Academically dishonest behavior, or cheating, has been a continued problem in post-secondary institutions. Research has been varied in terms of understanding the root causes of academically dishonest behaviors and has offered ways in which to mitigate the behaviors by educating students and holding them accountable to institutional expectations.…

The Fraud Diamond theory (rationalization, opportunity, motivation and perceived capability) has been widely used as a framework to explain criminal behavior. However, little is known about its application in an academic context. Research on the relationship between the prevalence of academic fraud (e.g., cheating on exams, plagiarizing essays)…

The highest estimates of the prevalence of commercial contract cheating in Australia come from self-report surveys, which suggest that around 2% of students engage in commercial contract cheating during their higher education studies. However, self-report surveys are limited in that participants under-report socially-undesirable behaviours. In…

Academic cheating is a problem that affects many educational institutions and has become increasingly significant with the new challenges of online education. Recent studies have found that learning goals are correlated with cheating behavior among students. In this study, we investigated whether learning goals are still a predictor of cheating…

The authors investigated the relationships between college cheating, self-efficacy, neutralization theory, and social desirability. Studies indicated that individuals who engaged in cheating had lower levels of self-efficacy and more frequently neutralized (rationalized) cheating behaviors. However, there is a paucity of research examining the…

Background: Cheating at the post-secondary level is a skewed phenomenon. While personality and environmental factors are associated with cheating, few studies account for the zero inflation when predicting cheating behaviour. Aim: In this study, we explore a person-situation interaction hypothesis where teacher autonomy support (AS) could modify…

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between university students' fear of negative evaluation and their academic dishonesty tendencies and to compare them in terms of various variables. The sample of the study carried out in the relational screening model consists of 306 students, who were selected by the easily accessible sampling…

Research on contract cheating usually considers most forms of outsourcing combined, although studies have found that students more commonly obtain work from those known to them, rather than from commercial sites; yet little research exists which explores which variables and motivators may be associated with this type of outsourcing. Strategies…

This investigation examined whether academic entitlement (AE) and academic dishonesty (AD) increased significantly over the course of the first semester of university coursework. AE and AD were measured at three time points over students' first semester in university and examined for change. While both increased, only AE's increase was…

A total of 1390 university students from five public Moldovan universities completed a survey reporting their experiences and beliefs with respect to 22 types of academic misconduct. An interpretable five-factor solution to the frequencies of these behaviors accounted for more than half of the total variance. The two most reliable predictors were…

The challenges of higher education can be stressful, anxiety-producing, and sometimes depressing for students. Such negative emotions may influence students' attitudes toward assessment, such as whether it is perceived as acceptable to engage in plagiarism. However, it is not known whether any impact of negative emotions on attitudes toward…

In this study, we examined the role of social learning theory in explaining academic dishonesty among 673 college students in the United States, France, and Greece. We found support for social learning theory such that perceived peer dishonesty was incrementally valid as a predictor of self-reported academic dishonesty across three countries…

Previous research on Western college samples has identified a number of personality traits associated with scholastic cheating. Based on these findings, we suggest a model integrating personality predictors of cheating. However, it remains unclear whether the proposed model can be generalised to the Chinese culture, which has different norms and…

The topic of student cheating at higher education has been studied empirically for more than 80 years in the U.S., and has become a subject of concern in the rest of the world, where academic research has spread to other continents. However, institutional research has just begun in South American countries, where studies and surveys conducted in…

Given the high prevalence rate of academic dishonesty in institutions of higher education, it is important to understand the factors that contribute to its occurrence. The characteristics of an individual's family of origin are one set of factors that have been shown to be important predictors of academic dishonesty. However, the quality of one's…