CHEATING YOUR WAY TO THE TOP:

ACADEMIC DISHONESTY AS A PRINCIPAL-AGENT GAME

BY:
CHARLES PRESCOTT
COASTAL CAROLINA UNIVERSITY

ABSTRACT:
Substantial research has gone into the amount of cheating students engage in
and their perceptions of what cheating is. However, there is not a significant body
of work on the perceptions of risk in cheating and the actions of students in
higher education. Most prior game theory analysis of higher education uses the
signaling game model. This model while effective in describing the purpose of
seeking higher education does not adequately explain the behavior of students
while seeking higher education. A better model of higher education is a principal
agent game, in which the goal of all parties is to maximize gains. Attempting to
gain a competitive advantage in short to cheat, best maximizes the resources
put in to higher education by the student, in the pursuit of a degree, the signal,
described in the signaling game model of higher education. It is my contention
that the agents in the game, students, do not engage in the optimal game play
strategy, cheating, because of an over estimation of the risk involved.

Within our society it is widely accepted that a college education is essential to any
particular students future economic success. The benefits of higher education are well
known higher future income, faster career advancement, the social benefits of
membership in the educated classes, as well as an assortment of other advantages that are
economic and/or social. The pursuit of a college degree has become an economic
necessity for the middle class, a key indicator of future livelihood. The attainment of said
degree is a crowning academic achievement for the vast majority students who enter into
higher education. The pursuit of the degree is extremely resource and time intensive
requiring a dedication that spans years and cost several thousand dollars. The purpose of
said degree is to prepare the student for future endeavors that require the skills that they
supposedly gain in higher education critical thinking, the ability to dedicate oneself to a
long term project, the ability to learn new material, a general understanding of western
civilizations core principles and ideas, amongst other skills that are gained in the pursuit
of a undergraduate education. Within the market place of potential employees a college
degree indicates that the applicant has gained this skill set.
When expressed in game theory terminology higher education is can be described
as a signaling game.1 A signaling game is a contest in which the actor, in this case the
student, indicates to the principal, in this case a potential employer, by a commonly
understood signal that they have a certain asset or capability. In the case of higher
education the signal, possessing a degree, is meant to indicate to the principal that they
have the characteristics of a college graduate. It is widely acknowledged that outside of
certain specific fields of study2 that the subject matter knowledge that a student gains in
1

Swinkels, 1999
These majors are those that are designed to train the recipient in a specific set of skills
such as accounting or nursing.
2

the pursuit of an undergraduate education is largely irrelevant to the degree holders

future employers. What future employers are looking for is the signal of a teachable and
reliable future employee.

Students, by gaining an undergraduate education, are

attempting to provide potential employers with the signals used when selecting potential
employees from the applicant pool.
The signal game model of higher education is fundamentally flawed as a tool for
explaining the behavior of students while engaged in study for an undergraduate degree
because it only explains the purpose of the degree, not the activity and resources involved
in pursuing it. The signal game only describes student strategies for the pursuit of higher
education at the selection level of varying degree programs at different schools. The
signaling game explains why Ivy League graduates are more valuable in the marketplace,
but does not explain by what means a degree is sought or the strategies utilized by
students to achieve graduation. Signaling theory explains that a degree has a purpose and
what that purpose is.
The existing research on academic dishonesty tends to ask the question Why
do students cheat? and views academic dishonesty as an aberrant behavior that is at best
morally suspect and has been equated with criminal deviance. 3

This view of academic

dishonesty emerges from the institutional view of higher education as a cultural good, not
as an economic good. If higher education is a cultural good cheating is a strategy that
always results in failure to attain the goal education. You simply cannot cheat your way
to smart. However, the institutional view that is put forward by the academic side of the
university is one that is inconsistent with the marketing material and methodology that is
used to attract students. Job placement rates are a common feature of college admissions
3

Bunn Et Al (1992)

departments websites, a clear acknowledgement from the business and administrative

side of the university system of the economic nature of the product being produced.
The game that best describes the pursuit of a higher education is in fact the
principal-agent game. A principal-agent game is a two-person game that describes the
exchange or allocation of resources, in this case academic credentials, between the
players. Seeking a degree is more specifically a type of principal agent game known as a
monitoring game. In this game the principal, the professor in this case, decides whether
to trust or not to trust the student, the agent, to behave honestly. The decision to monitor
comes with costs to the principal, as it is simply easier to reuse test over a period of years,
assign all students the same paper, grade other work while proctoring an exam, and other
trusting actions on the part of the instructor. Additionally there is a significant time cost
to pursuing the judicial process against a student; a cost that a cumulative 34.2% of
respondents in the Coultar study indicated that it was prohibitively difficult to punish
cheating.4 For the student the question then becomes to cheat or not to cheat. By
cheating the student is risking punishment, but gains a competitive advantage versus their
peers. By not cheating the student is abiding by the institutional rules, but is risking the
loss of a relative position to their peers that do decide to pursue a competitive advantage,
cheating, however they are at no risk of punishment for violating the institutional mores
of academic integrity.5
If cheating is a game play strategy with inherent risk then those risk must be
defined and clarified. A relatively common belief is that the consequence of academic
dishonesty is expulsion from the institution that one is attending, such as is shared by the
4
5

Coaltar, 2007 (Table 2B)

See Appendix 1 for game tree.

US Military Service Academies. This model of punishment is referred to as deterrence,

the idea being that the punishment is so severe that no amount of risk is acceptable.
However this model of punishment is rare in academia. Survey data shows that the
actions taken by professors are usually much less severe, the most common action
reported by professors being to report the student to the dean (92%), followed by to fail
the student on the assignment the student cheated on (67.1%). 6 However the likely of
getting caught is extremely low, in the Coaltar study of 2417 university professors the
survey respondents had discovered an average of less one cheater per respondent in the
last two years.8 Whitley in his review of 107 different studies on cheating found a mean
of 70.4% of students engaging in at least some form of academic dishonesty. 9 Using self
reported plagiarism as the only definition of academic dishonesty; Whitleys literature
review found a mean of 47%, across 9 studies, of students engaged that specific form of
cheating.10 This survey data leads to results that can be extrapolated from the statistics,
assuming an average class size of 20 students and 4 classes per semester, over a period of
two years that a minimum 225 of the 320 students within those average professors classes
engage in some form of academic dishonesty and minimum of 150 of the 320 students
engaged in plagiarism.
Given the risk involved and the less than 1% chance of getting caught and
punished the optimal game play strategy is to cheat. By cheating the student, the agent in
this game, gains the benefit of higher education, a degree, without the associated time and
6

Coaltar, 2007 (table 2A)

73 usable responses
8
Coaltar, 2007 (table 4)
9
Whitley, 1998 (this includes all forms of academic dishonesty, defined as unauthorized
cooperation on homework, plagiarism, or cheating on exams.)
10
Whitley, 1998
7

labor cost of pursuing a degree. The costs of not cheating are extensive losses in time,
resources, and a greatly increased stress level. Cheating allows the student to gain a
degree and the associated economic benefits with those costs. Additionally, even if
caught cheating the penalties are so mild that they have no real deterrent effect on
cheating behavior. The worst-case scenario of the expulsion from one school still leaves
open the possibility of enrolling in another institution that has an open enrollment policy
and transferring the already attained credits to the new institution. Furthermore the risk is
reduced by the strategy of only cheating in some classes, such as only cheating in classes
that are academically rigorous for which there is a clear benefit to cheating. Applying
this strategy allows the student to engage in the Monitoring game with almost no risk of
being caught.
Within the literature the question almost universally asked, upon determining the
rates of cheating, is Why do students cheat?11

This is fundamentally the wrong

question - it does not acknowledge the benefits of cheating or its nearly complete lack of
risk. Given the cheating strategies time and resource usage advantages, the question is
why dont all students cheat? The difference between the optimal strategy and actual
participant behavior is statistically significant because the nearly one third of students
who do not cheat are not gaining the full benefit of their strategy because in many cases
the peers that they are competing against for class rank, GPA, and future economic
benefits are engaged in the optimal strategy - cheating.

11

Whitley (1998), Jensena et al (2001), Jordan (2001), Bunn et al (1992), McCabe et al

(1997 & 2001), King et al (2009)

Bibliography
Chula G. King, Roger W. Guyette, Jr. , Chris Piotrowski. 2009. "Online Exams and Cheating: An
Empirical Analysis of Business Students Views." in The Journal of Educators Online,
vol. 6.
Donald L. McCabe, Linda Klebe Trevino. 1997. "Individual and Contextual Influences on
Academic Dishonesty: A Multicampus Investigation." Research in Higher Education
38:379-396.
Donald L. McCabe, Linda Klebe Trevino, Kenneth D. Butterfield. 2001. "Cheating in Academic
Institutions: A Decade of Research." Ethics & Bahavior 11:219-232.
Douglas N. Bunn, Steven B. Caudill and Daniel M. Gropper. 1992. "Crime in the Classroom: An
Economic Analysis of Undergraduate Student Cheating Behavior." The Journal of
Economic Education 23:197-207.
Jordan, Augustus E. 2001. "College Student Cheating: The Role of Motivation, Percieved
Norms, and Knowledge of Institutional Policy." Pp. 233-247 in Academic Dishonesty:
Special Issue of Ethics & Behavior/Number 3, edited by B. E. W. Patricia Keith-Spiegel:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Lene Arnett Jensena, Jeffrey Jensen Arnettb, S. Shirley Feldmanc and Elizabeth Cauffmand.
2001. "It's Wrong, But Everybody Does It: Academic Dishonesty among High School
and College Students." Contemporary Educational Psychology 27:209-228.
Swinkels, Jeroen M. 1999. "Education Signalling with Preemptive Offers." the Review of
Economic Studies 66:949-970.
Terry Coalter, Chi Lo Lim, Tekle Wanorie. 2007. "Factors that Influence Faculty Actions: A
Study on Faculty Responses to Academic Dishonesty." in International Journal for the
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, vol. 1.
Whitley, Bernard E. 1998. "FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH CHEATING AMONG COLLEGE
STUDENTS: A Review." Research in Higher Education 39:235-274.

Appendix 1
Game Tree for a Monitoring Game
PRINCIPAL

AGENT

RESULT

CAUGHT

Cheat
NOT CAUGHT

Monitor
Dont Cheat

NOT CAUGHT

NOT CAUGHT

Not Monitor

CAUGHT

Cheat
NOT CAUGHT

Dont Cheat

NOT CAUGHT

NOT CAUGHT