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Even 100 years ago, academic dishonesty was an issue of concern to educators at American universities and colleges and the beginnings of honor systems were introduced. Students were expected to be above reproach in all scholastic activities. Nonetheless, a decline in moral conduct was noted as far back at 1927 and a 1964 survey found that both deans and student body presidents ranked academic dishonesty second among various student discipline problems. Students are still expected to be above reproach in all scholastic activities; however, traditional delivery of education is changing. During the fall 2010 term, more than 6.1 million students were enrolled in at least one online course in the United States. This represents an increase of more than a half million online students compared to fall 2009. Online learning and virtual classes offer the freedom from traditional classroom constraints. With the advent of online courses, one of the largest concerns on the part of the faculty and administration is how to ensure that the student is actually learning the material and not cheating when it comes to exams. Today, both students and faculty continue to perceive that cheating occurs more frequently online than in a traditional classroom. In order to obtain online students' perceptions of their behaviors on online exams and other coursework, this study is designed to gauge students' attitudes and beliefs as to whether their behaviors constitute academic dishonesty.

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This study contributes to the literature on first year teachers by identifying complexities and struggles of becoming a teacher and the implications of district-university partnerships to strengthen our educator preparation program. The importance of partnerships with stakeholders, memorandum of agreements to share data, observations of first year teachers by university faculty, employer surveys, and the first year teacher’s perspectives about how well our university prepared them, as well as how they compare with other first year teachers nationally is addressed. Multiple sources of data were used to provide information about completers, individuals that graduated from the educator preparation program. These include state reports, national trends, and review of survey results next to universities across the United States involved in teacher preparation. Graduates of our teacher preparation program have a 93% retention rate after five years of teaching. The national average is 50% after five years.