Directions and dimensions in managing cheating and plagiarism of IT students

The problem of cheating at university is a widespread and long-standing issue. There are a variety of strategies that are used to address the problem which broadly fall into the areas of education, prevention, detection and consequence. An important consideration when deciding to tackle the problem of cheating is that the effectiveness of methods for addressing cheating are not necessarily the same for the different types of cheating. This paper presents an investigation of cheating practice of undergraduate IT students using a factor analysis to determine categories of cheating behaviour and influences on this behaviour. The implications arising from this analysis for addressing cheating are then examined and recommendations made for strategies which are appropriate for particular types of cheating.