“It is no big deal!”: Fraud Diamond theory as an explanatory model to understand students’ prevalence and perceptions of severity of academic fraudulent behavior

Academic fraud encompasses a number of different dishonest behaviors, such as cheating on exams, plagiarizing essays or using ghost writers, to name some. Regarding fraudulent academic behavior, little is known on the relationship between students’ perceptions of the severity of such behavior and its prevalence, and whether fraud diamond theory can serve as a framework to explain this phenomenon as it has for other criminal behaviors. We surveyed 1,032 university students and found that the more students reported engaging in academic fraudulent behavior, the less severe they perceived those behaviors to be. The results also showed that motivation, rationalization and capability are important factors in predicting students’ prevalence of academic fraudulent behavior but, and as expected, only rationalization emerged as a predictor of perceived severity, showing that the more students are able to find justifications for the fraudulent behavior, the less severe they perceive those behaviors to be. Implications to higher education are discussed.