Understanding Student Teaching and What Educators Can Do About It

This article reviews the empirical evidence on college student cheating and places it in a context that combines economic theories of benefit/cost analysis and unobservable behavior with social network analysis of how widespread rule breaking can develop in an organization. The implications are that students cheat because the benefit/cost trade-off favors cheating; that the problem of unobservable behavior can be substantially mitigated by promoting academic integrity as the social norm; and that many factors that have contributed to the development of more and stronger relationships between college students have helped to promote cheating.