Abstract
Introduction: Cheating has always been and continues to be a problem that dental schools have had to deal with and have long tried to eliminate. Student attitudes towards cheating have been the subject of research in the past with one study of particular interest completed in 1994 at Creighton University School of Dentistry. That study served as inspiration for this study.|Purpose: The first purpose of this study was to assess the attitudes towards cheating of pre-clinical and clinical dental students and compare them to previous findings. The second was to examine relationships between level of conscientiousness, overall student satisfaction with their education, and the likelihood of students to take action against their peers should they witness them cheating.|Methods: 263 out of 336 dental students (78.3%) were surveyed at Creighton University School of Dentistry. Participation was voluntary and responses were kept anonymous.|Results: A significant direct effect of conscientiousness on likelihood of doing something in response to cheating was found (c’ = 0.228, p = .006). It was also found that students higher in conscientiousness reported higher levels of satisfaction with their education at Creighton (a = 0.156, p = .003), and those who reported higher levels of satisfaction, in turn, reported a greater likelihood of doing something in response to witnessing cheating (b = .200, p = .039). |Conclusion: Findings suggest that cheating does occur on some level at Creighton University School of Dentistry. A discrepancy was observed between what students think should be done about cheating and what they personally will do about cheating. This raises questions about what is different about an individual who will take action against cheating and one who won’t. It was statistically significant that students who scored higher on a conscientiousness test were not only more likely to be satisfied with their dental education, but also more likely to take some action if they were to witness a student cheat. These findings suggest that admissions teams who include some measure of conscientiousness in their admissions process will benefit from selecting an incoming class that may better police itself when it comes to cheating.