Accounting Professors’ Perceptions of Academic Dishonesty: Motivations, Controls and the Impact of Technology

New technology has had a significant impact on higher education, including the area of academic dishonesty. Technology provides new opportunities for students to engage in dishonest behaviour while simultaneously providing faculty members with new ways to control against such behaviour. The purpose of this study is to investigate academic dishonesty in accounting programs from the perspective of accounting faculty members with a focus on the impacts of technology. A total of 388 survey responses were received from faculty members across Canada and the United States. The results reveal that accounting faculty perceive academic dishonesty to be a significant issue that is compromising the integrity of the classroom and that incidences of academic dishonesty have increased over the past five to ten years. The proliferation of technology is perceived to have resulted in increased incidences of academic dishonesty, with a greater impact on assignments as opposed to exams. The three types of academic dishonesty impacted the most by technology are: i) using information without proper referencing; ii) using unauthorized materials during a test; and iii) using another student’s assignments from a previous semester. Further, faculty members perceive that university policies related to academic dishonesty have not yet adapted to deal with the new challenges posed by technology. Introduction Accounting scandals are not a recent phenomenon. Several high profile accounting scandals have taken place over the past century, and it appears that accounting scandals have been increasing in recent years (Cornerstone Research, 2015). Serious questions are being raised regarding the ethical conduct of accountants as a result of the increasing implications of these accounting scandals. Many are questioning the ability of academic institutions to develop ethical sensitivity among students in light of widespread incidences of academic dishonesty (McCabe, 1993). Much has been written on the ethical conduct of professional accountants and accounting students. Most of the prior literature attempts to gauge the overall level of accounting student ethics by exploring how students behave in different situations (e.g., Chapman and Lupton 2004; Christensen et al., 2010). Overall, the prior literature suggests that academic dishonesty is a serious concern (Greene and Saxe, 1992; McCabe et al., 2001; Brown and Choong, 2005). The rapid proliferation of new technologies has had a profound impact on higher education (Bowen, 2012). With respect to academic dishonesty, technological developments provide new avenues for students to engage in dishonest behaviours (e.g., portable and wearable devices enable students to discreetly communicate during exams or view unauthorized material). Conversely, faculty members can also make use of new technologies to better prevent and detect instances of academic dishonesty (e.g., faculty members can make use of new software to detect plagiarism in student assignments). Currently, it is unclear how new technologies are impacting the perpetration of, and controls