Academic integrity among engineering undergraduates: Seven years of research by the E^3 Team

Abstract

The E3 Team (Exploring Ethical decision-making in Engineering) is a group of engineering educators and educational researchers who have worked collaboratively since 2000 to understand the underlying causes of academic dishonesty in engineering undergraduates. The team was especially motivated by decades of others’ work showing that, when surveyed, engineering students were among those most likely to report frequently cheating. This paper summarizes some of the team’s more important findings from three major studies that surveyed a total of 1300 undergraduates at eleven institutions. The paper also describes the next phase of the team’s research and presents implications of that work for engineering educators.