Universities must ‘break norms’ to combat cheating

Although societal norms can drive students to cheat, they can also be manipulated to promote honesty, a literature review suggests.

Guy Curtis, an applied psychologist at the University of Western Australia, has claimed that students can be prevailed upon to resist academic misconduct if they are convinced that it is rare in their peer groups – regardless of the accuracy of that conviction.

“Cracking down” is one way of achieving this, Dr Curtis told Times Higher Education. “If you can stop the cheating, it stops being the norm. Students see that those who do it aren’t getting away with it. Hence they don’t do it. You look around you; no one else is doing it. Suddenly that group momentum is undermined.”

But making students “think” that nobody else is cheating can have much the same effect. Dr Curtis said a key determinant of academic misconduct was the extent to which students believed their peers were cheating: “Is everyone else doing it? Or are they not? It is a really powerful backgrounder to whether students think it’s a reasonable thing to do...more so than even their own ethical commitment to doing the right thing.”

These currents are explored in a new book, Academic Integrity in the Social Sciences. In the opening chapter, Dr Curtis reviews the evidence around seven different types of norm – subjective, objective, descriptive, injunctive, implicit, explicit and cultural – and how their interplay affects academic integrity.

“People can be swept along by crowds to do the wrong thing, which might be described as mad, and to do the right thing, which might be described as wise,” he observes. “People are tragically predictable in groups, and one reason for this is that we tend to follow norms. However…people can redirect and reshape the social context for others [through] their own choices.”

Dr Curtis told THE that universities needed to “break” norms in order to overcome them. He said: “If you’ve got a situation where…consistent cheating is a norm, how do you change it? By one person at a time not doing what everyone else is doing.”

He cited some universities’ use of student “academic integrity ambassadors” to discourage misconduct. “It’s important…to keep reminding students that most students don’t do this.”

But universities must avoid being blinded by their own narrative, Dr Curtis stressed, saying administrators must maintain a distinction “between the message you want to get out to students and the actions you want to be taking as a university…when students are doing the wrong thing”.

The research outlined in the chapter suggests that societal norms, including some that students are barely aware of, can have more influence on their propensity to cheat than factors such as personality and moral obligation: “The norm ‘everyone else is doing it’ can be used by students as a rationalisation for violating standards of academic integrity.”

Nevertheless, “cultural” norms can also be “overridden” when students find themselves in new environments. For example, Chinese students’ tendency towards plagiarism – fostered by a belief that they should imitate experts in expressing “standard” correct answers – has been found to dissipate after a semester in Australia.

“Although a norm of educational practice might lead students to study or approach assessment in ways that…could be interpreted as misconduct in some cultures…there is also evidence that they can unlearn these norms in a new culture,” Dr Curtis said.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com