Plagiarism in student papers and cheating on exams: Results from surveys using special techniques for sensitive questions

Eliciting truthful answers to sensitive questions is an age-old problem in survey research. Respondents tend to underreport socially undesired or illegal behaviors, while overreporting socially desirable ones. To combat such response bias, various techniques have been developed that are geared toward providing the respondent greater anonymity and minimizing the respondent’s feelings of jeopardy. Examples of such techniques are the randomized response technique, the item count technique, and the crosswise model. I will present results from several surveys, conducted among university students, that employ such techniques to measure the prevalence of plagiarism and cheating on exams. User-written Stata programs for analyzing data from such techniques are also presented.