Development of a Short Scale for Assessing Academic Dishonesty

Abstract

While academic dishonesty is an important phenomenon within the higher education sector, previous literature is characterized by significant research gaps regarding the prevalence and antecedents of dishonest behavior. This lies partly in a lack of reliable and economic self-report measures. The Short Scale for Assessing Academic Dishonesty presented here serves as a behavior-based self-report measure to cover meaningful dimensions of dishonesty with a minimal number of items. The scale is based on comprehensive inventories of dishonest behaviors and assesses the central behavioral clusters "unauthorized aid,""plagiarism,"and "deception"with one item each. We investigated the validity and reliability of the short scale in a sample of N = 1,994 students. Our analysis indicates acceptable internal consistency and a clear pattern of convergent validity (theory-consistent associations with broader behavioral inventories and the personality trait honesty / humility). Confirmatory factor analyses illustrate that the scale is suitable for latent modeling, and that such latent models are characterized by scalar invariance for different classes of majors and genders. Overall, the short scale presented here provides a behavior-based, economic, and reliable self-report measure of academic dishonesty.