Cross Discipline Undergraduate Students' Perception on Cheating (May 2018)
With a group of 4 students, we are required to do research on certain topic in SKEE4012 Professional Engineering Ethics subject and create a journal as a outcome our project.
Cheating has become a serious problem in the society nowadays especially in colleges or universities. This problem is not particularly happening in engineering disciplines, but the same problem also appeared in other disciplines such as nursing and business disciplines. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to compare the perception of undergraduate students from different discipline on cheating in education. This study is done by reviewing the journal articles which can be obtained from online journal database. After that, the data from those journal articles are analysed by first classifying the data according to the disciplines of the students and followed by analysing it. It was found that engineering students have the highest average percentage in cheating once or more than once, 36% compared to other discipline and this result is most probably due to engineering students does not aware that they are actually cheating in terms of assignment. This can be shown by referring to score of engineering students gave for collaborating on an assignment that they supposed to do alone, 2.67 which is the highest compared to other discipline. This means that they think that this behaviour belongs to not cheating. This problem requires immediate attention since these behaviours might lead the students to become even worse in their future especially when they step into this society.
There are very little of study which compared the perception of undergraduate student from different discipline on cheating in education during their time in university. In this project, several researches about cheating in the respective discipline is compared such as Engineering, Business, Nursing and the Combination of varies discipline. The Journal that we found are mainly from several online journal database, for example, ScienceDirect, Springer, Wiley Online Library, etc. There are three comparisons in our engineering practice journal:
A. Comparison of Different Discipline of Undergraduate Students’ Perception on the Behaviours or Actions Constitute as Cheating
B. Comparison Between Frequencies of Cheating Behaviour Among Three Disciplines
C. Comparisons of Different Reasons of Cheating by 3 Different Major Disciplines of University Students
Figure 1.0: Graph of average student percentage of different disciplines involved in cheating for one semester
The average percentage for business student to cheat once or more than once per semester is only 8.7 %, the lowest among the three disciplines. This is probably because their question for test and assignment is difficult to discuss and copy. Answer for the questions might be different for every student. It only shows 5.7 % for “working in group for individual assignment” which is much lower than that for engineering (40.1%) and nursing (18.6 %) students. The average percentage for nursing student is 27.2 % which is second highest among three disciplines. All the percentage of the seven cheating behaviours that nursing students did for once or more than once is lower than that of engineering students and is higher than that of business students.
Table 2.0: FREQUENCY OF CHEATING AMONG DIFFERENT DISCIPLINE OF STUDENTS
In order simplify the comparison between the data, the average percentage for students involved in cheating once or more than one for one semester is calculated. From the bar chart plotted in Fig. 1, engineering students is the highest among three disciplines (36.9 %), second is nursing students and followed by business students (8.7 %). There are some assumptions can be made from these data. Engineering students prone to cheat frequently might be caused by the difficulties of their test and assignments. Engineering disciplines involve a lot of calculation and formulae which makes the disciplines more difficult. This may cause the students to take exam question from others who have taken it earlier (67.4%). They also show the high percentage for “working in group for individual assignment”.
To conclude, this paper showed different aspect of comparison generated from cheating behaviours. The behaviours are dependent on the type of students, the course of study and era of generation. For the comparison of Different Discipline of Undergraduate Students’ perception on the behaviours or actions constitute as cheating, collaboration on academic assignments is considered the most not cheating behaviour and quite ethical to do it. While using reference source to cheat an exam or directly copying from another student during a test or quiz are considered unethical in student perception. This proved that students tend to more ethical during the official academic evaluation that is supervised by their lecturer. For the assignment that can be done at home and outside the class, students have the perceptive that it is fine and ethical to collaborate to finish the task together. For the comparison between frequencies of cheating behaviour among three courses, engineering students tend to have more cheating behaviour than nursing students while business students stand last among the three courses. Engineering and nursing tend to have more intensive examination paper that triggers their actions of cheating against their conscience. For the comparisons of different reasons of cheating by 3 different major courses of university students, unknown reasons and not preparing well for the examination contribute to the top 2 reasons of cheating. On competent in another hand is the main reason why students not cheating in examination. Cheating in the examination is a behaviour that everyone should look into and study as it started since young among students. In the nutshell, students will cheat in the examination because they felt that the value of getting good results is more important than having their knowledge evaluated honestly.