An Investigation of College Students’ Perceptions of Academic Dishonesty,Reasons for Dishonesty,Achievement Goals,and Willingness to Report Dishonest Behavior

This study investigated students’ perceptions of their own and their peers’ academic dishonesty (AD), their reasons for this dishonesty, their achievement goals, and their willingness to report AD (WRAD) within a Chinese cultural context. The results identified students’ belief that their peers had a greater likelihood of engaging in AD and had more motivation to do so than did the students themselves. Gender and academic major did not affect students’ WRAD. However, students were significantly more willing to report classmates than friends. In terms of the participants’ self-perceptions and peer perceptions concerning motivations for AD, more female students cited the lack of penalties as the reason for their own and their peers’ AD, whereas male students more frequently cited their lack of attention to schoolwork as the reason for their own AD. In contrast to students in the social sciences, business students more frequently cited inadequate capabilities as the reason for their AD, and engineering students more frequently attributed their AD to self-interest. Multiple regression analysis demonstrated that three motivations for AD (opportunism, inadequacy, and self-promotion) could positively predict AD, whereas mastery-approach goals could negatively predict AD.     

Justice for the People? How Justice Sensitivity Can Foster and Impair Support for Populist Radical-Right Parties and Politicians in the United States and in Germany

Many people argue that support for populist radical-right political agents is motivated by people feeling “left behind” in globalized Western democracies. Empirical research supports this notion by showing that people who feel personally or collectively deprived are more likely to hold populist beliefs and anti-immigration attitudes. Our aim was to further investigate the psychological link between individuals' justice concerns and their preferences for populist radical-right political agents. We focused on stable individual differences in self-oriented and other-oriented justice concerns and argue that these should have opposing correlations with preferences for populist radical-right parties. We tested our hypotheses in two national samples, one from the United States (N = 1500) and one from Germany (N = 848). Sensitivity to injustice towards oneself enhanced the likelihood of preferring Trump (United States) and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) (Germany) via increased anti-immigration attitudes and increased populist attitudes. Sensitivity to injustice towards others reduced the likelihood of preferring Trump and AfD via decreased anti-immigration attitudes. We discuss our findings in regard to how stable individual differences in the evaluation of fairness can motivate intra- and interpersonal political conflicts in modern w estern societies and how politics and mass media can fuel these conflicts.     

Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Cheating: The Influence of Direct Knowledge and Attitudes on Academic Dishonesty

What effect does witnessing other students cheat have on one's own cheating behavior? What roles do moral attitudes and neutralizing attitudes (justifications for behavior) play when deciding to cheat? The present research proposes a model of academic dishonesty which takes into account each of these variables. Findings from experimental (vignette) and survey methods determined that seeing others cheat increases cheating behavior by causing students to judge the behavior less morally reprehensible, not by making rationalization easier. Witnessing cheating also has unique effects, controlling for other variables.     

The Prediction of Students’ Academic Performance With Fluid Intelligence in Giving Special Consideration to the Contribution of Learning

The present study provides a new account of how fluid intelligence influences academic performance. In this account a complex learning component of fluid intelligence tests is proposed to play a major role in predicting academic performance. A sample of 2, 277 secondary school students completed two reasoning tests that were assumed to represent fluid intelligence and standardized math and verbal tests assessing academic performance. The fluid intelligence data were decomposed into a learning component that was associated with the position effect of intelligence items and a constant component that was independent of the position effect. Results showed that the learning component contributed significantly more to the prediction of math and verbal performance than the constant component. The link from the learning component to math performance was especially strong. These results indicated that fluid intelligence, which has so far been considered as homogeneous, could be decomposed in such a way that the resulting components showed different properties and contributed differently to the prediction of academic performance. Furthermore, the results were in line with the expectation that learning was a predictor of performance in school.     

Intellectual Profiles and Violent Behavior in Juvenile Delinquents

Hemispheric laterality, measured by the Wechsler Verbal IQ-Performance IQ differential score, in a large group of delinquents (N = 101) was not associated with violent-nonviolent behavior. Delinquents were, however, likely to be relatively more impaired on verbal than on nonverbal intellectual capacities.     

Relationship between religious commitment and academic dishonesty: is self-efficacy a factor?

ABSTRACT

Academic dishonesty has been found to be on the increase globally, affecting the quality of education, ethics of professional practices and career outcome. Substantial literature exists on the role of religious commitment (RC) in reducing academic dishonesty (AD), but few or no studies have examined the pathways explaining this link. The present study examined whether self-efficacy mediates the relationship between RC and AD. Undergraduates of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (N = 350, Mean age = 22.18 years) completed the Academic Dishonesty Scale (ADS), Religious Commitment Inventory (RCI-10) and New General Self-Efficacy Scale (NGSES) and also provided relevant demographic information. Results of statistical analysis indicated that RC was negatively associated with AD. Self-efficacy was also a partial mediation in the relationship between RC and AD. This implies that self-efficacy contributes to the pathways through which RC influences AD among students. Our findings suggest that consideration of students’ level of self-judgment on their ability to cope with academic demands may be an important target toward enhancing the influence of RC in reducing academic dishonest behaviors among students.     

Heroes Don't Cheat: An Examination of Academic Dishonesty and Students' Views on Why Professors Don't Report Cheating

Some students do not cheat. Students high in measures of bravery, honesty, and empathy, our defining characteristics of heroism, report less past cheating than other students. These student heroes also reported that they would feel more guilt if they cheated and also reported less intent to cheat in the future than nonheroes. We find general consensus between students and professors as to reasons for the nonreporting of cheating, suggesting a general impression of insufficient evidence, lack of courage, and denial. Suggested interventions in academia are based in positive psychology and an understanding of academic heroes.     

Exploring the Judgment–Action Gap: College Students and Academic Dishonesty

This study examined differences between university students who were caught and sanctioned for cheating, students admitting to cheating but who were not caught, and students reporting that they had never cheated. Our findings showed that noncheaters are older, have better grade point averages, and have more sophisticated moral and epistemological reasoning skills. Qualitative analyses revealed that denial of responsibility and injury were the most common neutralization techniques and differed between the sanctioned and self-reported cheaters. We discuss the need to examine the extent to which reasoning skills have a causal impact on cheating behaviors.     

Personality Certainty and Politics: Increasing the Predictive Utility of Individual‐Difference Inventories

Research on political psychology has benefitted from using individual‐difference measures to predict political attitudes and behavior. And, previous research has further identified a number of specific variables that enhance the predictive utility of individual‐difference scales. However, a potentially important factor that has been overlooked is the certainty with which people make their responses. The present research establishes that the certainty with which people respond to scales is associated with stability of the scale responses over time and correspondence between the scale and related outcomes. In addition, the effects of certainty in political ideological identification in predicting politically relevant outcomes hold when controlling for a number of previously established moderators. This research suggests that measuring certainty in answers to individual‐difference scales can be a useful and efficient way to increase the predictive utility of those scales within the political domain and beyond. This benefit is demonstrated with need for cognition (Study 1), need to evaluate (Study 2), and ideological identification (Studies 2 and 3).     

Determining the Propensity for Academic Dishonesty Using Decision Tree Analysis

This article investigates the propensity for academic dishonesty by university students using the partitioning method of decision tree analysis. A set of prediction rules are presented, and conclusions are drawn. To provide context for the decision tree approach, the partition process is compared with results of more traditional probit regression models. Results of the decision tree analysis complement the probit models in terms of predictive accuracy and confirm results previously found in the literature. In particular, students’ moral character—whether they believe cheating is acceptable—is found to be the most important factor in determining the propensity for academic dishonesty.     

What if I am the one? Measuring individual differences in emotional sensitivity to probability and emotional reactivity to possibility

Current theories of risk perception point to the powerful role of emotion and the neglect of probabilistic information in the face of risk, but these tendencies differ across individuals. We propose a method for measuring individuals' emotional sensitivity to probability to assess how feelings about probabilities, rather than the probabilities themselves, influence decisions. Participants gave affective ratings (worry or excitement) to 14 risky events, each with a specified probability ranging from 1 in 10 to 1 in 10,000,000. For each participant, we regressed these emotional responses against item probabilities, estimating a slope (the degree to which emotional responses change with probability) and an intercept (the emotional reaction to an event with a fixed probability). These two parameters were treated as individual difference scores and included in models predicting reactions to several health risk scenarios. Both emotional sensitivity to probability (slope) and emotional reactivity to possibility (intercept) significantly predicted responses to these scenarios, above and beyond the predictive power of other well‐established individual difference measures.     

Academic Integrity of Millennials: The Impact of Religion and Spirituality

The majority of traditional students enrolled at most colleges and universities are a part of what has been termed the Millennial Generation, also known as Generation Y, which typically describes the group of individuals born in most of the 1980s and 1990s. This cohort’s life has been shaped by corporate scandals, economic instability, and worldwide tragedies. Concurrently, business ethics has become a popular topic in the news within the last 2 decades due to the increase in the number of high-profile business scandals. Unfortunately, this trend has also been accompanied by an increased number of reported incidents of academic dishonesty at many major universities. Two underresearched factors that may be related to academic dishonesty and cheating behavior are religiosity and spirituality. This article attempts to shed more light on the relationship between religious beliefs and unethical behavior, with a focus on millennial college students. It is posited that religiosity and spirituality influence an individual’s attitudes, views, decisions, and ultimately behaviors. The results of this study indicate that religiosity but not spirituality is a predictor of students’ attitudes toward cheating and cheating behavior.     

College Student Cheating: The Role of Motivation,Perceived Norms,Attitudes, and Knowledge of Institutional Policy

This study provides a comparative analysis of students' self-reported beliefs and behaviors related to six analogous pairs of conventional and digital forms of academic cheating. Results from an online survey of undergraduates at two universities (N = 1,305) suggest that students use conventional means more often than digital means to copy homework, collaborate when it is not permitted, and copy from others during an exam. However, engagement in digital plagiarism (cutting and pasting from the Internet) has surpassed conventional plagiarism. Students also reported using digital “cheat sheets” (i.e., notes stored in a digital device) to cheat on tests more often than conventional “cheat sheets.” Overall, 32% of students reported no cheating of any kind, 18.2% reported using only conventional methods, 4.2% reported using only digital methods, and 45.6% reported using both conventional and digital methods to cheat. “Digital only” cheaters were less likely than “conventional only” cheaters to report assignment cheating, but the former was more likely than the latter to report engagement in plagiarism. Students who cheated both conventionally and digitally were significantly different from the other three groups in terms of their self-reported engagement in all three types of cheating behavior. Students in this “both” group also had the lowest sense of moral responsibility to refrain from cheating and the greatest tendency to neutralize that responsibility. The scientific and educational implications of these findings are discussed in this study.