Based on the theoretical approaches of social capital and institutional trust, this paper seeks to identify contextual factors and conditions behind teacher behaviours which aim to alter the results of standardised tests in the Italian low-stakes accountability system. Numerous studies report significant factors associated with student cheating,…

This study conducted on a sample of 295 Dutch and Italian undergraduate and graduate students aims to investigate how psychopathic personality traits (meanness, boldness and disinhibition) may lead to cheating behavior, and to study whether there are correlations between psychopathic traits, motivation, moral disengagement, the perception of…

The extent and reach of commercial cheating opportunities is ever present; thousands of websites promote differing business models offering assignments in multiple languages and currencies. In addition to commercial companies, students are known to outsource their assignments from friends and family. Assignment outsourcing and contract cheating…

Unethical behaviour has become an increasingly controversial issue in Higher Education institutes. There have been debates about the reasons for the increase in unethical behaviour. But many of those debates contain problems. A key problem has been the lack of empirical results about faculty members' perceptions of their role in the phenomenon,…

Research on contract cheating usually considers most forms of outsourcing combined, although studies have found that students more commonly obtain work from those known to them, rather than from commercial sites; yet little research exists which explores which variables and motivators may be associated with this type of outsourcing. Strategies…

Research misconduct (RM) is an alarming concern worldwide, and especially in Italy, where there is no formal training of young researchers in responsible research practices. The main aim of this study was to map the perceptions and attitudes about RM in a sample of young researchers attending a one-week intensive course on methodology, ethics and…

We study if the Italian school system suffers from gender bias when judging students. To this aim, we use a differences-in-differences approach that compares the teachers' assessments and the standardized test scores that the students receive during the school year. We have census data for all Italian fifth and sixth graders in two different…

Academic integrity issues, e.g. plagiarism, continue to plague higher education across the globe. Research has noted that the identification and tolerance of cheating behaviors varies dependent upon local culture. This quantitative, comparative study investigated the potential differences among actual rates of incidence of plagiarism among…

In this paper we investigate the relationship between social capital and cheating behaviour in standardized tests. Given the low-stakes nature of these tests, we interpret the widespread presence of cheating as a signal of low trust towards central education authorities and as lack of respect for the rule of law. We find that cheating is…

We use a natural experiment to show that the presence of an external examiner has both a direct and an indirect negative effect on the performance of monitored classes in standardized educational tests. The direct effect is the difference in the test performance between classes of the same school with and without external examiners. The indirect…