In their best-selling book Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner stated: “Who cheats? Well, just about anyone, if the stakes are right . . . . Cheating . . . is a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor.” Evidence that some people cheat surfaced in the summer of 2011 when the superintendent of the board of the Atlanta school district resigned after a report documented widespread cheating on standardized tests that implicated officials from about 80 percent of Atlanta’s elementary and middle schools. In 2015, an Atlanta jury convicted 11 teachers as a result of the cheating scandal.
Sources: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, FreakonomicsNew York: HarperCollins 2005, pages 24–25; Patrik Jonsson, “America’s biggest teacher and principal cheating scandal unfolds in Atlanta,” Christian Science Monitor, July 5, 2011; Mary Beth McCauley, “Atlanta school cheating: When teachers cheat, what do you tell the kids?” Christian Science Monitor, September 5, 2013; and Valerie Strauss, “How and Why Convicted Teachers Cheated on Standardized Tests,” Washington Post, April 1, 2015.
Question: For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you would never cheat. Under what circumstances are students in general more or less likely to cheat on an economics examination?
Sample Solution