Cheating and Moral Judgment in the College Classroom: A Natural Experiment

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2004-10-01
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Ravenscroft, Sue
Professor Emeritus
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Shrader, Charles
Morrill Professor Emeritus, University Professor Emeritus
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Management and Entrepreneurship

The Department of Management and Entrepreneurship seeks to provide students with the knowledge of organizations and management functions within organizations. Graduates will be able to understand work-related behavior, competitive strategy and advantage, strategies of international business, and human-resource management practices.

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The Department of Management was formed in 1984 in the College of Business Administration (later College of Business).

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1984 - present

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Management and Entrepreneurship
Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a natural experiment involving academic cheating by university students. We explore the relationship of moral judgment (as measured using the defining issues test) to actual behavior, as well as the relationship between the honesty of students self-reports and the extent of cheating. We were able to determine the extent to which students actually cheated on the take-home portion of an accounting exam. The take-home problem was not assigned with the intent of inducing cheating among students. However, the high rate of observed cheating prompted the instructor to return to class and ask the students to provide information on their motivation. The students' responses are the data analyzed in this natural experiment. We found that in a simple regression the relationship between moral judgment scores and cheating behavior was insignificant. However, when we tested whether including Utilizer scores (i.e. the extent to which people select actions based on notions of justice) affected the relationship of cheating and moral judgment we found that Utilizer affected the relationship significantly. Finally, we found that moral judgment and honesty were not related, but higher levels of cheating behavior related to less honesty.

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This is a manuscript of an article from Journal of Business Ethics 54 (2004): 173, doi: 10.1007/s10551-004-9463-x. Posted with permission. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10551-004-9463-x.

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Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 2004
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