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Abstract
In prior studies, academic procrastination has been discussed as an influencing factor of academic misconduct. However, empirical studies were conducted solely cross-sectionally and investigated only a few forms of academic misconduct. This large scale web-based study examined the responses of between 1359 and 2207 participants from different academic disciplines at four German universities to address the effect of academic procrastination on seven different forms of academic misconduct (using fraudulent excuses, plagiarism, copying from someone else in exams, using forbidden means in exams, carrying forbidden means into exams, copying parts of homework from others, and fabrication or falsification of data) and its variety. In measuring academic procrastination six months prior to academic misconduct, we found that academic procrastination affected the frequency of all forms of academic misconduct and its variety. We found the strongest effect of academic procrastination on using fraudulent excuses. Implications for university counseling and theory are discussed.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, grant number 01PH08024, headed by Sebastian Sattler and Martin Diewald, and grant number 01PH08005A, headed by Stefan Fries) and a Rectorate Fellowship of the Bielefeld University for Sebastian Sattler (grant number 3521.01). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Notes
1 Due to the reduction in sample size, we refrained from using a homogeneous analytical sample consisting of respondents who received all questions on academic cheating (n = 1359) and took into account that our models were not based on the same population. However, highly similar patterns were found when restricting the sample to n = 1359 (results available upon request).
2 Conducting the principal component analysis on the sample consisting of respondents who received all questions on academic cheating (n = 1359) led to highly similar patterns (results available upon request).
3 This was tested using academic procrastination, as measured in t1, as a predictor of participation in t2, based on a logit regression model (results are available upon request).