BLOG

If you haven’t felt like cheating at least once in your life, you aren’t human.

I sometimes see evidence of cheating in the papers I edit. Cheating can come in many forms, for example, surveying or interviewing only people you know or can conveniently reach, or fudging the data to support your foregone conclusions (falsifying or fabricating data). The most common form of cheating I see is plagiarism, which I will address in my next blog post. Today I ponder why dissertators may feel tempted to cheat.

I can say without any doubt that I am completely human. I cheated in second grade when I erased my arithmetic errors and tried desperately to fill in the correct answers without my teacher seeing. I’m sure she saw it all. I dreaded the public humiliation of being wrong even more than I dreaded getting caught. What a dilemma for a 7-year-old!

Research has rules. Following the rules associated with scholarly integrity are similar to following the rules of any other field. Driving has rules and consequences if you break the rules. Scholarly research and writing is no different. Temptation to cheat can happen to anyone, anytime. Most of us don’t know what heinousness we are capable of until we are pushed into a corner with our backs against the wall. Picture someone deprived of sleep, subsisting on sugar and carbs, with burgeoning flu symptoms and a deadline to submit at midnight Eastern time. That person is at great risk of cutting corners, if not outright cheating.

All about plagiarism for dissertators whose backs are against the wall

Reasons why we feel tempted to cheat

People cheat, or think about cheating, in their academic writing and research for a variety of reasons. Cheating can take the form of buying essays, plagiarizing others’ words, falsifying or fabricating data, even outright lying about our study results. Cheating happens, in graduate school (Google cheating in graduate school and prepare to be shocked) as well as after graduate school. The big drivers behind cheating are fear, laziness, a sense of entitlement, a desire to beat the system, and unrealistic assumptions.

Fear

We fear that we will fail, that our work won’t be good enough, that we aren’t smart enough … or we fear that we might actually succeed and have to live up to some vague standard of perfection. We fear we will miss a deadline or be criticized; we fear that everyone will realize we aren’t really cut out for doctoral-level work. We fear that the world will discover we are frauds, that we can’t spell, that we are too stupid to learn statistics, that we’ll never understand how to write in English. Fear, fear, fear, a whole lot of vague fear. If the thought of cheating gives you a sense of relief, as if you just dodged a bullet, or eases the pressure in your chest so you can finally breathe, then you know fear is your enemy.

Laziness

Maybe you aren’t scared, maybe you are just lazy. You may once have had good intentions, but now that the assignment is due, you shrug and submit your half-baked paper, because you can’t be bothered to find those missing sources or add those missing citations. All that detail work is not really your scene. If anyone notices, you can always fix it later. The thought of following every darn detail and nailing it to the paper seems like an unnecessary amount of grunt work, best left to eggheads. You tell yourself you aren’t really a cheater, per se—you are just pragmatic and efficient.

Sense of entitlement

You may have signed up for this doctoral program with no intention of actually doing all the work necessary to earn it. You’ve coasted by on your good writing skills until now, why would graduate school be any different? Adding citations is good for other dissertators, but you should be exempt from that rule and from all the other silly research rules that seem like they don’t apply to your unique and special situation and status. You wouldn’t use the word cheating to describe what you are tempted to do, but whatever—you are fine with making up your own rules. The problem is, you don’t learn from your mistakes. You repeatedly make the same errors, because you don’t take direction.

Desire to beat the system

Getting one over on the system can be a sport for some of us. Are you pumped up and excited at the prospect of testing the limits of what you can get away with? You may have quickly discovered during your coursework that your mentors weren’t all that nitpicky—they didn’t call you on every missing citation. It’s easy to assume you were winning and that you would keep on winning when you presented your research plan. A vague proposal is okay with you—you will pull the rabbit out of the hat at the last minute, figure it out on the fly, make it by the seat of your pants, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, crunch a few numbers, and slide into home victorious. A little fudge here, a little nudge there … it’s all part of the game, right?

Unrealistic assumptions

You may have enrolled in your doctoral program with the assumption that it would be as easy to earn as your Master’s degree was. You may have recently come to the conclusion that you are in over your head with this doctoral research project. Your struggle to get your proposal approved could be an indication that you aren’t ready for doctoral-level work, but you are in too deep to back out now. You feel the only good option is to cheat and hope you don’t get caught.

Consequences of cheating

Can you relate to any of these temptations to cheat? If at least one doesn’t make you feel a bit queasy, you aren’t awake right now: Your eyes are traveling the text but the conductor is sacked out in the caboose, if you know what I mean. Maybe you need to take a break and think about your academic career. Because that is what you risk when you give in to the temptation to cheat in your research and writing.

You aren’t the only one who has something to lose when you cheat. Think about the people who haven’t been helped and may have been harmed or killed because unethical researchers falsified data, leading to inaccurate conclusions.

Please don’t lie to yourself. You may think it won’t happen to you, but pressure can blow our ethical boundaries to smithereens. It can happen to anyone. It has happened to many: Wikipedia shows a list of research cheaters here.

The most common form of cheating is plagiarism. Next week I will discuss plagiarism, because I consider it a scourge, a veritable plague upon dissertator land.

For more insight into cheating and plagiarism, and for help getting your proposal approved, check out my book.

Dissertators often struggle with theory. Virtually all dissertators must grapple with theory when they propose their research projects to their graduate school reviewers. Many whose proposals I’ve edited seem to think they can just ignore theory altogether. They seem to have a hard time choosing a theory, applying a theory… or even understanding why they need a theory in the first place.

The two fundamental theoretical approaches—deductive and inductive reasoning—offer dissertators two viewpoints to help them organize their thinking when they plan their projects.

Deductive reasoning

Deductive reasoning starts with a general theory about how something works. We collect observations to confirm the theory. It’s a birds-eye view of your topic.

For example, we can start with a theory, like this:

PROPOSED THEORY: Dissertators who don’t get enough sleep are cranky and dissatisfied with their doctoral experience.

Using that theory, we write a statement (hypothesis) that we can test: “Getting at least 8 hours of sleep a night significantly reduces dissertator dissatisfaction.” Then we collect observations of dissertators who get 8 hours of sleep per night and compare them to the data for dissertators who don’t. I bet the theory is confirmed: Dissertators who don’t get enough sleep act a lot like cranky teenagers who don’t want to go to school.

What can go wrong? The main drawback with research approaches that use deductive reasoning is the fact that the entire research project depends on the validity of the original theory or premise. The premise is assumed to be true. If the premise is incorrect, your conclusions may be valid, based on your theory, but only for that sample. Generalizing or transferring your conclusions to some other population or setting may be impossible.

For example, you might assume that toy preferences among six-year-olds are determined by gender.

PROPOSED THEORY: Girls prefer dolls and boys prefer toy trucks.

If you think this, you wouldn’t be alone: the toy industry has assumed this theory for years. Children may not know much about theory, but they know what they like. With two brothers, I had many opportunities to enjoy toy trucks, racing cars, little green army men, and cap guns. However, I also had my share of Barbies and troll dolls. Preferences vary by child, but overall, apparently, there is evidence to confirm the theory that children’s toy preferences are gender-typed from an early age. See here and here. But not all researchers have agreed: see here.

Your study of 50 six-year-olds may confirm or disconfirm this theory, thus adding to the body of knowledge on the topic and helping parents feel a little less guilty about watching their little girls grab for Barbies and their little boys grab for Legos.

For more on deductive reasoning, visit one of my favorite websites, changing minds.

Inductive reasoning

Inductive reasoning works from the specific and generates a theory from the observations. We observe some phenomenon, analyze the observation data, draw some inferences about it (our theory), and then collect more data to (we hope) confirm our conclusions.

1. Observe
2. Analyze
3. Infer
4. Confirm

Instead of starting with a theory, we collect observations of a phenomenon and build a theory from the ground up. That’s why grounded theory approaches used in qualitative research are considered inductive.

For example, you notice dissertators in the School of Education seem to sit around the library and cry a lot. You wonder what’s up. You talk to 10 dissertators from different programs and find some similarities and differences in their responses. Based on these patterns, you formulate a tentative hypothesis:

PROPOSED THEORY: Education dissertators worry more about everything, compared to dissertators in the business or computer departments, who usually worry about nothing.

Your data led you to generate this proposed theory. Thus, out of your data comes a broad theory about the tenderhearted education dissertator. You didn’t start with a theory: you got down and dirty with the data and the theory emerged from the patterns and themes you extracted from your data.

What can go wrong? The main issue with inductive reasoning approaches is that data collection can be an open-ended process. This is primarily a concern among qualitative dissertators. You can’t know ahead of time how big your sample needs to be, because you plan to collect data until you reach data saturation—that point at which new data generate no new insights.

That might sound like fun to you, but it’s a red flag for your Chair, Committee, and grad school reviewers. They are nervous enough letting a novice researcher collect data from human subjects: They know what can happen when overly enthusiastic interviewers go off the rails. What do I mean? Think about it: Pumped up (desperate) dissertators may badger, cajole, and otherwise manipulate their subjects into talking, thus injecting bias in their data, and setting up potential IRB issues for the institution that gave these dissertators permission to conduct research. That is why the idea of giving you a blank check to talk to an unknown number of people makes IRB reviewers shiver in their boots.

For more on inductive reasoning, visit changing minds.

Which approach should you use?

Most dissertators’ projects fall into the category of deductive reasoning. They start with a theory, collect some data, and see how their findings confirm or disconfirm the theory. This time-tested approach is safe and familiar, has lots of support in the literature, and your reviewers know and understand it. You are more likely to get your dissertation proposal approved if you use a deductive reasoning approach.

However, for all you off-the-beaten-path dissertators, if you can convince your Chair and Committee members that you can implement it successfully, the inductive approach is for you.

Misusing theory (or not using theory at all) is one of the reasons you might fail to get your dissertation proposal approved. If you need some help with your proposal, check out my book, available now through Amazon in both print and Kindle formats.