ACADEMIC DISHONESTY: A MULTI CAMPUS INVESTIGATION IN PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES OF ISLAMABAD

Abstract

Academic dishonesty is a contextual and multidimensional term which lacks a single standard definition. Authors and researchers have conceptualized it according to their necessity. Theorists have provided us with multiple prepositions. Several of them used in this study are: students commit academic dishonesty because the obtained benefits outweighs the costs, academic dishonesty is a learnt behaviour, and students commit academic dishonesty because society provides them with opportunities to do so. The present study defines academic dishonesty as a whole of four forms: cheating in test or exam, cheating in homework or assignment, plagiarism, and fabrication and falsification. It aims to find out the frequency of various academically dishonest behaviours representing each of the four forms. To achieve its aim, a quantitative research method was used in which 243 Students from Quaid-eAzam University and National University of Modern Languages were handed out similar questionnaires having close ended questions. These two universities are public and situated in Islamabad, Pakistan. The sampling techniques used was stratified. The answers responded in the questionnaires abstractly described the frequency of the academically dishonest behaviours. To find out the described the answers concretely, Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used. In SPSS, the researcher created cross tabs and frequency tables to describe the major goal of the research.