Abstract—The impact of information technologies on the ways people use and interacts with information has caused increasing concerns towards academic dishonesty or more commonly referred to as college cheating. Similarly, in Taiwan, strong emphasis is placed in fostering college students’ honor and integrity. Moreover, with the current emergence of the ubiquitous nature of information technology; students are easily tempted to take advantage of such innovations. In the other spectrum, studies with regards to the factors affecting engineering students’ academic dishonesty are still quite limited. Hence, this case study shall attempt to describe the factors that affect the notion of academic dishonesty within computer science students; wherein information technology is so abundant and readily available. Participants are volunteer computer science students of a Science and Technology University. A series of focus group interviews were conducted in order to gather insights into the different facets of academic dishonesty. Findings suggest that the entire campus climate including the students’ peer pressure, and both the teachers’ and school’s policies towards academic dishonesty have all contributed to the overall perceived factors affecting the prevalence of college cheating in the university.
Index Terms—Academic dishonesty, computer science students, peer pressure, school policy, students’ perception.
G. S. Ching is with the Department of Applied Foreign Language, University of Science and Technology, Taoyuan, Taiwan, ROC (e-mail: gregory@ mail.lhu.edu.tw).
Cite: Gregory S. Ching, "Computer Science Students and Their Sense of Academic Integrity," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 83-87, 2013.