Who’s Cheating Whom?
Mar 1, 2026 · 31 min · 8 segments
March 1, 2026 Who's Cheating Whom? We're often warned about an "epidemic" of academic cheating and urged to do more to deter and punish the devious culprits. But we've had a century of research…
Mar 1, 2026 · 31 min · 8 segments
March 1, 2026 Who's Cheating Whom? We're often warned about an "epidemic" of academic cheating and urged to do more to deter and punish the devious culprits. But we've had a century of research…
Cheating comes to be thought of more prominently in certain eras when certain things are going on such that we find ourselves possibly facing more of it.
A few years ago, during the COVID pandemic, there was a lot of virtual teaching and learning going on, and immediately a rush to to insert spyware on computers so that kids couldn't get away with something when they were doing their assignment.
Instead of spending most of our time being concerned with how AI might adversely affect teaching and learning, an awful lot of the discussion is just about whether kids will be able to cheat by having chatbots write their papers for them.
In the context of the fundamental attribution error, I want to tell you about a classic social science study that was conducted about 100 years ago in the 1920s.
And what they discovered, their primary finding regarding cheating was is that the correspondence between what any given child would do in two different educational environments was, quote, lower than would be required for accurate prediction of individual behaviors.
Look at the way the school is being set up, the values, the practices, the policies of the schools and classrooms.
Not that anybody takes this seriously, because most of the time people are still just focused on the bad kids who cheat.
We've got a bunch of studies to answer the question, okay, what about the classroom or school does lead more kids to cheat? My reading of this body of research is that there are basically four answers to this question.
First, When kids perceive that their teachers don't really care much about them as individuals or have much connection with them, kids are far more likely to cheat.
What predicts to understanding what happens is the perception of the people involved, the kids, not what the teachers think about what they're doing or why.
And maybe this seems to you pretty obvious that if kids don't feel cared about by their teachers, they're more likely to cheat.
But if you take that finding seriously, it really kind of turns on its head most of the way people think about and write about the problem of cheating.
Cheating comes to be thought of more prominently in certain eras when certain things are going on such that we find ourselves possibly facing more of it.
A few years ago, during the COVID pandemic, there was a lot of virtual teaching and learning going on, and immediately a rush to to insert spyware on computers so that kids couldn't get away with something when they were doing their assignment.
Instead of spending most of our time being concerned with how AI might adversely affect teaching and learning, an awful lot of the discussion is just about whether kids will be able to cheat by having chatbots write their papers for them.
In the context of the fundamental attribution error, I want to tell you about a classic social science study that was conducted about 100 years ago in the 1920s.
And what they discovered, their primary finding regarding cheating was is that the correspondence between what any given child would do in two different educational environments was, quote, lower than would be required for accurate prediction of individual behaviors.
Look at the way the school is being set up, the values, the practices, the policies of the schools and classrooms.
Not that anybody takes this seriously, because most of the time people are still just focused on the bad kids who cheat.
We've got a bunch of studies to answer the question, okay, what about the classroom or school does lead more kids to cheat? My reading of this body of research is that there are basically four answers to this question.
First, When kids perceive that their teachers don't really care much about them as individuals or have much connection with them, kids are far more likely to cheat.
What predicts to understanding what happens is the perception of the people involved, the kids, not what the teachers think about what they're doing or why.
And maybe this seems to you pretty obvious that if kids don't feel cared about by their teachers, they're more likely to cheat.
But if you take that finding seriously, it really kind of turns on its head most of the way people think about and write about the problem of cheating.
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