Cheating economics students at Duke

8/11/2011: From Dan Ariely at Duke, in the Chronicle:

They sent all 498 of their classmates e-mail messages from a
fictitious student explaining how to download Mr. Ariely’s final-exam
questions and answers from the previous year. Half the messages included
this postscript: “P.S. I don’t know if this is cheating or not, but
here’s a section of the university’s honor code that might be pertinent.
Use your own judgment: ‘Obtaining documents that grant an unfair
advantage to an individual is not allowed.'”

Among students who were reminded of the honor code, 41 percent
clicked on the link (which did not actually contain any test material).
But among students who were not reminded of the honor code, a much
higher proportion-69 percent-clicked on the link.
The day after the actual final exam, Mr. Ariely conducted an
anonymous survey, asking students whether they had cheated, and also for
their estimates of how many of their fellow students had done so.

Very few students admitted to cheating-and Mr. Ariely believes their
self-reports are basically accurate. If there had been much cheating on
the final, he writes, the grades would have been better. (The average
grade was 70.)

But Mr. Ariely does not take much comfort from that, because the
students estimated that 30 to 45 percent of their fellow students had
cheated. Those estimates are probably much higher than the reality, but
Mr. Ariely argues that “such an overestimation of the real amount of
cheating can become an incredibly damaging social norm. … If the
perception of cheating is that it runs rampant, what are the chances
that next year’s students will not adopt even more lenient moral
standards and live up to the perception of cheating among their peers?”

You might wonder why students would bother cheating when they can access lots of real exam questions online – just check out the az-500 exam here if you don’t believe me. Perhaps they weren’t intending to cheat, but were just curious of the link… who knows. If I read the story correctly the students actually *underestimate* the amount of cheating going on. The fact that this is happening at a school with an honor code is striking.