STUDENT Academic Integrity Survey Preliminary Report*

Qualitative Student Comments (Final Open-ended Question)
(quoted as written with no editing)

As a perpetual student, I am here to learn as much as I can. Cheating only hurts me in the long run, which is why I have rarely even considered cheating. I love doing research so I wouldn't fabricate any data or not cite the work of others.

Cheating sucks. It takes away from the people who actually work hard and put time into studying. I have noticed that athletes cheat a lot more than other students. Also, people in fraternities and sororities have been known to cheat more. They can share papers, assignments, etc, easily. I have actually witnessed more of these people cheating than any others.

I am a non-traditional student and am a full-time university faculty member so my answers to this survey might slant your results

I apologize in advance if this seems to ramble on, but I'll try to keep it short and focused: I think that certain students view it as an easy means to an end. It bothers me that there are rules set to level the playing field, but the cheaters ignore these illegally to get an unfair advantage. I'm even more disturbed when it's the parents of the student that condone the cheating, like the recent scandal in Piper, Kansas. I'd hope it's an atypical case, but if it isn't it shows just how accepted cheating is in our society. Now it seems that the ideal way of life is in instant gratification as opposed to working hard for something.

I didn't fill out the learning section because there was no scale listed for the 1-7 choices.

I don't agree that group collaboration is cheating unless the teacher specifically states that the assignment is to be done on your own. To me, discussing the assignment with classmates and friends is not only a very effective learning tool, but it is also a valuable way of using resources. Lots of times the teacher might be a bad teacher - if they can't get the point across, students should be able to learn in other ways, from other people.

I feel the quality of instruction at Kstate to be sorely lacking in comparison to other colleges...I transferred in after bouncing around at a number of cc's and universities but found the attention of the good community college professors to be far above that of MOST instructors at Kstate. the only reason I stay here is the amount of time and money I already have invested here, and the fact that the slip of paper I receive at the end gets me more attention with the Kstate logo than a cc logo...that's it. improve your staff's teaching ability, availabilty (big one), and ability to communicate (yes, proficiency with the english language is included). then perhaps students will be able to learn outside of the exceptionally narrowly defined "traditional student" roles the administration seems to increasingly rely on to make decisions which save money but shortchange those of us paying more every semester to take classes from an increasingly ineffective staff.

I have encountered people fabricating lab results and getting good grades on all of their labs. This person did not read the lab before coming to class but just made mistakes as he went and still got better results than the people who had read the lab.

I see cheating all the time, but I don't report it because there may not be proof or I just hope the cheater will have the decency to stop, and if not, I know that I really earned my grade, and they did not, even though the final grade may show they did.

I think it should be required of all undergraduate students to take an academic integrity course/ ethics course for credit before they should be allowed to graduate and hopefully be done early on in the students college career.

It is a problem, but usually those who are cheating don't have very smart friends and won't do as well as if they had studied in the first place.

It is unfair that some sections of the same class can be much easier than others. I would not feel the need to cheat if I felt that each section was receiving fair and equal grading practices. The answer to this problem may be to curve the entire section of each class, so that each section has the same number of A's, B's and C's.

*Donald L. McCabe. 2003 Spring Semester Academic Integrity Survey Study conducted at Kansas State University.