Mitigating Digital Academic Dishonesty: Effect of Ethno-Ethics

The rapid growth of the Internet and the proliferation of technologically enhanced teaching and learning tools have enormous benefits. On one hand, information sharing is cheaper, faster, and easier; and on the other hand, virtual platforms are continuously evolving. However, this massive adoption of digital educational platforms has seemingly engendered wide-spread misconduct amongst students, which now threatens not only academic integrity for unsupervised e-assessments but also the institutional integrity universities and colleges. While the current literature demonstrates the enormity of the mechanisms and approaches designed to combat academic cheating, there is still a persistent global increase in digital academic dishonesty and the plague even evolving. To contribute towards addressing this threat to e-assessment in specific, and academic integrity in general, this study examined the mitigating impact of African ethics on digital academic dishonesty. Therefore, using the pre-test/post-test quasi-experimental design, the impact of ethno-ethics on students' perceived attitudes toward digital academic dishonesty and their likelihood to engage in it was investigated. The study was based on a volunteer sample of 79 first-year Information Technology students recruited from a South African University of Technology. The results show that the approach was effective by over 90% in influencing students' attitudes against digital academic dishonesty.