Implications of Academic Dishonesty for Teaching in Psychology

Implications of Academic Dishonesty

for Teaching in Psychology

Augustus E. Jordan

Academic dishonesty among students reveals potential problems in the teaching of psychology. In particular, a teaching pedagogy that emphasizes information delivery, and uses examinations as a method to discriminate among students aspiring for social and fi-nancial status, contributes to an academic climate of dishonesty. As a constructive response, I recommend that psychology faculty discuss with students (and with each other) certain fundamental assumptions of liberal education and consider how these assump-tions relate to the discipline of psychology.

Two assumptions have long guided the practice of liberal education. The first assumption is that liberal education of-fers something of intrinsic intellectual value to the learner. The second assumption is that liberal education enables stu-dents to contribute in some essential fashion to liberal soci-ety. Despite major adjustments to the structure of higher education over the last century, including the rise of major research universities and changing curricula, these funda-mental notions continue to receive attention and emphasis in psychology (Altman, 1996; McCall, 1996; Myers & Waller, 1999) and in the broader educational context (Oakley, 1992; Orrill, 1997).

Nevertheless, these two assumptions face serious chal-lenges in modern academia. This article addresses one of those challenges: academic dishonesty. The study of academic dis-honesty is important because it describes actual student be-havior relative to these fundamental assumptions. It is well and good to formulate educational ideals for psychology stu-dents; however, psychologists must also assess with some seri-ousness behaviors that run counter to these ideals. Such behaviors may reveal something not only about student values but also about the current state of undergraduate psychology.

The bad news is that college student cheating is rampant. Most college students, including psychology students, cheat at least once in college and many cheat often (Cizek, 1999). For example, Whitley (1998) reviewed the findings of 46 in-dividual studies and McCabe and Trevino’s (1993) national assessment and concluded that on average 70.4% of students admitted to cheating while in college. The good news is that the study of cheating is providing insight not only into these alarming statistics but also into the social contexts and psy-chological processes that influence cheating behavior (Jor-dan, 2001). Here the tools of psychology usefully serve the broader educational context. However, this evidence also re-inforces a concern for the health of higher education. Cheating is not only a prima facie assault on the integrity of

liberal education; its pervasiveness reflects a broader social and cultural devaluation of educational values implicit to teaching in psychology.

In the discussion that follows I first provide a brief over-view of those trends and contradictions in the long history of liberal education that most influence the discipline of psychology. Second, I offer a modest suggestion for reform. This suggestion returns to the two assumptions identified previously and translates those assumptions into questions for action.

Liberal Education

Two developments in liberal education undermine aca-demic integrity at the undergraduate level: (a) the emer-gence of a diminished version of the rhetorical tradition (emphasizing the delivery of information) as the foundation for methodology in teaching and (b) the widespread use of examinations to discriminate among and rank students for functions extrinsic to the fundamental goals of education. Teaching in the Rhetorical Tradition

Education in ancient Greece was not without controversy. Plato (427–346 BCE) promoted the critical, speculative, dia-lectical pursuit of truth and held this pursuit to be an intrinsic good, unbounded by contingent expectations of effect (e.g., Kimball, 1986, 1997). In contrast, Isocrates (436–388 BCE) understood this pursuit as nonspeculative and best applied in the context of an identifiable literary canon (e.g., the epic and heroic tales of Homer). This perspective emerged as the foundation for classical humanism and, in a broad sense, for modern approaches to teaching in higher education (al-though what counts as canon changes over time).

However, I suggest that a diminished version of the rhe-torical tradition currently dominates teaching methodology in psychology. Today’s teaching is rhetorical because, in the tradition of Isocrates, it functions to deliver rather than to discover knowledge. In contrast, Plato argued that teaching, or dialectic, is in fact a fundamental method of discovery (Bloom, 1968). Today’s teaching is weakly rhetorical be-cause, in contrast to Isocrates and that tradition, it makes only limited claims regarding the truth value of its content.

Two problems illustrate psychology’s predicament. First, course offerings across psychology departments are

inconsis-tent. For example, Perlman and McCann (1999) identified the 30 most frequently listed undergraduate psychology courses in college and university catalogs for the year 1997. Some con-sensus emerged for the top 3 or 4 of these courses. For example, 97% of institutions listed an introductory course, 86% listed abnormal, and 80% listed social. However, a majority of these institutions (from 52% to 74%) did not list 22 of the 30 top courses. Thus, as a discipline psychology is not yet sure what in-formation an undergraduate major should know.

The second problem involves information overload. Typi-cal psychology textbooks now range from 500 to more than 800 pages and revisions occur nearly every 3 years. There are more than 40 journals associated with divisions of the Ameri-can Psychological Association and literally thousands of other behavioral science journals, each published multiple times a year. Yet the discipline of psychology offers no criteria for discriminating with students the relative importance of any particular aspect of this information. Thus, although stu-dents study vast amounts of curricular content, the discipline offers little guidance regarding how to evaluate that content. Together, the problems of discipline definition and informa-tion overload weaken psychology’s ability to articulate to stu-dents the relation of course content to enduring, intrinsic questions of human meaning. Although undergraduate psy-chology teachers provide access to a great deal of informa-tion, they are necessarily hesitant to make substantial claims regarding the enduring value and relevance of this informa-tion either to the intellectual life of the student or to the pres-ervation and functioning of liberal society.

I expect psychology teachers to resist this assessment; nev-ertheless, students by and large do not. Even if psychologists believe in the intrinsic value of what they teach (as I do), stu-dents and their parents focus chiefly on the extrinsic value of college courses. Courses lead to grades and diplomas, which in turn lead to jobs and incomes. For example, in a national sur-vey of attitudes about liberal arts colleges, Hersh (1997) found that 75% of parents and 85% of college-bound high school dents believed college to be important because it “prepares stu-dents to get a better job and/or increases their earning potential” (p. 20). In contrast, only 6% of each group rated “learning for learning’s sake” as the most important reason to go to college; 46% of parents and 35% of students rated this as the least important reason to go to college. The Higher Educa-tion Research Institute at the University of California, Los An-geles, which has monitored student attitudes in higher education for more than 35 years, reported similar findings (Sax, Astin, Korn, & Mahoney, 2000). Perhaps faculties should expect such concerns; after all, materialism is wide-spread and may be related to many modern social and psycho-logical dysfunctions (Kasser, 2002). The problem today is that once these high school students get into psychology courses, they receive no compelling alternative vision of higher educa-tion. Thus, many students may not appreciate or evaluate competing claims on their purposes and integrity.

Examinations

At its best the rhetorical tradition promotes a vision of ed-ucation and society directly at odds with academic

dishon-esty. However, society subverts the fundamental purposes of higher education when it uses education (especially in the di-minished version identified previously) to discriminate among students for access to social status or scarce economic resources.

For example, examinations played a crucial role in the ed-ucational process in China for nearly 1,400 years and served as the springboard to highly prized government service ca-reers (Miyazaki, 1963/1976). Paralleling the rhetorical tradi-tion in the West, the Chinese identified a particular canon, or literary tradition, as the purveyor of community values and the arbiter of truth claims; this tradition was Confucianism. The study of this literature shaped the thought and values of Chinese people century after century, just as the study of Greek philosophy shaped liberal thought in the West.

However, unlike pre-Enlightenment Western societies, Chinese society offered commoners access to civil service and thus to the social and financial rewards of such service (Miyazaki, 1963/1976). This access was based (at least theo-retically) on demonstrated intellectual talent and became regulated through education. Thus, the intrinsic value of ed-ucation as a source of community wisdom was often in danger of subversion to its extrinsic value as a path to better financial and social status. For many persons, educational success be-came a means to ends unrelated to the fundamental purposes of education. As a consequence, cheating became wide-spread in China (Miyazaki, 1963/1976).

This same deterioration happened in the West, although much later. With increases in egalitarian social structures in Europe, a parallel increase occurred in the importance of ed-ucation as a means to status and influence. To restrict access to that influence, Cambridge introduced formal, written ex-aminations in the mid-1700s, followed by Oxford in 1800 (Judges, 1969). I uncovered no reports of cheating in these centuries, and cheating may have been infrequent; however, in 1842 the University of Virginia instituted the first stu-dent-run honor system in the United States. This code re-quires students to sign a statement on each exam certifying that they have not cheated (Rudolph & Thelin, 1990). Al-though cheating does not appear to have been a critical con-cern at this point, its explicit mention indicates that faculty were not naive to its relevance. That even this prestigious university recently battled widespread cheating is a reminder that circumstances have changed (Schemo, 2001).

Responses and Recommendations

Today’s educational context is marked by a diminished al-legiance to the rhetorical tradition and a strong alal-legiance to examinations. Together, these developments place students under tremendous pressure to perform well but deprive them of significant discussion concerning what “to perform well” might mean in historical context. One outcome of this con-text is academic dishonesty. As previously experienced in China, cheating in the West became a growing problem and attracted progressively more attention from educators and psychologists alike.

In response, research educators and psychologists typically offered three recommendations to institutions to reduce

demic dishonesty. First, researchers suggested that students receive clear instructions about what counts as cheating (Cizek, 1999), including precise definitions of plagiarism and inappropriate collaboration (Roig, 1997). Second, some re-searchers suggested that schools employ specific testing tech-niques to reduce a student’s inclination to cheat; these techniques include appropriate seating arrangements, alter-nate versions of exams, tough penalties, and proctoring (Hollinger & Lanza-Kaduce, 1996). Third, some researchers recommended that colleges and universities consider imple-menting honor codes that include the involvement of stu-dents in the design and execution of these codes (McCabe & Trevino, 1993; McCabe, Trevino, & Butterfield, 1999; Pavela & McCabe, 1993). Although each of these methods shows some modest effect and may be worth instituting, cheating rates remain unacceptably high even in the pres-ence of such interventions.

Research on intrinsic and extrinsic goal motivation, how-ever, offers a clue to an alternative approach (Anderman, Griesinger, & Westerfield, 1998; Jordan, 2001; Newstead, Franklyn-Stokes, & Armstead, 1996). This research suggests that students vary in their academic goal motivations and that this variability is at least partially attributable to the classroom environment. Students can imagine being moti-vated by a particular course of study, and they can attribute to that endeavor intrinsic worth; in fact, on measures of course-specific goal motivations, students endorse intrinsic goals. The desire to learn something of enduring significance remains in students. How might faculty tap into it?

I recommend that psychology faculty who are committed to liberal education return to the two assumptions with which I began and incorporate into those assumptions a bit more of Plato’s dialectical process. After all, this process is most closely related to the scientific tradition in which psy-chology faculty trained and it is implicit in recent calls to broaden psychology’s understanding of scholarship with re-spect to teaching (Halpern et al., 1998). Perhaps liberally educated students might benefit if faculty turned these two assumptions into questions and held them in tension with the stated methods and content of each particular course. For example, what of intrinsic value is available to my stu-dents in the methodologies of inquiry and in the content base of my abnormal psychology course or my statistics course, such that the essence of a student’s life might be en-hanced through its discovery? On the basis of such a dis-covery (or at least its pursuit), what might students contribute, in some essential fashion, to the preservation and enhancement of liberal society?

I recommend that faculty present these kinds of questions as central to the goals of the course and revisit them regularly in lectures and in small group discussions. What in psychol-ogy courses is of intrinsic value to the intellectual well-being of students? How might participation in psychology courses enable students to contribute to liberal society? These ques-tions do not have easy answers and certainly not answers that teachers can deliver to students as an incentive to learn. Nevertheless, perhaps something of enduring value would happen in the presence and tension of such questions, some-thing fundamentally congruent with the foundations of lib-eral education and something largely incompatible with academic dishonesty.

This suggestion is an empirical one; it is transparent and open to investigation. It encourages clarification of the rela-tion between undergraduate psychology and liberal educa-tion, and it implies that such an education is of intrinsic worth to individual students, to communities of scholars, and to liberal society. In addition, this suggestion brings with it two consequences of particular concern to the discipline of psychology. First, it supplements the more passive, con-tent-driven aspects of introductory and survey-level courses with practice in structured, if rudimentary, inquiry. The questions that drive this inquiry become opportunities for real hypothesis testing in contexts that are uncontrived and motivationally loaded. Students must struggle to identify their working (if unarticulated) hypotheses about the rela-tion of intenrela-tion to acrela-tion, of individual to social obligarela-tion, of assessment processes (e.g., examinations) to intrinsic and extrinsic goals, and of psychology to the broader context of liberal learning. The power of such contexts, in terms rele-vant to academic integrity, is that they recast cheating as more obviously and fundamentally self-defeating. They ex-pose the personal and social constructs that bring academic dishonesty into being and place those constructs in open ten-sion with viable competitors.

Second, broad discussions of these types of questions with (potential) psychology majors may help bring greater coherence to psychology curriculums. Inquiring whether and how the courses offered by a particular department of psychology cohere, such that the pursuit of a major course of study is corollary to the kinds of pursuits Plato and Isocrates promoted, would itself be a rich and rewarding ac-ademic process.

The point here is that such a process is both psychologi-cally sound (it accentuates intrinsic goal motivations) and incommensurate with dishonesty. If psychology teachers ex-ercise the fundamentals of liberal education with their stu-dents, students will value that education, and they will pursue it as they do other intrinsically valuable activities; they will pursue it with integrity. On the other hand, when psychology faculty draw back from such higher purposes and abdicate their role as purveyors of intellectual passion in the interest of a psychologically informed and committed citizenship, then widespread student cheating is perhaps unavoidable.

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Note

Send correspondence to Augustus E. Jordan, Department of Psy-chology, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753; e-mail: jordan @middlebury.edu.