A Review of the Factors behind Academic Integrity Violations: Comparing the United States and Ukraine

Recently, there has been a rapid growth of articles on academic integrity issues in Ukrainian scholarly publications, however, few of them have focused on factors of academic dishonesty. To develop an effective academic integrity policy, it is necessary to conduct preliminary research into the factors and reasons of academic dishonesty. Extensive research related to reasons and factors of academic dishonesty has been conducted in other countries, but not yet for a Ukrainian context. This article aims to provide a literature review on the reasons for academic dishonesty and factors leading to academic integrity violations. The article shows the key directions of research on the factors of academic dishonesty that have been studied among American students, using articles primarily from US academic literature and comparing them to relevant, available Ukrainian scholarly publications. Though the review does not claim to be a fully comprehensive one, it does provide an overview of the scale of factors and the variety of reasons for academic dishonesty in Higher Educations Institutes (HEIs). Literature was retrieved from Scopus, ResearchGate, Google Scholar databases, and Springer journals by using key search words such as factors of, reasons or causes for academic dishonesty, academic misconduct, academic integrity violation and unethical academic behaviour. The review showed that there are numerous reasons for academic integrity violations and that they stem from two major groups of factors — internal individual and external contextual factors. Whether it is beyond or within the bounds of possibility that a factor can be changed and accordingly utilized depends on its nature — external or internal — towards a student, and level (scale) of its influence — national, institutional or individual. An overview of available studies on factors behind academic dishonesty in Ukrainian HEIs demonstrated which factors need more detailed and extensive research to provide a sound base for developing an effective academic integrity policy. The findings of the article contribute to a deeper understanding of the most significant reasons students might have for committing academic malpractice, and to help develop academic integrity policies in Ukrainian institutions.