Influence of Personality Traits on Plagiarism Through Collusion in Programming Assignments

TL;DR

This study investigates how personality traits influence plagiarism in programming assignments and finds that personality, rather than academic integrity education, significantly affects plagiarism tendencies.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence linking Big-five personality traits to plagiarism behavior in programming education, highlighting limited impact of integrity education.

Findings

No significant reduction in plagiarism after integrity education.

Extraversion positively correlates with plagiarism.

Conscientiousness negatively correlates with plagiarism.

Abstract

Educating students about academic integrity expectations has been suggested as one of the ways to reduce malpractice in take-home programming assignments. We test this hypothesis using data collected from an artificial intelligence course with 105 participants (N=105) at a university in India. The AI course had two programming assignments. Plagiarism through collusion was quantified using the Measure of Software Similarity (MOSS) tool. Students were educated about what constitutes academic dishonesty and were required to take an honor pledge before the start of the second take-home programming assignment. The two programming assignments were novel and did not have solutions available on the internet. We expected the mean percentage of similar lines of code to be significantly less in the second programming assignment. However, our results show no significant difference in the mean percentage of similar lines of code across the two programming assignments. We also study how the Big-five personality traits affect the propensity for plagiarism in the two take-home assignments. Our results across both assignments show that the extraversion trait of the Big Five personality exhibits a positive association, and the conscientiousness trait exhibits a negative association with plagiarism tendencies. Our result suggests that the policy of educating students about academic integrity will have a limited impact as long as students perceive an opportunity for plagiarism to be present. We explain our results using the Fraud triangle model.