AFFECTS OF ACADEMIC DISHONESTY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Affects of Academic Dishonesty in Higher Education

Affects of Academic Dishonesty in Higher Education

Introduction

Academic dishonesty in colleges is a global problem. More and more students seem to be cheating on their tests and assignments significantly for the past few decades. Public and private universities seem to share the same problem among their students: academic dishonesty, lack of academic integrity, and academic cheating.

Affects of Academic Dishonesty in Higher Education

According to the results of a survey conducted among management majors in both AACSB accredited a state university and a private Catholic university, students were found to be very similar in terms of their "extent of participation in 16 dishonest academic practices" despite the fact that "more emphasis was placed on ethics and values at the Catholic university". About 10 percent of the first-year MBA students at Duke University were accused of cheating in an open-book, take-home test. "Several hundred MBA applicants ... [were] caught hacking into software ... to discover their acceptance status weeks before decision letters were sent" (Anderman & Murdock, 2007). Those instances happened in multiple universities such as Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, Duke, MIT and Stanford.

Employee dishonesty is another major problem area, especially in highly dynamic for profit business environments, and becomes "more complicated". Major forms of employee dishonesty include fraud by top management, fraud in worker's compensation, and employee lying/ theft. For example, some top managers cooked the books in such companies like Enron, Global Crossing, Adelphia Comm., Qwest Comm. and WorldCom and caused a dramatic decrease in their companies stock prices. Many of the executives causing such frauds were trained in prestigious schools (Anderman & Murdock, 2007).

There seems to be a positive correlation between academic dishonesty in college and unethical behavior in work environment. For a more ethical business environment and a better world in that sense, universities aim to "educate principled leaders" with "the highest standards of integrity, sound judgment, and a strong moral compass--an intuitive sense of what is right and wrong" (Anderman & Murdock, 2007) as noted by Kim B. Clark, Dean of Harvard Business School. However, The university at the undergraduate level sounds like a place where cheating comes almost as naturally as breathing, where it's an academic skill almost as important as reading, writing and math. What is academic dishonesty or academic cheating? It does not seem to be quite black or white, one way to another, right or wrong. Student perceptions as well as others seem to be getting quite different, depending on the basis, opinion, or interpretation. There is a variation in findings on academic dishonesty levels, partly because of different definitions of dishonesty. Assignments, projects, take-home exams to be completed outside of the classroom seem to encourage academic dishonesty by providing more opportunities for students compared to in-class exercises, assignments, or tests.

Moreover, students are increasingly getting required of working with others in team projects and assignments, partly because of an emphasis on businesslike environment. In an age of technology, students more and more keep on ...