Abstract
Research on academic cheating by high school students and undergraduates suggests that many students will do whatever it takes, including violating ethical classroom standards, to not be left behind or to race to the top. This behavior may be exacerbated among pre-med and pre-health professional school students enrolled in laboratory classes because of the typical disconnect between these students, their instructors and the perceived legitimacy of the laboratory work. There is little research, however, that has investigated the relationship between high aspirations and academic conduct. This study fills this research gap by investigating the beliefs, perceptions and self-reported academic conduct of highly aspirational students and their peers in mandatory physics labs. The findings suggest that physics laboratory classes may face particular challenges with highly aspirational students and cheating, but the paper offers practical solutions for addressing them.
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Notes
We expect, actually, that the number of students actually engaging in these behaviors to be higher than the self-reported numbers suggest. Social desirability bias in survey research informs us that people will under report behaviors that are considered unacceptable, illegal or immoral by society because, even in anonymous surveys, people like to maintain positive self-impressions (Thompson and Phua 2005).
The write-up about the participants will be identical or extremely similar to the write-up appearing in two additional planned publications from this study.
The demographics are presented here for informational purposes only. Our analysis of the impact of student demographics is being written up for a separate publication.
Although studies have shown that self-reported GPAs tend to accurately reflect actual GPAs, these same studies have also found that students at the lower end of the actual GPA scale tend to overinflate their self-reported GPAs (Cassady 2001; Dobbins et al. 1993). Thus, our categorization of students with self-reported GPAs of less than 3.0 as Unrealistics is justified, given that their actual GPAs are likely too low to even be considered for admission into medical or health professional schools.
We included the following question in the survey—“We use this statement to discard the surveys of people who are not reading the statements. Please select “kind of disagree” as the answer for this statement.” 228 people selected an answer other than “kind of disagree” and so their survey responses were eliminated from the analysis.
The write-up about data collection will be identical or extremely similar to the write-up appearing in other publications stemming from this study.
The list of behaviors were adapted from McCabe’s international surveys, used with permission; see McCabe 2005a for a reference.
For purposes of calculation, the following values were assigned to each choice: Not Relevant = 0; Never = 1; Sometimes = 2; Frequently = 3.
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Bertram Gallant, T., Anderson, M.G. & Killoran, C. Academic Integrity in a Mandatory Physics Lab: The Influence of Post-Graduate Aspirations and Grade Point Averages. Sci Eng Ethics 19, 219–235 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-011-9325-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-011-9325-8