Unveiling a Painpoint in a College Classroom: College Students' Perceptions of Academic Dishonesty and Some Tests of Correlations

Abstract

In educational institutions, a culture of academic honesty is valued. However, while there is much awareness about the consequences of academic dishonesty, this is regarded as an endless academic concern. A sequential-explanatory mixed methods study assessed and explored the perceptions of 121 college students of a private Philippine university about academic dishonesty. Initially, a researcher-constructed questionnaire was administered to measure the perceptions of the respondents about academic dishonesty and correlated to their age, gender and course. A focus group discussion from seven purposively sampled respondents was conducted to extract deeper meanings of the survey results. The quantitative results disclosed that the college students have high perceptions about academic dishonesty. Meanwhile, age and gender were directly linked to academic dishonesty whereas the course did not associate with the college students' perceptions of academic dishonesty. Important information has been elicited and surfaced during the focus group discussions. This created complementarity of the quantitative and qualitative data and eventually resulted in a more profound, reflective analysis. School policy recommendations and interventions are suggested to enable the university to establish and sustain academic honesty as a culture within and among the members of the academic community especially its students, the end-receivers of good education.

Exploring Assignment Plagiarism by Students in Private Colleges in China

“…The fact that some private colleges neither mentor nor preach academic integrity to their students and that there are deficiencies in monitoring students' academic dishonesty is the focus of this study. The parents' adverse effects are an influencing factor in line with Gutierrez and Padagas (2019), who maintained that factor influences students' academic dishonesty related to their parents. Parents' words, deeds, and examples subtly affect their children.…”

Influencing Factors and Current Approaches to Academic Dishonesty in the Philippines during COVID-19 Pandemic: an Overview

“…Similarly, reiterated what is already common knowledge, that fear of failing is always at the back of a student's mind. Something that was already present in previous pre-pandemic studies (Balbuena & Lamela, 2015;Diego, 2017;Gutierrez & Padagas, 2019). Additionally, Aguilar (2021) pointed out student's poor learning capability, another possible influencing factor that led to academic dishonesty.…”

“…Simply, if the school or university tolerates any forms of academic dishonesty, leaning towards allowing such culture, then such acts are likely to proliferate among its student population. As previously mentioned, prepandemic-related studies had already provided an insight to normalization of cheating, plagiarism, and similar misconducts (see Balbuena & Lamela, 2015;Diego, 2017;Gutierrez & Padagas, 2019). While there are no clear indications of the school environment allowing a culture of academic dishonesty during the pandemic, the role that social media played in the creation and proliferation of cheating, as evidenced by the Facebook community page controversy must be accounted for and as mentioned by , that of academic servicing social media groups or pages.…”

“…As for normalization of academic dishonesty, existing literature during the pandemic did not highlight similar findings. However, pre-pandemic studies cited that the students engaged in academic dishonesty, particularly in the tertiary level, viewed cheating as normal (Balbuena & Lamela, 2015;Diego, 2017;Gutierrez & Padagas, 2019).…”

Psychological Profile of Unsuccessful University Students

“…It should be noted that among the criteria that affect the success of higher education students, motivation, the type of higher nervous system, the type of character, attitudes, the level of intelligence, self-awareness, the degree of conation, willpower, volitional qualities are distinguished (Barel, & Tzischinsky, 2018;Gutierrez, & Padagas, 2019;Maciuszek, Polczyk, & Tucholska, 2019;Ren, Schweizer, & Xu, 2013).…”