This article provides a comprehensive review of the literature on academic dishonesty and cheating. The different kinds of cheating behaviors and the factors associated with them are delineated and described. Suggestions are provided on how to take corrective and proactive decisions to control and thereby reduce academic dishonesty and cheating.

Leveraging perspectives from social cognitive theory, the attention-based view, and social networks literatures, we tested the relationship between unethical choice and network unethicality, which we define as respondents’ perceptions of their peer advisors’ unethical choices. Although social cognitive theory predicts that perceptions of peer advisor unethical choice are positively associated with unethical choice, we theorize that the nature of this relationship depends on the personality of the actor and the situation. Results from a lagged study suggest that individual and situational (...) variables may act as key buffers to the adverse impact of unethical social influence on ethical choice. Strengths, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

At the end of their article in the September 2014 issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, Douglas R. May, Matthew T. Luth, and Catherine E. Schwoerer state that they are “hopeful in outlook” about the “evidence that business ethics instructors are….able to encourage students…to develop the courage to come forward even when pressures in organizations dictate otherwise”. We agree with May et al. that it is essential to augment students’ moral courage. However, it seems overly optimistic to believe that (...) this improvement will result from any course in business ethics. Indeed, we question the appropriateness of their measure of moral courage and assert that business ethics educators must purposely design their courses to develop students’ moral courage. In particular, we advocate introducing business ethics students to works of literature featuring protagonists who exercise moral courage in organizations. Fiction provides rich accessible narratives that show students worlds beyond their experience, awaken their imaginations, and evoke their emotions. Further, we highlight morally courageous exemplars because they inspire the cultivation of character. Joining those who underscore the role of virtue in business ethics education, we argue that exposure to moral exemplars in fiction will help students to build the moral courage they need to carry out ethical decisions in the workplace. Results from 46 students at the end of an MBA ethics course featuring moral courage provide preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of our approach. (shrink)

In this study, undergraduate business students indicated the degree to which three activities were ethical or unethical, how likely they would be to commit each action, and how likely they thought the average student would be to commit each action. Significant declines in ethicality were found between comparisons of the ethical appropriateness of each scenario and the students’ personal intentions to commit the action, and between personal intention and the students’perceptions of other students’ actions. The comparison between self and others (...) was attenuated by academic classification with seniors perceiving their peers’ behavior as similar to their own. This demonstrates that business students do have an ethical blind spot both in acting contrary to their own stated ethical beliefs and in believing that their peers will commit unethical actions while they would not. We encourage faculty to develop reflective curricula that require students to actively engage in ethical decision-making. In addition, ethical training should, when possible, address the entire ethical decision-making process, from awareness, to intention, to actual behavior. Finally, students should be made aware of the unfounded disparities between their perceptions of their own actionsand their perceptions of their peers’ actions. (shrink)