Influence of Personality Traits on Plagiarism Through Collusion in Programming Assignments

Publication
Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research

We tested the hypothesis that educating students about academic integrity would reduce malpractice using data from an AI course with 105 students. However, we did not find a significant reduction in code similarity between the two programming assignments. Additionally, we examined how Big Five personality traits influence plagiarism tendencies. We found that extraversion was positively associated with plagiarism, while conscientiousness was negatively associated. The results suggest that educating students alone may have a limited impact if opportunities for plagiarism persist.