Sydney Hadden, Tanna Brubaker, Madison McKee

EDT 180 C - Group 4

Professor Lewallen

April 21, 2019

The Correlation Between Financing College and Willingness to Cheat

We decided to research the topic of cheating, a concept that is very important to ASU.

We chose this topic because it is something that we hear about all the time from administration,

professors, and fellow students on a constant basis. We decided to couple this topic with how

people fund college, as scholarships are a major aspect of college life, and the thought of losing a

scholarship due to an issue with academic integrity is a very real fear among college students,

especially at ASU. When asking our survey questions using Google Forms we focused mostly on

how scholarships have affected the surveyed students’ chpies in terms of cheating, and whether

or not said students condone cheating, have cheated, or would cheat. In total we received 90

responses, which served as a good basis for a thorough examination of where ASU students

stand in terms of cheating in correlation with how they finance college.

When we sent out our survey and received the results of 90 respondents, we expected the

gender variation to be fairly even, considering the wide number of responses we received.

However, as seen in the first graph below there we no respondents who selected “other” or

“Prefer Not to Respond”. In addition to the aforementioned, we had over two times the number

of female respondents than male respondents, which could have potentially changed our results

from what they would have been had we had an equal number of responses per listed gender.
 We also had an imbalance in the year/age of respondents, as over half of our respondents

were freshmen, with the remaining 38 respondents being from various other classes. This also

likely impacted our results, as freshmen have a tendency to be a bit more cautious which could

affect their willingness to cheat or not to cheat.

In addition to having an imbalance in respondents in terms of gender and school year,

there was also a large discrepancy between respondents in terms of college. Most of the

respondents came from either the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences or Mary Lou Fulton

Teachers College, with the remaining respondents coming from a few other colleges. This could

cause the results to differ as different colleges tend to have different student cultures, which in
turn would affect one’s willingness to cheat, as such a decision could potentially have social

standards behind it.

In terms of whether or not the surveyed students are financing college through the use of

scholarships, the responses were a bit more balanced than the first few questions. Nearly 60 of

the respondents said that they were attending school on a scholarship, which definitely could

change one’s perspective on cheating, as shown in the next graph.

 Of the respondents who stated that they were attending college on a scholarship, around

37 of them (a little over half) also said that they had never felt pressure one way or another in

terms of cheating or not cheating; that being said, a little less than half of the respondents who

said that they were attending college on a scholarship said that they had felt pressure to cheat or

not cheat based on the fact that they were on a scholarship. This means that having a scholarship

does change one’s perspective on, or willingness to cheat.

Despite what the above graphs and information imply, the overwhelming majority of

respondents stated that they had never in their college experience cheated on an exam. This could

mean that those who felt pressure to cheat chose not to out of moral obligation (to be discussed

in the next paragraph). Interestingly enough, the second largest amount of responses as shown on

the graph below show that 7 students had cheated only once, would could also have moral

implications (e.g. students cheated once and felt guilty so they didn’t cheat again).
 Our final graph compares respondents’ personal opinions when it comes to whether or

not they cheat, and whether or not they are okay with other people cheating. The results are not

too surprising as we expected many responses to state that the students didn’t personally agree

with cheating. That being said the number of students who stated that they were okay with

cheating, both for themselves and for others, was surprising, especially considering the fact that

we gave a third option of “Depends on the Situation”. There were more respondents who stated

that they were okay with cheating than what we expected.

When looking at our data and charts, the conclusions we can come to are that overall,

students who finance college with scholarships are not pushed to cheat or not cheat, however
when they are pressured, it's usually to not cheat, typically out of fear of losing their

scholarship(s). The margin between persuasion to cheat and disuation from cheating is fairly

close however, making scholarship ownership an ineffective tool against the prevention of

cheating, and just goes to show how warped the current mindset of higher education is. The

results imply that students feel pressure not to learn, but to get good grades, and will do things

that could potentially jeopardize their college careers simply for the sake of maintaining decent

grades. Higher education seems to no longer be about gaining more in depth knowledge of

specific subjects, and more about keeping a decent GPA so as to acquire a degree just to add an

addition one sentence to a résumé.

A couple other questions that came to mind to ask related to our topic were: “Does the

fact that someone is an in-state or out-of-state student affect one’s willingness to cheat?” and “Is

an out-of-state student more or less likely to cheat than in in-state student when financing college

with a scholarship?”

If we were to do this research project again we would change a few things. For example,

when we created the original survey form we focused mainly on whether or not students who had

scholarships would be more inclined to approach cheating in a uniform way (yes to cheating vs

no to cheating BECAUSE of their scholarship) but what we didn’t do is collect a control group.

We should have also asked those who aren’t attending college on a scholarship about the

pressures they’ve felt to cheat; if we had had two different sections of questions dividing those

with scholarships and those without, it would have been much easier to sort the information,

which would have, by extension, made the process of data comparison for easier to accomplish.

In addition to the aforementioned, having more in depth graphs that pulled information that

detailed which specific types of people