EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, ACADEMIC SELF-EFFICACY, ACADEMIC STRESS AS PREDICTORS OF POTENTIAL FOR ACADEMIC CHEATING AMONG SOME NIGERIAN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Academic cheating remains one of the most serious threats to validity of assessment at every level of Nigerian educational institutions. Serious efforts have been made towards the control of this menace. Without much positive result, the phenomenon has become highly pandemic and pervasive. There has therefore been the attempt towards providing psychological solution to the problem. It is in furtherance to this approach that this study is designed to determine the contribution of emotional intelligence, academic self-efficacy, and academic stress towards the prediction of potential for academic cheating among Nigerian university students. Such knowledge will further strengthen the basis for psychological approach to the solution of the problem. Two hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance to address the problem. The survey descriptive design was the platform upon which the study was conducted. Three hundred (300) respondents selected through a multi-stage stratified random sampling procedure were used for the study. Four validated instruments were used in the collection of data. These were (i) Emotional Intelligence Scale by Schutte et al, (ii) Academic Self-Efficacy Scale (iii) A Learning Situation Scale designed to measure academic stress and (iv) Examination Reaction Scale designed to measure potential for academic cheating. The results from the data analysis from the instruments showed that: (i) Emotional Intelligence, academic self-efficacy and academic stress combined to predict the potential for academic cheating of university students. They jointly accounted for 62.2% of the total variance found in academic cheating (R=.788; R2 (adj)=.622; F (3,296) = 34.08, p<.001). (ii) Academic self-efficacy contributed the highest variance in the prediction of academic cheating. Both the emotional intelligence and academic self-efficacy scales made less contribution to the variance predictive of academic cheating. (iii) Further examination of the data revealed that both the emotional intelligence and academic self-efficacy, because of the initial negative correlation with academic cheating appeared to have less effect in the prediction of the dependent variable. The implication of these findings is that academic stress of students when reduced to the minimum may help to reduce the degree of cheating among university students.