Measures

Participating students were asked to indicate how likely it would be that they behave in ways that are generally understood as academically dishonest. A brief scenario was presented, describing the situation of a difficult and very important academic examination, for which the participants were unprepared. Five statements were given, describing popular, unethical ways of behaving in this situation (e.g., preparing a cheat sheet or looking at a fellow student’s paper), and students were required to mark the extent to which they would consider such solutions. Answers were assessed on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from “Definitely not” to “Definitely yes.”

The questionnaire was adopted from a survey conducted on a national sample of Polish students (N = 514) by Bielska and Hoffman (2013). From among many items used in this study we decided to focus on dishonest behaviors during examinations, excluding other types of dishonesty (e.g., plagiarism). The internal reliability indicators in this report were not included, as the conclusions were discussed mostly in a qualitative manner. The full list of adopted items with English translations is available in the Supplementary Material. Cronbach’s alpha of the scale used in the current study was 0.73, which we consider satisfactory in scientific research.

To assess human values according to Schwartz’s 10-value model, we used the abbreviated version of the Portrait of Values Questionnaire (PVQ; Schwartz, 2003). This tool is broadly used in the European Social Survey and has been confirmed to show high adequacy for assessing relationships among values, attitudes, behavior, and socio-demographic variables (Davidov et al., 2008).

The questionnaire consists of 21 items, “portraits” of different people. These sentences describe a person’s goals and aspirations with words as “it is important to him/her …” or “he/she thinks,” “he/she believes,” etc. For each of these statements, respondents answered the question: “How much like you is this person?” and checked one of boxes labeled from “Very much like me” to “Not like me at all” (a six-point categorical scale).

In the process of statistical data analysis, the obtained raw scores were ipsatized (centered) to remove the effect of individual differences in mean response level (Schwartz, 2003) and to minimize the response bias and social desirability bias (Cheung, 2016). All human values proposed in this model were determined by two items in the questionnaire (apart from Universalism: consisting of three items as the most complex construct among all values).

We used the Polish version of the PVQ questionnaire, phrased for both male and female respondents (the “/” symbol was used, for example: “It is important to him/her …”). The translations used in the European Social Survey were used and the original order of questions was unchanged (as suggested by Schwartz, 2003).

All participants were asked to give their approximate grade point average for the previous academic year (first year students gave their grade point average for the last year of secondary school). The best grade given was 5.0 (the maximum score in the Polish grading system) and the worst grade was 3.0 (the lowest grade in Poland is 2.0, but it is not a passing grade).