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The10.2.13 Hawk Newspaper
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Features, pg. 10
Features, pg. 11
Saint Joseph’s University Volume XCI
Est. 1929
Campus cheating culture
Cat Coyle ’16 News Editor
S
tudents are aware of the prevalence of cheating on the college campus, but research has shown that few attempts are being made to combat it. Increased student appeals to alleged violations, reported faculty discontent with Academic Honesty Policy implementation, and a report conducted by two Saint Joseph’s University marketing professors all contribute to the discussion of the moral and ethical social implications that correspond with reporting a peer or student of cheating. “We All Think It’s Cheating, But We All Won’t Report It: Insights into the Ethics of Marketing Students” is the title of recent study by Brent Smith, Ph.D., associate professor of international business and marketing and director of the Office of Fellowships, and Feng Shen, Ph.D., assistant professor of marketing. Smith explained that a lot of time and care was taken into the naming of the project, because they wanted a title that accurately reflected their findings.
Smith and Shen are the first researchers to break down the typical cheating questions and take an in-depth look into the ethical and social implications of students who report, or do not report, that their peers are cheating. The study was conducted by having 235 undergraduate marketing students from St. Joe’s complete a questionnaire that asked them to respond to cheating scenarios. In their data, Smith and Shen found that the marketing students surveyed were less likely to cheat or commit an honesty policy violation when they perceived that the decision they were making was not ethical. However, the research also showed that when presented with evidence that a peer may be cheating on an assignment, a student is unlikely to report the violation. Smith explained that this was because reporting on a fellow student breaks a sort of socially constructed ethical code. Continued CHEATING, Pg. 4