Academic Dishonesty among Engineering Undergraduates in the United States

Abstract

Over the past 15-years the authors have undertaken a series of research studies examining the tendency of undergraduate engineering students to participate in unethical behaviors, such as academic dishonesty, and the nature of the decision-making that such students use when faced with an opportunity to behave unethically. The four studies, PACES-1, WES, PACES-2, and SEED, have elucidated the extent of the problem of academic dishonesty among engineering students and demonstrated that cheating in college is associated with unethical workplace behaviors. They have also confirmed that a model of ethical decision-making can successfully predict an individual's intention to engage in unethical behavior in the future. Finally, the studies have shown that, while engineering students' ethical reasoning improves throughout college, their tendency to engage in unethical behaviors such as cheating actually increases, suggesting there is a gap between moral judgment capacity and moral behavior.