Measuring Academic Integrity Perceptions and the Correlation with Ethical Reasoning.

Here we share findings of student and faculty perceptions of academic integrity practices at two institutions, gaps between these perceptions, and how these perceptions may correlate with markers of ethical engineering identity formation. We hypothesize that a climate of informed ethical practices surrounding academic integrity supports higher levels of student outcomes on an ethical reasoning assessment. As part of this mixed methods study, engineering students indicated their perceptions via a confidential survey of how well faculty fulfill several best practices for supporting academic integrity: articulating clear policies, preventing cheating, and promoting the value of integrity in class. Students also self-reported their perceived achievement of ethical reasoning and what value they place on it. Student responses are compared with performance on an objective ethical-reasoning exam which involves applying a code of ethics to multiple-choice problems that are modeled after licensing exam ethics questions. Engineering faculty indicated via an anonymized survey and individual interviews their perceptions of how well they fulfill the same best practices for supporting academic integrity as referenced above. Faculty also shared perceptions of the achievement level of student ethical reasoning and what value students place upon it. The gap of student vs. faculty perceptions is compared with student performance on the objective ethical-reasoning exam at one institution. We expected larger perception gaps would correlate to lower ethical reasoning performance. Although our data is not sufficient to support the hypothesis, the results contribute significantly to further investigation and future academic integrity work. Future work beyond the scope of this paper will seek to lower the perception gap by identifying and motivating better faculty support for student academic integrity, which is hoped to lead to higher student outcomes. The work reported in this paper is designed to assess needs and serve as the background to launch future changes in academic integrity education and practices within the two Engineering Schools studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]