Relations Between Achievement Goals and Academic Dishonesty in Undergraduate Students: A Two-Wave Prospective Survey Study and Moderator Analyses

Although students’ achievement goals have been linked to academic dishonesty, more re-search is needed to clarify mixed findings and identify contextual factors that may influ-ence these linkages. We therefore conducted a longitudinal study to investigate prospective associations between students’ achievement goals and academic dishonesty (exam cheating and plagiarism) while examining the explanatory power of situational and personal moder-ators (academic and cheating self-efficacy, injunctive and descriptive norms, justifying at-titudes). We surveyed 856 German undergraduate students twice within two consecutive semesters. Performance (appearance) approach and work-avoidance goals were positively linked to plagiarism, while only performance (appearance) approach goals mattered for ex-am cheating. Cheating self-efficacy, descriptive norms and justifying attitudes had main ef-fects on both exam cheating and plagiarism above and beyond the effects of the achieve-ment goals, but they did not moderate the goals’ effects. Taken together, our findings add to the achievement goal – academic dishonesty literature with a fine-grained perspective on goals and corroborate and extent existing knowledge on situational and personal influences on academic dishonesty.