Personality, Procrastination and Cheating in Students from different University Degree Programs

Introduction. Personality, procrastination and dishonest behaviour in the classroom (or cheating) are variables that have been seen to have an important influence on learning. However, they have seldom been studied together and even less taking into account the gender of the student and their choice of degree course. This work analyses the variables for students in different faculties of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, UAB (Spain) with the aim of identifying similarities and differences between the different qualifications, which may help teaching staff to plan their courses so that they are better adapted to the characteristics of their students. Method. A total of 620 students from four faculties of the UAB (Engineering, Economics, Humanities and Education) volunteered to take part in the research. The answered an EDA questionnaire to evaluate procrastination and cheating and an S version of the Big Five Inventory, which measures personality. They also took part in an individual educational psychology interview which was used to contrast the results of the tests. Results. The results confirm the idea that students on different university degree courses have distinct characteristics in terms of personality, procrastination and cheating. Among the peculiarities is the face that technology students got higher scores for emotional stability and the economics students scored higher in procrastination. Education students got higher scores in awareness and kindness than their peers on other degree courses. All of these were mediated by the gender of the student which is a significant factor to take into account in all the variables being studied. Discussion. The results of this work expand and clarify those that existed to date and give us a clearer understanding of the relations that are established between the students' characteristics and the university degree courses they choose.