James M. Lang argues that classroom cheating has less to do with the students and more to do with the structure of coursework:
[C]heating levels are fairly high, but they have always been so. The better question to ask is why. Duke University researcher Dan Ariely and his colleagues have conducted dozens of experiments designed to see what makes people willing to engage in acts of cheating and dishonesty in their everyday lives. Their findings have been remarkably consistent: most people, under the right circumstances, are willing to engage in small acts of dishonesty. This seems to be a part of our human nature. With enough incentives in front of us, most of will cheat at least a little bit.
Fortunately, Ariely’s formulation has a happy corollary:
Since most people are willing to cheat under the right circumstances, our best approach to reducing cheating will be to change those circumstances. If we open our minds to this possibility, we will have to reconsider the nature of the learning environments we are presenting to our students at both the high school and college level. When we do so, we might find that a significant portion of college and university courses feature precisely the types of circumstances that induce cheating.
Daniel Luzer gets specific:
If you make students write papers by proposing ideas, submitting multiple drafts, they won’t cheat on the papers. Likewise, if you give examinations that are based on answers to essay questions (rather than Scantron multiple choice tests), students can’t cheat.
This isn’t to say students aren’t 100 percent responsible for the moral error of cheating, but if you want them to learn that requires more effort on the part of the teachers. This higher quality examination strategy is not just good for preventing cheating; it’s also a better way for students to learn.
The Dish 