Donald L. McCabe, Professor of Organization Management at Rutgers University, is the country’s leading researcher on academic integrity. During the past ten years he has surveyed over 14,000 students at 60 colleges and universities. His work appears frequently in business, education, and sociology journals, and was recently featured in a front page Los Angeles Times story ("Focus on Ethics Can Curb Cheating Colleges Find," February 15, 2000). McCabe served as Director of Rutgers’ Executive M.B.A. program from 1994 to 1996, and recently completed a three year term as Associate Provost for Campus Development at Rutger’s Newark campus.

     What follows is a special SWR interview with professor McCabe on his latest national survey.

SWR: You’ve done a series of surveys about academic integrity at America’s colleges and universities. Please tell us about your latest effort.

McCabe: This past fall I conducted a survey on twenty-one campuses around the county in which over 2100 students participated. At each school, 100 sophomores, 100 juniors and 200 seniors were mailed surveys. Reflecting the unwillingness of many students to complete surveys on any topic, the long length of this particular survey, and the sensitive nature of the topic, the response rate of 29% was notably lower than the 35-40% I’ve obtained in previous surveys.

     The twenty-one campuses participating in this project represented a broad cross-section of schools, including one community college, seven state universities, and 13 private institutions. Nine of the private institutions had some form of academic honor code and three of the state schools employ what I would describe as modified honor code approaches.

SWR: Who supported the survey? What was its purpose?

McCabe: This survey was part of a larger project being conducted by the Center for Academic Integrity, a consortium of about 200 colleges and universities based at Duke University. The Center has been working on a project, sponsored by the Templeton Foundation, to develop assessment materials that any school may use to evaluate the current state of academic integrity on its campus. Thus the survey not only asked students about the extent of cheating on their campuses, but it also asked students how faculty respond to suspected incidents of cheating, why they think some students cheat, how their school addresses allegations of academic dishonesty, and the effectiveness of their school’s policy on cheating.

SWR: How did you distinguish between traditional and "modified" honor codes?

McCabe: Strong traditional academic honor codes often include such provisions as unproctored exams, the use of some form of pledge that students are asked to sign attesting to the integrity of their work, and a strong (often exclusive) student role in the judicial system that addresses allegations of academic dishonesty. Some traditional codes also include provisions that encourage or require students to report any cheating they may see among other students.

     Modified honor code approaches typically include a strong or exclusive role for students in the judicial process but generally do not mandate unproctored exams or the use of a pledge, although they can often be used at an instructor’s option in selected courses. What modified honor code approaches do, however, is place a strong campus focus on the issue of academic integrity. I believe this simple fact alone explains much of the success of modified honor codes. Students are reminded, often quite frequently, that their campus places a high value on the question of academic integrity. Policies are clearly communicated to students, and they are asked to personally exercise responsibility for academic integrity.

McCabe: Based on my earlier research, I had some definite hypotheses about the influence of academic honor codes on student cheating. Indeed, my earlier work has provided strong support for the effectiveness of traditional codes on the small to medium, selective campuses where I have done much of my previous work. Testing this hypothesis in this new project, however, was of particular interest for two reasons. First, to my knowledge, it would be the first time quantitative data was available on the impact of modified honor codes at large universities. Second, the variety of honor code, and no code schools participating in this project was broader than my previous work.

McCabe: Probably the major finding of this new research was empirical confirmation that modified honor codes do seem to reduce student cheating, even on large campuses where levels of cheating are generally found to be among the highest.

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"Probably the major finding of this new research was empirical confirmation that modified honor codes do seem to reduce student cheating, even on large campuses . . ."

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     While cheating on the three large modified campuses in my survey (Kansas State University, the University of California at Davis, and the University of Maryland at College Park) was more prevalent than on the smaller, generally more traditional honor code campuses in my sample, it was significantly lower than the level found on the campuses with no honor code. This result can probably be best seen in the following data which show the number of students in each category who admitted to one or more instances of serious cheating in my survey.

     The same basic pattern is observed when we look at the number of students who admit to more than three incidents of serious test cheating, students I label repetitive test cheaters. At private schools with an honor code, 6% of respondents admitted to such levels of cheating vs. 17% at campuses with no code. Once again, students at the large public universities with modified codes reported an intermediate level of cheating—10% in this case.

McCabe: I’d mention three in particular:

• As has been the case in previous surveys, business and engineering students generally self-reported higher levels of serious cheating than other majors. The level of cheating in majors related to the health professions (e.g., physical therapy and occupational therapy) also showed above average rates of self-reported cheating.
• Many students simply do not think that certain forms of cheating are very serious. For example, only 79% felt copying from another student on a test or exam was serious. Even fewer students felt using unpermitted crib notes (77%), helping someone else to cheat on a test (72%), and plagiarism (69%) were serious. Reinforcing the need for faculty to do more than simply state their expectations on how written work is to be completed by students, less than one in four students (24%) felt collaborating on an assignment was serious even when the faculty member had asked for individual work. Only about one in three (35%) felt copying a few sentences from a source without citing that source was serious.
• Confirming previous findings, a small, but statistically significant difference was found between the number of female (58%) and male (62%) students who admitted to serious cheating.

McCabe: The most surprising findings were those related to the use of the Internet. The media have run numerous stories recently that suggest the Internet has led to a dramatic increase in cheating by students—downloading term papers, plagiarism, etc. Even though I’ve stated on previous occasions that I don’t believe these increases have been as great as suggested by the media, I must admit I was surprised by the very low levels of self-reported Internet-related cheating I found.

     For example, only 5% of respondents reported they had turned in a paper obtained from a term paper mill on the Web and only 10% indicated they had plagiarized a paper via the Internet. Of course, many of these students have also engaged in more traditional forms of plagiarism, so the net increase in "new" cheaters spurred by the Internet appears to be quite small.

     Indeed, I remain more concerned about Internet cheating at the high school level and the impact this is likely to have on college campuses in the future. For example, two years ago I did some focus groups with both high school and college students in which Internet cheating was one of the issues we highlighted. The basic scenario in the college sessions was that what’s available on the Internet is of questionable quality in many cases and your professors are likely to be familiar with anything that’s any good. In addition, most professors are pretty savvy on the Internet, increasing your chances of getting caught if you download information directly.

     High school students painted a very different picture—many of our teachers are clueless when it comes to the Internet, the material you can find on the Internet is of sufficient quality to submit on your assignments, and paper topics are usually so broad that your teachers are not at all likely to recognize a source you might use.

     My concern, of course, is that as students in high school rely to an increasing extent on inappropriate use of the Internet to complete assignments, this behavior is likely to be carried over to college. In addition, as the material available on the Internet continues to grow exponentially, most faculty will not be able to keep track of it all, reducing the risk of detection.

     I also worry about students rationalizing any use of the Internet as true research, convincing themselves that drawing from material on the Web, no matter how it’s done, is acceptable. My research suggests we have already seen this happen to a large degree on the question of collaboration. Many students have convinced themselves that they learn more when working in groups (which is probably true) and thus this is an acceptable strategy no matter what directions the instructor has given.

McCabe: The bad news, of course, is the large number of students who admit that they have cheated in college.

     Perhaps equally disturbing is the ease with which many of these students are able to justify or rationalize their cheating. And often they find a convenient way to place the "blame" on others—other students who cheat; faculty who do a poor job in the classroom; institutions that don’t try very hard to address the issue of cheating; and a society that supplies few positive role models when it comes to personal integrity.

     As I implied earlier, I think this is one of the reasons, perhaps the major reason, that schools with honor codes experience lower levels of cheating than other schools. Although their systems are far from perfect, and although they too have some faculty who do a poor job in the classroom, one thing that clearly separates them from other schools is the fact that they actively communicate to students that academic integrity is a core institutional value and that students have a major role to play in achieving this important institutional goal.

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"[L]arge campuses can reduce student cheating through a carefully crafted strategy that utilizes selected elements of a traditional honor code."

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     I remain convinced that when it comes to instances of serious cheating, the majority of students at most schools would prefer an environment where honesty, rather than cheating, is the norm. But most are unwilling to be "moral heroes" while many other students are gaining an advantage. That is why I believe strongly that institutional efforts to address cheating should be aimed at the entire campus community, not individual students. In the ideal case, all students, faculty and administrators should feel some responsibility for this issue since it lies at the very core of the academic enterprise.

McCabe: I think the most significant good news generated in this study are the findings about the impact of modified honor codes. Until now, schools like the University of Maryland at College Park and the University of California at Davis had only anecdotal evidence that their modified honor codes were successful.

     As I said earlier, to my knowledge this new survey provides the first empirical support for the effectiveness of such approaches. Although I have long been an advocate of honor code strategies, I have stated on several occasions that I have doubts about the efficacy of such strategies on large campuses since I believe the success of honor codes is due at least in part to successfully building a sense of community responsibility for academic integrity on campus. Doing this at a large public university with the many part-time and commuter students that often characterize such institutions would seem to be a very difficult challenge.

     I believe another important factor is the ability of students to remain relatively anonymous on large campuses, disassociating themselves from other students and resulting peer pressures to adopt the community’s standards.