A Study of the Student's Attitude towards Cheating and the Rate of Cheating Among Them and the Predictability of Their Attitude Based on the Implemented Curriculum

This study aimed to identify the students’ attitude toward cheating and the rate of cheating among them as well as the role of the implemented curriculum on it. The researcher obtained the data for the study from a sample of 153 girl students in a high school of Mahvellat city, who were selected based on the random sampling. The instruments used in this study were: (1) attitude towards cheating questionnaire, made by the researcher, (2) educational environment questionnaire that was developed by Wood Ruff and colleagues (1997) and (3) perceived evaluation questionnaire that was developed by Alkharusi (2009). The results confirm that a correlation of 0.88 was observed between the attitude to cheating and committing it. The results of Pearson correlation indicated that there is a negative correlation between student's perceptions of teaching methods, teacher, learning space, learner's academic self-efficacy, mastery appraisal with attitude toward cheating. Also, there is a positive correlation between performance- oriented appraisal and attitude toward cheating. The results of simultaneous Regression indicated that predictor variables can explain 86% of the changes in the ‘attitude toward cheating’ variable synthetically. Among the predictor variables, two variables of mastery-oriented and performance-oriented appraisals can predict the positive attitude toward cheating, but other predictor variables cannot predict this attitude. Also, the findings indicate that the mark of students’ attitude toward cheating is greater than the average value of questionnaire and 96/1 percent of students cheat in the exams and only 3/9 percent of them did not commit cheating.