Cheating And Fraud Case Study

INTRODUCTION

Cheating behaviour is prevalent in college students in general. This has been studied widely across the globe (Silpiö 2012; Barnett & Dalton 1981; Graham 1994; Bowers 1964; McCrary & Gay 2015;) and the results all show that about half of students cheat at some time of their university career. The way faculty combats this problem is with rigorous monitoring of exam situations and applying a variety of technical tools like TurnItIn for checking against plagiarism and copying. As more and more of assignments and test are done online the monitoring of students seems not to be feasible long term solution to the problem. There is evidence that cheating takes place not only by careful and malign planning to cheat but also as a situational

In the west we have recent examples like the recent Libor scandal in London as well as numerous scandals before and during the global financial crisis concerning unlawful and unethical action. Cheating seems to be in the heart of these unethical behaviours where rules are bent and misinformation is leveraged on purpose for financial gain like in the mortgage backed securities scheme, that some have argued, was the harbinger of the collapse of the Western financial system.

For this kind of behaviour to take place social scientists have offered different models of justifying cheating, fraudulent actions and taking advantage of other people. Most models that the discipline of economics offer a model of people as selfish agents that are ultra-rational, making every action a computation to maximize personal gain. This model of actors is commonly referred as Homo Economicus. (Hobbes and Macpherson 1968; Smith and Skinner 1997,

(2005) used in their study. The experiment consists of two different sets of experiments. In the first set a paper and pencil test will be conducted at the end of students’ lectures. They are given a task to solve as many mathematical problems as they can in four minutes. The problems themselves are number matrices containing nine numbers with two decimals each. The object is to find which two numbers add up to 10. The participants circle these numbers and move on to the next. After four minutes the number of solved matrices is calculated. An example is given in figure 1. The participants are told that the top third of participants enter a raffle to win a prize (a free movie ticket valid in local cinemas). Two sets of tests are conducted with one group self-calculating the results and instructed to take the test paper with them and recycle it. This group is given the opportunity to cheat. For the second (control) group, the papers are collected in the end of the test and the results calculated by the