The affects of Academic dishonesty in Higher Education
More young men and women are attending colleges and universities than ever before because in the twenty-first century, a minimum of an undergraduate degree is a prerequisite for any well-paying job. Competition is stiff, and the pressures of acceptance and maintaining a certain grade point average have been known to push some students into taking drastic measures to keep from ‘flunking out’ of school. Schmelkin, Gilbert, Spencer, Pincus, & Silva (2008) observed in their article, A Multidimensional scaling of college students' perceptions of academic dishonesty, “Academic integrity is one of the fundamental values of higher education,” and the number of students who commit acts of academic dishonesty is constantly growing (p. 587). In fact, one study has stated that at the college level, it is “reaching epidemic proportions” (Schmelkin et al., 2008). Why? Before a greater examination of this issue and its effects on higher education and elsewhere, the term academic dishonesty should be defined. It can refer to anything from copying off another person’s test or quiz, stealing an exam, or plagiarizing a report or term paper. In higher education, it has been reported that more than 50 percent of students have committed some type of cheating or dishonesty during their academic careers in order to receive a good grade, achieve a competitive edge, to complete a difficult task, or because of time constraints (Schmelkin et al., 2008).
A 2002 study of nearly 50,000 undergraduate students in various U.S. colleges and universities conducted by Professor Donald McCabe, president and founder of the Center for Academic Integrity, revealed that a quarter of the students surveyed admitted to “serious cheating” on a recent examination (Burke, Polimeni, & Slavin, 2007, p. 58). Fifty percent of the students surveyed confessed to cheating at least once on writing assignments, and more disturbingly, of the...