The Impact of Performance Goals on Cheating Depends on How Performance Is Evaluated

• In Event: The "Dark Side" of Motivation: Unpacking Malleable Personal Factors Associated With Academic Dishonesty

Abstract

Academic cheating behaviors (e.g., passing notes, copying answers during tests) are common at universities, although largely deemed socially unacceptable (McCabe, 2005; Teixeira & Rocha, 2010). The high frequency of academic cheating has prompted researchers to investigate which motivations drive students to engage in this behavior (Anderman & Koenka, 2017). This empirical research supports the notion that academic cheating is detrimental to learning goal striving as it hinders actual knowledge acquisition (e.g., Jordan, 2001). It also stands to reason that performance goals, particularly appearance goals (i.e., striving for competence demonstration), may facilitate cheating because cheating can be considered helpful for the attainment of praise for good performance. However, prior findings on this relationship are inconclusive and highlight the possibility that the effect of appearance goals on academic dishonesty may depend on moderators such as personal attitudes (Janke, Daumiller & Rudert, 2018) and social norms (Daumiller & Janke, 2019). An important research value to acquire knowledge about moderators that can be directly affected by instructors by changing aspects of the testing procedure. Such knowledge is especially helpful for high stakes testing situations where it may be more suitable to address situated moderators than to reduce appearance goals.
We use the Expectancy-Value Theory of achievement motivation (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000) to theorize about potential moderators bound to the testing procedure. Expectancy-Value Theory postulates that engagement in a behavior depends on a combination of the value ascribed to the result of that action (influenced by appearance goals) along with the expectancy of success. We propose that the evaluation standards employed by the instructor may influence students’ perceived expectancy of being able to cheat successfully and thus, moderate the effect of appearance goals on cheating behavior. Specifically, we assumed that appearance goals would only lead to increased cheating if students’ performance was presumably evaluated based on results rather than on strategies applied to solve the questions.
To investigate this hypothesis, we developed an experimental paradigm based on prior research and two preliminary studies with 59 and 72 students. In the final preregistered between-subject experiment, 169 German university students (51 males, 116 females) participated. We manipulated students’ goals (induced appearance goals versus no goal induction) as well as the evaluation standards (result-based vs. process-based evaluation standards). Manipulation checks confirmed the success of both experimental manipulations. As dependent variables, we investigated observed cheating behavior (using a confederate student) and cheating in unsolvable questions (measuring how many unsolvable questions participants reported to have solved).
Confirming our hypotheses, we found, robustly across different sets of analyses, that students were twice as likely to cheat when appearance goals were induced and the evaluation standard focused on the results (only interaction, no main effects). This new knowledge helps explain mixed findings regarding how performance goals affect cheating. While the mechanisms behind the observed interaction warrant further investigation, our results imply that practitioners who develop tests for high-stakes testing situations should use evaluation practices that reward strategies used by the students to achieve their answer instead of solely rewarding the correct results.

Authors

• Martin Daumiller, University of Augsburg

• Stefan Janke, University of Mannheim