The document reviews academic cheating among high school students, highlighting that about 75% of students engage in this behavior due to a complex interplay of individual, contextual, and moderating factors. Key influences include gender, self-efficacy, personality traits, classroom culture, and parental pressure. The authors emphasize the need for early detection and intervention to address the underlying issues associated with cheating, suggesting it stems more from external influences than from poor judgment.

1. Academic Cheating Among Youths: A Causal Pathway Model
Academic cheating is a problem more commonly
manifested among children and adolescents than one
might expect. Researchers estimate that
approximately 75% of high school students cheat at
some point during their course of academic study
(e.g., McCabe, Trevino, & Butterfield, 2001; Whitley,
1998). While cheating appears to be widespread, it
has been under-emphasized in the empirical literature
and poorly understood as a behavioral phenomenon
despite its association with a range of youth risk
factors (including low self-esteem and poor academic
performance) and its capacity to predict more severe
problems in later adolescence and young adulthood.
Introduction
Nicolette de Sumrak, M.A., and James Tobin, Ph.D
American School of Professional Psychology at Argosy University, Orange County – Doctor of Psychology in Clinical Psychology Program
Purpose of Review
To construct a comprehensive causal pathway model, a
literature review was conducted. The search engines
used were PsycINFO and ProQuest Central for English.
Published articles containing the terms “academic
dishonesty” and/or “academic cheating” yielded the
initial set of publications. Adding the search terms
“high school academic cheating,” “predictors of
academic dishonesty,” and “correlates of academic
dishonesty” progressively reduced the count of
publications to approximately 450 articles. This group
was further narrowed by eliminating studies that did
not address the focal concerns of the current review,
i.e., gender and age differences vis-à-vis academic
dishonesty, concurrent correlates of cheating, and
factors that cheating predicts. A final group of 26
studies was retained for the purposes of assessing
individual, contextual, and moderating factors
associated with cheating.
Method
Our literature review revealed the following trends:
Individual Factors: Male students who have
experienced a lower degree of academic success,
demonstrate atypical narcissistic issues, are externally
motivated (i.e., are more concerned with grades than
an internal sense of mastery), and hold a less self-
punitive approach toward cheating were individual
factors associated with cheating.
Contextual Factors: Contextual factors most highly
associated with cheating included the occurrence of
peer cheating, the pressure of parents to obtain good
grades, enrollment in classroom environments
characterized by a performance (i.e., emphasizing
competition, grades, class rank) vs. mastery (i.e.,
emphasizing learning for individually-based self-
improvement) culture, and engagement with teachers
who were not subject-matter experts and who lacked
a strong interpersonal investment in their students.
Moderating Factors: Gender (male > female), age
(younger > older), ratings of self-efficacy (lower >
higher), personality factors (e.g., narcissism; features
of psychopathy) and teacher competence (lower >
higher) appeared to moderate the relationship
between academic performance and cheating.
Additionally, male students were more likely to have a
positive attitude toward cheating than female
students, and female students were more likely to
perceive the classroom culture as mastery-oriented
than male students.
Results
Discussion
Cheating appears to be a phenomenon not simply
motivated by the desire to achieve and/or to
compensate for learning difficulties or a low degree of
effort, as is commonly believed. Instead, our review
of the literature indicated a complex interplay of
individual, contextual, and moderating factors that
contribute to the occurrence of cheating. Gender, level
of self-efficacy, personality factors, the culture of the
classroom, teacher competence and interpersonal
investment in students, and degree of parental
pressure to obtain good grades were some of the
major factors that interlinked to predispose high-
school students to cheat.
More specifically, our review suggested that
bidirectional influences may exist in which certain
individual (e.g., externally- vs. internally-motivated)
factors may increase some youths’ susceptibility to
various contextual (e.g., peer cheating; grade pressure
from parents) factors which, in turn, further intensify
the individual factors. Perhaps relevant across a range
of specific risk factor pairings, these loops of
bidirectional influence may not only increase the
likelihood of cheating, but may also negatively impact
one’s fundamental view of self. It is thus suggested
that cheating during adolescence may have more to do
with deficits in self-agency and autonomy than with
lapses of judgment or aberrant moral/ethical decision-
making tendencies. Our view is that, for some youths,
cheating is conceptualized as motivated not by an
exaggerated need to achieve and/or to conceal
deficient academic skill or knowledge, but by a failure
to reject influences outside of the self. Undetected
cheating likely exacerbates the fundamental nature of
the problem: the desire for external validation
progressively degrading internal processes of self-
mastery and individuation.
Implications of this review include the need to
sensitize teachers and school administrators to the
potentially significant concurrent and imminent
problems associated with cheating and other forms of
academic dishonesty. The utility of the early detection
and treatment of cheating in the domain of prevention
cannot be made more strongly. Finally, future
research is necessary to arrive at a profile of qualities
and circumstances that differentiate those youths who
cheat non-problematically vs. those who cheat
chronically and insidiously. It is this latter group for
which academic cheating is likely a “gateway” to more
significant affective, behavioral, personality, and social
distress.
References
Contact Information
Nicolette de Sumrak, M.A James Tobin, Ph.D.
Graduate Student Professor
Argosy University, Argosy University,
Orange County Orange County
Email: Email:
Ndesumrak@yahoo.com JTobin@argosy.edu
714-494-6896 714-620-3700
This review attempted to organize the current
research findings on academic cheating into a
comprehensive causal pathway model. Empirical
findings were categorized into (1) individual, (2)
contextual and (3) moderating factors that interact to
increase the likelihood of the onset and maintenance
of cheating behavior.
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