Cheating behavior, anticipated success-failure, confidence, and test importance created by John P. Houston

An experiment with 190 undergraduates studied correlations between actual university classroom cheating behavior (multiple-choice answer copying) and pretest estimates of success, confidence, and test importance. In agreement with J. P. Houston and T. Ziff (1976), answer copying correlated positively with estimates of success. Confidence in these estimates of success also correlated positively with answer copying, while judgments of test importance which were uniformly high, did not. The best prediction of cheating was obtained through a multiple correlation involving estimates of both success and confidence. Results are related to previous findings and to cheating behavior as it may interact with levels of anticipated success and levels of risk incentive.