Individual and Contextual Influences on Academic Dishonesty: an Investigation of Under graduate Student Perceptions

There are two types of ethics. Type I and Type II. Type I ethics deals with how closely one's own ethical values parallel society's ethical values. If an individual fails to absorb a sense of the "rightness" or "wrongness" of certain acts from his or her family, surroundings, or society, that person is generally considered to be unethical in a type I sense. However, simply having strong beliefs about what is right and wrong does not make a person ethical which leads us to type II ethics which describe the strength of the relationship between what a person believes and how he or she behaves. Individuals who realize and believe that their actions are wrong as defined by society in general or by their profession specifically and choose to take the actions anyway have violated type II ethics (Premeaus,1992).
When I asked my undergraduate students in my Organizational Behavior class, do they believe  that  cheating  in exams is an ethical behavior? All of them answered "no". When I asked them, do they sometimes cheat in exams? The answer of a considerable number of them was "yes". My conversation with them regarding academic dishonesty revealed that there are many reasons for cheating in exams.The following are the most cited reasons: "we should cooperate with one another"; "when I help someone else, Iwill not loose anything"; "the educational system is already unfair"; and that "cheating is no longer considered a major problem because most people do it nowadays". It seems that what students believe is very different from what they really do. The pervious conversation between my students and me triggered the desire to investigate the issue of academic dishonesty in one of the Egyptian universities, namely Alexandria University with focus on one of its largest faculties, the Faculty of Commerce.