Academic Integrity

A controlled experiment was conducted with a cohort of graduate accounting students, which involved a mild form of deception during a class ethics quiz. One of the answers to a difficult question was inadvertently revealed by a visiting scholar, which allowed students an opportunity to use the answer in order to maximise test scores and qualify for a reward. Despite an attempt to sensitize students prior to the test to the importance of moral codes of conduct, a high incidence of cheating was reported. Students who took the opportunity to cheat were more condoning of the behaviour compared to control group members and this difference in attitudes was consistent regardless of the intensity of the issue specified in the survey. The cognitive dissonance associated with the academic dishonesty is believed to reveal behavioural orientations that reflect conscious and unconscious desires to alleviate the discomfort associated with the behaviour by attempting to condone it. This inappropriate behaviour appears to attract students professing no religious faith and is significantly influenced by the reported level of religious commitment

An extensive study has been performed on the importance of building ethical principles into secondary school and college curricula. In published surveys, females are almost universally found to be more ethical, but experience tells us females lag behind males in their ability to maintain and act upon their convictions in the workplace. We examined these issues by administering a survey on academic ethics to an undergraduate business school population, focusing heavily on gender differences.

Although a large body of research has examined academic cheating, very little attention has been devoted to student reporting of academic misconduct. We argue academic integrity violations are similar to but different in some ways from whistle-blowing. Using data from 131 business students, we use hierarchical regression to show how demographic, personality, attitudinal and contextual factors combine to predict intention to report cheating

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Handbook of Academic Integrity