ABSTRACT
My study has the advantage of assessing students' evaluative perceptions for a particular instructor in a particular course in a particular semester. The articles cited in the introduction of this article (Baird, 1980; McCabe, 1992; McCabe & Bowers, 1994; Stearns, 1997; Zastrow, 1970) citing academic dishonesty rates of 65% to 100% used a different unit of analysis: anytime, so far, in college. This unit of analysis is not necessarily the best comparison to the study in this article. Similar to my study, Ward and Beck (1990) reported using 1 full semester as their unit of analysis. These authors found 28% of the students committed academic dishonesty. Additionally, Gardner, Roper, Gonzalez, and Simpson (1988) reported cheating increases across the term. Thus, my findings reporting 20.5% of students committing academic dishonesty in a time span of less than 1 semester is similar to past findings. It should be noted, however, that asking students to report their own cheating and the methods they used to cheat in a course in which they were currently enrolled placed them in an extremely delicate position. Therefore, it is possible that these self-reported occurrences are lower than the actual occurrence of academic dishonesty.
