The Study On Postgraduates' Attitude Towards Dishonest Academic Conduct And The Analysis Of Related Conduct

This research classifies dishonest academic conduct into two parts.The first part is short for FFP which has the worst effect and destroyed the scientific environment seriously,including fabrication,falsification and plagiarism.The other part is short for QRP that is questionable or irresponsible academic conduct lying in the gray area of scientific research.There are three main purposes of this research.Firstly,from the economic perspective,this research constructs three different types of scholars' utility functions based on the expected utility theory and cost-benefit theory in order to analyze factors on the utilities of dishonest academic conduct.Secondly,from the perspective of social psychology,the scenery questionnaire on postgraduates' attitude of dishonest academic conduct is authorized from academic emotion,academic moral judgment and the tendency for dishonest academic conduct.Thirdly,inner and outer punishment variables are introduced in order to analyze their modulated function on predictive factors of postgraduates' attitudes on dishonest academic conduct.The author adopted mathmatictis model to construct utility function of academic conduct and utilized value assignment to analyze factors that affect the utility of dishonest academic conduct.Futhermore,the empirical survey was adopted to explore postgraduates' attitude towards dishonest academic conduct and predictive factors on the tendency of dishonest academic conduct.The results of this research are concluded as follows:Firstly,the author has constructed the general utility function based on the expected utility theory.The concrete utility functions of different types of scholars were deduced which are linear function for risk neutral,logarithmic function for risk averse,and exponential function for risk preference.It was concluded that changing the values of risk costs,internal condemnation costs,academic benefits,and the subjective estimation of penalties following dishonest academic conduct can lead to changes in the utility of academic dishonesty.Moreover,it was found that these four factors had different influence on utility function.Secondly,there existed a difference of postgraduates' attitude between different types of conducts,FFP and QRP.For academic moral judgment,postgraduates hadmore strong moral condemnation towards FFP.For academic emotion,postgraduates showed more sympathy for QRP and regarded QRP as being more worthy of forgiveness.For the tendency of dishonest academic conduct,the probability of implementing QRP is higher that the probability of FFP.Moreover,this research also found that demographic variables reflect differences on attitudes toward dishonest academic conduct.It can be concluded that there existed a difference of attitudes on grade,that is,Ph D have more appropriate attitudes than postgraduate.Thirdly,in the analysis of predictive factors on postgraduates' attitudes towards dishonest academic conduct,whether it be for FFP or QRP,academic emotion and academic moral judgment can predict the tendency for dishonest academic conduct.However,academic emotion was found to be more predictive.Furthermore,inner punishment was modulated when academic moral judgment predicted the tendency of dishonest academic conduct,while outer punishment was modulated when academic moral judgment predicted the tendency of FFP.