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Literature Review: Academic Dishonesty – What Causes It, How to Prevent It

by Thomas Keith | Nov 16, 2018 | Instructional design

Note:  For further information on academic dishonesty and academic integrity, please see our series Combating Academic Dishonesty . Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Academic dishonesty, which encompasses behaviors such as cheating, plagiarism, and falsification of data or citations, is a widespread and troubling phenomenon in higher education.  (For the full spectrum of behaviors that qualify as academic dishonesty, see Berkeley City College’s What Is Academic Dishonesty? )  It may be as simple as looking over a classmate’s shoulder during a quiz or as elaborate as hiring a ghostwriter online for a course paper, but whatever the method employed, academic dishonesty harms the learning experience and gives cheaters an unfair advantage over those who abide by the rules.  This post examines some of the chief factors that lead to academic dishonesty among college students, as determined by empirical research in the field, and offers suggestions to faculty and instructors on ways to reduce the likelihood of dishonest conduct among their students.

What Causes Academic Dishonesty?

There is no single explanation for the occurrence of dishonest behavior in college.  Studies suggest that most students realize academic dishonesty is morally wrong, but various outside factors or pressures may serve as “neutralizers,” allowing students to suppress their feelings of guilt and justify their dishonest acts to themselves (Baird 1980; Haines et al. 1986; Hughes and McCabe 2006).  In certain cases, dishonest behavior may arise not from willful disregard for the rules of academic integrity, but from ignorance of what those rules are.  Some common reasons for students’ engaging in academic dishonesty are given below.

Poor time management

Particularly in their early years of college, many students have difficulties with managing their time successfully.  Faced with demands on their out-of-class time from athletics, extracurricular clubs, fraternities and sororities, etc., they may put off studying or working on assignments until it is too late for them to do a satisfactory job.  Cheating then appears attractive as a way to avoid failure (Haines et al. 1986).

Academic pressures

Sometimes a student must maintain a certain GPA in order to receive merit-based financial aid, to participate in athletics, or even to continue receiving financial support from his/her family. Even high-achieving students may turn to academic dishonesty as a way to achieve their target GPA.  Academic pressures can be worsened in courses that are graded on a curve: with the knowledge that only a fixed number of As can be awarded, students may turn to dishonest methods of surpassing their classmates (Whitley 1998; Carnegie Mellon University ).

In very large classes, students may feel anonymous; if the bulk of their interaction is with teaching assistants, they may regard the instructor as distant and unconcerned with their performance.  This can increase the temptation to cheat, as students rationalize their dishonest behavior by assuming that the instructor “doesn’t care” what they do.  Not surprisingly, this can often be a danger in online courses, since course sizes can be huge and students do not normally interact with their instructors face-to-face ( Carnegie Mellon University ).

Failure to understand academic conventions

The “rules” of academic writing often appear puzzling to students, particularly those who have not had extensive practice with academic writing in high school.  The Internet has arguably exacerbated this problem; the easy availability of information (accurate or otherwise) on websites has led many students to assume that all information sources are de facto public property and need not be cited, which leads to unintentional plagiarism.  Faculty and instructors should not take for granted that their students simply “know” when they must cite sources and how they should do so (Perry 2008).  In addition, the ready availability of websites on every topic imaginable has had a deleterious effect on students’ ability to assess sources critically.  Some students simply rely upon whichever site comes up at the top of a Google search, without considering the accuracy or potential biases of the information with which they are being presented.

Cultural factors

Related to the above, international students may face particular challenges in mastering the conventions of academic writing.  They do not necessarily share Western/American understandings of what constitutes “originality,” intellectual property rights, and so forth, and it often takes time and practice for them to internalize the “rules” fully, especially if English is not their first language.  In addition, students who come from cultures where collaborative work is common may not realize that certain assignments require them to work entirely on their own (Currie 1998; Pecorari 2003; Hughes and McCabe 2006; Abasi and Graves 2008).

The academic pressures common to all college students can be particularly acute for international students.  In some cultures (e.g. those of East Asia) excellent academic performance at the university level is vital for securing good jobs after graduation, and students may therefore believe that their futures depend upon receiving the highest possible grades.  When a student’s family is making sacrifices to send him/her overseas for college, s/he may be concerned about “letting the family down” by doing poorly in school, which can make academic dishonesty all the more tempting.

Low-Stakes Assignments

While some people may think of cheating as a risk only on high-stakes assignments (course papers, final exams, and the like), it can easily occur on low-stakes assignments as well.  In fact, the very lack of grade weight that such assignments bear can encourage dishonesty: students may conclude that since an assignment has little or no bearing on their course grade, it “doesn’t matter” whether or not they approach it honestly.  For this reason, it is vital to stress to students the importance of honest conduct on all assignments, whether big or small.  The University does not take grade weight into account when deciding whether academic dishonesty has occurred; plagiarism is plagiarism and cheating is cheating, even if the assignment in question is worth zero points.

Technology and Academic Dishonesty

The rapidly increasing sophistication of digital technology has opened up new avenues for students bent on academic dishonesty.  Beyond simply cutting-and-pasting from webpages, an entire Internet economy has sprung up that offers essays for students to purchase and pass off as their own.  Students may also use wireless technology such as Bluetooth to share answers during exams, take pictures of exams with their smartphones, and the like (McMurtry 2001; Jones, Reid, and Bartlett 2008; Curran, Middleton, and Doherty 2011).  Research suggests that the use of technology creates a “distancing” effect that makes students’ guilt about cheating less acute ( Vanderbilt University ).

How Can Faculty and Instructors Combat Academic Dishonesty?

There is no panacea to prevent all forms of dishonest behavior.  That said, at each step of the learning design process, there are steps that faculty and instructors can take to help reduce the likelihood of academic dishonesty, whether by making it more difficult or by giving students added incentive to do their work honestly.

Course Management and Syllabus Design

The sooner students are informed about the standards of conduct they should adhere to, the greater the likelihood that they will internalize those standards (Perry 2010).  This is why it is worthwhile for faculty to devote a portion of their syllabus to setting standards for academic integrity.  Consider setting the tone for your course by offering a clear definition of what constitutes academic dishonesty, the procedure you will follow if you suspect that dishonest behavior has occurred, and the penalties culprits may face.  Include a link to UChicago’s statement on Academic Honesty and Plagiarism .  If you have a Canvas course site, you can create an introductory module where students must read a page containing your academic integrity policies and “mark as done,” or take a quiz on your policies and score 100%, in order to receive credit for completing the module.

If your syllabus includes many collaborative assignments, it can also be useful to explain clearly for which assignments collaboration is permitted and which must be done individually.  You can also specify what you consider acceptable vs. unacceptable forms of collaboration (e.g. sharing ideas while brainstorming is allowed, but copying one another’s exact words is not).

Finally, consider including information in your syllabus about resources available to students who are having academic difficulties, such as office hours and tutoring.  Students who are facing difficulties with time management, executive function, and similar issues may benefit from the Student Counseling Service’s Academic Skills Assessment Program (ASAP) .   The University’s Writing Center  offers help with mastering academic writing and its conventions.  Encourage your students to avail themselves of these resources as soon as they encounter difficulties.  If they get help early on, they will be less likely to feel desperate later and resort to dishonest behavior to raise their grade (Whitley 1998).

In general, making your expectations clear at the outset of your course helps to build a strong relationship between you and your students.  Your students will feel more comfortable coming to you for help, and they will also understand the risks they would be running if they behaved dishonestly in your course, which can be a powerful deterrent.

Assignment Design

When crafting assignments such as essays and course papers, strive for two factors: originality and specificity.  The more original the topic you choose, and the more specific your instructions, the less likely it is that students will be able to find a pre-written paper on the Internet that fits all the requirements (McMurtry 2001).  Changing paper topics from year to year also avoids the danger that students may pass off papers from previous years as their own work.  You might consider using a rubric with a detailed breakdown of the factors you will be assessing in grading the assignment; Canvas offers built-in rubric functionality .

If an assignment makes up a large percentage of your students’ final grade (e.g. a course paper), you might consider using “scaffolding”.  Have the students work up to the final submission through smaller, lower-stakes sub-assignments, such as successive drafts or mini-papers.  This has the double benefit of making it harder for students to cheat (since you will have seen their writing process) and reducing their incentive to cheat (since their grade will not be solely dependent upon the final submission) ( Carnegie Mellon University ).

In the case of in-class exams, you may find it worthwhile to create multiple versions of an exam, each with a separate answer key.  Even as simple an expedient as placing the questions in a different order in different versions makes it harder for students to copy off one another’s work or share answer keys ( Carnegie Mellon University ).

Technological Tools to Prevent Academic Dishonesty

Even as students have discovered more sophisticated ways to cheat, educational professionals and software developers have created new technologies to thwart would-be cheaters.  Canvas, the University’s learning management system, includes several features intended to make cheating more difficult.

By default, the Files tab in Canvas is turned off when a new course is created.  This prevents students from accessing your course files and viewing files they should not, such as answer keys or upcoming exam questions.  If you choose to enable Files in your course, you should place all sensitive files in locked or unpublished folders to render them invisible to students.  For more details, see this post .

If you are using Canvas Quizzes in your course, you can choose from a number of options that increase the variation between individual students’ Quizzes and thus decrease the chances of cheating.  These including randomizing answers for multiple-choice questions; drawing randomly selected questions from question groups; and setting up variables in mathematical questions, so that different students will see different numerical values.  For more details, see this post .

Several different computer programs have been developed that claim to detect plagiarism in student papers, usually by comparing student submissions against the Internet, a database of past work, or both, and then identifying words and phrases that match. Viper follows a “freemium” model, while the best-known subscription-based plagiarism checker, Turnitin , is currently licensed only by the Law School at the University of Chicago.  These programs can be helpful, but bear in mind that no automatic plagiarism checker is 100% accurate; you will still need to review student work yourself to see whether an apparent match flagged by the software is genuine plagiarism or not (Jones, Reid, and Bartlett 2008).  Also be aware that Turnitin and some other plagiarism checkers assert ownership rights over student work submitted to them, which can raise issues of intellectual property rights.

In addition to detecting plagiarism after the fact, there are technological tools that can help prevent it from occurring in the first place.  Citation managers such as Endnote and Zotero are excellent ways to help students manage their research sources and cite them properly, especially when writing longer papers that draw on a wide range of source material.  The University of Chicago Library offers a detailed guide to citation managers , along with regular workshops on how to use them .

What to Do if You Suspect Academic Dishonesty

If you suspect that academic dishonesty may have occurred in one of your courses, the University has resources to which you can turn.  For undergraduates, it is best to begin by speaking to the student’s academic adviser .  You can find out which adviser is assigned to a student in your course by visiting Faculty Access and looking at the “Advisor” column in the course roster.  If you have questions about disciplinary procedures specific to the College, you can contact the Office of College Community Standards, headed by Assistant Dean of Students Stephen Scott .   For graduate students, the appropriate area Dean of Students can provide information about the correct disciplinary procedures to follow.

The fight against academic dishonesty is a difficult one, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.  But if faculty and instructors give careful thought to the causes of student misconduct and plan their instructional strategies accordingly, they can do much to curb dishonest behavior and ensure that integrity prevails in the classroom.

Bibliography

Journal articles.

• Abasi, Ali R., and Barbara Graves.  “Academic Literacy and Plagiarism: Conversations with International Graduate Students and Disciplinary Professors.”   Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7.4 (Oct. 2008), 221-233.  
• Baird, John S., Jr.  “Current Trends in College Cheating.”   Psychology in the Schools 17 (1980), 515-522.  
• Curran, Kevin, Gary Middleton, and Ciaran Doherty.  “Cheating in Exams with Technology.” International Journal of Cyber Ethics in Education 1.2 (Apr.-Jun. 2011), 54-62.  
• Currie, Pat.  “Staying Out of Trouble: Apparent Plagiarism and Academic Survival.”   Journal of Second Language Writing 7.1 (Jan. 1998), 1-18.  
• Haines, Valerie J., et al.  “College Cheating: Immaturity, Lack of Commitment, and the Neutralizing Attitude.”   Research in Higher Education 25.4 (Dec. 1986), 342-354.  
• Hughes, Julia M. Christensen, and Donald L. McCabe.  “Understanding Academic Misconduct.” Canadian Journal of Higher Education 36.1 (2006), 49-63.  
• Jones, Karl O., Juliet Reid, and Rebecca Bartlett. “Cyber Cheating in an Information Technology Age.” In R. Comas and J. Sureda (coords.). “Academic Cyberplagiarism” [online dossier]. Digithum: The Humanities in the Digital Era 10 (2008), n.p. UOC. [Accessed: 26/09/18] ISSN 1575-2275. 
• McMurtry, Kim.  “E-Cheating: Combating a 21st Century Challenge.”   Technological Horizons in Education Journal 29.4 (Nov. 2001), 36-40.
• Pecorari, Diane.  “Good and original: Plagiarism and patchwriting in academic second-language writing.”   Journal of Second Language Writing 12.4 (Dec. 2003), 317-345.
• Perry, Bob.  “Exploring Academic Misconduct: Some Insights into Student Behaviour.”   Active Learning in Higher Education 11.2 (2010), 97-108.  
• Whitley, Bernard E.  “Factors Associated with Cheating among College Students: A Review.”   Research in Higher Education 39.3 (Jun. 1998), 235-274.  

Web Resources

• Berkeley City College:  http://www.berkeleycitycollege.edu/wp/de/what-is-academic-dishonesty/
• Carnegie Mellon University: https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/solveproblem/strat-cheating/index.html
• University of Chicago: https://college.uchicago.edu/advising/academic-honesty |  https://studentmanual.uchicago.edu/Policies
• Colorado State University: https://tilt.colostate.edu/integrity/resourcesFaculty/whyDoStudents.cfm
• Harvard University (Zachary Goldman): https://www.gse.harvard.edu/uk/blog/youth-perspective
• Oakland University: https://www.oakland.edu/Assets/upload/docs/OUWC/Presentations%26Workshops/dont_fail_your_courses.pdf
• Vanderbilt University (Derek Bruff): https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/2011/02/why-do-students-cheat/

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Academic dishonesty among university students: The roles of the psychopathy, motivation, and self-efficacy

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Institute of Psychology, University of Silesia in Katowice, Katowice, Poland

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy, Institute of Psychology, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

• Lidia Baran, 
• Peter K. Jonason

• Published: August 31, 2020
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238141
• Reader Comments

Academic dishonesty is a common problem at universities around the world, leading to undesirable consequences for both students and the education system. To effectively address this problem, it is necessary to identify specific predispositions that promote cheating. In Polish undergraduate students ( N = 390), we examined the role of psychopathy, achievement goals, and self-efficacy as predictors of academic dishonesty. We found that the disinhibition aspect of psychopathy and mastery-goal orientation predicted the frequency of students’ academic dishonesty and mastery-goal orientation mediated the relationship between the disinhibition and meanness aspects of psychopathy and dishonesty. Furthermore, general self-efficacy moderated the indirect effect of disinhibition on academic dishonesty through mastery-goal orientation. The practical implications of the study include the identification of risk factors and potential mechanisms leading to students’ dishonest behavior that can be used to plan personalized interventions to prevent or deal with academic dishonesty.

Citation: Baran L, Jonason PK (2020) Academic dishonesty among university students: The roles of the psychopathy, motivation, and self-efficacy. PLoS ONE 15(8): e0238141. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238141

Editor: Angel Blanch, University of Lleida, SPAIN

Received: April 9, 2020; Accepted: August 10, 2020; Published: August 31, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 Baran, Jonason. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The database was uploaded to Open Science Framework and is available under the following address: https://osf.io/frq9v/ .

Funding: Funding was provided by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange ( https://nawa.gov.pl/en/ ) to P.K.J under Grant number PPN/ULM/2019/1/00019/U/00001. This funding source had no role in the study conception, design, analysis, interpretation, or decision to submit for publication.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Academic dishonesty refers to behaviors aimed at giving or receiving information from others, using unauthorized materials, and circumventing the sanctioned assessment process in an academic context [ 1 ]. The frequency of academic dishonesty reported in research indicates the global nature of this phenomenon. For example, in a study by Ternes, Babin, Woodworth, and Stephens [ 2 ] 57.3% of post-secondary students in Canada allowed another student to copy their work. Similarly, 61% of undergraduate students in Sweden copied material for coursework from a book or other publication without acknowledging the source [ 3 ]. Working together on an assignment when it should be completed as an individual was reported by 53% of students from four different Australian universities [ 4 ], and copying from someone’s paper in exams at least once was done by 36% of students from four German universities [ 5 ]. Research shows that academic dishonesty is also a major problem at Polish universities. In the study by Lupton, Chapman, and Weiss [ 6 ] 59% of the students admitted to cheating in the current class, and 83.7% to cheating at some point during college. According to a report on the plagiarism in Poland, prepared by IPPHEAE Project Consortium, 31% of students reported plagiarizing accidentally or deliberately during their studies [ 7 ].

Existing academic dishonesty prevention systems include using punishments and supervision [ 8 ], informing students about differences between honest and dishonest academic actions [ 9 ], adopting university honor codes [ 10 ], and educating students on how to write papers and conduct research correctly [ 11 ]. Although these methods lead to a reduction of academic dishonesty (see [ 12 ]), their problematic aspects include the possibility of achieving only a temporary change in behavior, limited impact on students' attitudes towards cheating, and a long implementation period [ 13 , 14 ]. Possible reasons for these difficulties include the fact that conventional prevention methods rarely address differences in students’ personality and academic motivations, which may be associated with a tendency to cheat. For example, previous studies have reported that negative emotionality was associated with positive attitudes toward plagiarism [ 15 ]; intrinsic motivation was associated with lower self-reported cheating [ 16 ]; and socially orientated human values were negatively, while personally focused values were positively correlated with academic dishonesty [ 17 ].

It is also important to remember that implementing the aforementioned methods of prevention will not lead to a reduction in academic dishonesty if faculty members do not follow and apply the established rules [ 18 ]. Faculty members often prefer not to take formal actions against dishonest students [ 19 ], and in many cases do not use the methods available to them to detect and prevent cheating [ 20 ]. However, when they do respond to academic dishonesty it is often in inconsistent ways [ 21 ]. This might suggest that, while dealing with students’ dishonesty, faculty members prefer to choose their own punitive and preventative methods, which may differ depending on the particular student and professor. If that is the case, then examining the role of individual differences in academic dishonesty could be useful not only to better understand the nature of academic transgressions but also to address faculty's informal ways of dealing with students' cheating.

The aim of the current study was to investigate relationships between personality, motivation, and academic dishonesty to understand the likelihood of cheating in academia more effectively and potentially inform faculty's personalized interventions. Of all the personality traits under investigation, psychopathy appears to be useful for this purpose, because it includes a tendency to be impulsive, to engage in sensation-seeking, and resistance to stress, all of which are associated with academic dishonesty [ 2 ]. Indeed, psychopathy is the strongest—albeit moderate in size ( r = .27)—predictor of academic dishonesty according to a recent meta-analysis of 89 effects and 50 studies [ 22 ]. In the present study, we wanted to further examine the relationship between academic dishonesty and psychopathy by using the triarchic model of psychopathy distinguishing its three phenotypic facets: boldness, meanness, and disinhibition [ 23 ] which may reveal added nuance to how this personality trait relates to academic dishonesty.

Within the triarchic conceptualization of psychopathy, boldness represents self-assurance, fearlessness, and a high tolerance for stress and unfamiliarity; meanness captures interpersonal deficits such as lack of empathy, callousness and exploitativeness; and disinhibition represents the tendency towards impulsivity, poor self-regulation and focus on immediate gratification. Because of the different neurobiological mechanisms leading to the shaping of those aspects [ 24 ], it seems likely that the tendency towards academic dishonesty may have a different etiology depending on their levels. For students with high disinhibition, cheating may result from low self-control; for those with high meanness from rebelliousness with propensity to use others; and for bold ones from emotional resiliency and sensation-seeking [ 25 – 27 ]. However, because boldness constitutes fearlessness without failed socialization [ 28 ], breaking academic rules might not be the preferred way to look for excitement among bold students. Thus, our first goal was to examine the predictive power of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition in academic dishonesty.

Furthermore, we were interested if the relationships between the psychopathy facets and academic dishonesty would be mediated by individual differences in motivations for mastery and performance. Mastery motivation is fostered by the need for achievement and associated with learning to acquire knowledge, whereas performance motivation is geared towards reducing anxiety and related to learning to prove oneself to others [ 29 ]. We expect mediation for several reasons. First, undertaking actions motivated by achievement goals is predicted by the level of positive and negative emotionality and also by activity of the behavioral activation and inhibition system [ 30 ], which also correlate with the dimensions of the triarchic model of psychopathy [ 31 ]. Second, unrestrained achievement motivation partially mediates the relationship between psychopathy and academic dishonesty, suggesting a role of achievement in understanding the relationship between psychopathy and individual differences in the propensity to cheat [ 32 ]. Third, meanness and disinhibition are negatively and boldness positively correlated with conscientiousness and its facets [ 33 , 34 ]. This fact may play an important role in students’ willingness to exert and control themselves to achieve academic goals and the particular way to do it [ 35 ]. Moreover, research on mastery-goal orientation suggests it is correlated negatively with academic dishonesty and views of the acceptability of academic dishonesty [ 36 – 38 ] and that the change from mastery to performance-based learning environment lead to increased levels of dishonesty [ 39 ].

Therefore, we hypothesized that students with a high level of disinhibition may have difficulties studying because of their need for immediate gratification and lack of impulse control, and in turn, cheat to pass classes. Bold students could want to acquire vast knowledge and high competences because of their high self-assurance, social dominance, and a high tolerance for stress without resorting to fraud. Lastly, students with a high level of meanness may be less prone towards mastery through hard work and learning because of their susceptibility to boredom, tendency to break the rules, and to exploit others to their advantage, perhaps by copying or using other students’ work. Because performance-goal orientation can be driven by the fear of performing worse than others, no specific hypothesis was generated regarding its relation to psychopathy (characterized by a lack of fear).

Besides behavioral tendencies based on personality traits and specific motives to learn, another closely related predictor of academic dishonesty is general self-efficacy. People with high levels of general self-efficacy exercise control over challenging demands and their behavior [ 40 ] and perform better in academic context because of their heightened ability to solve problems and process information [ 41 ]. On the other hand, low levels of general self-efficacy in the academic context can lead to reduced effort and attention focused on the task, which may result in a higher probability of frauds to achieve or maintain a certain level of academic performance [ 42 , 43 ]. Because competence expectancies are important antecedents of holding an achievement goal orientation [ 44 , 45 ] it seems possible that general self-efficacy might moderate the relation between psychopathy facets and academic dishonesty mediated by achievement goals. Thus, we hypothesize that high general self-efficacy will reduce the indirect effects for disinhibition and meanness (i.e., negative moderation effect) and amplify it for boldness (i.e., positive moderation effect).

In sum, we examine the relationships between three facets of psychopathy and academic dishonesty, the possible role of achievement goals as a mediators for those relations, and lastly the possible role of general self-efficacy as a moderator of those mediation models. By analyzing the facets of psychopathy independently, we can determine their unique relationship with the tendency to cheat and thus more accurately predict the risk of dishonest behavior for students with a high level of each of the facet. In addition, investigating indirect effects and interactions between personality and motivation may describe the psychological processes that may lead to cheating and can potentially be used in planning preventive actions.

Materials and methods

Participants and procedure.

The participants were 390 Polish university students and residents (100% White, 74% female) with an average age of 23 ( SD = 3.39, Range = 19–56) years. Participants self-identified as students in social sciences (17%), humanities (12%), science and technology (24%), law and administration (22%), and medical sciences (23%); 7 failed to respond (2%). In addition, participants were first-year (19%), second-year (16%), third-year (31%), fourth-year (13%), fifth-year (13%), and doctoral students (2%); 23 failed to respond (6%).

We established the required sample size as 290 participants, following Tabachnick and Fidell [ 46 ] guidelines and gave ourselves three months to collect it to avoid concerns with power and p- hacking, respectively. The study was approved by Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Pedagogy and Psychology (University of Silesia in Katowice) and was conducted online through the Webankieta platform to maximize the anonymity and security of the participants. An invitation to participate in the project was sent to 28 largest Polish universities by enrollment, with a request to publish it on the universities' websites. The link to the survey directed the participants to a detailed description of the research and the rules of participation. After consenting to participate, students completed online questionnaires and, at the end, they were asked if they wanted to receive a summary of the general results and take part in a prize drawing (after the end of the study, five randomly chosen participants received vouchers for online personal development courses). The present study was part of a larger investigation that aimed to examine psychological determinants and predictors of academic dishonesty.

Psychopathy was measured with the TriPM-41 [ 34 ], the shortened Polish adaptation of the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure [ 47 ]. Participants rated statements on a 4-point scale (0 = completely false ; 1 = somewhat false ; 2 = somewhat true ; 3 = completely true ). Items were summed to create indexes for three subscales: disinhibition (16 items, e.g., “I jump into things without thinking”; Cronbach’s α = .83), meanness (10 items, e.g., “I don't have much sympathy for people”; α = .92), and boldness (15 items, e.g., “I'm a born leader”; α = .88).

Achievement goals were measured with the Polish translation of the Achievement Goals Questionnaire-Revised [ 29 ]. Participants reported their agreement (1 = strongly disagree ; 5 = strongly agree ) with statements such as “My aim is to completely master the material presented in this class” (i.e., mastery-goal orientation, 6 items) or “My aim is to perform well relative to other students” (i.e., performance-goal orientation, 6 items). Items were summed to calculate mastery (α = .80) and performance (α = .87) goal orientation indexes.

The Polish translation of the New General Self-Efficacy Scale [ 48 ] was used to measure general self-efficacy (e.g., “Even when things are tough, I can perform quite well”). Participants were asked how much they agreed (1 = strongly disagree ; 5 = strongly agree ) with eight items, which were summed to create the general self-efficacy index (α = .89).

Academic dishonesty was estimated with the Academic Dishonesty Scale [ 49 ], which is a list of 16 academically dishonest behaviors (e.g., “Using crib notes during test or exam” or “Falsifying bibliography”). Participants rate the frequency (0 = never ; 4 = many times ) of committing each behavior during their years of studies. Items were summed to create the academic dishonesty index (α = .83).

Data analysis

Descriptive statistics were calculated with JASP (v0.9.0.0), correlations with STATISTICA (v13.1), and regression, mediation, and moderated mediation with SPSS (v25). In the mediation analysis we used model 4 in macro PROCESS 2.16.3 (10,000 bootstrapped samples) and for the moderated mediations model 7 in macro PROCESS 2.16.3 (10,000 bootstrapped samples). Analyzes were carried out on the responses from 390 fully completed surveys. Because of mixed results in previous studies concerning psychopathy and academic dishonesty levels in men and women (see [ 50 , 51 ]) we conducted analyses on the overall results and also separately in each sex. The database was uploaded to Open Science Framework and is available under the following address: https://osf.io/frq9v/

Descriptive statistics, sex differences tests (see Bottom Panel), and correlations (see Top Panel) for all measured variables are presented in Table 1 . Academic dishonesty was positively correlated with meanness and disinhibition, and negatively correlated with mastery-goal orientation and general self-efficacy. Mastery-goal orientation was positively correlated with boldness and general self-efficacy, and negatively correlated with meanness and disinhibition. Performance-goal orientation was positively correlated with meanness. General self-efficacy was positively correlated with boldness and negatively correlated with meanness and disinhibition. We found only three cases where these correlations were moderated by participant’s sex. The correlation between performance and mastery-goal orientation was stronger ( z = -1.85, p = .03) in men ( r = .51, p < .01) than in women ( r = .34, p < .01). The correlation between mastery-goal orientation and meanness was stronger ( z = 2.00, p = .02) in men ( r = -.28, p < .01) than in women ( r = -.05, ns ). And the correlation between disinhibition and academic dishonesty was stronger ( z = 1.72, p = .04) in women ( r = .39, p < .01) than in men ( r = .20, p < .01). If we adjust for error inflation for multiple comparisons ( p < .007) for these moderation tests, none of the Fisher’s z tests were significant. Therefore, we conclude the correlations were generally similar in the sexes. Men scored higher than women on meanness and disinhibition.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238141.t001

To test the contribution of personality and motivation variables in predicting academic dishonesty, we conducted a standard multiple regression where the model explained 23% of the variance in academic dishonesty [ F (6, 383) = 18.60, p < .001]. The residuals for boldness ( β = .12, p = .04), disinhibition ( β = .27, p < .01), and a mastery-goal orientation ( β = -.39, p < .01) were correlated with academic dishonesty. Additional regression analysis revealed that both mastery-goal orientation and disinhibition strengthened the association between boldness and academic dishonesty, which on its own was not a predictor of the frequency of cheating–suppressor effect (results of hierarchical regression showed that after adding boldness to the model explained variance increased by 1% [Δ F (1, 383) = 4.40, p = .04]).

To examine whether achievement goals mediated the associations between psychopathy and academic dishonesty we conducted a series of mediation analyses.

As shown in Table 2 (see Left Panel), mastery-goal orientation mediated the relation between facets of psychopathy and academic dishonesty (i.e., none of the indirect effects CIs contained zero), and performance-goal orientation was not a mediator of those relations (see Right Panel; all of the indirect effects CIs contained zero). Mastery-goal orientation mediated relation between disinhibition and academic dishonesty (i.e., initial 𝛽 Step 1 = .32, p < .001; 𝛽 Step 2 = .24, p < .001), and the relationship between meanness and academic dishonesty (i.e., 𝛽 Step 1 = .10, p < .05; 𝛽 Step 2 = .05, p = .29). Initial non-significant negative relation between boldness and academic dishonesty (𝛽 = -.0001, p = .99) stayed unrelated after adding mastery-goal orientation to the model, but the value for the relation coefficient was higher and positive (𝛽 = .07, p = .12) suggesting a nonsignificant suppression effect.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238141.t002

To test if the level of general self-efficacy moderated the aforementioned relationships between psychopathy, achievement goals, and academic dishonesty we ran a series of moderated mediations. Index for moderated mediation was significant only for the model with disinhibition and mastery-goal orientation ( - 0.03; 95% CI: -0.70, -0.003), however, the same analyses ran separately for men ( - 0.03; 95% CI: -0.13, 0.05) and women ( - 0.04; 95% CI: -0.08, -0.01) revealed moderated mediation only in women (therefore, we do not report these analyses in men; they can be obtained from the first author). Estimates for that model are presented in Table 3 .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238141.t003

Women with high levels of disinhibition manifesting low level of mastery-goal orientation (see Left Panel, line A1) declared higher levels of academic dishonesty (see Right Panel, line B). An interaction between disinhibition and general self-efficacy (see Left Panel, line A3) with the significant, negative index for moderated mediation means that the indirect effect of disinhibition on academic dishonesty through mastery-goal orientation is negatively moderated by general self-efficacy. The higher the level of the moderator, the weaker the effect of mediation, and for moderator values above one standard deviation from mean mediation become non-significant (95% CI: -0.01, 0.09). In sum, the mastery-goal orientation partially mediated the associations that disinhibition had with academic dishonesty, however, this effect was absent for people with high levels of general self-efficacy.

Discussion and limitations

Psychopathy is an important predictor of engaging in unethical behaviors [ 52 ], including in an academic context [ 53 ]. In the present study, we examined the relationships between facets of psychopathy, as described in the triarchic model of psychopathy (i.e. disinhibition, meanness, and boldness), and the frequency of academic dishonesty among students. We revealed that students with higher levels of meanness and disinhibition, but not boldness, reported more frequent academic dishonesty during their tertiary study.

In the case of meanness, this relationship may indicate a tendency for dishonesty resulting from a lack of fear and, consequently, a diminished impact of the perceived risk of being caught cheating, sensation-seeking that involves engaging in destructive behavior regardless of possible negative consequences of such actions, and a propensity to exploit other student’s work or knowledge to pass classes [ 23 , 54 ]. The association between disinhibition and academic dishonesty may indicate impulsive cheating resulting from self-control problems (see [ 55 ]), and an inability to predict possible negative consequences of cheating [ 26 ]. The fact that academic dishonesty and boldness were uncorrelated may indicate that even though bold students can perform successfully in stressful situations and have high levels of sensation-seeking, those features are unrelated to the tendency to cheat in the academic context. It confirms that the “successful psychopath” [ 56 ] may be characterized by boldness but not antisocial behavior. Of all the facets of psychopathy, disinhibition was the strongest predictor of academic dishonesty, which confirms the role of impulsivity in predicting risky behavior [ 57 , 58 ], and the role of delaying gratification in refraining from academic transgressions [ 59 ].

Beyond these basic associations, we also examined the role of achievement goals as mediators for the relationships between psychopathy facets and academic dishonesty. Mastery-goal orientation mediated the relationships between two psychopathy facets and academic dishonesty. Both meanness and disinhibition led to low levels of students’ mastery-goal orientation which, in turn, contributed to cheating in the academic context. Low mastery-goal orientation might result from the fact that those who are characterized by meanness may have a propensity to be rebellious (e.g., disregard for formal responsibilities, low diligence, and sensitivity to rewards) and those who are characterized by disinhibition may have a propensity for impulsivity (e.g., inability to postpone gratification or control impulses, high behavioral activation system). Without motivation to acquire knowledge, students may cheat to achieve academic goals with no regard to the fairness (i.e., high meanness) or the consequences (i.e., high disinhibition) of their actions [ 31 – 33 ]. In the case of boldness, the result of the mediation analysis might indicate a cooperative or reciprocal suppression effect, however, it should not be trusted because the main effect path did not pass the null hypothesis threshold when the potential suppressor was included in the model. Nonetheless, it seems possible that a particular configuration of boldness and disinhibition could lead to the interactive effect of those facets on the other variables [ 26 ]. Performance-goal orientation did not mediate the relationships between psychopathy facets and academic dishonesty, probably because bold, mean, and disinhibited students are not motivated by the fear to perform worse than others [ 60 ].

Lastly, we tested if general self-efficacy acts as a moderator of these mediation models and found evidence that it moderated the indirect effect of disinhibition on academic dishonesty through mastery-goal orientation. This means that disinhibited students who have a high sense of perceived ability to control their chances for success or failure, might be able to overcome the tendency to cheat resulting from their personality (i.e., high impulsiveness), and motivational (i.e., low motivation to learn) predispositions. However, that effect was found only for women, limiting any insights that can be drawn about men. Previous research showed that an increase in general self-efficacy reduced the risk of suicide among women [ 61 ]. Moreover, Portnoy, Legee, Raine, Choy, and Rudo-Hutt [ 62 ] found that low resting heart rate was associated with more frequent academic dishonesty in female students, and that self-control and sensation-seeking mediated this relationship. Thus, along with the observed lower level of disinhibition for female students, it appears that self-regulation abilities may play a different role for men and women’s performance, and also that deficits in self-control might not lead to the same behavioral tendencies in the sexes (see [ 63 ]). However, because of the cross-sectional nature of our study and an uneven number of men and women in the sample, this needs to be investigated further.

In the present study, we aimed to combine personality and motivation variables to describe the possible process leading to academic dishonesty assessed with a behavioral measure. Because Polish students do not constitute a typical W.E.I.R.D. sample (i.e., Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), presented results can be used to generalize conclusions from research on academic dishonesty beyond typical W.E.I.R.D cultures. However, our study is not without limitations. First, the measurement of academic dishonesty was based on self-report, which, even after maximizing anonymity of the measurement, might have attenuated our results concerning the frequency of cheating. Thus, future studies should focus on measuring actual dishonest academic behavior. Second, we examined academic dishonesty as an overall frequency of committing different acts of cheating, which reflects the general propensity to cheat. It could be useful to further investigate the predictive power of described models in experiments, focused on the specific type of dishonest behavior. Third, the obtained range of academic dishonesty scores might result from sampling bias, which would require using different sampling procedure in future studies, or from non-normal distribution of academic dishonesty, which would be consistent with the results of the previous studies [ 2 – 4 ]. Fourth, we tested mediation models in a cross-sectional study with a one-time point measurement, which require cautious interpretation. Future studies could use longitudinal methods; starting at the beginning of the first year and continuing over the course of their studies to capture the influence of personality, achievement goals, and general self-efficacy on the academic dishonesty of students in a more robust manner. Despite these shortcomings, our study is the first attempt (we know of) to integrate the triarchic model of psychopathy, general self-efficacy, and achievement goals to predict academic dishonesty, showing potential for further investigation in this area.

Implications and conclusions

Preventing academic dishonesty is often made difficult by the lack of centralized and formalized university policies concerning cheating, faculty reluctance to take formal action against dishonest students, and limited attention paid to students’ personal characteristics associated with a tendency to cheat [ 64 ]. Based on the results of our study, lecturers might overcome those difficulties by: maximizing the amount of oral examinations to deal with the risk of cheating by disinhibited and mean students; enhancing students’ mastery-goal orientation, for example, by increasing use of competency-based assessment; enhancing students’ self-efficacy in academic context, for example, by providing spaced assessed tasks, and the opportunity to practice skills needed for their fulfillment. In the case of dealing with actual dishonest behavior, the fact that teachers prefer to warn students rather than fail them [ 19 ] might suggest indifference to academic integrity rules, reluctance to initiate time-consuming formal procedures against cheating, or teachers’ preference toward autonomy to deal with dishonesty. Therefore, a useful solution could be to assess which areas need to be improved for a particular student (e.g., knowledge about plagiarism, ability to delay gratification, or treating acquisition of knowledge as a value) and to allow the teacher to choose an effective way to remedy them.

In sum, we presented evidence that disinhibition and meanness are associated with the frequency of committing academic dishonesty. We described the possible underlying mechanism of those relations involving mediation effects of the mastery-goal orientation and, in the case of disinhibition, also a moderation effect of the general self-efficacy. Our research can be used by teachers to better identify factors conducive to dishonesty and to modulate their responses to fraud based on the personality and motivational predispositions of students.

Supporting information

S1 table. descriptive statistics and correlations for academically dishonest behaviors..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238141.s001

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr Guy Curtis for his comments and suggestions on the article.

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• Published: 19 August 2022

The effects of personality traits and attitudes towards the rule on academic dishonesty among university students

• Hongyu Wang 1 &
• Yanyan Zhang 1  

Scientific Reports volume  12 , Article number:  14181 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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Academic dishonesty is becoming a big concern for the education systems worldwide. Despite much research on the factors associated with academic dishonesty and the methods to alleviate it, it remains a common problem at the university level. In the current study, we conducted a survey to link personality traits (using the HEXACO model) and people’s general attitudes towards the rule (i.e., “rule conditionality” and “perceived obligation to obey the law/rule”) to academic dishonesty among 370 university students. Using correlational analysis and structural equation modeling, the results indicated that both personality traits and attitudes towards the rule significantly predicted academic misconduct. The findings have important implications for researchers and university educators in dealing with academic misconduct.

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Introduction.

Academic dishonesty is a global issue that attracts much attention from educators worldwide, and relevant research could date back to the last century 1 . It is considered immoral and inappropriate because the behavior has an unfair advantage over other students and impedes individuals’ capacity to study 2 , 3 . Dishonesty behavior often starts early in school, such as copying others’ work, and has been a consistent and paramount problem throughout all education levels 4 . It is an educational and academic issue with severe consequences 5 . Engagement in academic dishonesty predicts increased acceptance of immoral workplace behavior, indicating its continuous influence post-graduation 6 , 7 . At the university level, such misconduct behavior has clear potential to diminish the reputation and integrity of universities. It hinders universities’ ability to ensure that students who achieve degrees have the knowledge and skills they require for employment or further study 8 .

Much literature on the individual predictors of academic cheating has mostly focused on the influences of personality traits, academic attitudes & values, and some demographic variables 9 . Several personality traits were found to be significantly predictive, such as impulsivity 10 , psychopathy 11 , Machiavellianism and narcissism 12 . Self-control may explain why people do, or do not, engage in plagiarism when the opportunity is available 13 . Curtis et al. 14 found that self-control and academic misconduct were negatively correlated. Although individuals’ self-control can vary depending on situational factors such as mood, fatigue, and hunger, it is more like stable personality-like differences 15 .

Research on the demographic variables found that age and gender are critical factors predicting academic misconduct. For instance, as they age, female college students are less likely to engage in academic dishonesty due to fewer comparisons between one’s own behaviors and peer behaviors 16 . However, age and gender are not consistently found to be significant factors in most research on academic misconduct 9 , 17 .

In the current study, we still focused on these individual factors with attempts to 1) assess a recent model of personality (i.e., HEXACO) and its predictive power of academic dishonesty; and 2) to link people’s general attitude towards the rule/law to academic dishonesty, considering that it is essentially a violation of the rules in academia. Age and gender effects are examined along with the above goals.

Academic dishonesty

Academic dishonesty, academic misconduct, academic cheating, and academic integrity are concepts often used interchangeably in previous literature. The concept is usually defined through behavioral classifications. Pavela 18 considered academic dishonesty to contain four main types of misconduct that deliberately violate school regulations: cheating, fabrication, facilitation, and plagiarism. McCabe and Trevino 19 further expanded the scope of this concept into 12 types of violating behaviors in school, including sneaking at notes in the exam, copying others’ answers in the exam, copying others’ answers without their permission in the exam, etc. These researchers developed a 12-item scale to measure academic dishonesty, which is widely used 19 , 20 . However, Adesile and Nordin 21 criticized that the psychometric properties have not been critically investigated despite their broader literature application. To validate the psychometric properties of the instrument and determine the dimensionality of academic dishonesty, Adesile 21 adapted the original scale, divided academic dishonesty into three dimensions (“cheating,” “plagiarism,” and “research misconduct”), and named it “the academic integrity survey.”

Academic dishonesty is found to be largely explained by individual factors 22 . Motivation is one of the major individual factors relating to academic dishonesty. Through a meta-analytic investigation, Krou and colleagues 23 reviewed 79 studies and reported that academic dishonesty was negatively associated with intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, utility value, and internal locus of control, and was positively associated with amotivation and extrinsic goal orientation. Motivation, however, may vary across different cultural backgrounds. A recent study of Chinese university students found that their unethical academic behaviors are associated with their unique motivation to meet parents’ expectations 24 .

Morality is another crucial predictor of academic cheating and plagiarism. Individuals with a high level of morality, emphasis on fairness, and value of social rules have stringent attitudes towards plagiarism 25 , 26 , 27 . Meanwhile, moral disengagement is positively associated with cheating 28 . The predicting effect of morality may also be inconsistent across cultures. Ampuni et al. 29 studied the relationship between academic dishonesty and the five moral foundations in Indonesia, and found only a weak predictive power of the “authority” foundation on academic dishonesty.

Since the COVID-19 epidemic outbreak, courses and examinations have been conducted online, and researchers are concerned that academic misconduct in online learning environments has become more serious 30 . Studies, however, provided little and even opposite evidence regarding the actual behavioral differences in academic misconduct between traditional and online settings. Peled et al. 31 found that students tend to engage less in academic dishonesty behaviors online than in face-to-face courses. In addition, cheating intentions among students in traditional and online education settings are very little 32 . To reconcile the inconsistent findings, researchers started considering potential moderating and mediating factors such as the types of academic dishonesty, the level of technology complexity, and statistics anxiety 33 , 34 , 35 .

Personality traits and academic dishonesty

Personality reflects a person’s consistent patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It has a large effect on individuals’ academic behaviors. The Big Five personality model is the most widely used predictor of academic dishonesty. For instance, Giluk and Postlethwaite 36 reviewed studies of both high school and university students, and concluded that conscientiousness and agreeableness (of the Big Five) are the strongest predictors of academic dishonesty. Graziano and Eisenberg 37 found agreeable people more trusting and less cynical. As a result, they were less likely to justify cheating and see it as a necessity to compete with others. Lee et al. 9 conducted a meta-analysis on predictors of academic dishonesty and confirmed the strong relationship between agreeableness and academic dishonesty. They also found openness to be associated with self-efficacy/personal ability, and in turn, was negatively related to academic dishonesty. Finally, a positive association between neuroticism and academic procrastination increased cheating behaviors at school 38 .

Empirical evidence on the relationship between extraversion and academic dishonesty, however, is not consistent. For example, some research found a small positive association between extraversion and scholastic dishonesty 11 , while others indicated a moderate negative association 39 , and nonsignificant findings 36 .

Ashton and Lee 40 extended the Big Five personality model with a set of lexical studies, and developed a six-dimension model, referred to as the HEXACO model of personality structure. The name of this model reflects both the number of factors (i.e., the Greek hexa , six) and their names: Honesty-Humility (H), Emotionality (E), extraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness to Experience (O). It is essential the Big Five personality plus an additional Honesty-Humility dimension. The six-dimensional structure was more replicable across cultures than the Big Five model, as the Big Five structure has failed to present in four languages that recovered the HEXACO dimensions 41 . It has become a major tool in measuring personality traits in the early 21st century.

The HEXACO model, particularly the Honesty-Humility (H) dimension, is proven to be very useful in predicting many unethical behaviors. Kleinlogel et al. 42 investigated the relationship between Honesty-Humility and cheating behavior. Results showed that individuals high in Honesty-Humility were less likely to cheat than those low on this trait. Honesty-Humility was negatively associated with adolescents’ unethical behavior, and moral disengagement partially mediated this negative association 43 . Hilbig and Zettler 44 found that German adults who were low in Honesty-Humility were more likely to behave dishonestly across various experimental situations (e.g., coin-toss task and dice-task). Honesty-Humility was negatively associated with unethical business decisions among people from Fiji and the Marshall Islands 45 . Honesty-Humility was proved to be the strongest predictor of cheating, dishonesty, counterproductive behavior, and antisocial behavior, according to a meta-analysis 41 . Accordingly, the current study posits that,

Hypothesis 1

All six dimensions of the HEXACO model will predict academic dishonesty. Specifically, Honesty-Humility (H), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), Openness to Experience (O), and Emotion Stability (E) are all expected to predict academic dishonesty negatively.

Attitudes towards the rule: perceived obligation of rule/law and rule conditionality

The concept of the perceived obligation of law/rule proposed (short for POOL) by Tyler 46 refers to individuals’ variability in perceptions of obeying general laws. The higher the endorsement, the more likely they are to comply with laws and rules. If one’s POOL level is high, it has nothing to do with the fear of violating and thus being punished by the laws, and it is also not because someone sees other people’s compliance behaviors and tries to conform and comply. POOL exists at the personal level, which arises from people’s knowledge and conscience to stand up for the laws and rules.

Tyler’s research has shown a negative link between POOL and general criminal behavior. The more one perceives an obligation to obey the law, the less likely one will violate the law 47 . In other words, if one’s POOL is higher, one is not expected to perform academic misconduct, as the person would like to obey the rule or law, and volunteer to restrain one’s behavior. POOL is also found to be a key element in predicting compliance behavior to slow the spread of the virus during the COVID-19 pandemic 48 .

Rule conditionality (RC), also called rule orientation, assess the extent to which an individual perceives it is acceptable to violate the legal rules under certain conditions 49 . In other words, less rule-oriented people accept more reasonable circumstances to break the rules, and those who are more rule-oriented acknowledge fewer acceptable circumstances to violate the regulations.

RC derives from POOL and negatively relates to POOL, but they are very different. RC presents the level of flexibility when people evaluate different circumstances to break the law or rules. POOL is a sense of one’s obligation and duty to obey the laws and regulations. RC played a crucial role in predicting compliance behaviors and law violations. When laws go against personal morals, people will weigh the advantages, and disadvantages of immoral behavior, combined with moral belief, the lack of knowledge of the law, cost-benefit analysis, social norms, and lack of procedural justice are all critical roles in influencing the possibility of violating the law 49 .

In general, since both POOL and RC are stable personality-like variables that do not vary across mood and situations, and because misconducts in academia are rule violations by their nature (although the consequences are not similarly severe as law violations), we expect that students’ perception of the duty to obey the law/rule and their sense of rule conditionality would both be significant predictors of academic dishonesty. Accordingly, the current study expects that ,

Hypothesis 2

RC positively predicted academic dishonesty, and POOL negatively predicted academic dishonesty. That is, participants who are more likely to consider rules as conditional, will report more cheating behaviors. In contrast, participants who perceive more obligation to obey the law, will report fewer cheating behaviors.

The current study has been approved by the IRB of School of Philosophy and Sociology of Jilin University. Informed consent has been obtained from all participants of the present study. All methods were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations.

The sample consists of 370 students coming from a Northern Chinese University. The mean age of the participants was 19.77 years old (SD = 3.63). 224 (60.54%) participants majored in sciences and 146 (39.46%) participants majored in humanities and social sciences. 211 (57.03%) were male students, and 159 (42.97%) were female students.

Instruments

All research instruments were originally in English, translated into Chinese by a psychology graduate student, and back-translated by a bilingual psychology researcher.

Academic dishonesty (AD)

The Academic Integrity Survey (AIS) 50 was used to measure academic dishonesty (α = 0.916). It contains 15 items assessing the “Cheating,” “Research Misconduct,” and “Plagiarism” of academic misconduct. The survey comprised an 8-point Likert scale (1 = ‘very strongly disagree’; 8 = ‘very strongly agree’). A higher score on the scale indicated a higher level of academic dishonesty. The internal consistency for the whole scale in current study was 0.955, with Cronbach’s alpha being 0.919, 0.812, and 0.817 for “Cheating,” “Research Misconduct,” and “Plagiarism,” respectively.

Personality

The HEXACO model 40 , a six-dimension structure containing the factors Honesty-Humility (H), Emotionality (E), Extraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness to Experience (O), was used as a measure of personality, with 60 items in total. The internal consistency reliabilities ranged from 0.77 to 0.80 in the college sample and from 0.73 to 0.80 in the community sample 51 . The HEXACO-60 comprised a 5-point Likert scale (1 = ‘strongly disagree’; 5 = ‘strongly agree’). Cronbach’s alpha was 0.795(α HH  = 0.701, α EX  = 0.748, α EM  = 0.642, α AG  = 0.649, α CO  = 0.609, α OP  = 0.668) in the current study.

Rule conditionality (RC)

Rule Conditionality Scale 49 was utilized to indicate the extent to which individuals perceive acceptable conditions for breaking the law in general (α = 0.928). The 7-point Likert scale (1 = ‘strongly disagree’; 7 = ‘strongly agree’) contains 12 items, which is calculated as a mean score ( M  =  3.49 , SD  = 1.08), with higher scores indicating more rule conditionality (i.e., the individual accepts fewer justifications for violating laws). Cronbach’s alpha was 0.868 in the current study.

Perceived obligation to obey the law (POOL)

Perceived Obligation to Obey the Law 47 includes six items on a 4-point Likert scale (1 = ‘strongly disagree’; 4 = ‘strongly agree’, α = 0.64). The POOL was calculated as a mean score of all items (M = 2.78, SD = 0.61), with a higher score indicating a higher perceived obligation to obey the law. Cronbach’s alpha was 0.671 in the current study.

Participants were offered course credits to take part in an online study. Wenjuanxin was used as the data collection platform, providing functions equivalent to Amazon Mechanical Turk. The participants were asked to answer the AIS, HEXACO, RC, and POOL questionnaires and then reported demographic information (gender and age). Data were excluded from the analysis if the participants failed to choose the correct answer of the “filter” items (e.g. “Please choose #1 on this question”). A total of 397 questionnaires were collected and 370 were valid (rejection rate = 6.80%).

Data analysis

SPSS and Amos 26.0 were used for data analysis. Pearson correlation analysis and structural equation model were conducted to test the hypotheses.

Results of the correlation analysis

Pearson correlation was used to examine the correlations among the variables. Regarding the effects of demographic variables on academic dishonesty, age was positively correlated with academic dishonesty (r = 0.208, p  < 0.01). As age increased, people were more likely to conduct various academic misconducts.

Regarding the effects of personality traits on academic dishonesty, as expected and in line with a prior study 9 , we found strong negative correlations between personality and academic dishonesty on all six dimensions. Specifically, academic dishonesty was negatively predicted by honesty-humility (r = − 0.362, p  < 0.01), emotion stability (r = − 0.119, p  < 0.05), agreeableness (r = − 0.246, p  < 0.01), conscientiousness (t = − 0.231, p  < 0.01), openness to experience (r = − 0.190, p  < 0.01), and extraversion (r = − 0.185, p  < 0.01).

Finally, regarding the effect of attitudes towards the rule on academic dishonesty, rule conditionality was positively correlated with academic dishonesty (r = 0.231, p  < 0.01). It showed that academic misconduct was more acceptable as students scored higher on rule conditionality, consistent with the hypothesis. Contrary to the hypothesis, however, perceived obligation to obey the law/rule was not correlated with academic dishonesty (r = − 0.009, p = 0.864). In addition, POOL was also not associated with five of six personality dimensions nor rule conditionality (r HH  = − 0.001, p  = 0.984; r EM  = 0.043, p  = 0.413; r EX  = 0.009, p  = 0.861; r AG  = 0.012, p  = 0.816; r CO  = 0.007, p  = 0.897; r RC  = − 0.016, p  = 0.761) (see Table 1 ).

Results of the structural equation modeling

The structural equation models linking the demographic variables (age and gender), the personality variables (HEXACO), and the attitude variables (RC and POOL) were tested. The findings were presented in Fig.  1 . The model was examined for the goodness of fit using indices including Chi-square, comparative fit index, and root mean square error of approximation. The results indicated an overall good model fix (χ2 = 180.714, χ2 /df = 2.82, p  < 0.001; CFI = 0.922; RMSEA = 0.070) 52 .

Structural model for determinants of academic dishonesty.

In general, students’ tendency to engage in academic dishonesty was accounted for by the demographic variables, the personality variables, and the attitude variables. Specifically, consisting to the results of correlation analysis, age but not gender positively predicted academic dishonesty. The HEXACO model negatively predicted academic dishonesty, with five out of the six dimensions being significant except for the emotionality dimension. It indicated that people who scored higher on honesty-humility, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and extraversion were less likely to engage in academic misconduct. In addition, rule conditionality positively predicted academic dishonesty, indicating that individuals who believed in the conditionality of rules were more likely to misbehave at school. These results partially aligned with the hypotheses.

The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of individual factors (personality and people’s general attitudes toward the rules) on academic dishonesty. A survey among university students was conducted, and the results provided evidence that both personality traits and people’s rule orientation had significant effects on their various academic misconducts. The HEXACO model is a relatively recent personality model to expand and replace the Big Five personality model, and its cross-cultural applicability has been verified in many research settings 41 . The current study applied the HEXACO model in predicting academic dishonesty for the first time, and our findings justified its application.

Attitudes towards the rule are manifested in two aspects. Rule conditionality assessed whether individuals would violate relevant regulations and commit deviant behaviors under certain circumstances. Perception of the obligation to obey the law and rules (POOL) assessed individuals’ sense of duty to avoid behaviors that violate regulations, such as academic misconduct. Results of the current study demonstrated that rule conditionality positively predicted academic misconduct; that is, individuals who believed that rules are conditional and could be broken under certain conditions are more likely to engage in various academic transgressions. POOL, however, was not found to be related to academic dishonesty. Previous results showed that Chinese students scored lower on the POOL than American students 53 . POOL is likely an inadequate measure of Chinese students’ sense of obligation and duty to obey the laws and rules. Future research could use a different sample to test the predicting effect of POOL on academic dishonesty, and should also consider revising and refining the POOL measure for cultural research.

Regarding the predictive effect of demographic variables on academic misconduct, only age was found to have a significant positive correlation with academic misconduct. Gender had no effect which is consistent with the previous literature 9 , 17 .

Conclusion and implication for future research

The current study examined the HEXACO model and peoples’ attitudes toward the rule to better understand the academic misconduct behaviors among university students. Our findings have important implications for researchers and institutional educators. We demonstrated that in addition to the tractional big five personality factors, honesty-humility is a unique contributor to decreasing academic dishonesty. Recent studies have suggested focusing on integrity as the broadest defense against dishonesty in all spheres of academia 54 . Our research findings encourage university educators and institutional policymakers to pay much attention to this dispositional protector.

Our study also linked law-abiding attitudes with academic behaviors. Legal laws and academic rules share features in regulating people’s behaviors by imposing sanctions. They are quite different from social norms, which is a rather indirect way of behavior regulation. The current study confirmed that rule conditionality plays an important role in predicting academic misconduct of university students. Thus law-abiding education and behavior modification interventions might also be effective in preventing academic dishonesty.

Our results have contributed to the academic dishonesty field, but it is not free from limitations. First, it was a correlational study, meaning it is only possible to speak about relationships but not causal links. Experiments are necessary for future research. In addition, we did not control the participant’s prior academic performance. A previous study showed that students with lower than average performance tend to cheat 55 . Future research should control and study the links in a longitudinal data set. Finally, although the current research only focused on the impact of individual factors on academic misconduct, contextual factors could be considered using multi-level analysis.

Data availability

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due the present study is a part of a bigger study that has not been completed yet, but is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding was provided by Jilin University Innovative Team of Philosophy and Social Sciences (Project entitled “Research on the Theories and Practices of Social Modernization”.

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Perceived seriousness of academic cheating behaviors among undergraduate students: an Ethiopian experience

• Wondifraw D. Chala   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8113-5027 1  

International Journal for Educational Integrity volume  17 , Article number:  2 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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The study was conducted to examine perceived seriousness of academic cheating behaviors among undergraduate students in an Ethiopian University. A total of 245 (146 males and 99 females) regular undergraduate students were randomly selected from three colleges: business and economics, natural and computational science, and social science found in a university. Data were collected using a survey. The results indicated that majority of the respondents rated most cheating behaviors as “serious” The study found that although students perceived the seriousness of most cheating behaviors, they continued to actively engage in cheating. Furthermore, significant differences were found in the perception of the seriousness of academic cheating behaviors amongst students according to field of study and gender. Therefore, as today’s undergraduate students are the employees of tomorrow and that the ethics they adopt and adhere to shape their behavior in the future, it is suggested that there is a need to make known to students the reality of academic integrity and to expose them to the consequences of violating students’ academic code of ethics.

Introduction

In many social and economic contexts individuals often face the choice to adopt different types of opportunistic or even illicit behavior to increase their welfare taking advantage of others for personal interests. It is common to see people cheating on taxes, free riding on public goods, claiming benefits without entitlement, bribing and corrupting public officials. Likewise, academic dishonesty is among these fraudulent behavior which is becoming a major concern and threat to education systems of almost all countries of the world.

Academic cheating as defined by Davis et al. ( 2009 ) is deceiving or depriving by trickery, defrauding, misleading or fooling another. They further explained that academic cheating/academic misconduct refers to acts committed by students that deceive, mislead, or fool the teacher into thinking that the academic work submitted by the student was a student’s own work. Rana and Ajmal ( 2013 ) also defined it as “students attempt to present others’ academic work as their own.” It includes many activities such as cheating (seeking help from peers) on examination, copying other student’s assignment, collaborating with others on individual assignments and using unauthorized material during examination. In the same vein, Anderman et al. ( 2009 ) has described academic cheating behaviors as four categories: information transfer between individuals, the use of assisting tools, exploitation of weakness, and copying answers or information. Commonly, cheating behavior is conducted in two activities, which are during tests/exams and homework. In addition, Cizek ( 2012 ) defined cheating as involving three domains: cheating by giving, taking, or receiving information from other during exam/test; cheating by using prohibited materials or information; and cheating to evade the assessment process.

Academic cheating is not a new phenomenon. The Chinese have been concerned about cheating for longer than most civilizations have been in existence. As explained by Bouville ( 2010 ), Over 2000 years ago, prospective Chinese civil servants were given entrance exams in individual cubicles to prevent cheating, and searched as they entered the cubicles for crib notes. The penalty for being caught at cheating in ancient China was not a failing grade or expulsion, but death, which was applicable to both the examinees and examiners. Since then, academic cheating has been a problem and continues to concern the educational communities. Studies have shown that academic cheating has become increasingly prevalent (Antneh and Asres 2014 ; Barabanell et al. 2018 ; Dyer et al. 2020 ; Jennifer et al., 2009 and Mebratu 2016 ) and is becoming a habit for a growing number of students (Bacon et al. 2019 ; Löfström and Kupila 2013 ; Miller et al. 2015 ; Quaraishi and Aziz 2017 ; Rana and Ajmal 2013 ; Davis et al. 2009 ; and Thomas et al., 2010). In the past 50 years, the number of students that self-report consistent or frequent cheating increased rather sharply, especially in regard to cheating on tests (Bertram Gallant 2020 ; McCabe et al. 2012 ; Parnther 2020 ). For instance, in the early 1960’s, according to McCabe et al. ( 2001 ), cheating prevalence has been around 17% while in the 1990’s that number had increased to 38%. Similarly, Hamlin et al. ( 2013 ) and Küҫüktepe ( 2014 ) have reported cheating prevalence within the range of 50–70%. Moreover, Burton et al. ( 2011 ) and Simkin and McLeod ( 2010 ) have estimated that between 60% - 95% of undergraduate students employed dishonest tactics at some point in their university career.

Investigating higher education institution students’ perceptions of cheating is of particular importance because the implications of academic dishonesty are numerous—it affects the integrity of the learning process (Paris and Robert 2007 ; Davis et al. 2009 ), an individual’s long-term behavior (Lupton and Chaqman 2002 ) and the ability of academic institutions to achieve their stated objectives (Rana and Ajmal 2013 ). For example, students who engaged in cheating are more likely to develop attitudes and habits that can interfere with their learning and this may ultimately lead to practicing graduates who are insufficiently prepared. Furthermore, acts of academic dishonesty undermine the assessment of student learning and interfere with the efforts of faculty to properly diagnose and address shortcomings in student learning (Jan et al. 2002 ; Lupton and Chaqman 2002 ; and Davis et al. 2009 ).

Academic cheating in higher education institutions is universally considered as a serious problem. However, most studies on the subject were undertaken in western countries (Yazici et al. 2011 and Lim & See, 2001 ) and focused on the prevalence, determinants, and different definition of cheating (Jan et al. 2002 ; Fienberg 2009 ; and Witherspoon et al. 2012 ). Only a handful of studies have explored how people perceive cheating behaviors (Fienberg 2009 ). Students’ perception regarding the severity of cheating behavior affects both the frequency and likelihood of the activity i.e. cheating behavior. For example, if a student believes that copying from friends on exam is trivial cheating, greater frequency of this activity would be reported. A student who does not perceive certain cheating behaviors as being unethical is more likely to cheat (Elias and Farag 2010 ).

It is obvious that differences in socio cultural settings, demographic composition and even educational policies and programs bring about difference in students’ perception of cheating behavior. For example, cross cultural studies conducted to examine students’ attitudes toward academic cheating have found evidence that students of different nationalities and of different cultures vary significantly in their perceptions of academic cheating (Godfrey et al. 1993 ; Jan et al. 2002 ; and Fienberg 2009 ).

Similarly, Diekhoff et al. ( 1999 ) found that Japanese college students, as compared to US students, report higher levels of cheating tendencies, have a greater propensity to neutralize the severity of cheating behavior and are not as disturbed when observing someone cheating in class. Moreover, a comparative study conducted by Lupton et al. ( 2000 ) found significantly different levels of cheating between Polish and US business students. The Polish students reported much higher frequencies of cheating than their American counterparts and were more likely to feel it was not so bad to cheat on one exam or tell someone in a later section about an exam.

Although these few studies conducted in other countries have shed some light on the cultural and national aspect of the issues, the researcher believed that there is a need for further studies within different contexts in order to widen the empirical base of cheating studies and improve our understanding of students’ perception of cheating behavior. Furthermore, research examining cheating in general and students’ perception of cheating in particular in Ethiopian higher education institutions is scant. Few studies conducted so far in Ethiopian higher education institution focused on prevention and detection (Mengistu, 2019 ; Wubalem et al. 2020 ), faculty perception (Tefera and Kinde, 2009 ), nature and causes (Mebratu 2016 ), and consequences (Nelson, Devardhi, and Dino; Solomon 2017 ). These studies have shown that academic dishonesty is a serious problem and widely spread among university students in Ethiopia with the prevalence rate of ranging from 53%–96%. In addition, the studies have suggested that much has to be done under the theme of academic dishonesty in Universities of Ethiopia. Therefore, this study was conducted to examine students’ perception of cheating behavior in Dire Dawa University. The following research questions were raised.

How do university students perceive seriousness of academic cheating behaviors?

Do students perceive seriousness of academic cheating behaviors differently according to their demographic background?

What is the prevalence rate of academic dishonesty among Dire Dawa university undergraduate students?

Conceptual framework

Academic dishonesty is ‘any fraudulent actions or attempts by a student to use unauthorized or unacceptable means in any academic work (Theart and Smit 2012 ). Jensen et al. ( 2001 ) also defines academic dishonesty as students’ attempt to present others’ academic work as their own. Academic cheating has two forms, which is cheating behavior such as copying answers of others and plagiarizing behavior such as citing without including the correct source. According to Craig and Dalton ( 2013 ), plagiarism includes intentional and unintentional actions in utilizing another person’s work wrongly. It is conducted in the form of replicating another person’s work, copying the whole text, or even buying another person’s writing and then admitting it as one’s own. It also refers an inaccurate and non-thorough behavior in quoting, citing, and reporting the source being used dishonestly (Spielberberger 2004 ).

On the other hand, cheating, as defined by Salkind ( 2008 ), a dishonest action with the element of deceiving with the goal of obtaining benefits or superiority from other students. Anderman et al. ( 2009 ) described cheating as four categories: information transfer between individuals, the use of assisting tools, exploitation of weakness, and copying answers or information. Cizek ( 2012 ) has defined academic cheating as any action taken before, during, or after the administration of a test and assignments that is intended to gain an unfair advantage or produce inaccurate results. Cizek ( 2012 ) further elaborated cheating as involving three domains: cheating by giving, taking, or receiving information from other during exam/test; cheating by using prohibited materials or information; and cheating to evade the assessment process. According to Davis et al. ( 2009 ) and Lambert et al. ( 2003 ), cheating includes, but is not limited to: lying; copying from another’s test or examination; discussion at any time of questions or answers on an examination or test, unless such discussion is specifically authorized by the instructor; taking or receiving copies of an exam without the permission of the instructor; using or displaying notes, “cheat sheets,” or other information devices inappropriate to the prescribed test conditions. For the purpose of this study, the author has used Anderman et al. ( 2009 ) and Cizek ( 2012 ) definition and/or description of academic cheating as they are detail and best describe the nature of academic cheating common among Ethiopian students at all levels.

Academic dishonesty is not a new phenomenon, indeed it has been extensively studied in the academic context and empirical evidence indicates that it is changing and increasing in recent years (Davis et al. 2009 ; Yardley et al. 2009 ; Jensen et al. 2001 ; McCabe et al. 2001 ). Results regarding the influence of gender on cheating behavior have been mixed (Godfrey et al. 1993 ; Davis et al. 2009 ). Evidence for the gender differences in cheating vary with some studies showing strong differences and others showing no differences between males and females. A good number of studies (e.g. Kobayashi and Tedor 2012 ; Lupton and Chaqman 2002 ; Peled et al. 2013 ) have reported that academic cheating is more frequent in boys than in girls. On the other hand, Trost ( 2009 ) found no difference between male and female. Some other study by Jacobson and his colleagues as cited in Jensen et al. ( 2001 ), in contrary, reported that females are more likely to cheat than males.

Furthermore, other studies have demonstrated that females tend to rate most academic cheating behaviors as “most serious” and unethical than males (Fienberg 2009 ; Whitley 2001 ; and Whitley et al. 1999 ). However, despite their negative attitudes towards cheating behaviors, females were found to be engaged in cheating behavior just as frequently as males. A Meta analysis conducted by Whitley et al. ( 1999 ) and Fienberg ( 2009 ) reported that although women show a more ethical attitude toward cheating than men, “in practice, women were almost as likely to cheat as men”. Wilkinson ( 2009 ) suggested that a significant element in the issue of academic cheating is the students’ beliefs about right and wrong, and the level of seriousness attached to specific instances of wrong-doing. Moreover, McCabe and Trevino ( 1993 ) explained that as the perceived severity of punishments increases, the levels of individual cheating will become lower.

On the other hand, Elias and Farag ( 2010 ) contend that business students with a love of money do not perceive certain cheating behaviors as being unethical, and are therefore, more likely to cheat. Morris and Kilian ( 2006 ) confirm this argument with their study conducted in seven US universities. They have found that undergraduate accounting majors and business major students report higher frequencies of cheating than other major students. Therefore, Oneill and Pfeiffer ( 2012 ) concludes that if accounting students lack academic integrity, then accounting scandals are not surprising. They suggest appropriate training in ethics is necessary for business students.

Researchers have shown that dishonesty in college, cheating in particular, is a predictor of unethical behavior in subsequent professional settings (Lupton and Chaqman 2002 & Lim and See 2001 ). In other words, people who engaged in dishonest behaviors during their college days continue to do so in their professional careers. Lupton and Chaqman reported that successful cheating behaviors in college carry over as a way of life after college. The works of Sims ( 1993 ) also confirmed this fact. Sim has found that people who engaged in dishonest behaviors during college are more likely to commit dishonest acts of greater severity at work.

The literature on students’ perception of academic dishonesty include aspects such as what constitute cheating, seriousness of cheating behavior, why and how cheating occurs, and how cheating can be discouraged. This study, however, is delimited to the study of undergraduate students’ perception about the seriousness of academic cheating behaviors among undergraduate students. Moreover, of the three types of academic dishonesty, i.e. exam-related, assignment-related, and research-related, usually mentioned in different literatures, exam and assignment related academic dishonesty were considered in this study.

Methods and materials

This study used descriptive survey research method. A total of 245 (146 males and 99 females) senior undergraduate students were selected from three colleges (Social Science and Humanities, Business and Economics, and Natural and Computational Sciences) found within a University at Dire Dawa City, Ethiopia, using stratified and simple random sampling. In the selection of participants, they were told that their participation is voluntary and the result will be reported in aggregate. To measure students’ perception about the seriousness of academic cheating behavior, the researcher adopted academic dishonesty questionnaire used by Oneill and Pfeiffer ( 2012 ) and Witherspoon et al. ( 2012 ). Eleven items that fit to the context of Ethiopian Universities were selected from the instruments. In other words, academic cheating behaviors that are common and in Ethiopian universities are considered. For instance, cheating using internet is currently impossible because of no access to internet in examination rooms. Few of the items were modified based on the review of literature and experience of the researcher as University instructor. All the items are considered as academic cheating.

In the questionnaire, students were asked to indicate how often they had undertaken a particular cheating behavior (rated in three scale i.e. 0 = never, 1 = once, 2 more than once) and the degree to which they perceived the seriousness of the cheating behavior (rated in five scale i.e. 0 = not at all cheating, 1 = trivial cheating, 2 = moderate cheating, 3 = serious cheating and 4 = most serious cheating). The lower the value of the perception shows that the students accept the behavior as normal (acceptable).

Pilot testing was made to test and fit the instrument with the context of Universities in Ethiopia. Forty (40) students from the institute of technology participated in the pilot test and the Cronbach alpha coefficients of all the items included in the main study were acceptable with the coefficient values of 0.80 and above. Finally, as gaining accurate data on cheating is difficult, the researcher went to some effort to make sure that the students answered frankly and honestly. The students were informed at the beginning of the data collection sessions about purpose of the study and anonymity of their responses. In the actual data collection, the questionnaires were administered while students were in classroom, before the beginning of new session.

The purpose of the study was to assess perceived seriousness of academic cheating behaviors among undergraduate students. Depending on the nature of the data, quantitative data analysis techniques such as frequency, percentage, mean, independent t-test, one-way ANOVA, and chi-square were employed. Table  1 presents the perceived seriousness of academic cheating behaviors as rated by the respondents.

Table 1 summarizes the mean perceived seriousness ratings for items pertaining to respondents’ attitudes toward academic cheating behaviors. The findings indicate that respondents surveyed generally perceived cheating behaviors to be “serious” (with a mean of 2.87). Not all cheating behaviors were perceived to be equally serious. The findings show that allowing someone to copy one’s answer during a test or examination; doing other students’ course work/assignment; and whispering the answers to friends during examination had mean scores below 2 (M = 1.69, M = 1.88, and M = 1.73 respectively) suggesting that these activities were considered only as moderate cheating by the respondents. Whereas cheating behaviors such as failure to contribute one’s fair share in group project (M = 3.46) and allowing own course work/assignment to be copied by another students (M = 3.46) were perceived as most serious academic misconduct.

An overall t-test comparison between male and females respondents indicated statistically significant difference in their perception of seriousness of academic cheating behaviors [t (243) = 10.08, p  < .05] meaning female students perceive academic cheating behaviors as more serious (M = 3.04, SD = .21) than males (M = 2.76, SD = .22). More specifically, the result of the independent sample t-test, as can be seen from Table 2 , indicated that there were statistically significant difference in the seriousness perception of item 1, 2, 3, 6, and 9 between male and female: “doing less than one’s fair share in group project [ t (243) = 4.375, p<05], such that female students perceive this behavior as more serious (M = 3.71, SD = .52) than male (M = 3.29, SD = .75); “copying from a nearby students during exam, test or quiz [ t (243) = 7.221, p<05], such that female students perceive this misconduct as more serious ( M= 3.59, SD = .59) than males ( M = 2.96, SD = .73); “using text messages to get/send answers on test or exam” [t (243) = 3.901, p  < 05], such that female students perceive this misconduct as more serious (M = 3.61, SD = .53) than males (M = 3.27, SD = .75); “working on an assignment in group when individual work is assigned” [t (243) = 7.321. p  < 05], such that female students perceive this misconduct as more serious (M = 3.49, SD = .68) than males (M = 2.73, SD = .87); and “copying homework/assignment from another student” [t (243) = 5.341, p  < 05], female students perceive this misconduct as more serious (M = 3.57, SD = .64) than males (M = 3.08, SD = .71).

A one way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to compare mean score of students among the three colleges: Social Science, Business and Economics, and Natural and Computational Sciences. As can be understood from Table 3 , there were statistically significant difference between the mean score of students’ perceived seriousness of academic cheating behaviors among the colleges (2, 242) = 7.754, p  = 001: the result of the tukey HSD indicate a statistically significant difference between college of Business and Economics and the other two colleges.

Table 4 above summarizes the percentages of respondents who admitted to having engaged on at least one occasion in each cheating activity surveyed. The majority of respondents (81.26%) indicated that they had committed one of the surveyed cheating activities at least once; only 18.74% reported that they had never been involved in any form of cheating. This is an indication that cheating behavior was highly prevalent among the students participated in the study. This finding was congruent with the past study carried out in Addis Ababa and Jimma Universities by Tefera and Kinde ( 2009 ) who found that 82–96% of the students had committed one form of cheating at least once.

Descriptive statistics depicted in Table 4 suggest that a high percentage of respondents (about 93%) reported having allowed others to copy their answers during test or examination. Approximately 93% admitted that they have done an assignment/coursework for other students. Again more than 91% of the respondent reported that they have whispered answers to their friends during examination at least once. These findings might not be surprising as these behaviors rated as moderate cheating activities by the students (Table 1 ). Using text message to get/send answers in examinations recorded the lowest frequency at 16.33%. The study also examined whether there is an association between variables like gender and field of study (stream) and cheating behavior. To do this, a chi square test was applied and the results are indicated in the following tables Table 5 .

Regarding gender difference in prevalence of cheating, the study revealed no difference between males and females. Approximately 81% of male respondents reported having cheated at least once. Similarly 80% of female respondents admitted that they have engaged in one of the cheating behavior at least once. The chi-square test is found to be not significant at x 2  = 0.222, df = 1, p  > 0.05. This shows that although females perceived academic cheating behaviors more serious than their counterpart, the engaged in those activities as equal as males Table 6 .

As can be seen from Table 6 above, the results of the chi square test demonstrated that there is a significant difference among colleges in self-reported cheating behavior. The chi square test among the three colleges were statistically significant at x 2  = 6.530, df = 2, p  < 0.05. To examine which college’s students involve more in cheating behavior, further analysis of standardized residual test was computed. The result is indicated in Table  7 below.

As shown in Table 7 , there is a significant difference between business and economics students and the remaining two colleges in cheating. This suggests that students of business and economics have engaged more in cheating behaviors than students of college of natural & computational sciences and social science & humanities. In other words, business and economics students engaged more in cheating behaviors than college of natural & computational sciences and social science & humanities.

The study revealed that majority of the respondents perceived most cheating behaviors as serious problems. Respondents perceived cheating behaviors such as doing less than one’ fair share in group assignment; using text messages to send/receive answers; taking crib notes to the exam halls; and allowing own coursework/assignment to be copied by others to be more serious. Such finding is congruent with previous researches (Yazici et al. 2011 ; Yardley et al. 2009 ; McCabe et al. 2001 ; Lim and See 2001 ; and Peled et al. 2013 ).

It is interesting that “cheating in the form of allowing someone to copy during exam”; “doing homework for others”; and “whispering the answers to friends during examination” were perceived by respondents to be least/moderate cheating and accordingly more incidence of these behaviors were reported. It is clear that cheating would be more likely to occur where students view cheating as a minor problem. This finding is congruent with the study of Oneill and Pfeiffer ( 2012 ) who found that allowing someone to copy one’s answers during a test or examination and whispering the answers to friends during an examination are considered as trivial cheating, accordingly, greater frequency of this activity was reported. Similarly, Graham ( 1994 ) reported that students with lenient attitudes towards academic cheating behaviors reported more cheating as compared to students with stricter attitudes. The reason why this happen might be beyond the scope of this study, however, one possible explanation according to McCabe ( 2005 ) is the probability of being caught and severity of the punishment for that specific behavior. Trost ( 2009 ), for example, contend that students believe that some academic cheating behaviors are more acceptable or tolerated than others because of the variations in disciplinary consequences of the academic dishonesty. In addition, Hutton ( 2006 ) found that students believed that engagement in academic cheating behaviors in school were alright because they saw the school doing nothing towards the behavior. Similarly, Oneill and Pfeiffer ( 2012 ) underlined that the probability of being caught and penalized are the most effective predictors of student engagement in academic cheating. The severity of punishment for cheating is the value which a student weighs the benefits he/she will gain from not being caught. To put it differently, some students may rationally assess the costs and benefits of their actions.

However, despite their perception, still majority (81%) of the respondents reported that they have engaged in cheating behavior at least once. In other words, though the students perceive cheating as serious problem and unethical, they couldn’t be deterred from cheating. This finding is in agreement with what Tefera and Kinde ( 2009 ) have reported. Cheating behaviors such as copying from a nearby student during a quiz, test, or exam; allowing someone to copy your answers during a test or examination; writing on the hands, chairs, walls of exam halls; doing other students’ coursework/assignment for them; and whispering the answers to friends during an examination are the top five cheating behaviors with high rate of incidence. Wilkinson ( 2009 ) and Lupton and Chaqman ( 2002 ) also reported that copying from another student in an exam and/or assignment are forms of misconduct that have become areas of increasing concern for academics in higher education.

According to Wilkinson ( 2009 ) and McCabe et al. ( 2001 ), though majority of the students indicated academic cheating behaviors as unacceptable behavior, they do not condone cheating. Davis et al. ( 1992 ) also reported inconsistency between students’ belief about the seriousness of academic cheating behaviors and their actual behavior. Davis and his colleagues found that around 90% of students affirmed that cheating is incorrect but 76% of them admitted they have cheated at least once. In this regard, as discussed above, the likelihood of getting caught, instructors’ supervision, and the severity of the punishment matters a lot in students’ behavior.

In addition, the study compared the ratings of female and male students to determine if there are gender differences in beliefs about seriousness of cheating behaviors. Accordingly, female students consistently rate the items as more serious than male students. In other words, females have shown more ethical attitudes towards most academic cheating behaviors than males. “Doing less than one’s fair share of work on a group project; copying from a nearby student during a quiz, test, or exam; using text messaging to get/send answers on test; working on an assignment in group when individual work is assigned; and copying homework from another student are the activities where females showed more ethical attitude than their male counterpart. A meta-analysis conducted by Whitley et al. ( 1999 ) and Fienberg ( 2009 ) also affirmed this finding. The irony here is that however, females have perceived most cheating behavior as serious and inappropriate acts, the study revealed that they got engaged in cheating as frequently as males. This finding is against the findings of most previous researches who found that males are more likely to cheat than females (Kobayashi and Tedor 2012 ; Oneill and Pfeiffer 2012 ; and Peled et al. 2013 ). On the other hand, the finding is congruent with previous studies (e.g. Anitsal et al. 2009 ; Monahan et al. 2018 ; Quaraishi and Aziz 2017 ; Whitley et al. 1999 ; Fienberg 2009 ) who have reported no difference between males and females in cheating. Such inconsistency, thus, strengthen Klein et al.’s ( 2007 ) argument that explain gender as an inconsistent determinant of academic dishonesty.

The study also revealed that business and economics students have shown less ethical attitude towards academic dishonesty than students from the school of social science and humanities and school of natural and computational sciences. Moreover, the students of business and economics students have engaged in cheating more than students in the school of social science and humanities and natural and computational sciences. The same was found by Elias and Farag ( 2010 ). According to Elias and Farag, business students, with love of money, do not perceive certain cheating behaviors as unethical, and therefore, more likely to cheat than others. Another study by Morris and Kilian ( 2006 ) also found that undergraduate Accounting majors and business major students report higher frequencies of cheating than other major students. A recent study by Dyer et al. ( 2020 ) have also concluded that academic honesty runs particularly high among business students.

Conclusion and implications

This study presented some limitations. First, data are based on self-reports which would may result in the vulnerability to socially response bias because of the sensitive nature of the topic. This may have resulted in under-reporting of cheating during tests and examinations. The researcher attempted to avoid this problem by guaranteeing complete anonymity and emphasizing the importance of honest answers to the questions. Future investigations shall collect such data also from other sources (e.g., institutional reports related to honor code violations) and informants (e.g., course mates and teachers). Second, being conducted in a single University and the small sample may not be representative of University students in Ethiopia. Thus, findings of this study should be replicated on other Universities with large number of students and varied compositions for comprehensive understanding of academic cheating. Despite the limitation, however, this study has shed some light with regard to how university students perceived academic cheating behaviors in the Ethiopian context.

From the findings, it would be concluded that cheating is rampant in the university and students seems to be tolerant of unethical academic behaviors. This conveys a clear message that academic institutions has revisit their academic integrity policies and take necessary measures to deter academic cheating as its impact goes beyond the individual impact of crossing a moral or ethical boundary. Chace ( 2012 ) and Mensah et al. ( 2016 ) underlined that it reduces the perceived academic integrity of the institution, devaluing degrees earned from that institution. Similalry, Wollack and Cizek ( 2017 ) added that academic cheating threatens the validity of those credentials. Students who cheat rather than learn to pass courses are less prepared for the workforce and are more likely to engage in behaviors that are similarly unethical (Smyth et al. 2009 ; Teixeira and Rocha 2010 ). In view of this, the researcher discussed the implications as follows;

The researcher believes that high prevalence of the cheating as witnessed in the study might be attributed to the less probability of getting caught and severity or absence of punishment. Thus, the university has to revisit the strength and applications of its students’ code of conduct. As argued by Vandehey et al. ( 2007 ), students’ concern for being caught and punished for cheating was far more effective as a deterrent to academic misconduct than the student’s internal feelings toward the act. Vandehey et al. ( 2007 ) further emphasized that student punishment factors continued to be the best deterrents to student academic misconduct. If students are caught cheating, accused, and have a severe admonishment, it is more likely that, according to Petress ( 2003 ), the behavior can be curtailed. Levy and Rakovski ( 2007 ) also added that students’ engagement in academic dishonesty decreased when they knew the cheating would be discovered and severely punished.

Moreover, given the essential nature of academic integrity to the academic mission of an institution, preventing academic dishonesty on the most common form of assessment (testing) is of high value to many colleges and universities. In classrooms and in the test center environment, this threat to academic integrity should lead to very strict security rules. Students should be observed at all times while taking test and/or examination and invigilators must be able to intervene immediately if there is any unusual testing behavior.

Above all, following an educational approach would be noteworthy to bring about long-term and sustainable changes within the minds of our students. Accordingly, the integration of academic integrity into every curriculum would seem to provide a potential means of increasing students’ ethical sensitivity and, hence, behavior. Emphasizing this, Nonis and Swift ( 2001 ) have stated that we can implement fundamental approach involving the teaching of integrity and discussion of ethical issues in every subject, with particular emphasis in the capstone subjects instead of integrating a stand-alone ethics education/subject. Such an approach, according to Nonis and Swift ( 2001 ), focuses not so much on teaching students the rules of ethical analysis, but on providing a strong ethical foundation that becomes deep-rooted within students’ personality over the duration of their studies so that they come to value integrity and honesty in their own behavior. The last, but not the least, more researches on academic integrity at all levels of the education ladder shall be conducted so that timely and preventive alternatives shall be considered. Moreover, higher education institutions and/or other stakeholders of the education sector shall encourage such studies through funding and dissemination thereby maximizing quality education.

Availability of data and materials

Raw data and materials are not attached because of the fact the nature the data (being on academic cheating) may spoil the images of the institutions and/or departments. However, on request, the author could provide the data to concerned bodies.

Abbreviations

Analysis of Variances

College of Business and Economics

College of Natural and Computational Sciences

College of Social Sciences and Humanities

Honestly significant difference

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I would like to thank the students who voluntarily participated in this study. I want to extend my gratitude to Dire Dawa University, its academic staffs and college deans who allowed and helped me to collect the data.

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Wondifraw Dejene Chala is an assistant professor in Curriculum and Instruction serving as a teacher-educator in Dire-Dawa University, Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, since 2007. His research interests include, but are not limited to, initial teacher education, multicultural education, teacher beliefs, teacher-educators’ classroom practice, inclusive education; academic integrity; and gender equality in education.

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Chala, W.D. Perceived seriousness of academic cheating behaviors among undergraduate students: an Ethiopian experience. Int J Educ Integr 17 , 2 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-020-00069-z

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Academic dishonesty: What impact does it have and what can faculty do?

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Academic dishonesty occurs among nursing students at multiple levels of professional education programs. Studies have shown that students who commit dishonest acts in the educational setting may also commit dishonest acts as students in the clinical setting and as professionals in their practice setting. This lack of professional integrity may result in poor outcomes for patients as well as loss of trust from patients and from colleagues. Although multiple studies done among prelicensure nursing students explored academic dishonesty, there are few studies of academic integrity among nurse practitioner (NP) students. As advanced practice nurses, we need to understand the issues of academic dishonesty among NP students through further research. As faculty, we must act to prevent academic dishonesty and unethical behavior and to provide appropriate consequences when it occurs. It is also important that we consider ways to socialize students into ethical behavior to maintain trust in the profession. It is important that we respond to both students and colleagues who demonstrate a lack of integrity. All NPs must work to create a culture of professional integrity among students and members of the profession at every level.

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14 Theoretical Frameworks for Academic Dishonesty

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Academic dishonesty has so far been understood using theoretical frameworks derived from criminology literature. These frameworks contribute pieces of the puzzle and even enjoy some empirical support, but conceptualizing students as delinquents is problematic and ultimately ineffective. This chapter reviews the current frameworks, including their theoretical underpinnings, empirical support, and strategies they suggest, and goes on to analyze their limitations and suggest alternative frameworks.

Since the landmark study of Bowers (1964), where 75 percent of five thousand students at ninety-nine colleges and universities admitted to cheating at least once, the figures have not changed much. More recent estimates range from 70 percent to 80 percent, with a peak of 95 percent of students admitting to cheating (Brown & Emmett, 2001; McCabe & Trevino, 1993; Stern & Havlicek, 1986; Whitley, 1998). Faculty, educational developers, student affairs professionals, and higher education researchers have all devoted effort, resources, and programs to reduce cheating, but given these figures, the return on investment of such initiatives is disheartening.

This chapter explores possible reasons for this disconnect. To understand the limitations of current approaches, it is helpful for faculty developers to understand the theoretical frameworks that have been used to explain academic dishonesty and their origination. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section reviews the theoretical frameworks scholars currently use to conceptualize academic integrity and the research supporting them, as well as their fundamental limitations. The second section proposes alternative ways to think about cheating, and the last section addresses the implications for educational development.

Current Frameworks

In my review of the literature on cheating and academic integrity, five theoretical frameworks are the most common: (1) deterrence theory, (2) rational choice theory, (3) neutralization theory, (4) planned behavior theory, and (5) situational ethics. Before I describe them, some caveats are in order.

First, as in every field that investigates stigmatized behavior, research subjects will understate their participation in such behaviors or deny them altogether. Although it is possible to employ research techniques that reduce such positive response bias, it is generally not possible to eliminate it altogether. Second, studies of cheating may not be directly comparable. The researcher can avoid positive response bias by not asking about cheating directly. Some studies ask about cheating behaviors observed in peers, while others ask about hypothetical scenarios (“Given this situation, would you engage in this behavior?”). Still others set up experimental situations where the researchers themselves can observe cheating. Diversity of methods yields diversity of results, creating a problem for comparability across research studies. I have relied heavily on Whitley’s meta-analysis (1998) of 107 studies of the correlates of cheating and effect size measures for each correlate to obviate the problem of comparing studies conducted using different methods. The results of his meta-analysis are more compelling than the results of each individual study. I use his estimates as measures of support of the theoretical frameworks I consider.

Finally, and most important, the theoretical perspectives that have informed research on academic dishonesty thus far all share a common bias: they are all derived from theories of criminal behavior. Although some people may philosophically disagree with conceptualizing students as delinquents, this bias also creates a pragmatic problem. Criminal theories are theories of deviant behavior, designed to explain why a few individuals deviate from behavior that the rest of the population observes as normative and ethical. When more than 70 percent of students admit to having cheated, it is not clear who is deviant and who is in the norm anymore, and these theories lose much of their descriptive and predictive power.

Deterrence Theory

The deterrence theory posits that cheating is a function of the severity of the consequences (Zimring & Hawkins, 1973). If we want to curtail a certain behavior, we should punish it with consequences severe enough to discourage students, including failing the assignment, failing the course, academic probation, or even expulsion. Research on the correlates of cheating behaviors partly supports the deterrence theory in that students’ self-perception of their ability to cheat has a medium positive effect on cheating (Whitley, 1998). In other words, if students think they are able to engage in their behavior without consequences, they are likely to do so. Here and throughout this chapter, the strength of an effect (small, medium, and large) is calculated according to the rules for the d statistic, a measure of effect size based on the standardized mean difference between cheaters and noncheaters on a given variable (Cohen, 1988).

The approach suggested by deterrence theory has some practical problems. Professors can dole out punishment with consequences only at the assignment and course level; therefore centralized academic review boards must lead in increasing the severity of the consequences. However, instructors are reluctant to report cases to their academic review board because of the extra effort involved (Schneider, 1999). Research also shows that the effectiveness and intensity of deterrents varies among cultures. For instance, Western students asked to list deterrents to cheating are very likely to mention expulsion as the ultimate deterrent. In Japan, students asked the same question are more likely than American students to focus on public humiliation—for example, making cheaters use only red ink pens to write for the rest of the year (Burns, Davis, & Hoshino, 1998). Therefore, responses to academic dishonesty are not universal but should be tailored to the particular culture of the institution.

Rational Choice Theory

The rational choice theory treats dishonest actions as the result of decisions that rational agents make (Cornish & Clarke, 1986). The eventual course of action is chosen after weighing the advantages and disadvantages of all possible alternatives. Therefore, deciding to cheat results from a cost-benefit analysis. The factors involved in the decision might include the effort involved in cheating rather than studying the material, the expected improvement in the grade due to cheating, the stakes involved in the assignment, and so on. Of course, the severity of the possible consequences also factors in, making the strategies suggested by deterrence theory, as well as its limitations, relevant to rational choice theory as well. Rational choice theory finds further support in the research on the correlates of cheating. The risk of being caught has a medium negative effect on cheating, the fear of punishment has a small negative effect, and the importance of the outcome has a medium positive effect (Whitley, 1998).

Neutralization Theory

Other frameworks conceptualize students as moral beings as well as rational ones. Cost-benefit considerations aside, surely the effect of engaging in morally wrong acts should have psychological consequences on those who do so. In fact, earlier research on academic dishonesty focused on the so-called self-esteem cycle (Aronson & Mettee, 1968; Ward, 1986). Cheaters were believed to start out with low-self esteem. They didn’t think they would do well on the task, and they were not invested in maintaining a positive image with the instructor, because they didn’t think he or she believed in their abilities. When they engaged in cheating, the knowledge of their morally wrong behavior further lowered their self-esteem, precipitating future iterations of this vicious cycle. This cycle unravels in view of the finding that, even though it is true that reported past cheating has a large positive effect on future cheating, it is not true that cheaters have low self-esteem (Whitley, 1998).

Some cheaters might deny responsibility, saying they did nothing wrong or they didn’t mean to and were influenced by circumstances beyond their control.

Others might deny consequences, claiming that cheating is no big deal or that it is a “victimless crime.”

Still others might blame the authorities, saying it’s the professor’s fault if they have to cheat because the tests are always unfair, or professors too probably cheated as students.

Some might invoke a more compelling value system or higher loyalties that supersede academic rules, such as the value of helping friends pass the course.

This framework posits that efforts to prevent cheating should focus on deneutralizing it, perhaps emphasizing the consequences of various kinds of academic dishonesty (such as fabrication or falsification of data) to the scientific and intellectual community or stressing personal responsibility and agency.

Planned Behavior Theory

Planned behavior theory posits that cheating happens as a result of the opportunity as well as the intention to cheat (Ajzen, 1969). Therefore, efforts to prevent cheating should also act on both situational and behavioral factors. Instructors who reduce opportunities to cheat by being more vigilant during exams may only create frustrated cheaters who still have every intention to cheat at the next available opportunity. Proponents of planned behavior theory would focus their efforts both on prevention and on educating people about the value of academic integrity. Research on the correlates of cheating support both sides of the planned behavior theory. On the opportunity side, empty seats between students and multiple forms of the same test during exams have a medium and small negative effect on cheating, respectively. Conversely, letting students sit in the back of the room and letting them sit next to their friends have a small and medium positive effect on cheating, respectively. On the intention side, perception of a moral obligation to avoid cheating has a medium negative effect (Whitley, 1998).

Situational Ethics

Some people have raised the question of whether students cheat in response to extraordinary circumstances, where breaking the usual rules of ethical behavior is possibly justified. Consider the hypothetical situation of a student who needs to decide whether to help his foreign-born girlfriend cheat on an exam. He knows that she is on academic probation and that if she fails this test she will be expelled from the university, lose her student visa, and be deported back to her country, where her family will force her into an arranged marriage. He has a tough dilemma, and it is not clear which choice will lead to the best outcome. Situational ethics posits that such unique situations should be decided on the basis of a unique set of considerations that don’t normally apply to other situations (Fletcher, 1966).

However, the situational ethics framework does not have empirical support. The high incidence of reported cheating suggests that students don’t cheat in response to extreme—and therefore rare—circumstances, where breaches of academic integrity would possibly be understandable. In fact, reported past cheating has a large positive effect on cheating (Whitley, 1998). The premise that students use one set of ethical rules for most aspects of their life but suspend them in a few situations such as cheating is also undermined by findings; in their study of business students from six universities who worked a part-time or full-time job in the past five years, Nonis and Swift (2001) found a moderate to strong correlation between the frequency of academic dishonesty and the frequency of workplace dishonesty. The workplace dishonesty behaviors they considered included using office supplies for personal use, leaving early when the boss was absent, calling in sick when well, padding an expense report, or taking credit for someone else’s work. Similar results hold for other populations, such as engineering students (Carpenter, Harding, & Finelli, 2006).

Limitations of Current Approaches and Need for New Ones

The conceptual frameworks discussed so far and the empirical support they enjoy add to our understanding of cheating in higher education. Yet these theories have not given us tools to counteract cheating effectively. As mentioned previously, the reason these frameworks inevitably fall short is that they are actually theories of criminal behavior, with a less-than-perfect fit to academic situations.

That students do not conceptualize cheating as a criminal act is apparent from the research on perceptions of what constitutes cheating. Although most people agree on a few clear-cut situations (stealing a paper from a friend, fabricating research results, buying a paper from the Internet and submitting it as your own), gray areas and disagreement in perception exist not only between faculty and students but also among groups of faculty and groups of students. Different groups attribute varying degrees of seriousness to certain actions, such as submitting the same paper for two classes, referencing an article without having read it, paraphrasing words without attribution, or collaborating inappropriately (Higbee & Thomas, 2002).

Cross-cultural research highlights even more discrepancies in perceptions of the seriousness of certain behaviors. In a study involving 885 students from the United States, Russia, the Netherlands, and Israel, Magnus, Polterovich, Danilov, and Savvateev (2002) presented a scenario in which “Student C reports to the departmental office that student A, while taking an exam, copied answers from student B’s paper with the consent of student B” (p. 126). The researchers asked the students to rate the behavior of all three characters. As expected, the ratings for student A (the cheater) ranged from slightly negative to negative, those for student B (the friend) ranged from negative to slightly positive, and those for student C (the whistleblower) ranged from neutral to very negative. Neutralization techniques can explain the positive ratings for student B and negative ratings for student C, where the former was rewarded for being a good friend and the latter was punished for not exhibiting solidarity. Interestingly, the U.S. average for student C was the only neutral rating; all other countries rated him negatively.

The high variability of judgment across students and instructors together with the high prevalence of cheating exposes the limitations of the current approaches to academic dishonesty and the need for alternative modes of conceptualizing cheating. We turn now to discussion of some possibilities.

Cheating as Ignorance or Confusion About Instructor’s Expectations

Certain behaviors that instructors classify as cheating can actually stem from unarticulated expectations, especially those behaviors regarding plagiarism and collaboration. Misconceptions about plagiarism abound; for instance, many students think it is acceptable to quote without attribution if they do not use the actual language (Wilhoit, 1994). Collaboration policies have incredible variability across courses, from no collaboration allowed to collaboration encouraged, to rules such as the “Gilligan’s Island collaboration policy” common in computer science departments (for an example, see Rutgers University, 2009). If this is the problem, instructors can easily obviate it by articulating and clarifying their expectations, policies, and the rationale behind them.

Cheating as Learned Behavior

By not explaining the value of academic integrity and not enforcing consequences for cheating, perhaps the environment in which students have been educated so far reinforces cheating and actually socializes them to do it. Given the prevalence of cheating, it is apparent that students do indeed grow up in a culture of cheating. Research on the correlates of cheating supports the learned behavior hypothesis because cheating norms on campus have a medium-to-large positive effect on the behavior (Whitley, 1998). If we subscribe to the learned behavior theory, then reducing cheating requires changing the campus culture.

A written pledge to academic integrity that each student signs

Significant student involvement in academic review boards in charge of academic integrity violations

Unproctored exams

A clause that obliges students to report violations they learn about or observe

Modified honor codes involve some subset of the four elements, and predictably they are less effective than pure honor codes but better than no code at all (McCabe & Pavela, 2000). Though the most controversial, the reporting clause seems to be the most effective (McCabe, Trevino, & Butterfield, 2001).

Cheating as a Coping Strategy in a Stressful Environment

We need to acknowledge that students, especially millennials, are under tremendous pressure to achieve (Howe & Strauss, 2000). This pressure comes from parental expectations, the rising cost of tuition, societal emphasis on grades, and a tighter job market. In the face of such pressure, cheating might be a way for a student to keep head above water in spite of the best intentions. Research on the correlates of cheating lends support to this hypothesis. In fact, achievement motivation has a small positive effect on cheating, while external pressure to achieve high grades, perceived workload, and perceived competition all have a medium positive effect on cheating (Whitley, 1998).

Cheating as Professional Development

Unfortunately, some recent public scandals have demonstrated that people can cheat their way to the top and profit, while many others suffers as a result. Some students might make sense of events such as the Enron and other corporate and political scandals by deciding that cheating skills are essential for professional success, and that higher education is the perfect setting in which to develop and hone them. Almost twenty years ago, Moffatt (1990) warned that the university is “a place where cheating comes almost as natural as breathing, where it’s an academic skill almost as important as reading, writing, and math” (p. 2). Sadly, the literature supports this speculation. Business undergraduates have long been documented as cheating at a higher rate than other students (Bowers, 1964), but recent research documents that even MBA students do the same (McCabe, Butterfield, & Trevino, 2006). Ghoshal (2005) has argued that “by propagating ideologically inspired amoral theories, business schools have actively freed their students from any sense of moral responsibility” (p. 76).

Cheating as a Developmental Stage

Might cheating be just a stage that most students naturally outgrow once they become professionals and see a more direct link between actions and their consequences? During my workshops on academic integrity, several instructors invariably come forth and volunteer their “confessions of a reformed cheater.” Research on the correlates of cheating lends some support to the developmental hypothesis. Students’ age has a moderate negative effect on cheating, as does marital status; married students tend to cheat less. Number of hours per week employed has a small negative effect on cheating, financial support from parents has a small positive effect, and living off campus as opposed to on campus has a small negative effect (Whitley, 1998). All these variables taken together point to the fact that the more maturity, independence, and responsibility students develop, the less they cheat.

This developmental hypothesis also implies a developmental strategy: helping students reach a higher level of maturity sooner by giving them more responsibility for their own lives.

Cheating as a Game

Game theory (von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1944) is a mathematical formalization of strategic situations among two or more players who have at their disposal a set of strategies, or moves, that they can use toward the goal of maximizing their individual payoff. Each individual move has a payoff that is dependent on the other player’s move. In this vein, a student has several moves available during an exam—for example, attempt to solve the problem on his own, look over another student’s test, or reach for his cheat sheet. The game is sequential in that each student move triggers the proctor’s moves. For example, if the student looks over another student’s test and the proctor sees him doing so, the proctor can ignore it, give a warning, or fail the student for the exam. If given a warning, the student can heed it or ignore it and try again. If the student is eventually failed for cheating, he can still do nothing or plead, cry, appeal the decision to the academic review board, and so on. Depending on the value the student associates with each possible outcome, and also depending on the probability the student ascribes to the proctor’s moves, the student can find the optimal path through this game. The game reaches equilibrium if the players, in trying to maximize their payoff, arrive at a sequence of moves from which neither derives an advantage by deviating. The current high level of cheating, which has been fairly stable for forty years, can be interpreted as an aggregate equilibrium between students and instructors’ current strategies.

The game theory approach is similar to the rational choice theory, but it has two main differences. In game theory, the instructor is also a player, with a set of strategies to use and the option of suddenly changing strategy or even affecting the payoffs. The payoffs can be modeled to incorporate a number of variables. For instance, Magnus et al. (2002) suggest that the social cost of going against the grain of the cheating culture on campus could be incorporated in the payoff function. The second difference is that game theory makes no ethical or moral claims on the situation and thus is likely closer to many students’ thinking.

Despite the promise of the game-theory approach, scholars have not yet applied it to student cheating, so I have been unable to locate an empirical analysis of cheating through this theoretical lens.

Implications for Educational Development

In many institutions, educational developers lead the campus community in conversation about academic integrity. We have opportunities in several areas. First, we can push for efficient and transparent processes for our academic review boards. In time, this effort would encourage more instructors to pursue breaches of academic integrity. Second, we can give faculty more effective countermeasures to cheating. When instructors discuss cheating prevention, they often focus on decreasing the opportunities to cheat, especially in the wake of new technologies that promote cheating, such as calculators and phones that can store documents and give access to the Internet. Instead, we can remind faculty to act on the intention side, encouraging them to think of interventions to reduce students’ inclination to cheat, such as educating students about the far-reaching consequences of academic dishonesty. Using the game theory approach, we can ask instructors to think about how they are increasing or decreasing the payoffs for certain courses of action with the messages they explicitly or implicitly communicate in their courses. Third, partnering with student affairs and health services professionals, we can work to equip students with better coping strategies to deal with stress, such as time management skills, holistic wellness programs, and the like. Fourth, we can prompt the administration to review overload policies. We know increased workload leads to more cheating, so we should be thinking about how many credits or units per semester we allow students to take. Finally, we can engage the campus community in conversations about honor codes. Apart from personality variables, which we can’t control, honor codes reduce cheating more than all the situational factors. Yet their adoption has been very slow. Our signature skill set—listening actively, bringing in various constituencies, reconciling conflicting viewpoints, and gradually building consensus—can surely help here.

As we support our faculty in the scholarship of teaching and learning, we can help our colleagues document and disseminate classroom interventions that work in preventing cheating. More broadly and importantly, as we continue to promote creation of learning experiences that meaningfully engage students and call for authentic assessments, we help transform the educational system in ways that make cheating inefficient and undesirable. Undoubtedly, cheating is a daunting problem to solve, but educational development has a lot to offer and can effect significant change.

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• Aronson, E., & Mettee, D. (1968). Dishonest behavior as a function of differential levels of induced self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9 (2), 121–127.
• Bowers, W. J. (1964). Student dishonesty and its control in college. New York: Columbia University, Bureau of Applied Social Research.
• Brown, B., & Emmett, D. (2001). Explaining the variations in the level of academic dishonesty in studies of college students: Some new evidence. College Student Journal, 35 (4), 529–538.
• Burns, S., Davis, S., & Hoshino, J. (1998). Academic dishonesty: A delineation of cross-cultural patterns. College Student Journal, 32 (4), 590–596.
• Carpenter, D., Harding, T., & Finelli, C. (2006). The implications of academic dishonesty in undergraduate engineering on professional ethical behavior. Proceedings of the 2006 World Environmental and Water Resources Congress. Red Hook, NY: Curran Associates.
• Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Cornish, D., & Clarke, R. (1986). The reasoning criminal: Rational choice perspectives on offending. New York: Springer-Verlag.
• Fletcher, J. (1966). Situational ethics. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
• Ghoshal, S. (2005). Bad management theories are destroying good management practice. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 4 (1), 75–91.
• Higbee, J., & Thomas, P. (2002). Student and faculty perceptions of behaviors that constitute cheating. NASPA Journal, 40 (1), 39–52.
• Howe, N., & Strauss, W. (2000). Millennials rising: The next great generation. New York: Vintage.
• Magnus, J., Polterovich, V., Danilov, D., & Savvateev, A. (2002). Tolerance of cheating: An analysis across countries. Journal of Economic Education, 33 (2), 125–135.
• McCabe, D., Butterfield, K., & Trevino, L. (2006). Academic dishonesty in graduate business programs: Prevalence, causes, and proposed action. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 5 (3), 294–305.
• McCabe, D., & Pavela, G. (2000). Some good news about academic integrity. Change, 32 (5), 32–38.
• McCabe, D., & Trevino, L. (1993). Academic dishonesty: Honor codes and other contextual influences. Journal of Higher Education, 64, 522–538.
• McCabe, D., Trevino, L., & Butterfield, K. (1999). Academic integrity in honor code and non-honor code environments: A qualitative investigation. Journal of Higher Education, 70 (2), 211–234.
• McCabe, D., Trevino, L., & Butterfield, K. (2001). Dishonesty in academic environments: The influence of peer reporting requirements. Journal of Higher Education, 72 (1), 2–45.
• Melendez, B. (1985). Honor code study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Moffatt, M. (1990). Undergraduate cheating. Unpublished manuscript, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED334921)
• Nonis, S., & Swift, C. (2001). An examination of the relationship between academic dishonesty and workplace dishonesty: A multicampus investigation. Journal of Education for Business, 77 (2), 69–77.
• Rutgers University. (2009). 198:415 compilers, spring 2009: Academic integrity. Retrieved March 2, 2009, from http://remus.rutgers.edu/cs415/academiclnteg.html
• Schneider, A. (1999, January 22). Why professors don’t do more to stop students who cheat. Chronicle of Higher Education, pp. A8-A10.
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• Zimring, F. E., & Hawkins, G. J. (1973). Deterrence: The legal threat in crime control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Northern Illinois University Academic Integrity Tutorials

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• Definitions and Types

Academic Dishonesty Definition and Types

"Good academic work must be based on honesty" ( NIU, 2023a ). Promoting honesty in academic work requires understanding the definition of academic dishonesty, its different types, and its causes and consequences.

According to NIU's undergraduate and graduate catalogs ( NIU, 2023b ),

The attempt of any student to present as his or her own work that which he or she has not produced is regarded by the faculty and administration as a serious offense. Students are considered to have cheated if they copy the work of another during an examination or turn in a paper or an assignment written, in whole or in part, by someone else. Students are responsible for plagiarism, intentional or not, if they copy material from books, magazines, or other sources without identifying and acknowledging those sources or if they paraphrase ideas from such sources without acknowledging them.

Good academic work is expected not only in classroom activities, but also in research and related activities. As NIU's Graduate Catalog ( NIU, 2023b ) emphasizes, research misconduct includes "falsification of data, improper assignment of authorship, claiming another person's work as one's own, unprofessional manipulation of experiments or of research procedures, [and] misappropriation of research funds".

Academic Dishonesty Defined

Academic dishonesty refers to committing or contributing to dishonest acts by those engaged in teaching, learning, research, and related academic activities, and it applies not just to students, but to everyone in the academic environment (Cizek, 2003; Whitley, Jr. & Keith-Spiegel, 2002). NIU considers academic dishonesty a serious offense, regardless of whether it was committed intentionally or not ( NIU, 2023a ; NIU, 2023b ).

Academic dishonesty can take many forms, which can be broadly classified as follows (Whitley & Keith-Spigel, 2002; Pavela, 1978; Stern & Havelick, 1986):

Fabrication or falsification

Cheating involves unauthorized use of information, materials, devices, sources or practices in completing academic activities. For example, copying during an exam that should be completed individually is an unauthorized practice, and, therefore, is considered cheating. A student who allows another student to copy from his or her work is considered to be facilitating or contributing to cheating.

The NIU Student Code of Conduct ( NIU, 2023c ) states that the term "cheating" includes, but is not limited to:

Use of sources beyond those authorized by the instructor in writing papers, preparing reports, solving problems, or carrying out other assignments; Acquisition, without permission, of tests or other academic material belonging to a member of the university faculty or staff; Engagement in any behavior specifically prohibited by a faculty member in the course syllabus or class discussion.

Check Your Understanding

What if the cheating or plagiarism committed was unintentional?

Reveal Answer

It is still considered as academic dishonesty even if it was committed unintentionally.

Plagiarism is a type of cheating in which someone adopts another person's ideas, words, design, art, music, etc., as his or her own without acknowledging the source, or, when necessary, obtaining permission from the author. For example, copying and pasting material from a web site into your own document without proper citation is considered plagiarism.

Per the NIU Student code of Conduct ( NIU, 2023c ):

The term “plagiarism” includes but is not limited to the use, by paraphrase or direct quotation, of the published or unpublished work of another person without full and clear acknowledgment. Plagiarism also includes the unacknowledged use of materials prepared by another person or agency engaged in the selling of term papers or other academic materials.

Fabrication or falsification involves the unauthorized creation or alteration of information in an academic document or activity. For example, artificially creating data when it should be collected from an actual experiment or making up a source of information that does not exist is considered fabrication or falsification.

Sabotage involves disrupting or destroying another person's work so that the other person cannot complete an academic activity successfully. For example, destroying another person's artwork, experiment, or design is considered sabotage. Failure to contribute as required to a team project can also be considered academic sabotage.

Keep in Mind

The two key ideas to remember in understanding the four types of academic dishonesty are:

• Unauthorized practices
• Improper use of another person's work in the course of completing an academic activity

Even if a student unintentionally uses another person's work improperly or does something that was unauthorized while completing an academic activity, he or she is still guilty of academic dishonesty. Instructors have the responsibility to educate students on these issues in order to promote academic integrity.

Two key issues to keep in mind regarding academic dishonesty are:

• Improper use of other person's work

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Academic Integrity at MIT

A handbook for students, search form, what are the consequences.

The consequences for cheating, plagiarism, unauthorized collaboration, and other forms of academic dishonesty can be very serious, possibly including suspension or expulsion from the Institute. Any violation of the rules outlined in this handbook, established by the instructor of the class, or deviating from responsible conduct of research, may be considered violations of academic integrity. The MIT Policy on Student Academic Dishonesty is outlined in MIT’s Policies and Procedures 10.2 .

Instructors, research or thesis supervisors decide how to handle violations of academic integrity on a case-by-case basis, and three options exist. Questions about these options should be directed to the Office of Student conduct ( [email protected] ).

Academic consequences within a class or research project

Within a class, the instructor determines what action is appropriate to take. Such action may include:

requiring the student to redo the assignment for a reduced grade.

assigning the student a failing grade for the assignment.

assigning the student a failing grade for the class.

For a research project, the supervisor determines what action is appropriate to take. Such action may include:

• terminating the student's participation in the research project.

The instructor or supervisor may also submit documentation to the Office of Student Citizenship in the form of a letter to file or a formal complaint. These options are outlined below.

Letter to file

The instructor or supervisor writes a letter describing the nature of the academic integrity violation, which is placed in the student’s discipline file. The student’s discipline file is maintained by the Office of Student Citizenship (OSC) and is not associated with the student’s academic record .

A letter may be filed with the OSC in addition to the action already taken in the class or research project.

If a student receives a letter to file, s/he has the right to:

submit a reply, that is added to the student’s file.

appeal the letter to the Committee on Discipline (COD) for a full hearing.

In resolving the violation described in the letter, the OSC reviews any previous violations which are documented in the student’s discipline file.

Committee on Discipline (COD) complaint

The instructor or supervisor submits a formal complaint to the COD, which resolves cases of alleged student misconduct.

This complaint may be filed with the OSC in addition to the action already taken in the class or research project.

A COD complaint is reviewed by the COD Chair and considered for a hearing. Any previous violations documented in the student’s discipline file are reviewed as part of this process.

Cases resulting in a hearing are subject to a full range of sanctions, including probation, suspension, dismissal, or other educational sanctions.

Policies, Procedures, and Contacts

• MIT Policy on Student Academic Dishonesty
• Typical MIT Student Discipline Process Outline
• Committee on Discipline Rules and Regulations
• Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards
• For Faculty and Staff: What You Should Know about Academic Integrity

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• SafeAssign: Plagarism Prevention

Tips to Prevent Violations of Academic Integrity

It is important that instructors put a statement regarding academic dishonesty/academic integrity in their syllabi. This informs students that you are aware that violations of academic integrity occurs and that you plan to pursue all violations. Just as importantly, it allows you to formally clarify what sorts of grey-area actions are or are not acceptable in your course (e.g., collaborative work). You may want to include a statement about your policy for handling cases of suspected violations (e.g., "Any incidence of academic dishonesty will be reported to the Academic Judiciary Committee and can result in an F for the course."). Try to be specific on course syllabi if you are aware of violations that occur often. If your particular course uses devices such as "clickers", specify that possession alone, of an absent student's clicker can result in an accusation being reported. If switching of color-coded or numbered exams that are pre-placed on desk are suspected cases of violations, specify on course syllabi. Cases of plagiarism often involve students improperly using Internet sources. If you allow students to use internet sources in papers for your class, tell them to include the URLs for those sources in their bibliography. You should warn them that copying (or closely paraphrasing text) text or figures from a website without citing it and placing it in quotation marks is plagiarism. It is no different from doing the same thing with a printed source. Inform students that assignments will be submitted to a plagiarism detection program on Blackboard (ie: SafeAssign) will be used. Professing ignorance of this rule will not be accepted as a legitimate basis for appealing an accusation of academic dishonesty. If you suspect a student has plagiarized an internet source, the simplest way to test this hypothesis is to submit student's paper through the plagiarism detection program on Blackboard (ie: SafeAssign).

Approaches to Prevention:

An excellent discussion of plagiarism can be found at   http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets/plagiarism.shtml

Categories of Academic Dishonesty Recommended Actions to Prevent Cheating Legal Protection For Accusers

• Report of Academic Dishonesty
• SafeAssign: Plagiarism Prevention