Academic Dishonesty: Perceived Gravity and Development of the Academic Dishonesty Scale in Mexican college students
Abstract
Academic dishonesty has been related to dishonest workplace behaviors, decreased learning, and a bad reputation for academic institutions. For this reasons several questionnaires have been developed to measure it, but only a few studies have reported the factorial structures of their instruments. Similarly, not many research projects have described the correlation between perceived seriousness and the frequency of cheating. Therefore, the objective of this article is to identify the factorial structure of the Academic Dishonesty Questionnaire (ADQ), and to report the correlation between cheating fre-quency and perceived seriousness. To fulfill these objectives several students answered the ADQ, and a perceived seriousness scale. Results show that the ADQ has three factors, which include cheating behaviors, like copying and plagiarizing, among many others. Likewise, a negative correlation bet-ween the frequency of cheating and perceived seriousness was observed. Therefore, the ADQ is considered to provide a correct estimation of academic dishonesty, and perceived seriousness is likely a relevant factor in the frequency of cheating.
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