Sheard and Dick attempt to address the dearth of quality research related directly to the factors influencing cheating within the graduate information technology student body. Through this research, the authors attempt to identify not only the types or “quality” of unethical behavior, but also what factors influence this behavior. The end result indicates some courses of action that may help educators and students reduce the amount of academic misconduct.

The research used a questionnaire to gather the data. From this data, a series of factor analyses were conducted to isolate the four major categories of cheating (from unacceptable assistance to exam cheating), as well as positive and negative factors that influence cheating behavior.

The study was conducted over a single student body of 112 graduate information technology (IT) students. While this by no means invalidates the research findings, it should be validated against a larger and more diverse set of campus student bodies, to eliminate factors that may be isolated to a single campus or student body. Another factor that would be interesting to explore would be the correlation between students who were guilty of “major” cheating, and those that were also involved in one or more of the “minor” cheating categories.

Interestingly, more than ten percent of students admitted to engaging in serious forms of cheating. This result should certainly raise interest in the associated factors that appear to influence this behavior, which included grade improvement and other external factors, as well as workload pressures. Faculty and students alike would do well to understand and address these issues, and researchers should continue to explore this topic to expand our overall understanding of this problem.