Attitudes towards cheating behavior during assessing students᾽performance: student and teacher perspectives

Our aim in this study was to determine students’ and teachers’ attitudes towards cheating in assessing students’ performance. We used mixed methodology and the main research method was a case study. We aimed to describe how our respondents: 1. recognize ethical misconduct (EM) in several situations given through case studies, 2. understand the roles of each subject involved, 3. predict consequences of the EM and how they understand its possible causes, 4. create individual answers to EM or resolve problem situations. The research sample of students (120) includes participants from three basic study programs and two postgraduate programs in the field of education. A sample of teachers (42) was obtained from a number of faculties by random selection. Our respondents have identified most forms of EM reasonably well, although in some situations, the respondents recognized other errors (poor organization of time for learning, professors’ strict deadline for paper submission, etc.) as EM. Therefore, the issues of ethics are not completely clear to all respondents, which leads to the conclusion that universities must organize training in this field. Both groups of respondents understand EM in a similar way, and whether it is a professor or a student (or students) who commits EM has not affected their responses. Our results suggest that it is necessary to work on the prevention of fraud by discussing the consequences (especially the long-term ones, which were not considerably discussed in the comments), by learning ethical reasoning, by developing functional strategies of learning for the purpose of preventing fraud.