, two of my students took it upon themselves to run something of an experiment on the rest of the students. They sent an email to everyone in the class from a fabricated (but conceivably real) classmate, and included a link to a website that was supposed to contain the answers to a past year's final exam.
This was what they emailed half the students:
<span class="Apple-style-span">From: Richard Zhang
<span class="Apple-style-span">Subject: Ariely Final Exam Answers
Hey guys, thought you might find this useful. See link below.
<span class="Apple-style-span">---------Forwarded message ---------
From: Ira Onal
To: Richard Zhang
Hey Richard, Here's a link with the answers from the test when I did the class, and I don't think he changes the questions/answers every semester. Hope this is helpful and let me know if you have any questions: Best of luck, Ira
The other half got the same email but with the following message:
PS, I don't know if this is cheating or not, but here's a section of the University's honour code that might be pertinent. Use your own judgment: "Obtaining documents that grant an unfair advantage to an individual is not allowed."
The students tracked how many people visited the site. Without the honour-code reminder, 69 per cent of the class accessed the answers. However, when the message included the reminder about the honour code, 41 per cent accessed it.
The presence of the honour code, as well as the ambiguity of the moral norm, may have had a role in the students' behaviour. When the question of morality becomes salient, students are forced to decide if they consider their behaviour to be cheating -- and presumably most decided that it is.
The issue of cheating rose again with the final exam. I received several emails from students who were concerned about their classmates cheating, and so I decided to look into the situation with a post-exam survey. After the exam, I asked them to report (anonymously) their own cheating and the cheating they suspected.
Although the students estimated that 30-45 per cent of their peers had cheated, only very few admitted that they themselves had.
You might be thinking we should take these self-reports with a pinch of salt -- after all, even on an anonymous survey, students will under-report their own cheating. We can also look at the grades on the exam, and because less than one percent of students got 90 percent, I feel confident that the belief that students cheated is much more extreme than the real level (or they could just be very bad at cheating).
Although it might sound like good news that fewer students cheat than they suspect, in fact such an overestimation of the tendency to cheat can become a very damaging social norm: when students think that their peers are cheating, they feel both that it is socially OK to cheat and feel pressured to cheat. A few students have even complained to me that they were penalised because they decided not to cheat.
If cheating is perceived to be rampant, what are the chances that 2012's students will not adopt even more lenient moral standards and end up living up to their perceived cheating among their peers?
Dan Ariely is the James B Duke professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University, North Carolina, and the author of The Upside of Irrationality <span class="Apple-style-span">(HarperCollins)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
