Establishing a reliable and valid measure of academic integrity that can be used in higher education institutions across the world is a challenging and ambitious task. However, solving this issue will likely have major ramifications for understanding dishonest action. It also enables the development of a standardised measure that can be used to assess the efficacy of interventions aimed at enhancing academic integrity that can be administered across regional boundaries and diverse cultural groups. This study has used a combination of (...) confirmatory factor analysis and item distribution inspection procedures to further validate the cross-cultural academic integrity questionnaire version 2. Primary participants in this study were from Saudi Arabia, and secondary reference participants were from New Zealand. The findings indicate that a revised 10-item questionnaire, the cross-cultural academic integrity questionnaire version 3, has better credibility in terms of construct validity than its predecessor. Three CCAIQ-3 domains are proposed: copying, cheating, and complying. This research will inevitably create further academic and international debate; however this measure is likely to be useful in terms of creating a research protocol for evaluating and measuring cross-cultural issues and interventions aimed at promoting academic integrity. (shrink)

Establishing a reliable and valid measure of academic integrity that can be used in higher education institutions across the world is a challenging and ambitious task. However, solving this issue will likely have major ramifications for understanding dishonest action. It also enables the development of a standardised measure that can be used to assess the efficacy of interventions aimed at enhancing academic integrity that can be administered across regional boundaries and diverse cultural groups. This study has used a combination of (...) confirmatory factor analysis and item distribution inspection procedures to further validate the cross-cultural academic integrity questionnaire version 2. Primary participants in this study were from Saudi Arabia, and secondary reference participants were from New Zealand. The findings indicate that a revised 10-item questionnaire, the cross-cultural academic integrity questionnaire version 3, has better credibility in terms of construct validity than its predecessor. Three CCAIQ-3 domains are proposed: copying, cheating, and complying. This research will inevitably create further academic and international debate; however this measure is likely to be useful in terms of creating a research protocol for evaluating and measuring cross-cultural issues and interventions aimed at promoting academic integrity. (shrink)

Understanding and measuring levels of academic integrity within higher education institutions across the world is an important area of study in the era of educational internationalization. Developing a cross-cultural measure will undoubtedly assist in creating standardization processes and add to the discourse on cross-cultural understanding on what constitutes honest and dishonest action in the higher education context. This study has used a combination of exploratory and confirmatory factor analytical procedures to validate a previously published questionnaire, namely the cross-cultural academic integrity (...) questionnaire. Inspection of response distributions was also undertaken. Primary participants in this study were from Iran, and secondary reference participants were from New Zealand and Nigeria. The findings indicate that a revised questionnaire better represents the data obtained from all three regions. Three CCAIQ-2 domains are proposed: cheating, collusion and complying. However, the response distributions indicated differences among the three groups, further suggesting that the theoretical constructs developed through factors analysis may not represent equivalence in terms of cross-cultural understanding. This research will inevitably create international debate on the measurement of integrity and how this measurement process can be used to establish internationally recognized and accountable educational regulations. (shrink)

Concern is growing as research continues to find evidence of academic misconduct among medical students. There is, however, paucity of information on this issue among medical students and medical graduates in Africa. We determined the perceptions and attitude of house officers on academic misconduct within Nigerian medical schools. We conducted 7 focus group discussions among pre-registration house-officers working in a Nigerian Teaching hospital between October and November 2013. A FGD guide containing 7 broad questions related to their perception and attitude (...) on academic misconduct was employed. Ethnographic content analysis and manual coding were adopted in identifying themes, issues and representative quotations. A total of 58 participants out of an eligible pool of 76 PRHOs were recruited. All the groups associated academic misconduct chiefly with cheating in examinations, and perceived it as a commonplace problem. “It is a part of school life”, admitted one PRHO. Copying during exam appeared to be the commonest form of cheating. Another respondent opined that “The lecturers should be more concerned with helping students understand better. They should not make passing an exam a do-or-die affair.” The perception and attitudes towards academic misconduct may be a reflection of the prevailing moral decline in the contemporary Nigerian society. Underlying the reasons adduced by the participants for getting involved in academic misconduct is the fear of failure in examinations. Apart from consolidating formal and informal medical ethics education, the medical schools should ensure that the opportunities and pressures to indulge in academic misconduct are minimized. (shrink)