Do Academic Honesty Statements Work?

James Alm (), Patrick Button, Christine Smith and Toni Weiss
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Patrick Button: Tulane University
Christine Smith: Tulane University
Toni Weiss: Tulane University

No 2510, Working Papers from Tulane University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Many colleges have attempted to deal with student cheating by using "academic honesty statements," or statements that students must read and acknowledge that they will follow. In this paper, we conduct a randomized controlled experiment that investigates the impact of academic honesty statements on college student examination performance, using an objective measure of student examination performance as a proxy for student cheating. Overall, we find no statistically significant differences in the test performance of students who are given the academic honesty statements and students who are not given these statements. These results indicate that academic honesty statements do not affect student performance in a significant way, so that their use is unlikely to be a reliable tool in reducing cheating. However, other explanations are possible.

Keywords: Student cheating; academic misconduct; academic integrity; nudges; priming; randomized control trial (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A22 C93 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-11
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