Investigating students' understanding of the relationship between academic integrity and professional integrity in construction

Abstract

It is assumed that construction management and civil engineering technology students are aware of what constitutes a violation of academic integrity (AI). Academic integrity is addressed at the beginning of every course they have taken though the various syllabi and discussions with instructors and other academic personnel. Violations of professional integrity (PI) are usually addressed through various courses and students are expected to have some understanding as to what constitutes acceptable behavior regarding maters of PI. It is believed though, that students cannot grasp the relationships between violations of AI to their equivalent violations of PI. To investigate the level of students' understanding of that relationship, the authors conducted a series of three separate and anonymous surveys from representative construction management and civil engineering technology undergraduate classes at a four year institution. The first survey investigated the level of understanding of what constitutes a violation of AI. This was performed to validate the assumption that students understand AI and they recognize a violation when they see one. The survey included a series of actions such as "Taking an exam for another student" and the students were asked to identify if these actions can be described as "cheating", "unethical but not cheating", and "neither unethical not cheating". In addition the students were asked to state the number of times they performed or witnessed these actions within the past year. The second survey looked at the students' understanding of what constitutes a violation of PI in the construction industry, by answering whether several scenarios represent a violation of PI or not. The third survey in the series attempted to investigate whether the students could link the violations of AI to their equivalent violations of PI. The time between the surveys was between 1 to 2 weeks and students from all undergraduate levels were surveyed. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2014.