This study was concerned with ident

This study was concerned with identifying and classifying the specific techniques that students use to cheat during in-class exams; it was exploratory in nature, designed to elicit detailed narratives. Consequently, no hypotheses were tested. Rather than using pre-formulated surveys and coding schemes, students were instructed to be as detailed and as descriptive as possible in their narratives. The narrative responses were then inductively categorized into recurring analytical patterns (see Emerson et al., 1995). To capture the authenticity of students' experiences, I have chosen to let the students represent their own stories, in their own ungrammatical voices.

The data for this study were collected from a medium-sized regional university in the Midwest (MU) and a medium-sized regional university in the South (SU) in the spring of 2003 and fall of 2003. The subjects were chosen from a convenience sample of 128 undergraduate students, 72 male and 56 female, who had enrolled in an introductory criminal justice/criminology course. Although participation was voluntary, and for extra credit, two respondents did not give consent to use their responses so they were excluded from the analysis; furthermore, seven respondents stated outright that they had never cheated on any exam, so their responses were not included in the substantive portions of the paper. While it could be argued that these two courses are not representative of the university population as a whole, the two courses fulfilled the general education requirements of both universities; hence, students from a broad range of majors and disciplines, as well as class standing, were represented in the sample.

Each student was asked to complete a semi-structured questionnaire. [2] The students were asked two questions:

Have you ever cheated during an in-class examination? (Cheating was defined as copying a test from others, using unauthorized crib notes and "cheat sheets" during an exam.)
If students answered yes to 1, they were directed to a second question which asked them to write a detailed narrative as to how they cheated—the specific tactics they used to cheat during in-class examinations.
There were wide variations in the length and detail of students' narratives, ranging from one paragraph to several pages; for the purposes of this paper, narratives that are rich in descriptions and representative of the analytical category under discussion are chosen as examples.