Academic Ethics: What has Morality, Culture and Administration got to do with its Measurement?

While there is no dearth of studies on ethical issues, the specific subject of examination misconduct has attracted fewer studies, especially in Africa. This study is an ongoing exploratory attempt to develop a measure of examination misconduct. Self-administered questionnaires were used to collect data from 450 undergraduate business students of the Universities of Botswana and Swaziland. A nine-item measure of examination misconduct was correlated with a measure of perception of business ethics, ethical value assessment and Hofstede's four dimensions of culture. The results indicated significant inter-correlations among the variables (especially the three measures of ethics) and limited construct validity for the examination misconduct scale. The results of factor analysis suggest three factors for the emerging scale: cheating behaviour, intervention and desperation. The ethical inferences of the findings, managerial implications for university administrators and practitioners, study limitations and directions for future research are discussed.