• Data from the University of Montevallo (Steik et al.). This study shows that the students are not always malicious. In many cases they are not informed and have different standards. This may be corrected with proper information.
• Data from Arizona State University (Davidson et al) on incidence of cheating among undergraduate students. Students perceive that their grade depends more on obtaining the expected results, in part because instructors tell them so. This is compounded by the fact that students do not have a chance to repeat the study, and therefore feel they must manipulate date to get good grades.
• Data from the University of South Alabama (Turrens) reporting perceived changes in attitudes after taking a course addressing ethical issues and scientific and academic misconduct. The majority of students indicate that they feel better prepared to make ethical decisions and less inclined to become involved in academic misconduct.

Group discussion:

Several participants brought up some of the arguments used by students to justify academic misconduct including:

• Current curricula for non majors is perceived by students as non responsive to their needs. (Need to pass the course to achieve unrelated goals).
• Someone else gets always better grades because s/he cheats
• Need to obtain good grades for future goals (i.e., med school)
• They may not have known that they were cheating when they did it (for example, plagiarism).

Other comments: 

• There are significant differences in the reported incidence of academic misconduct across campuses. This may reflect various factors, including students not telling the truth, different student populations (for example, Senior vs. Sophomores), etc. 
• Even though students feel less inclined to become involved in misconduct, their attitude may not reflect future behavior. In other words, they may think they will not cheat and do it again.
• A faculty member who teaches Biostatistics discussed how she addressed the questions of undergraduates concerning ways of dealing with outliers in a set .of data values. The idea is that, if a student wants will eliminate and outlier, s/he must have a valid reason. Credibility depends on how serious is the approach to data processing.
• Dr. Davidson also mentioned that the attitude towards misconduct of students conducting directed research is different from that of students taking regular courses. For example, they may fabricate data points in a lab report for a course, but they would never manipulate data from their own research.