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Synthesis
Directions: Write a well-organized, 700-1000 word essay synthesizing the following texts on the subject of academic dishonesty. You may summarize, paraphrase, or quote directly from these texts. You must cite at least 7 of the 8 texts. Be sure to cite your sources correctly and provide a list of Works Cited at the end, all according to the MLA Handbook, 7th ed. Also, include the following: 1) a title that calls attention to your focus; 2) an introduction with a thesis statement; 3) a conclusion. Assume that your audience is educated general readers.
Text 1. From Charles Lipson’s book Doing Honest Work in College: How to Prepare
Citations, Avoid Plagiarism, and Achieve Real Academic Success, published by the
University of Chicago Press in Chicago in 2004.
Academic honesty boils down to three simple but powerful principles:
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When you say you did the work yourself, you actually did it.
When you rely on someone else’s work, you cite it. When you use their words, you quote them openly and accurately, and you cite them, too.
When you present research materials, you present them fairly and truthfully. That’s true whether the research involves data, documents, or the writings of other scholars.

These are the bedrock principles, easy to remember and follow. They apply to all your classes, labs, papers, and exams. They apply to everyone in the university, from freshmen to professors.
They’re not just principles for students. They’re principles for academic honesty across the entire university. (Page 3)
Text 2. From the book Cheating in School: What We Know and What We Can Do, by
Stephen F. Davis, Patrick F. Drinan, and Tricia Bertram Gallant. Published in 2009 by
Wiley-Blackwell in Chichester, U.K., and Malden, MA.
Cheating can be defined as deceiving or depriving by trickery, defrauding, misleading or fooling another. When we talk about student cheating, academic cheating, or academic misconduct, we are referring to acts committed by students that deceive, mislead, or fool the teacher into thinking that the academic work submitted by the student was a student’s own work. Academic cheating deprives the teacher of the ability to evaluate a student’s independent knowledge and abilities, as well as his or her progress in the class. Sometimes academic misconduct deprives the student of the learning opportunity intended by the teacher who created the academic assignment. And systematic and unaddressed academic cheating defrauds the public who believe that academic diplomas or degrees signify a certain level of accomplishment by the students who possess them.
(Pages 2-3)
Students who persistently and uniformly complete their academic assignments in ways that shortcut effort and garner unfair advantage will learn habits of a cheating character. These children may eventually grow up to take shortcuts in life as a way to achieve personal goals, like the baseball player who takes steroids in order to beat an existing batting record or the business executive who “cooks the books” in order to artificially increase shareholder value. The Enron

2-6 scandal of the early twenty-first century shows that cheaters do not just hurt themselves; they can ruin businesses, create financial and economic insecurities, and cause harm to thousands of bystanders. (Page 7)
As the following examples of cheating on tests indicate, students have been quick to make use of technological advances to assist them in academically dishonest pursuits.
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Student respondents reported that the popularity of programmable calculators skyrocketed when they discovered that these devices could send messages (such as answers to test questions) from one calculator to another.
Several students have used the miniature camera-pager technique. In this procedure, one student takes a miniature camera into the testing situation. The camera may be worn as part of a piece of jewelry (women) or part of a fraternity pin (men), and so forth. The student uses the camera to send a picture of the test to an outside accomplice. The accomplice looks up the answers to the test questions and sends them via an alphanumeric pager to the student taking the test.
Students have made effective use of miniature computers to aid their academically dishonest pursuits. For example, a substantial number of cheaters report that they have taped a Palm Pilot computer to their leg before taking an exam. Because they wore baggy shorts to the exam, all they had to do to access the computer (i.e., test answers) was to raise the leg of their shorts.
Currently, the most blatant use of technology involves the use of cell phones. Textmessaging provides students with an easy way they can share answers during a test.
(Page 98)

We maintain there are two primary methods for deterring student cheating in the long term and creating a culture of integrity: moral development, primarily of students and teachers, and the institutionalization of integrity in educational organizations. (Page 133)
If we wish to convey academic integrity as the “right” choice of action, then, we have to work to ensure that not only are the costs high for choosing academic misconduct but the benefits are higher for choosing academic integrity. In other words, academic integrity has to be profitable for the individual student, teacher and the institution as a whole. Perhaps the most effective way to increase the perceived profitability of academic integrity is through eliciting the help of the very people the students think want the high grades—colleges, employers, and graduate/professional schools. If high school students cheat for college, then colleges need to make it profitable for students to repudiate cheating and advocate academic integrity. If college students cheat for careers, then employers and graduate/professional schools need to make it profitable for colleges to repudiate cheating and advocate academic integrity. (Pages 145-46)
Text 3. From a magazine article entitled “The great university cheating scandal,” by Cathy
Gulli, Nicholas Kohler, and Martin Patriquin, published on the website Macleans.ca
(sponsored by MacLean’s Magazine) on February 9, 2007, and accessed December 26, 2010.
The numbers on academic misconduct at both Canadian and American post-secondary institutions are startling. The [University of] Guelph report puts the percentage of Canadian

3-6 students engaging in serious cheating on written work at 53 per cent. In the U.S., according to some studies, 70 per cent of students admit to cheating in one form or another. Universities, apparently not convinced that cheating has reached crisis proportions, offer little but token antiplagiarism policies and ineffective ethics campaigns to assuage critics. Professors, meanwhile, are not effective at policing their classrooms. In one U.S. survey, 44 per cent of profs said they had not reported a student caught cheating to officials during the three years prior to participating in the study.
When put into historical context, the numbers for academic integrity across North America show cheating is on a steady rise. U.S. research conducted by Donald L. McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, comparing students in 1963 and 1993, shows the percentage of those admitting to copying from a classmate doubled to 52 per cent; those reporting having helped another student cheat jumped to 37 per cent from 23 per cent; and that the use of crib notes in test and exam settings increased to over a quarter from 16 per cent.
The advent of the Internet has only accelerated the trend. While 10 per cent of U.S. students surveyed in 1999 confessed to yanking whole passages from the Web to write their papers, almost 40 per cent admitted to the practice six years later, according to McCabe 's research. Other
Web-based services include the so-called "paper mills" hawking custom-made essays by ghostwriters with proven records for scoring high grades. The numbers attached to instances of
Internet-related cheating -- and indeed to cheating of all kinds -- are likely under-reported. "What could be happening now is that it 's becoming so commonplace among students that it 's not cheating now -- it 's just a way to survive the system," says McCabe.
Text 4. From a newspaper article entitled “UCF cheating scandal: 200 students step forward,” by Denise-Marie Balona, published on November 12, 2010, in the Orlando
Sentinel. Accessed on the newspaper’s website, Orlandosentinal.com, on December 23, 2010.
About 200 students at the University of Central Florida have come forward to admit their involvement in a cheating scandal that has drawn national attention, college officials announced
Friday evening. This represents roughly one-third of the nearly 600 students who had to retake a mid-term this week for a senior-level business course after an instructor was tipped off to cheating. Although cheaters typically face disciplinary action, UCF instructor Richard Quinn worked out a deal with the business dean to allow his students to finish the course if they owned up to their mistake before a different exam was administered this week. The 200 or so students who confessed will be required to complete an ethics seminar, although college officials have not yet worked out the details of when and how that seminar will be offered. It 's still unclear what will happen to about 15 others who have not admitted their involvement.
The university is still trying to figure out how students acquired the test questions. It appears they accessed them online somehow, said UCF spokesman Grant Heston. Quinn, Heston acknowledged, did not write his own questions for the test. Citing an ongoing investigation, he could not say whether the questions were publicly accessible online. Publishers often create exam questions from their textbooks that are made available to instructors and professors. And

4-6 sometimes those questions end up on websites. In this case, Quinn 's test questions came from the publisher of the textbook used in his class, Heston said.
One Sentinel reader blamed both the students and the professor: "These students knew their professor well. They know he has been using the same resource for test questions for years. They took advantage of his shortcomings."
Text 5. From an online article entitled “A Formula for Cheating: Big Schools, Weak
Community,” by David Callahan, published on the website CheatingCulture on November
10, 2010, and accessed on December 26, 2010. The website is edited by David Callahan.
[T]he scope of cheating varies widely across different schools. Small colleges with a focus on the liberal arts and a strong campus community tend to have less cheating, while large universities that are professionally oriented and filled with commuter students tend to have more.
This makes sense. If you know your fellow students and professors, and if you 're focused on learning as an end in itself, you 'll fret more about violating the trust of others and see little point in cheating in your courses. In contrast, people feel more license to cut corners in anonymous settings and, when a degree is simply a meal ticket, tend to take a more instrumental -- and less ethical -- approach to their education.
By this logic, it should come as no surprise that the biggest cheating scandal this year would erupt at the University of Central Florida, a mammoth school with 56,000 students -- many of whom live off campus, attend huge classes, and are pursuing utilitarian degrees in fields like business and hospitality.
Cheating is now deeply embedded in many universities and is fueled by the economic insecurity of our age, with young people deeply worried about their futures. Another driver is the me-first culture of American society, where extreme individualism reigns and it can be hard to get through with messages about the common good.
Text 6. From David Callahan’s book The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are
Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, published by Harcourt in Orlando in 2004.
Most academic cheating does, in fact, go unpunished. A consistent finding of the research on academic cheating is that there are few consequences for those suspected of cheating. In a 1999 survey of 1,000 faculty at twenty-one colleges, a third of professors said they were aware of cheating in their classes but didn’t stop it. Likewise, in an earlier survey of student-affairs administrators in colleges across the United States, 60 percent reported that faculty at their schools tended to handle incidents of cheating independently and not subject student violations to formal disciplinary action. Many professors would rather let cheaters slide than take on the bureaucratic hassles of pursuing disciplinary actions. Others were afraid of lawsuits filed by the parents of cheaters. (Page 229)
Cheating involving athletes is also widely tolerated at universities. School athletics departments are awash in scandal, including cash briberies to recruit high school athletes and flunking

5-6 athletes who are still allowed to compete on the playing field. Cheating coaches and top athletes are let off the hook again and again. Schools are put on probation one year, only to violate the rules again the next year. Professors who try to enforce academic rules against athletes find themselves receiving hate mail and obscene phone calls. (Pages 232-33)
Text 7. From the book Combating Academic Fraud: Toward a Culture of Integrity, by Max
A. Eckstein, published in 2003 by the International Institute for Educational Planning, in
Paris. Accessed on the website of UNESCO on December 29, 2010.
[why they cheat] Students usually cheat because of concern about their performance. They are prompted by anxiety about their capacity to produce acceptable work, by fear of failure, by the demands and pressures made on them by such external sources as parents and teachers, and the importance of the results of their efforts for their future. They cheat because they are ill -prepared.
They cheat because they have not learned the rules of honest behaviour, or to comprehend its longer-term value, or to appreciate the negative results of dishonesty for themselves and the society they live in. Some assert that cheating is part of a student sub-culture: they do it for fun and because their peers do it. There do not appear to be any victims of misconduct and the consequences are usually not serious. Moreover, as students, they believe, possibly correctly, that academic dishonesty is rarely detected or punished. Cheating is becoming so common (and so easy with the help of the Internet) that not to do so is to put oneself at a disadvantage. (Pages
43-44)
Competition for a limited number of valued prizes is a primary cause of cheating in examinations as well as other forms of academic fraud. The rewards for success in examinations and for degrees or other professional qualifications are considerable, in some instances, inestimable. To the extent that the process of gaining these prizes is a competitive one, and it usually is, the temptation to obtain the rewards illegitimately is great. But the value of academic success and qualifications is not limited to educational advancement alone. It is accompanied by the prospect of improved status, power, and influence. (Pages 44-45)
Ambiguity and lack of clarity about what constitutes cheating adds to the array of causes of academic fraud. Nowhere is this more evident than in cases of plagiarism. The very concept is a problematic one for many individuals and some cultures. To cite the words or ideas of others, even without acknowledgment, may be regarded as a gesture of respect. The conventional concept is that knowledge is a communal possession, constantly built up over time, and is a view that teachers and researchers foster and promote. That ideas or words can belong to any one individual seems strange to some and the concept that they may be considered as individual intellectual property is a relatively recent one. (Pages 49-50)
The social costs [of cheating] in such sectors as schooling, medicine, and administration, are incalculable. The financial costs are considerable too. Where finances are limited, as in the case of poor countries and poorer systems in wealthier nations, examination security measures, investigation and adjudication of malpractice, repetition of assessments, are all an expensive drain on resources. And as programs of study abroad proliferate and more students seek to study in foreign countries, the extent of corruption abroad limits the confidence of the host country in

6-6 such programs. Professors may ask if foreign students who are used to buying grades and credentials instead of earning them will import those habits to the host country. (Pages 73-74)
[M]oving from a culture of “success by any means” to a culture of integrity requires concerted efforts to combat a number of growing threats to the quality of society. But as a basis for such a broader and long-term program, action on the pedagogical front is imperative in order to eliminate some of the causes of academic fraud. This includes early and continued education in ethical behaviour, reduction of excessive pressure upon students and teachers to meet performance standards, replacement of exclusive, single measures of meeting these by varied and multiple criteria, as well as sharpening awareness of academic fraud. (Page 79)
Text 8. From the article “Individual and Contextual Influences on Academic Dishonesty: A
Multicampus Investigation,” by Donald L. McCabe and Linda Klebe Trevino. Published in
1997 in the journal Research in Higher Education, Vol. 38, No. 3, pages 379-96.
Students look to their peers to observe what they do and to learn about behaviors that garner peer approval. The study results suggest that cheating behavior is more likely among fraternity/sorority members, and more generally in environments where peers are cheating and where peer disapproval of cheating is low. (Page 392)
One approach to influencing the academic integrity environment in colleges and universities that has met with success at many institutions is the establishment of an honor code. Research suggests that cheating is significantly lower at honor-code institutions. Honor codes are characterized by an honor pledge, peer reportage, unproctored examinations, and a peer-run judiciary or honor council. Interestingly, the latter three characteristics of honor code environments are consistent with our findings regarding the importance of peer disapproval. Peer judiciaries and peer reportage are straightforward mechanisms for registering peer disapproval.
And, if unproctored examinations are viewed as a benefit of life in an honor-code environment, cheating may be viewed as a threat to that shared benefit, leading to peer disapproval. Clearly, more research is needed to understand how honor codes work and which aspects of such codes are most important. Of course, the findings of this study suggest that the most important aspects are those that relate to peer disapproval. (Page 393)

Citations: (sponsored by MacLean’s Magazine) on February 9, 2007, and accessed December 26, 2010.