Empirical Analysis of Cheating Among Students on the Basis of Surveys

Abstract

The article examines cheating among students as a special case of opportunism studied by the new institutional economic theory. The study is based on a survey in which more than 500 students from the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg took part from March to April 2023. This survey was complemented by an experiment in the form of a multi-question quiz designed to test students' knowledge of popular culture, economics, and technology, with both the format of the quiz and its content encouraging students to be opportunistic. As a result, in such an experimental way, it was possible to prove the connection between the use of a cheat sheet and cheating in everyday life. The authors built five logistic regressions - one for each variable explained in the form of one or another manifestation of cheating - double delivery of work, submission of other people's work, purchase of work, use of a cheat sheet, and fabrication of data. Among the factors influencing the likelihood of belonging to a group of unscrupulous students, one can highlight high income, studying in educational programs such as Management, Economics, Political Science, Public Policy, and Analytics, a focus on performance instead of mastery, being at the bottom of the rating, the presence of retakes, a negative attitude towards academic ratings, distance learning, deviant behavior in the form of theft, violation of prohibitions and stowaways, the external environment, and a short session. This study also made it possible to create a typical portrait of a fraudster at HSE using clustering associated with the identification of unobserved groups based on the presented observed categorical variables.