Academic Dishonesty and Intention to Cheat: A Model on Active versus Passive Academic Dishonesty as Perceived by Business Students

Abstract

ABSTRACT Academic dishonesty seems to be an increasing problem in colleges. There seems to be a positive correlation between academic dishonesty in college and unethical behavior in work environment as well. Therefore, for a ethical business environment and abetter world in that sense, universities need to train tomorrow's with higher ethical standards. What is academic dishonesty or academic cheating? It does not seem to be quite black or white, one way to another, right or wrong. Student perceptions as well as others seem to be getting quite different, depending on basis, opinion, or interpretation. purpose of this research is to understand whether passive and active academic dishonesty as perceived by students are two separate constructs. If they are separate constructs, how each type of academic dishonesty influences intentions to cheat was also be studied. Structural equation modeling has been utilized to test hypotheses. All hypotheses were supported, and results have been discussed. INTRODUCTION Academic dishonesty in colleges is a global problem (Chapman & Lupton, 2004). More and students seem to be cheating on their tests and assignments significantly for past few decades (Bolin, 2004; Brown & Choong, 2005; Chapman, Davis, Toy, & Wright, 2004; Chapman & Lupton, 2004; Whitley, 1998). Public and private universities seem to share same problem among their students: academic dishonesty, lack of academic integrity, and academic cheating (Brown & Choong, 2005; Damast, 2007; Gloeckler & Merritt, 2005). Educational Testing Service (ETS) suspended some computerized tests like GRE (Graduate Records Exam) and TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) due to cheating in China, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan as noted by Shanghai Star (2002) in Chapman and Lupton (2004). According to results of a survey conducted among management majors in both AACSB accredited a state university and a private Catholic university (Brown & Choong, 2005), students were found to be very similar in terms of their extent of participation in 16 dishonest academic practices despite fact that more emphasis was placed on ethics and values at Catholic university. About 1 0 percent of first-year MBA students (class of 2008) at Duke University were accused of cheating in an open-book, take-home test (Damast, 2007). Several hundred MBA applicants . . . [were] caught hacking into software ... to discover their acceptance status weeks before decision letters were sent. Those instances happened in multiple universities such as Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, Duke, MIT and Stanford (Gloeckler & Merritt, 2005). Employee dishonesty is another major problem area, especially in highly dynamic for profit business environments, and becomes more complicated. Major forms of employee dishonesty includes fraud by top management, fraud in worker's compensation, and employee lying/ theft (Wang & Kleiner, 2005). For example, some top managers cooked books in such companies like Enron, Global Crossing, Adelphia Cornm., Qwest Comm. and WorldCom and caused a dramatic decrease in their companies stock prices (Wang & Kleiner, 2005). Many of executives causing such frauds were trained in prestigious schools (Burke, Polimeni, & Slavin, 2007). There seems to be a positive correlation between academic dishonesty in college and unethical behavior in work environment (Brown & Choong, 2005; Hilbert, 1985; Nonis & Swift, 2001; Sierles, Hendrickx, & Circle, 1980; Sims, 1993). For a ethical business environment and a better world in that sense, universities aim to educate principled leaders with the highest standards of integrity, sound judgment, and a strong moral compass - an intuitive sense of what is right and wrong as noted by Kim B. Clark, Dean of Harvard Business School (Gloeckler & Merritt, 2005). However, The university at undergraduate level sounds like a place where cheating comes almost as naturally as breathing, where it's an academic skill almost as important as reading, writing and math as noted by Moffatt (1 990, p. …