Examining Online Cheating in Higher Education Using Traditional Classroom Cheating as a Guide

Academic dishonesty in higher education is a perverse problem affecting institutions of learning in many countries across the globe. More alarmingly, numerous studies have pointed to increasing rates of cheating and plagiarism over the past few decades offering a wide array of explanations and theories for this trend. A relatively new feature of both higher education and the discussion of academic dishonesty involves the growing market for online education. Within the last decade, online education has become a permanent fixture increasing its reach in education markets throughout the world. The trend of online education is seen as bringing with it a new set of opportunities and challenges related to academic dishonesty. With high rates of cheating already a well-documented problem in the traditional (face-to-face) learning environment, it is important to analyze how online education factors into this scenario. The goal of this paper is to provide the reader with a critical analysis of the current literature on academic dishonesty in online education and to propose areas for future research where gaps in the literature exist.