EXPLORING ACADEMIC DISHONESTY PRACTICES AMONG SCIENCE EDUCATION UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

The opportunities offered by the Internet for interpersonal communication, storage, and dissemination of information have brought many benefits to the university environment. The new technologies have changed the achievement of the teaching-learning process, the design and development of research projects, and the writing of scientific articles. However, with these positive changes, there has also emerged the reverse: cheating, fraud, piracy. The unethical use of the Internet became a severe concern to the academic environment. A wide range of behaviors of giving or receiving unauthorized assistance in a learning task in the university environment was a current debate topic (Kibler, 1993). The problem of plagiarism is still prevalent in universities, which is why specialists are trying to find new ways to combat this unwanted behavior (Cronan, Mullins, & Douglas, 2018). Many specialists have argued that cheating today is much handier because of the Internet, e-cheating being a current practice for more and more students (King, Guyette, & Piotrowski, 2009; Scanlon, 2003). With the help of the Internet, students can easily download or copy materials and use them to solve different work tasks without providing the author (Balbay & Kilis, 2019; Jereb et al., 2018; Ramzan, Munir, Siddique, & Asif, 2012). Increasing concerns about moral dilemmas on unethical behavior have emerged as the Internet is used more and more frequently in educational activities (Burnam & Kafai, 2001). The constant confrontation with the frequent changes of technology implies the formation of new attitudes towards the ethical issues of information technology (IT) use. The concept of academic dishonesty is usually defined in its general sense but is particularized in relation to Internet practices. There is no consensus among researchers about what unethical behavior means. In a very general way, cheating was understood by King et al. (2009, p.4) “as a transgression against academic integrity, which entails taking an unfair advantage that results in a misrepresentation of a student’s ability and grasp of knowledge.” Furthermore, academic misconduct has been associated with “antisocial behavior” by Ternes, Babin, Woodworth, & Stephens (2019, p.75). The common point of all these definitions is the dimension of plagiarism. If computer ethics is one of the issues that emerged with computer technology (Namlu & Odabasi, 2007; Spinello & Tavani, 2001), Internet ethics might be considered as either a sub-component of computer ethics or a new area of ethics that emerged with the advance of the Internet. The rapid development and expansion of technology have led Abstract. The aim of this research was to explore e-dishonesty practices among science education undergraduates based on measurement models. The measuring tool was the Internet-triggered Academic Dishonesty Scale (IADS) comprised of ten items for the fraudulence construct and five items for the plagiarism construct as proposed by Akbulut et al. (2008), and another eight items as proposed by Karim, Zamzuri, and Nor (2009) for the construct of misuse in using information technologies by university students. A pilot sample of 125 valid responses and a test sample of 249 valid responses collected from university students in the Science Education program were subjects of factor analyses, non-parametric and invariance test methods. 16-item IADS scale was confirmed in a Romanian higher education context. A second-order factor (e-dishonesty), and three dimensions of first-order factors (plagiarism, fraudulence, and misuse in using information technologies (IT)) were validated. Plagiarism was the most important factor, followed by fraudulence and misuse in using IT. E-dishonesty practices dimensions not varied depending on the sociodemographic profile of undergraduates. The case study research provided a significant contribution to the understanding of ethical Internet behaviors and to generate an appropriate tool to measure the e-dishonesty practices among undergraduates learning science education subjects.