Cracking the code: unveiling e-cheating trends among tertiary education students

This study is a response to the call for more research exploring the factors that can address the e-cheating behaviour of accounting and business students. Based on fear appeal theory, moral appeal theory, and cognitive moral development (CMD) theory, we examine if implementing monitoring systems, teachers’ support, moral reminders, perceived fear, and self-efficacy could directly or indirectly reduce the accounting and other business students’ e-cheating behaviour. We employed partial least square based structural equation modelling to analyse 432 responses from seventeen public and private universities in Bangladesh. Results reveal that monitoring, moral reminder, and teachers’ cooperation and support have a significant positive relationship with students’ e-cheating behaviour, and perceived fear partially mediates the relationship between student monitoring and e-cheating behaviour. Moreover, teachers’ support strongly influences students’ self-efficacy and self-efficacy has a significant influence on student’s e-cheating behaviour. However, no mediating effect of self-efficacy between teachers’ cooperation and support and e-cheating behaviour. Our findings furthermore indicate that moral reminders, teachers’ cooperation and support, and self-efficacy have only negligible influence on students’ e-cheating behaviour. In a nutshell, our empirical findings outline some valuable policy implications, limitations, and future research suggestions which might be useful in addressing students’ e-cheating behaviour.