The European Proceedings of

Social & Behavioural Sciences

EpSBS

Future Academy ISSN: 2357-1330

EDU WORLD 2018

The 8th International Conference

I AM GOOD, EVERYONE ELSE IS BAD. A RESEARCH ON THE

ETHICAL VALUES OF ROMANIAN STUDENTS

Dan Pătroc
*Corresponding author

(a) University of Oradea, Romania, dpatroc@uoradea.ro

Abstract

Recently, the Romanian Ministry of Education has decided to promote mandatory courses on
academic ethics in all Romanian universities (both at the Bachelor, and Master's level), a move which
has its origins in some very public scandals concerning doubtful academic moral values (mostly
plagiarism). While this initiative seems creditable, we lack at this moment data concerning the ethical
values of students, in order to evaluate, after some time, the effects of such courses on the overall ethical
status of Romanian universities. Thus, this paper aims to be a simple investigation on the opinions and
statements of Romanian students regarding ethical issues such as plagiarism and cheating in exams and
the answers we provide will be somehow surprising. While nobody denies that cheating and plagiarism
take place in our schools and universities, it seems that the culprits are – every time – all around us,
except us, of course .

© 2018 Published by Future Academy www.FutureAcademy.org.UK

Keywords: ethics, plagiarism, cheating, students,

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0
Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
http://dx.doi.org/
Corresponding Author:
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference
eISSN: 2357-1330

1. Introduction
A common definition of academic integrity states that it is “the commitment, even in the face of
adversity, to six fundamental values: honesty, trust, fairness, respect, responsibility, and courage. From
these values flow principles of behaviour that enable academic communities to translate ideals to action”
(ICAI, 2013). The antonym of academic integrity is “academic dishonesty” (McCabe & Trevino, 1993)
(with variants such as “academic fraud” or “academic misconduct”), concepts that refer to one or more
behaviours (or even a complete set of behaviours – an entire way of being) which stands against the moral
values proposed or imposed by an educational institution. Since we are talking about moral values, the
forms of academic dishonesty are most of the times not violations of the penal law, but violations of
written or unwritten norms of conduct of a particular institution. For instance, in the case of plagiarism,
the original author (the one who had his/her work copied without permission) cannot press charges
against the author of the plagiarism but instead should pursue a civil action against him/her. Usually, this
tends to happen extremely rare. Despite the beliefs of some recent studies, academic misconduct is not a
new phenomenon but as old the first forms of evaluation. Cheating in tests, for example, was such a major
issue in Ancient China, thousands of years ago, that the death penalty had to imposed (for both the
examinee and the examiner) if such an event took place (Lang, 2013).
Several categorizations or classifications of academic dishonesty have been attempted, but most of
them tend to underline the same phenomena. Usually, studies mention behaviours such as: copying from
“illegal” sources during tests (crib notes, books hidden in various places, other colleagues’ papers, outside
sources like telephones, radios etc.), bribing the examiner (under various forms, from money or goods to
influence or even symbolic rewards – this is one the very few form of academic dishonesty sanctioned by
the penal law), lying the examiner/evaluator in any form in order to gain any kind of advantage (from
lying in order to get an extension of the deadline for turning in a paper, for example, to lying about
medical conditions or tragic events in order to “soften” the evaluator’s attitude), copying fragments from
various sources without giving the necessary credit (all forms of plagiarism), buying or obtaining in other
ways works written by other people and turning them in as one’s own work, having other people taking
tests instead of the student etc. Obviously, this list can be extended a great deal by detailing contexts and
circumstances for all of the behaviours noted here, but this is not my purpose here (see, for instance, the
detailed description of academic dishonesty in Ercegovac & Richardson, 2004). Actually, I have come to
notice that in many studies this excessive detailing of the ways to be dishonest tends to be quite a problem
for interpreting the results. Therefor, I suggest that unless the researcher intends to do a radiography of
the ways in which students are dishonest, he/she should use a limited list of dishonest behaviours in order
to keep people concentrated on the key facts. In my case, I prefer to guide myself on the following
reasoning:
 significant dishonesty can occur only in evaluation contexts;
 evaluations can be basically divided in two major categories: evaluating recorded/learned
knowledge (all forms of tests, either written or oral) or evaluating (usually) cognitive abilities
(all forms of students’ oral or written own compositions such as essays, dissertations etc.)
 students’ dishonesty is adapted to these two contexts of evaluation.
Drawing from this (and from my own experience as a teacher), I have come to be preoccupied by
two major instances of academic misconduct: cheating (in tests) and plagiarism (in all its forms). Other
researchers have noted the same thing before; MacFarlane, Zhang, and Pun (2014) asserted that the term
“academic integrity” has come to refer almost exclusively to behaviours such as plagiarism and cheating.

2. Problem Statement
http://dx.doi.org/
Corresponding Author:
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference
eISSN: 2357-1330

At this moment, despite some recent efforts in researching academic dishonesty, we have little (or
none at all) reliable data concerning the psychological mechanisms involved in cheating and/or
plagiarizing, the profile of the cheater/plagiarizer and the most efficient ways to inhibit or prevent such
behaviours. Since these subjects involve very much aspects of the human development (from the moral
development in the early stages of life, to school training and general policies of the educational system,
to mention just some of the external elements which determine dishonest behaviour, in addition to
cognitive or personality traits), it is obvious that we cannot hope to discover a “special something” which
would fully resolve or explain what we are enquiring.

2.1. Plagiarism.
In the last decade, the Romanian public scene has witnessed a tremendous increase of the interest
for the matter of academic ethics, and in particular for the subject of plagiarism. As one could expect, this
increased concern is not the result of a systemic and natural transformation of the population’s intellectual
preoccupations, but instead a more mundane pursuit of the political game. Like in many other European
countries, some of the important political actors had their intellectual achievements contested either by
political opponents or by members of the civil society mainly by unveiling possible plagiarisms, a thing
which happened in the last decade (maybe a bit more) in Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary,
Croatia, Russia etc. The first direct result of such public scandals was, in most cases, the resignation of
the ones accused of academic misbehaviour, even though, in most cases involving politicians, they were
not practicing specific occupations in which their competences could have been questioned (because of
the plagiarism) but, instead, their reputation and moral profile was now being questioned (a fact which is
usually fatal for political figures). The secondary result of such scandals was a major increase of the
public in what it concerns the rules, regulation and customs of academia (and more specific, the ethics of
research and academic integrity). Let us look at some trivial examples to prove the cause-effect
relationship between public scandals concerning plagiarism and the increased interest matters of
academic integrity.
For example, the figure below shows the trends registered by Google Trends in the searches of the
term “Plagiat” (plagiarism, in German) in Germany, between 2004 and present. The huge spike in
searches in February 2011 represents the political scandal involving the Minister of Defence of Germany,
Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, resigned as a result of public accusations of plagiarism regarding his
doctoral dissertation (the first accusations were made in February 2011).

Figure 01. The search trends for the term “Plagiat” (plagiarism) in Germany between 2004 and present

Figure 02 illustrates the same idea and fact, but this time regarding Romania. Here, the spike in
July 2012 is equivalent with the moment in which the Prime-Minister of Romania (at that time), Victor
Ponta, was publicly accused through an article in Nature magazine that he copied large sections of his
doctoral thesis in Law.
http://dx.doi.org/
Corresponding Author:
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference
eISSN: 2357-1330

Figure 02. The search trends for the term “plagiat” (plagiarism) in Romania between 2004 and present

Our last example (though the list can be extended with a great number of examples) is the case of
Hungary, where the enormous increase in the searches for the term “plágium” is equivalent with the Pál
Schmitt plagiarism scandal, in January 2012, when non-other than the President of Hungary was forced to
resign after it was found out that most of his 1992 doctoral thesis was copied from two sources.

Figure 03. The search trends for the term “plágium” (plagiarism) in Hungary between 2004 and present

Overall, there can be seen a worldwide increase of the interest for the subject of plagiarism if we
are to take as a reference the same data presented by Google. As the chart below shows, there is a very
clear upwards trend in the last years, which signifies (regardless of the reasons) an obvious growing
preoccupation of the large public for this subject.

Figure 04. The search trends for the term “plagiarism” worldwide between 2004 and present

The most important benefit of all these public scandals involving political figures is the fact that
the large public becomes increasingly aware of the matter of academic integrity and, thus, we can
drastically improve our chances for a lifelong and reliable education in this direction for the next
generations. At the same time, because politics is an inherently subjective field and tends to cause
passional reactions from people, it becomes very difficult to perform researches on the public perception
of this topic (especially in countries where there have been recent politically biased debates over this)
since people’s opinion will be, obviously, affected by their political stance and the way the subject affects
their favourite political party/figure.
Before getting to the data provided by our research, I should mention that the resorting to theories
about plagiarism written in other countries than Romania is not extremely efficient for our purposes,
respectively for the level of undergraduate students and this is due mainly to the fact that the whole
http://dx.doi.org/
Corresponding Author:
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference
eISSN: 2357-1330

paradigm of evaluation is different from one country to another (as opposed to testing knowledge where,
with more or less different details, the paradigm is the same: the students has to assimilate some
knowledge and the teacher verifies the manner in which this happened). The Romanian system of
education is not necessarily accustomed to evaluating the students’ independent/creative work. The whole
idea of giving written assignments to be carried out at home became common only after the beginning of
this century and became to be prevalent in high schools (and universities) in the second decade of the
century. As the teachers were not prepared for this, but rather they just “imported” this fashion and they
did not passed through any kind of training (including for the subject of academic integrity), students
learned rather quick that you can turn in any kind of material, copied in its entirety or just in small
passages from other sources, with the teachers being unable or unwilling to test the accurateness of the
citation system. More than this, in the vast majority of the classes, students were not instructed on how to
cite other works, how to use the Internet for documentation or – put in simpler words – how and why to
be moral in performing academic tasks. Unfortunately, this passive approach on students’ work was
perpetuated at the universities’ level, a phenomenon facilitated by the rapid and significant increase of the
students’ number in the previous decade (especially around 2010, when more than 400,000 students were
enrolled in online forms of higher education, forms which favoured evaluation through creation works).
The low academic standards of many such institutions, combined with the very high desirability of the
diploma (a subject which deserves a long discussion involving the status of college graduates in
communist Romania and after 1989 – unfortunately, it is not the case here and now) turned higher
education into a very pragmatic business where ethical standards were overlooked by most competitors in
this field.
In this context, the plagiarism scandals after 2012 were actually not a surprise, but a revelation for
the large public and the acknowledgment of a known fact for those involved in education. Like I stated in
the abstract of this article, the recent initiative of the Ministry of Education, that of imposing mandatory
academic ethics courses in all of the Romanian universities is a very normal and auspicious one. On the
other hand, such an initiative needs to be accompanied by the enforcement of some “zero toleration”
policies regarding plagiarism in the following years. At this moment, we have little data concerning the
rates of plagiarism within the student population of Romania (and almost no reliable data on the reasons
and the psychological mechanisms involved in cheating and/or plagiarizing). One of the few
comprehensive studies on this topic (Foltýnek and Glendinning, 2015) shows that Romania is ranked 4 th
in Europe by the rates of plagiarism (over 50% of the Romanian respondents believed that they might
have plagiarised accidentally or deliberately at least once). Other sources (www.plag.fr) state that
Romania leads the ranks of plagiarism in Europe with an over 26% plagiarism rate.

2.2. Cheating in exams and tests

As opposed to plagiarism, cheating in exams leaves no traces (to speak in forensic terms) which
means that if one did not get caught while doing it, it is extremely improbable to be accused at a later
time. The first level of measures taken against all forms of cheating targets not the prevention through
education against this, but rather making classrooms (or online environments) less cheating-friendly and
making the teachers more attentive to contemporary means of cheating. For example, the Romanian
equivalent of the SATs, the national Baccalaureate exam, take place in extremely rigorously controlled
environments since 2011 (more precisely, video cameras have been installed in every classroom in which
exams take place and the video footage is being monitored in real time, but also in replay). The first major
and visible result of this was the fact that the passing rates for the exam (the percentage of students who
passed the general exam, from the total number of students enrolled for it) dropped abruptly (as shown in
the graph below). Of course, questions can be asked about how the percentage managed to rise up again
http://dx.doi.org/
Corresponding Author:
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference
eISSN: 2357-1330

in the following years (though they never reached 80% like before 2011), but the discussion is not simple
and it entails even political details.

Figure 05. The percentage of promoted students for the national Baccalaureate exam in Romania since
2006 (2011 – the introduction of video surveillance). Source: www.hotnews.ro
(https://media.hotnews.ro/media_server1/image-2017-07-5-21856063-41-rata-promovare-bac.jpg) .

In a way, by starting with this level of measures instead of making cheating less attractive, we are
actually admitting that the fascination of cheating in tests is impossible to avoid and that cheating is
simply instinctual (especially since many students feel compelled to cheat as long as many other of their
peers do it and there is so much at stake in terms of academic results). In a previous work (Patroc, 2018),
I have treated the subject of cheating in tests extensively, but only referring myself to online testing;
there, I have argued – based on some facts and figures – that every new generation of students is more
prone to cheating than the previous ones.
Unlike plagiarism, where evidence of the dishonesty remains and can be retrieved and analysed
even after decades, we have no compelling data on cheating in exams and tests since it happens ”live” and
as soon as the exam is over, the student is virtually exonerated of any kind of charges against him/her. In
this instance, we can solely rely on the testimony of the cheaters, but – for obvious reasons – we must
consider the responses we get with much caution.

3. Research Questions
Since at this moment we have basically no data on the mechanisms and demographics of academic
dishonesty for Romanian students, we will be content with any kind of preliminary findings on this topic.
As a consequence, the questions we ask are general and do entail strict hypotheses:
What do students think about the rates of cheating and plagiarism in Romania?
How do they compare themselves to their peers when discussing these aspects?
Are there differences between the undergraduate education and the higher education regarding
plagiarism and cheating?

4. Purpose of the Study

http://dx.doi.org/
Corresponding Author:
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference
eISSN: 2357-1330

This study aims to find and interpret some preliminary data concerning the rates of cheating and
plagiarism in Romanian students and their opinions regarding the mechanisms involved in cheating and
the possible measures that can be taken in order to inhibit academic dishonesty.

5. Research Methods
The data was collected through a questionnaire addressed to current students and containing
questions related to the subject of cheating in tests, both in high school and university, and plagiarism (as
well for high school and university). The questions targeted the personal experience of the students
(”How often did you plagiarize when you were a high school student?”), but also their perception of how
severe this phenomenon was (”To your knowledge, how often did your colleagues plagiarized during
high school?”). Most questions required answers on a Likert scale with 10 steps. I have to mention here
that this research also included some open-answer questions regarding the motivation and psychological
mechanisms involved in plagiarism in cheating, and also some questions regarding proposals for
measures that can be taken to limit or inhibit dishonest behaviours from students, but the results for this
section of the research will be presented in a future article.
Between April 2018 and July 2018, 565 students provided answers for this research, most of them
being students at various programs within the University of Oradea, in Western Romania. A large
majority of them are students in the field of Educational Sciences (52.5 %), Psychology (28.3%), and
Philology (14.7%), while the rest of participants come from various fields such as History, Geography,
Sports. Related to properties of the sample, let us mention this as the first limit of the present study (the
fact that the respondent’s group could have been larger and could have included students in other fields –
such as engineering or medical studies). There is an obvious disproportion between the number of female
respondents vs. male respondents (74.3% female vs. 25.7% male).
I should add that this study intended from the very beginning to compare the status of cheating and
plagiarism in high school to that of academic dishonesty in universities. I can only speculate (at this
moment) that the intensity and the prevalence of dishonest behaviour in some low-performance high
schools is significantly higher than in those high schools which provide larger proportions of future
students.

6. Findings
6.1. Cheating
The first data we look at is the students’ confession on how much they resorted to cheating during
their high school. As the chart below shows us, there is an obvious tendency for the students to see
themselves as rather fair individuals, which followed the moral code expected from a normal student. The
psychological limit seems to be drawn somewhere between the 3 and 4 values for answers.
http://dx.doi.org/
Corresponding Author:
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference
eISSN: 2357-1330

How often did you cheat in tests/exams during high

school?
25.0%
21.6%
19.6%
20.0% 17.7%
15.0%
10.3%
10.0% 8.5% 7.4% 7.8%
5.0% 3.9%
1.8% 1.4%
0.0%

1 (at all) 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 (every time)

Figure 06. Answers for the question: “How often did you cheat in tests/exams during high
school?”

When targeting the same question at the respondent’s peers, there is an overwhelming consensus
on the fact that – if cheating happened – it was done by the others (more than 66% of the answers are
situated in the 7-10 interval of evaluation, which is similar to a rather bleak perspective on the status of
cheating in the respondents’ classes in high school)

How often did your colleagues cheat in

tests/exams during high school?
25.0%
21.1%
20.0%
16.1% 16.3%
15.0% 13.3%
9.7%
10.0% 7.4%
4.4% 5.5%
5.0% 2.7% 3.5%

0.0%

1 (at all) 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 (every time)

Figure 06. Answers for the question: “How much did your colleagues cheat…?”

When asking the same question, but this time about college (the current level of studies for our
respondents) we notice a more powerful polarization tendency, which can only be explained through the
fact that students provided extremely desired (in their opinion) answers. Less than 10 students evaluated
their cheating with scores between 8 and 10, while more than 75% of them claimed to have avoided
cheating almost completely (scores between 1 and 3). A staggering close to 40% maintained that they
have absolutely never cheated during their college years. Obviously, based on my own experience, on
common sense and on the numbers provided by the next question, we can conclude that the fact that this
study was conducted in an educational environment and by the students’ very own teachers (despite the
constant care to reassure them of the anonymity of their responses) resulted in a very dishonest attitude of
the respondents.
http://dx.doi.org/
Corresponding Author:
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference
eISSN: 2357-1330

How often did you cheat in tests/exams during

college?
40.0% 36.6%
35.0%
30.0%
25.0% 21.2%
20.0% 18.1%
15.0% 9.7%
10.0% 6.2%
5.0% 3.5% 2.1% 1.8% 0.5% 0.2%
0.0%

1 (at all) 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 (every time)

Figure 07. Answers regarding respondents’ cheating in college.

As mentioned above, the responses to the same questions, but directed towards the respondents’
peers, are proofs not only for the fact that they were rather dishonest, but also to the fact that they tend to
keep their self-esteem at high levels, while blaming others for the bad things which happen around us.
This time, the majority of the responses are situated between the 6-9 interval (with the peak value being
7), which can be explained by the fact that the self-esteem of the respondent is somehow dependant on the
overall status of the group in which they are a part. Obviously, there would be a need to correlate the
answers with the results of a self-esteem questionnaire and a group identity questionnaire in order to have
definite results on this.

How often did your colleagues cheat in

tests/exams during college?
20.0% 17.7%
18.0%
16.0% 14.2% 14.5%
14.0% 13.1%
12.0% 11.3%
10.0% 8.3%
8.0% 7.3%
5.8% 5.8%
6.0%
4.0% 1.9%
2.0%
0.0%

1 (at all) 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 (every time)

Figure 08. Answers regarding the cheating by respondents’ peers in college.

6.2. Plagiarism
At all surprising, the data concerning plagiarism done by students is remarkably the same with the
data on cheating. This time, the results are somehow less dispersed than in the case of cheating, which
leads us to believe that plagiarism is a behaviour regarded as less immoral by students (a fact which will
be confirmed by the ratings shown in the final graphs).
http://dx.doi.org/
Corresponding Author:
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference
eISSN: 2357-1330

How often did you plagiarize during high school?

25.0%
19.8%
20.0%
15.6% 14.9%
15.0%
11.5%
9.7% 8.7%
10.0%
6.2% 5.3% 4.4% 3.9%
5.0%

0.0%

1 (at all) 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 (every time)

Figure 09. The respondents’ perspective on his/her plagiarism during high school

But, even if this offense is less severe than cheating, the same tendency is present: “I didn’t do it,
but others did”. As you can notice, there is a sudden gap from 6 to 7, while the last 4 values are rather
close which could be again explained by a less severe/precise evaluation of this act.

How often did your colleagues plagiarize during

high school?
25.0%
20.0% 18.6% 19.5%
16.1%
14.5%
15.0%
10.0% 8.0% 7.4% 8.7%
4.4%
5.0% 1.9%
0.9%
0.0%

1 (at all) 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 (every time)

Figure 10. Respondents’ perception on peer plagiarism during high school.

At the college level, things look extremely similar to the reports on cheating, with a small
peculiarity: the peak value was “2” instead of “1”, while the general tendency was to have smaller gaps
between answers, a fact which could be easily explained by the fact that in the daily experience with
teachers, plagiarism is less frowned upon than cheating, at least at the bachelor’s level (one could argue
that there is a silent complicity between students and teachers regarding this aspect). Most likely, at the
master’s level (and even more, at the doctoral level) the perception would be more drastic against
plagiarism.
http://dx.doi.org/
Corresponding Author:
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference
eISSN: 2357-1330

How often did you plagiarize during college?

20.0%
17.7%
18.0%
15.6% 15.6%
16.0%
14.0% 12.4%
12.0% 10.8% 10.3%
10.0%
8.0% 6.5%
6.0% 4.8%
3.7%
4.0% 2.7%
2.0%
0.0%

1 (at all) 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 (every time)

Figure 11. Respondents’ reports on own plagiarism during college.

As expected, our subjects tend to believe that their peers plagiarize more than themselves, and we
can observe the same tendency to maintain high levels of self-esteem by creating less than drastic
evaluations of their groups. Also, as a result of the fact that plagiarism is not very much explained to and
understood by students, the results tend to be spread on closer intervals than in the case of the other
answers.

How often did your colleagues plagiarize during

college?
14.0% 12.2% 12.9% 12.7% 11.5%
12.0% 10.8%
9.7%
10.0% 8.7% 8.1%
8.0% 7.4%
5.8%
6.0%
4.0%
2.0%
0.0%

1 (at all) 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 (every time)

Figure 12. Respondents’ perception on peer plagiarism during college.

Since one of the questions addressed to students aimed specifically their evaluation on how bad
(how immoral) are the acts of plagiarism and cheating, let us compare the results. As visible from the
graph below, cheating tends to be regarded as much more severe than plagiarism (the answers being
extremely polarized, with 10 – “the worst thing possible” being the most chosen answer). On the other
hand, although considered generally bad, plagiarism tends to be overlooked, especially when compared to
cheating (a thing which valid not only for Romania, but worldwide – Ercegovac & Richardson, 2004).
http://dx.doi.org/
Corresponding Author:
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference
eISSN: 2357-1330

How bad is the act of cheating / plagiarizing?

25.0%

20.0%

15.0%

10.0%

5.0%

0.0%
1 (not 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (the
bad at worst
all) thing
possible)

Cheating Plagiarism

Figure 13. Comparison based on the evaluations of the immorality of cheating and plagiarism.

7. Conclusion
The most important conclusion of this study is one related to the methodology of research; we
conclude that students are most likely insincere when answering questions related to cheating and
plagiarism in academic environments. Thus, we would need to rely not on their opinions, but rather on
observation and objective data in order to accurately asses the rates of cheating and plagiarism in higher
education institutions.
Next to this, we can conclude as well that there is an obvious and extremely generalized tendency
in students to see (or to report) themselves as extremely virtuous when compared to their peers. They tend
not to deny the existence of phenomena like cheating and plagiarism, but they tend to completely
dissociate themselves from it. Also, the rates of blaming the peers seem to decrease when we are talking
about current peers (as opposed to former peers). What seems to be a bit surprising is the fact that the
answers provided tend to be extremely categorical: “I have never cheated!” as compared to “The others
always cheat!”. What can we do in the future? First of all, we should start investigating the problem of
cheating and plagiarism seriously, based on objective observation, and not on the subjects’ own reports.
Secondly, we should investigate the psychological mechanisms involved in cheating and plagiarism and
experiment interventions on those specific elements which trigger dishonest behaviours. Thirdly, we need
to consolidate large scale instruments in order to inhibit dishonest behaviours and to build up means to
make academic honesty intrinsically desirable, such as honour codes (McCabe, 2016).

Acknowledgments [if any]

References
Ercegovac, Z. & Richardson, J. (2004). Academic Dishonesty, Plagiarism Included, in the Digital Age: A
Literature Review. College & Research Libraries. 65. 10.5860/crl.65.4.301.
Foltýnek, T. and Glendinning, I. (2015). Impact of Policies for Plagiarism in Higher Education Across
Europe: Results of the Project. Acta Universitatis Agriculturae et Silviculturae Mendelianae
Brunensis. Volume 63, Issue 1. pp. 207-216.
International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) (2013). Fundamental Values of Academic Integrity
(2nd Edition). Retrieved from http://www.academicintegrity.org/icai/assets/Revised_FV_2014.pdf.
http://dx.doi.org/
Corresponding Author:
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference
eISSN: 2357-1330

Lang, J.M. (2013). Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
MacFarlane, B., Zhang, J., & Pun, A. (2014). Academic integrity: A review of the literature. Studies in
Higher Education, 39(2), 339–358
McCabe, D., & Trevino, L. (1993). Academic Dishonesty: Honor Codes and Other Contextual Influences.
The Journal of Higher Education, 64(5), 522-538. doi:10.2307/2959991.
McCabe, D. L. (2016). Cheating and honor: Lessons from a long-term research project. In T. Bretag
(Ed.), Handbook of academic integrity (pp. 187–198). Singapore: Springer.
Patroc, D. (2018). Arguments Against Online Learning. In C. Fitzgerald, S. Laurian-Fitzgerald, & C.
Popa (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Student-Centered Strategies in Online Adult Learning
Environments (pp. 120-138). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Whitley Jr., B.E., Keith-Spiegel, P. (2002). Academic Dishonesty: An Educator’s Guide. Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.