academic dishonesty among undergraduates in the ...

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL of ACADEMIC RESEARCH

Vol. 5. No. 2. March, 2013

Mohd I.M. Salleh, Noor R. Alias, H.A. Hamid, Z. Yusoff. Academic dishonesty among undergraduates in the higher education. International Journal of Academic Research Part B; 2013; 5(2), 222-227. DOI: 10.7813/2075-4124.2013/5-2/B.34

ACADEMIC DISHONESTY AMONG UNDERGRADUATES IN THE HIGHER EDUCATION 1

2

Mohd Idzwan Mohd Salleh *, Noor Rahmawati Alias , 3 4 Haslinda Abdul Hamid , Zulkarnain Yusoff 1

Lecturer,

2,3 4

4

1,2,3

Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor, Faculty of Information Management, Academic Affairs Division, Universiti Teknologi MARA (MALAYSIA) *Corresponding author: [email protected] DOI: 10.7813/2075-4124.2013/5-2/B.34

ABSTRACT This paper explored the academic dishonesty among undergraduates in a public university. Undergraduate Malaysian university students in their final year of study completed a survey examining their views on various components of academic dishonesty. Findings disclosed that males and females are differed on measures of cheating on tests and assignments. Student age and program of study are also contributed significantly to the variability in the different measures of academic dishonesty. Key words: Academic Dishonesty; Undergraduates; Public University 1. INTRODUCTION Storch and Storch (2002) have defined academic dishonesty as “the act of giving or receiving unauthorized assistance in an academic task or receiving credit for plagiarized work.” Academic dishonesty is one of the serious academic diseases plaguing academic integrity in higher education institutions, attracting scholarly studies all around the world in this decade. The number of private and public sector educational institutions is increasing day by day; therefore, the impact of academic dishonesty on the life of potential professionals needs to be carefully analysed and appropriate policies must be formulated in order to minimize these unethical practices in the business and education sectors (Nazir & Aslam, 2010). It is evident that this issue has brought a serious ethical and moral dilemma among the university students. Bates et al. (2005) stressed that the problem of cheating behaviours among students is so pervasive to the extent that it is almost commonplace, resulting in students viewing the actions as ordinary and not morally wrong. Heather et al. (2010) strongly believed that the emergence of technology may have further increased the prevalence of academic dishonesty. With the advent of personal device assistants (PDAs) for storing information, emailing, text messaging and infrared beaming information conspicuously across a room the ability of one to cheat may likely increase and therefore explain the sharp increase in pervasiveness of academic dishonesty in more recent years. Without doubt, cheating students could expect good results from their unethical practices, but in the long term it would significantly affect their future attitudes and work ethics. Consequently thus, major forms of employee dishonesty exist including fraud by top management, fraud in worker’s compensation and employee lying/theft (Wang & Kleiner, 2005). Many of the executives causing such frauds were trained in prestigious schools (Burke, et al., 2007). According to Lin and Wen (2007), the issue of academic dishonesty has been broadly studied in many different countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and others. However, only few researches have been carried out in Asia. It is important to increase investigations of this issue in Asian countries as they have become one of the major players in world economy. The students in higher education institutions now will soon be playing effective roles in the workforce. Their ethical perceptions and behaviours during their studies could be carried into their future careers. There is currently not much evidence of academic dishonesty among the university students that can be used as a measure to indicate the extent to which its incidence may be increasing in Malaysia (Smith, Ghazali & Noor Minhad, 2007). Therefore, the objective of this study is to investigate the inclination toward academic dishonesty of Malaysian undergraduates. 2. LITERATURE REVIEW There are many past researches on the students’ attitudes toward cheating and unethical behaviours connected to their demographic profiles. McCabe and Trevino (1997) suggested that variables such as gender, age and parent’s level of education have an important influence on academic dishonesty. Ruegger and King (1992) agreed that student’s gender is a significant factor in the determination of ethical conduct and females are more ethical than males in their perception of business ethical situations and ethical inclination rose with age. Alan and Tse (2001) examined behavioural predisposition and religiosity and gender. They found that males tend to be more

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unethical at work than their female counterparts. Smyth and Davis (2004) reported that the perceptions of males indicated a significantly higher acceptance of cheating behaviour than females. Chapman and Lupton (2004) compared cheating behaviour, the effect of gender and determinants of cheating in a business course taught in both Hong Kong and the US. American business students reported more cheating and believed that more of their peers cheat. Male US students cheated more than females but there is no difference in the Hong Kong sample based on gender. A study done by Mirshekary and Lawrence (2009) revealed that female Australian students reported higher mean scores for altruism/universalism values and attitudes to all types of academic ethical misconduct and business ethical misconduct than their Australian male counterparts. Female Iranian students reported higher mean scores for attitudes to business ethical misconduct than their male counterparts. Brown and Choong (2005) confirmed the same that females consistently report lower cheating rates than males did. Although men are more likely to report having cheated than women (Jensen et al., 2002), concrete measures of cheating did not confirm such a sex difference (McCabe, Trevino & Butterfield, 2001). The related results of a study by Geiger and O’Connell (2000) exploring accounting student responses to academic and accounting/business ethical vignettes indicated no gender differences. Roig and Caso (2005) supported that no significant difference in plagiarism between genders. Allmon et al. (2000) compared U.S.A. and Australian business students and found a relationship between cheating behaviour and the age, religion and country of origin of the respondents. The age of the respondent is proven to have influence on responses to attitudes. Young and older Australian students reported significantly less acceptability of serious academic ethical misconduct than their Iranians counterparts. By contrast younger Australians are more accepting of minor academic ethical misconduct than younger Iranians but there is no difference between the groups for those aged more than 20. Within country group differences also are revealed. Younger Australians reported less acceptance of minor academic cheating than the older students. By contrast older Iranians reported less acceptance of minor academic cheating than younger Iranian students (Mirshekary & Lawrence, 2009). When comparing the differences in class rank, freshmen showed more dishonest acts in some areas. They reportedly use more prohibited electronic equipments, copied others’ assignments, worked with others when prohibited, provided paper or assignment to other students, falsified grade score and changed test or assignment answers after grade scores are given (Lin & Wen, 2007). Similarly, McCabe, Trevino and Butterfield (2001) found that younger students tend to cheat more than older students. On the other hand, McCabe (1996) surveyed over 4,000 students from 30 different institutions of higher education. It is clear from the findings that the more professionally oriented disciplines experienced higher levels of cheating than the intellectual disciplines. This study corroborated findings from a 1964 survey that found business and engineering students to report a higher frequency of cheating 66% and 58% than, for instance, language and humanities students 37% and 39%. These findings are supported by Newstead et al. (1996) as well who found that students with science majors reported higher levels of cheating than those with arts majors. Abdul Karim, Ahmad Zamzuri and Muhamad Nor (2009) added that the significantly higher means for both ICT and engineering faculties are perhaps explainable through the nature of their classrooms which many of them are particularly designed to be lab-based. This provided more opportunities for students to use the facilities wrongly while the classes are in progress. Nursing students also have the most difficulty in identifying academic dishonesty in laboratory situations, despite the fact that most of them have much experience in prerequisite science laboratory courses. This finding is consistent with Del Carlo and Bodner’s (2006) study of biochemistry students and warrants further exploration of academic dishonesty in the laboratory. Although reports of academic cheating are abundant, there are relatively few papers in the literature that focus on cheating in the context of science courses and even fewer that address dishonest practices such as cooking or fudging data within the classroom laboratory. Similarly, Bates et al. (2005) revealed that students majoring in education reported fewer occurrences of academic dishonesty compared to pharmacy students. They have difficulty in identifying behaviours that constituted academic dishonesty in scenarios related to classroom and laboratory assignments but are quite clear on the definition of academic dishonesty in most examination situations. Consequently, a majority of students did not perceive the behaviour of grading a peer’s paper leniently as wrong. This perception might be influenced by the strong peer dependence found in today’s generation of students (Arhin, 2009). Iyer and Eastman (2006) also found that non-business students are more likely to cheat than business students. Oppositely, Lupton and Chapman (2002) found that among Russian students, 69% of the Russian students majored in business reported having cheated. From the literature discussed it is clear that little relevant published studies found from outside the USA, UK and Australia. The key contributing factors driving the perceptions and behaviours on the issue of academic dishonesty might be different from those found in the developed countries in terms of contextual, cultural, language proficiency, level of awareness, education system and religious differences as compared with Malaysian universities’ environment. The empirical evidence in this regard is very thin (Devlin & Gray, 2007). 3. RESEARCH HYPOTHESES Based on the literature review, the research hypothesized that: H1: There is a significant difference in perceived tests cheating, assignments cheating and plagiarism when undergraduates are classified according to their gender groups. H2: There is a significant difference in perceived tests cheating, assignments cheating and plagiarism when undergraduates are classified according to their age groups. H3: There is a significant difference in perceived tests cheating, assignments cheating and plagiarism when undergraduates are classified according to their program enrolments.

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H4: The independent or moderating variables (gender, age and program enrolments) are the significant predictors in estimating the value of dependent variable (academic dishonesty). 4. METHODOLOGY The samples of respondents in this study were drawn from the student population at a public institution of higher education in Malaysia. The respondents were the full time final year undergraduates who studied in 5 major fields of studies such as accounting, marketing, finance, information management and statistics from 4 different faculties at 2 campus branches selected using stratified random sampling as the respondents were classified into different groups of classes. The final year undergraduates were chosen on the basis of their extensive experience as they have already mastered the fundamental skills in searching, retrieving, using, evaluating and referencing the information sources relevant to their course assessments. Disproportionate stratified was applied under this random sampling category which is acceptable to represent the population. 388 hand delivered questionnaires were distributed to the respondents and only 348 questionnaires were returned. Specifically, the samples consisted of 57 (16.4%) males and 291 (83.6%) females. Of these, 284 (81.6%) were 21-23 year olds, 52 (14.9%) were 2426 year olds and 12 (3.4%) were above 26 years old. Relating to program enrolments, 106 (30.5%) students were from accounting program, 39 (11.2%) from marketing program, 47 (13.5%) from finance program, 57 (16.4%) from statistics program and 99 (28.4%) from information systems management program. Subjects were asked about their engagements on the selected academic dishonest practices. The questionnaire was divided into 2 sections. The first part consisted of demographic information questions which described the profiles of respondents. The second part consisted of the students’ views on academic dishonesty using a 10-point scale ranging from 1 as strongly disagree to 10 as strongly agree. The items were adopted from numerous past researches (Lin & Wen, 2007) which represented the three types of academic dishonesty namely cheating on tests, cheating on assignments and plagiarism. The questionnaire items also have been reviewed by experts on the field and have been modified in line with appropriate teaching and learning environments in Malaysia to establish the content validity before distribution. After data collection was completed, the analysis procedures were aided by the use of the quantitative data analysis computer program called Data Statistical Package for the Social Science software (SPSS). In this study, both Descriptive and Inferential Statistics were used to analyse the research data that were arranged into nominal, ordinal and scale of measurements. 5. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Reliability Analysis A reliability analysis for questionnaire items was carried out with Chronbach’s alpha coefficients. The values of Cronbach’s alpha are as depicted in Table 1 for Tests Cheating, Assignments Cheating and Plagiarism Constructs were higher than 0.75 which is considered as internally consistent and reliable. Table 1. Reliability Test Results Cronbach’s Alpha 0.881

Cronbach’s Alpha Based on Standardized Items 0.882

Number of Items 15

Means Differences for Academic Dishonesty by Gender Groups As shown in Table 2, there was a significant difference in the mean score between male and female students in the group statistics. It was reported that male has the higher scores than female. Since the probability values for tests and assignments cheating were less than the predetermined alpha values (α/2 =.025), thus the null hypotheses were rejected. Hence, the alternative hypotheses were supported at t (346) = 2.253 and t (346) = 2.229 respectively. However, for plagiarism, since the computed value was significant at the 5% level (t-statistic = 1.116, sig. = 0.265), the null hypothesis was supported. Table 2. T-Test Results by Gender Groups No. 1 2 3

Component Tests cheating Assignments cheating Plagiarism

df 346 346 346

t 2.253 2.229 1.116

Sig. 0.025 0.026 0.265

Means Differences for Academic Dishonesty by Age Groups From the ANOVA tests (see Table 3), the computed F-value for test cheatings was (2, 345) = 8.193, p < 0.05 followed by assignment cheatings (2, 345) = 1.005, p > 0.05 and plagiarism (2, 345) = 0.868, p > 0.05 separately. Since the P-values for assignment cheatings and plagiarism were higher than 0.05, the null hypotheses failed to be rejected. In contrast, there was a significant difference in perceived test cheatings among students when they were classified into different age groups. Not all the groups have the similar mean scores in the population.



Vol. 5. No. 2. March, 2013

Table 3. ANOVA Test Results by Age Groups No. 1 2 3


df 2, 345 2, 345 2, 345

F 8.193 1.005 0.868

Sig. 0.000 0.367 0.421

Once the null hypothesis was rejected for test cheating, Post-Hoc comparison test with HSD (Honesty Significant Difference) would be used to determine which age groups showed significant difference in the mean scores as illustrated in Table 4. The results showed that the mean scores for students aged 21-23 were significantly higher than students aged 24-26 and above 26. Table 4. Tukey HSD Test Results by Age Groups (I) Age

21-23 24-26

(J) Age

Mean Difference (I-J)

Sig.

24-26

4.38407

YES

Above 26

1.83920

NO

21-23

-4.38407

YES

Above 26

-2.54487

NO

21-23

-1.83920

NO

24-26

2.54487

NO

Above 26

Means Differences for Academic Dishonesty by Program Enrolments The same analysis proceeded with the program enrolments of students. Based on Table 5, the F-statistic for test cheating was significant at the 0.05 level (F-statistics = 8.592, sig. = 0.000) followed by plagiarism (F-statistics = 5.634, sig. = 0.000). However, the F-statistic for assignment cheating was not significant (F-statistics = 1.655, sig. = 0.160), thus the null hypothesis could not be rejected. Table 5. ANOVA Test Results by Program Enrolments No. 1 2 3


df 4, 343 4, 343 4, 343

F 8.592 1.655 5.634

Sig. 0.000 0.160 0.000

As the null hypotheses for tests cheating and plagiarism were rejected, Tukey HSD test results indicated that there was a significant difference in the perceived behaviours between the students’ program enrolments (see Table 6). The mean scores for information systems management students were higher than the others. Table 6. Tukey HSD Test Results by Program Enrolments

Component

(I) Program

(J) Program

Tests cheating

Statistics

Information Sys. Mgt.

Plagiarism

Accounting


Mean Difference (I-J)

Sig.

Accounting

-.52979

NO

Marketing

-2.59244

NO

Finance

-1.93505

NO


-5.61031

YES

Accounting

5.08052

YES

Marketing

3.01787

NO

Finance

3.67526

YES

Statistics

5.61031

YES

Marketing

-4.10716

NO

Finance

-.44540

NO

Statistics

-2.71715

NO


-5.35192

YES

Accounting

5.35192

YES

Marketing

1.24476

NO

Finance

4.90651

YES

Statistics

2.63477

NO



Vol. 5. No. 2. March, 2013

Regression Analysis The results of simple linear regression analysis from Table 7 showed that the model was significant with an 2 adjusted R = 0.88 (p < 0.01) and thus indicating 88% of the dependent variable (tests cheating) could be explained by the independent or moderating variables (gender, age and program enrolments). It was evident that tests cheating, assignments cheating and plagiarism were statistically significant and could be used to predict the academic dishonesty. Table 7. Regression Test Results No. 1 2 3

2

Component (Adjusted R ) Tests cheating Assignments cheating Plagiarism

Value 0.88 0.23 0.35

Sig. 0.000 0.011 0.002

6. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH It was found that the demographic characteristics of undergraduates confirmed to influence their perceived academic dishonesty. In brief, males were believed to cheat and plagiarize more than females. More students aged 21-23 were found to have cheated and plagiarized than the rest. Then, students from information systems management program were reported to cheat and plagiarize more. This could be due to the fact that learning process needed to utilize ICT made easier for students to commit such unethical acts. Surprisingly, tests cheating were the most significant predictor of academic dishonesty which could explain 88% of the variance. The findings therefore consistent with the past studies carried out by the earlier researchers. The findings also indicated that the respondents were still unaware and unclear about the concepts of academic dishonesty besides unable to disclose their personal behaviours because of cultural and religious concerns in the local perspective. Although the instrument was proven to be internationally acceptable as adopted by the numerous researchers, it has to be modified according to the context of the Malaysian culture and environment to establish the consistency and uniqueness of the results. Appropriate rewards could be provided to the respondents for their participations depending on how much they have cheated and plagiarized. Accordingly, this research was anticipated to be carried out with the intention for creating awareness among the university undergraduates about the negative impact of academic dishonesty on their studies. Furthermore, it could also establish awareness among academicians, thus initiating them to take the most preventive action to tackle the problem more systematically. Although various alternatives have been taken by the government and universities to overcome the issue, students should also be well-informed about the concept of academic dishonesty through adequate education and training programs rather than punishments, such as talks, seminars, workshops and hands-on exercises on information literacy to create awareness as well as to enhance individual’s information skills and motivation. The main limitation of this study was the fact that only one public university was involved with rather smaller respondents so that the results might not be generalized to the rest of Malaysian institutions of higher education. Future research is expected to broaden the selection of population and sample size from different study levels, races and sociocultural backgrounds through a nationwide study of various public and private higher education sectors in order that unexpected dishonesty rates between these institutions can be investigated and compared. In addition, the relationship between students’ morale with academic dishonesty, plus more awareness and comprehension studies on the topic may be widely explored. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research was supported by Excellence Fund from the Research Management Institute, Universiti Teknologi MARA Malaysia. REFERENCES 1. Storch E.A. & Storch J.B. Fraternities, sororities and academic dishonesty. College Student Journal. 3; 247-251 (2002). 2. Nazir M.S. & Aslam M.S. Academic dishonesty and perceptions of Pakistani students. International Journal of Educational Management. 24(7); 655-668 (2010). 3. Bates I. P. et al. A multi-faculty exploration of academic dishonesty. Pharmacy Education. 5(1); 6976 (2005). 4. Heather P.W. & Starr J. Academic dishonesty among pharmacy students: Does portable technology play a role? Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning. 2(2); 94-99 (2010). 5. Wang Y. & Kleiner B.H. Defining employee dishonesty. Management Research News. 28(2/3); 11-22 (2005). 6. Burke J. A. et al. Academic dishonesty: A crisis on campus forging ethical professions begins in the classroom. The CPA Journal. 77(5); 58-60 (2007). 7. Lin C.H.S. & Wen L.Y.M. Academic dishonesty in higher education-A nationwide study in Taiwan. Higher Education. 54; 85-97 (2007).



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