(148) Pharmacy Student Perceptions of Academically Dishonest Behavior in Skills Activities

Objective : Assess pharmacy student perceptions of academically dishonest behavior across multiple skills activities to determine if correlations exist between their perceived wrongness and their willingness to engage.

Methods: Students in each year of the professional curriculum were asked to complete an anonymous, electronic survey near the end of the 2022 academic year. The survey contained 12 scenarios describing academically dishonest behavior with skills activities, involving one or two students. Eighteen individual student behaviors were presented. Students were asked whether they believed each student’s behavior was wrong and their willingness to engage in the behavior. Possible responses were “yes”, “no”, and “I’m not sure.” Descriptive statistics were completed. Spearman-R correlation between agreement of wrongness and willingness to participate was completed.

Results: Surveys were completed by 200 students (76.3% response). There was widespread agreement that presented behaviors were wrong (57-99% agreement for 16 items). Two items had less than 50% agreement, with both items involving failure to report another student. Willingness to engage in behaviors ranged from 1-44.9%. Eight of eighteen individual student behavior examples showed moderate inverse correlation (R= -0.2 to -0.5, p< 0.05) between agreeing that the action was wrong and willingness to engage.

Conclusions: Responses to our survey showed widespread agreement in the wrongness of multiple academically dishonest behaviors. These results demonstrated mild-moderate negative correlations between agreement in the wrongness of behavior and a willingness to engage for some of the presented behaviors. Further studies should be completed to assess causes and solutions to discrepancies in perceptions and behaviors.