Collecting and Reporting Self-Reports of the Number of Times Cheated

Abstract The reasons why little has been learned about how many times college students say they have cheated are examined. It is argued that the main reason is that the frequency distribution of the self-reported number of times cheated is not collected and reported appropriately. Other reasons, which appear to be either solvable or manageable, but persist, are discussed. Keywords: cheating, self-reports ********** What do college students say about how often they have cheated? What is the average? Although these are among the most basic questions one could ask about self-reported cheating, reasonable answers were not found in a search of the literature. This is the case even though the literature contains hundreds of surveys on student cheating. There are a variety of reasons for doing a survey on student cheating, and for some of these, a measure of the incidence of cheating is not necessary. For example, many surveys are concerned with attitudes or opinions. Surveys of this type examine attitudes toward cheating, opinions about whether various behaviors are cheating, opinions about cheating deterrents, etc. A large number of studies are concerned with factors related to cheating, and therefore a measure of the incidence of cheating is necessary. These studies frequently rely on surveys that ask for self-reports of cheating. In some of these studies, the self-reported cheating is collected by using two categories (e.g., 0, 1 or more times). In others, the self-reported cheating is collected by using either three or more numerical categories (e.g., 0, 1-4 times, 5 or more times) or three or more non-numerical categories (e.g., never, seldom, often). In some studies, data collected is not reported. The goal in the present paper is to examine the reasons why so little is known about college students' self-reports of how many times they have cheated. Search Method Prior to beginning this study, I had read about two-thirds of the articles included in the present literature search on cheating. Almost all the articles in the remaining third were cited in the articles that had been previously read. Tables 1 and 2 provide summary statistics of the search. The following criteria determined whether a paper was included in the set of papers to be analyzed: (1) the paper reported numerical data on self-reports of the number of times undergraduates in the United States cheated during some period in college; (2) the paper reported self-reports of the number of times cheated by using either (a) categories containing one number, or (b) at least three categories if some categories contain more than one number; and (3) the paper was published by 2013. Evidence The literature search yielded nine papers that met the criteria stated above. One of these nine papers was excluded from the following analysis because inconsistencies in the reported statistics were large enough to make interpretation of the results difficult. Relative frequencies of self-reports of cheating from the eight remaining papers are shown in Table 3; one paper appears twice. The table shows, for example, that in the survey by Eve and Bromley (1981), 37% of students said they cheated from 1 to 4 times. As the table shows, aspects of Eve and Bromley's procedure for collecting and reporting their data are as follows: (1) the period covered in the survey was the preceding semester; (2) an unreported number of forced-response categories were used to collect the data; (3) relative frequencies in Table 3 are for a set of 15 behaviors; (4) questions on the 15 behaviors were displayed exactly in the paper; (5) data was collected on each behavior separately; (6) data was reported on each behavior separately; and (7) relative frequencies in Table 3 were calculated by aggregating across separate behaviors. Part of the information shown in Table 3 for the McCabe (1992) paper was reported in McCabe and Trevino (1993, p. …