Academic Dishonesty: Do cheating students learn from punishment? Scenario:
You catch a student cheating on a graded assessment. While you are required to report them to a student-affairs administrator, it is up to you, the instructor, how to grade the student on the assessment.
The most common response seems to be to give the student a zero on the assessment. If this is an exam, this may mean failing the course.
Question:
Is punishing a cheating student by failing them useful because it results in learning (either by the individual cheater, or by the community at large because of the message it sends), or because it weeds out students who are dishonest?
I would appreciate any references to the effectiveness of punishment for academic dishonesty leading to changed behavior(s).
Note: If a student cheats on assessments, it is clear that you will not have sufficient data to grade their knowledge or abilities there. This question is not about whether we should accept work completed via cheating, but whether rewarding the behavior with a failing exam/course grade is effective in some way. Answers that boil down to &quot;but what else can we do&quot; probably answer a different question not being asked here.
In my opinion, yes. They learned to cheat by seeing their classmates cheat, and cheating is a learned behavior. Since cheating was learned, they can learn from punishment, that this will negatively affect their reputation as a student and their future.