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One unfortunate fact of academic life is that many students cheat (e.g., McCabe, Butterfield , & Treviño, 2004; McCabe & Treviño, 1993, 1996; McCabe, Treviño, & Butterfield, 2001). Whether plagiarizing or copying from another student's exam, academic dishonesty rates are high (Bowers, 1964; McCabe & Treviño, 1993) and rising (McCabe & Treviño, 1996; Trenholm, 2006). For example, in 1964 Bowers reported that 26% of students across nine college campuses reported copying from another student's exam. McCabe and Treviño surveyed the same campuses in 1993 and found the rate had increased to 52% (McCabe & Treviño, 2002). As more students perceive college as an inconvenient requirement for employment (Jordan, 2003; Nadelson, 2006), cheating appears to have become a more accepted method of attaining educational goals (Murdock, Miller, & Kohlhardt, 2004).
Online instruction is on the rise as well. According to a recent Sloan-C survey (Allen & Seaman, 2010), the growth rate for online enrollment (17%) continues to outpace the overall growth rate for enrollments in higher education (1.2%). This trend presents new challenges for protecting academic integrity, particularly in online courses where instructors cover large quantities of fact-based information and typically rely on multiple-choice assessments for measuring academic performance (Jordan, 2003; Trenholm, 2006).
Honor codes can reduce cheating on exams (e.g., Konheim-Kalkstein, Stellmack, & Shilkey, 2008; McCabe, Treviño, & Butterfield, 2002 ), but they are less effective on larger campuses, where the social and instructional environment is typically less personal and students are less likely to collectively support a norm of academic integrity (Arnold, Martin, Jinks, & Bigby, 2007) . These results suggest that honor codes might be less effective for online instruction as well because of the physical and psychological distance between online instructors and students. If online students feel socially isolated and are unable to personally connect with their instructor or their peers, then the temptation to cheat may be overwhelming (Gibbons, Mize, & Rogers, 2002). Mastin, Peszka, and Lilly (2009) provided initial evidence that honor codes may be relatively ineffective online. However, they focused on the cheating behaviors of traditional students engaged in an online extra-credit task and did not examine academic integrity among online students completing required assessments.
Three studies were conducted to determine the impact of an honor code on...