Academic Dishonesty among Iranian Students

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Introduction
Academic dishonesty and misconduct has been one of the main issues that academia.Being too tough on it will disperse students (clients?)and overlooking it will likely culminate in debacle.This is why the majority of universities take a middle stance which is more likely inclined towards loosening monitoring and measures.Therefore, whether it is in the form of plagiarism, ghost authorship, cheating or fabricating data, etc., academic dishonesty or misconduct is prevalent all over the world.The advent of Internet has been a double edge sword.On one hand we can now track and find instances of academic dishonesty across languages and cultures, and on the other hand, the very nature of Internet has made it much easier to become a successful but unethical academician.This is not simply about the "copy-paste" capability of electronic resources or even "automatic paraphrasing" which make it almost impossible to track-down and hunt instances of plagiarism, but about a complex set of social, economic, political, and maybe racial factors that now govern the industry of academic writing and publishing.For example, as the prosperous world is now connected to the third world in a "high speed" manner, intellectual works are now easily and openly outsourced to the third world researchers (see for example Kapoor ; Havens & Lotz ), and therefore tracking them down has become complicated.
One major concern in the academia has always been student academic dishonesty.Students are the future of the science and educating and correctly evaluating them is vital in continuity of scientific flourishment.This is why universities continuously update their terms of academic conduct, particularly in regard to utilizing new communication technologies, though this does not stop here.Now, rules are increasingly extended to other related fields like professors' relationships with students, receiving money in return for educationalresearch work, or self-plagiarism (see for example Roig ; Roig ; Pellegrini and Shahghasemi & Akhavan ).
Iran is known as a culture in which "knowledge" has a special place.For centuries, Iranian and Persian literature has been full of poems, admonitions and advices that the human life is worth nothing without knowledge, and in our time, Iranians are eager to show off by acquiring academic degrees.Today, about 4.5 million Iranians are studying in Iranian universities while another 100 hundred thousands are studying abroad.It's a big figure for a country of 80 million population with economic difficulties and limited international relations.Anyway, this bubble growth has entailed negative consequences including replacement of quality with quantity (see for example Varij Kazemi and Dehghan Dehnavi for detail).As a result, this seemingly bright profile has been racked in the last decade by several international debacles.First, Declan Butler from the famous journal Nature , accused several Iranian officials of plagiarism and academic misconduct, and after that, Iranians were frequently cited by bodies like Plagiarism Watchand others as more instances of plagiarism were identified.It was a great defamation for Iranian academia and many professors and students have been expelled by authorities and university deans in reaction; moreover, some Iranian scholars initiated a website namedProfessors against Plagiarism to monitor academic publishing work by Iranian scholars and whistle blow plagiarized papers when are published in international journals.
We believe that the issue of academic dishonesty should be tackled but we don't think expelling cheaters or whistle blowing is enough.We rather think providing an education which is rigorous and help students to become aware of what ethical writing and publication is and how to do it, is a vital and practical step in removing two main causes of academic misconduct in Iran -namely, lack of education about academic misconduct, and lack of fear of punishment.Certainly, when students are aware of what academic dishonesty is, professors will become more cautious not to cross red lines of ethical writing.Doing research on this subject will help us bring more light on this problem and authorities will probably be forced to "do something" about it.Shahghasemi & Akhavan , Ataie-Ashtiani , Hadji, et al. , Shahghasemi , Varij Kazemi & Dehghan Dehnavi , and, Saberi-Karimian, et al. among others) have recently taken up the topic of academic misconduct and dishonesty in Iran and published papers in international journals.Since these papers are in English and therefore accessible to readers of this journal, in this section we only include those studies which have been published in Persian journals.We found at least 24 of these studies but here we include only 5 of them which are more or less representative of the results of others.

Some researchers (for example
Nakhaei & Nikpour conducted a research to assess the prevalence of research cheating among medical students.They employed an all-inclusive sampling method and all 104 final year medical students at their university participated in their study.They designed a questionnaire which examined seven main kinds of academic misconducts based on methodology books and focus groups they had carried out with some researchers.Students were asked to assess relative frequency of each kind of academic misconduct and rate their own opinions on a Likert scale.Based on their analysis, students reported 37% of all students fabricate data while 40% of all students manipulate the data in order to produce the desired results.Also, participants estimated that between 25 to 50 percent of theses use plagiarized materials.Nakhaei and Nikpour concluded that if their results was generalizable to the whole country, we should take this as a serious problem in our educational system.
Zamani, Azimi & Soleymani conducted a study to find how students in Espahan University ranked effective factors in plagiarism.They employed an applied descriptive-survey study and their sample was consisted of 300 university students.Their instrument was a researcher-made questionnaire which after analysis revealed that their participants ranked credentialism and motivation to have better scores as the main factors predicting student plagiarism, respectively, followed by lack of self-effectiveness feeling, lack of proper mechanisms to detect and punish plagiarism, sociocultural factors, insufficient education as to how to write academically and ethically, indifference of professors about plagiarism, lack of fear of being punished for plagiarism, etc. Jamshidi Boroujeni, Saeidi, & Heydari studied level of awareness of students about examples of plagiarism and factors influencing it.They conducted a survey using a researcher-made questionnaire.Their statistical society was all graduate students in Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, and using Morgan table, they picked up 354 students by random sampling.Jamshidi Boroujeni and her colleagues found that there was a more or less moderate awareness of plagiarism among students.Moreover, they found that plagiarism was mainly due to educational, economic, technological, social, and cultural factors.They also found that the main reason for plagiarism and academic dishonesty was incompetency in doing research, economic ability to pay a ghost author, credentialism, failing to do one's academic assignments, procrastination and lack of good education about the proper way of paper writing, are among the most important reasons why graduate students turn to plagiarism.
Abedini, Khezrzadeh, & Zamani investigated the relationship between students' religious orientation, awareness of the consequences of academic dishonesty and their attitudes toward plagiarism and academic achievement.Their statistical population included students of the Espahan University and Espahan Medical Science University.They used Categorical Randomized sampling method to select 263 students.Their results showed that there was a significant difference between female and male attitudes towards Plagiarism.Based on students' major, there were also differences between the consequences of the Plagiarism and students' attitudes towards Plagiarism.In this study there was a strong relationship between religious orientation and students' attitudes towards plagiarism, and this is why Abedini and her colleagues recommend that empowering religiosity of the students would play an important role in reducing academic dishonesty.
Hemati Alamdarloo, Shojaee, Salimi, & Arjmandi compared plagiarism and its risk factors among talented and ordinary students at Shiraz University.Their statistical population included all students at Shiraz University and their sample size was consisted of 156 students (78 talented students and 78 ordinary students).The behavior of plagiarism questionnaire and effective factors on plagiarism questionnaire were used to measure plagiarism and its effective factors.Using multivariable analysis of variance, they revealed that talented students were far less likely to commit different kinds of plagiarism and academic dishonesty.The y also found that attitude on plagiarism, self-efficiency, credentialism, lack of education on academic dishonesty, and lack of fear of punishment were among the most effective factors which contribute in plagiarism prevalence among students.

Method Participants
Participants were 300 BA university students (female = 182, male = 118) ranging in age from 17 to 34 (M= 20.55 and SD= 2.04) from three faculties at University of Tehran: Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Faculty of Management and Faculty of Social Sciences.Requirements for participation were as follows: (a) being currently enrolled as a BA student; (b) having no history of psychological disorders; and (c) not identified as supper senior or expelled student.We used proportionate stratified sampling to reach greater precision, guard against an unrepresentative sample, and to ensure that we obtain sufficient sample points to support a separate analysis of any subgroups .About 85 percent of sample approached agreed to participate in the study and others either did not meet the criteria of inclusion, refused to participate, or returned an incomplete questionnaire.Data were collected in classrooms, lobbies, or food courts where students were briefed, agreed to participate and received the form.We made it clear that participation was completely optional and their answers would not affect their grades or anything else.Given the sensitivity of our subject, the students were assured that the whole procedure would remain anonymous so they could comfortably answer our questionnaire.Generally, it is compulsory that studies that include humans as research participants, provide an IRB certificate to show that academic ethics has been well regarded.We, unfortunately, don't have such things in Iran.But, as we described above, all measures of ethical research have been observed here.

Measure
Research instrument was a self-report 22-item Questionnaire, which included five demographic questions and 17 items directly asking how much the respondents had experienced or witnessed academic dishonesty (hereafter AD) in their immediate academic environment; the respondents were also asked to what extend they themselves participated in AD of any kind.Respondents scored each item either on a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 = completely disagree to 5 = completely agree , or on a 4-point scale ranging from 1 = never to 4 =always .Initial pool of items was gathered by scanning the literature and reported instruments in similar studies.We refined the order, content and response range of items through an interaction with masters and professors of the field to reach the last version.Some items were meaningful and could reflect an important aspect of our interest (such as: I know social problems that are related to my major ).While some others were computed to represent a wider significant concept (such as: self-reported AD or exam cheating ).

Results
In this study we aimed at exploring the perceptions of academic dishonesty (AD) committed by students and professors.We also asked questions to estimate the degree to which students were concerned about social problems and to realize how they perceived their special discipline as an instrumentally important in solving those problems.In addition, demographics were used as factors to explain variance among perceived AD.Prior to main analyses, we conducted an exploratory analysis to diagnose outliers and verify normality of distributions.Univariate and multivariate outliers, considering leverage, Cook's D, and Mahalanobis distance indices, were limited to the edge of normal range .

Prevalence of AD
A set of frequency distributions is presented in Table 2. Rows represent answers range for each component of AD.Chi-square tests were used to diagnose any nonrandom difference between expected and observed frequencies.

Com.: completely
In the first item, we asked the degree to which students are aware of current problems related to their major.
Some students thought that cheating in exams is acceptable, or they had no idea about it (completely agree= 34, agree= 58, and no idea= 62).Although, most answers were cumulated in disagree and completely disagree points (χ 2 = 24.696,df= 4, p<.001), but that number of agreeing or completely agreeing with cheating acceptability is considerable and could be an index of what exists in the society.In the same way, many students had no idea of contextual support for cheating or AD in their faculties (χ 2 = 97.167,df= 4, p<.001).Surprisingly, many others agreed (66 persons) or completely agreed (22 persons) with perceiving the existence of contextual support for cheating.Most students disagreed or completely disagreed they had copy-pasted from Internet (χ 2 = 53.291,df= 4, p<.001) or used others' writings without citation (χ 2 = 118.241,df= 4, p<.001).Nevertheless, the number of agreeing or even completely agreeing students is not ignorable (copy-pasting from Internet= 89 and copying without citation= 63).

Demographics and AD
In this research we included male and female students from different levels and groups (years and faculties).
Here are our results for gender, major and level as factors.We used multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to compare self AD, classmate AD, professors' AD, contextual AD, and plagiarism across these groups.Table 3 shows means separated by gender.Multivariate F was statistically significant (F 5, 274 = 2.455, p= .034)with an effect size of .043.This showed there was at least one mean difference (of the five dependent variable) between male and female.In order to examine difference source, we applied between subject test which runs univariate F-test for each dependent variable.As shown in the table, men (5.622) scored higher in self AD than women (4.947) did (F= 9.357,p=.002,Eta Squared= .033).Men (7.819) outscored women (7.136) in reported classmate AD (F= 7.077, p=.008, Eta Squared= .025),too.The Effect size was too small for both differences.There were no significant difference between men and women in terms of professors' AD (F=.060, p=.807), contextual AD (F=.142, p=.707), and plagiarism (F= 2.551, p=.111).Further considerations using multiple comparisons for means showed that first year students (4.625) perceived significantly less self AD than their third (5.532) and fourth (6.180) year peers did.Second year students (5.222) expressed almost the same level of perceived self AD as first year students.Perceived classmate -AD was also different among students.Students' level of belief in prevalence of AD grew significantly as they went from year one (6.384) to year two (7.444), from year two to year three (8.404), and from year three to year four (8.640).Interestingly, the changes in all three transformations are statistically significant.Students' reported levels of AD among professors grew significantly from the first (7.036) to the second year (7.958).It returned a bit back to a distance which was not significantly different from the first year (third= 7.596 and fourth= 7.600).In the case of contextual AD which implies the degree to which students perceived their academic environment justified AD, we also have an interesting finding.Student's belief in existence of a somehow support for misconduct grew significantly up from the first (23.268) to the second year (25.167) and stayed almost flat (with a very slow positive slop) through the third and the fourth years.8) summarizes the condition.We could see some differences, but were they big enough to be mentioned as a systematic variance?Let's review MANOVA test to find out.Age, Perception of Effectiveness for One's Major, and DA In this section we will review correlation of age and perception of effectiveness of one's major (operationalized by knowledge of current problems in students' major, students' hope to have a contribution, perceived knowledge instrumentality, and perceived CV importance) to various types of AD.We used Pearson's moment coefficient to examine possible associations.Table 11 represents the zero-order correlation coefficients.

Conclusion
Beside the fact that our results showed more or less similar results with those found earlier by other researchers, we found other interesting results.For example, when we asked our participants about the prevalence of AD among their professors, only 7 of our 300 participants (about 2 percent) accepted to choose "never."This low trust in university system must have some implications for university authorities, though one good future study could be carried out on the effect of general distrust in the wider society on student distrust in academic righteousness.Another interesting finding of this study is that half of our respondents admitted they had witnessed classmates' AD while only 16% said they themselves had committed AD; this means participants in this study were not honest when reporting their own AD.
As some previous studies show (see for example Aiken , Davis, Grover, Becker, & McGregor , Tibbetts , Hensley, Kirkpatrick, & Burgoon among others), female students are generally less likely to commit Ad, and this is what our study has revealed.We should note, however, that some scholars recommend the possibility of men more inclined to report self AD should also be studied, or said the results of gender differences in AD in relation to gender should be scrutinezed more closely before making general claims .

Table 1 .
Table 1 represents participants' demographic information.Demographic characteristics of sample

Table 2 .
Frequency distribution and chi-square test for each item

Table 3 .
Means separated by gender

Table 4 .
Multivariate and between subject tests to examine mean differences between male and female

Table 5 .
Mean separated by education by years

Table 6 .
Multivariate and between subject tests to examine mean differences between students with different education by year 15, 825 = 2.455, p= .034)with a small but statistically significant effect size of .083.That is, students in different levels of education by year reported different levels of perceived AD, at least in one component.We subjected the data to a univariate F-test to see where the difference was.

Table 7 .
Multiple comparisons for mean between students with different education by years

Table 9 .
Multivariate and between subject tests to examine mean differences between students from different faculties F= 5.203, p=.006, Eta Squared= .036)differed in different faculties, although, self AD was not different among students from various faculties (F=2.535,p=.081,Eta Squared= .018).Multiple comparisons for means showed that Psychology students (6.882) perceived significantly less classmate AD than Social Sciences students did (7.877).Management students perceived fairly the same level of classmate AD (7.435) as Social Sciences students did.Their mean distance from Psychology students was not significant, too.Psychology students (7.035) scored less than Social Sciences (7.642) and Management students (7.661) in perceived AD among professors.Management and Social Sciences students had almost the same attitude towards AD among professors.Students from Faculty of Social Sciences (25.469) reported more contextual AD than their peers from Faculty of Management (24.357) and Faculty of Psychology (24.141).Management and Psychology students perceived equal levels of contextual AD.Students' belief in the existence of plagiarism was different between Management (6.252) and Social Sciences students (6.975), and between Management and Psychology students (7.059).Means were near between psychology and Social Sciences students.

Table 10 .
Multiple comparisons for means among students from different faculties