Cheating—A research area in need of resuscitation

Ruth Strang, writing in 1937 on student personnel problems, stated that numerous articles on cheating do little more than to confirm the idea that cheating is prevalent in high school and college. ... Very little has been done with the psychological analysis of the causes of cheating and the characteristics of the students who (14, p. 75). The purposes of this article are (a) to evaluate the research on the extent of student cheating and its psychological determinants, and (b) to propose some recent research concepts which might be useful in understanding the motivations of student cheaters. A survey of the literature on cheating and student motivation, covering the work of the last 25 years, was done to aid in achieving these purposes. Perhaps the most striking revelation of this survey of the literature is the lack of published research on cheating in the schools. It is almost as if people, remembering the old Hartshorne and May study (6), accept the finding that some students cheat and leave it at that. Only 14 papers, or a little more than one every two years, empirically studied cheating in the classroom. Of these 14, several did little to advance our knowledge of the dynamics of cheating, but rather were saddening and repetitious demonstrations that if you give students their own examination papers to score, many of them will deliberately alter their answers or misscore them in order to get a better grade. This duplicating technique, originated by Hartshorne and May (6), whereby the test is given and then the answer sheets are copied by the teacher and are returned to the students for self-scoring, seems to be the most persistently used method for detecting cheating. (See, for example, 4, 8, 11, and 13.) Similar devices, using waxed paper and chemical impressions and permitting immediate scoring by the pupil, have been used by Howells (9). It should be noted that the results of these researches-which gener-