Plus ca change ….

I was interested to read in the June issue's Research Digest section about the paper by David Playfoot and colleagues on students' use of AI tools such as ChatGPT in their work. The authors came to the conclusion that apathy in their degree work was a main reason for students' use of such tools.

I was reminded of some research we did some 30 years ago looking at reasons for students engaging in various types of cheating behaviours (Newstead, Franklyn-Stokes & Armstead, Individual differences in student cheating, Journal of Educational Psychology, 1996). 

Obviously, we were not looking at AI tools, which did not exist then, nor even at internet cheating since the internet was then in its infancy. Rather we looked at a variety of cheating behaviours that existed back then such as copying other students' work and using crib notes in exams.

We found a relationship between students' reasons for studying and their cheating, and in particular what we called 'stop-gap' reasons for studying was a good predictor of the frequency of cheating. This measure bears much similarity to Playfoot et al's 'degree apathy' measure.

The types of cheating might have changed radically over the past few decades, but the reasons for doing it seem to have remained much the same.

Steve Newstead