Journal of Business Ethics Education

Volume 9, 2012

Attitudes and Behaviors of Academic Dishonesty and Cheating—Do Ethics Education and Ethics Training Affect Either Attitudes or Behaviors?

Academic dishonesty and cheating by students has become endemic in higher education. In this article, we conducted a study on undergraduate business students (n = 162) to examine the impact of business ethics education and ethics training on student attitudes towards academic dishonesty as well as their cheating behaviors. We found that business ethics education in conjunction with business ethics training had a positive impact on students’ attitudes towards academic dishonesty and cheating; however there was no significant impact of either business ethics education or training on actual cheating behaviors. In our discussion we suggest some implications of our findings, and make some suggestions about future research directions.