Rating Lecturer-Related Classroom Academically Dishonest Practices in Ghana’s Institutions of Higher Learning

Abstract

The falsification in higher education comes with it attended plethora of problems including academic corruption (Macfarlane, Zhang, & Pun, 2014). The menace has become one that is eating deep into the fiber of high education within the Africa region with increase media reportages of promotion, accreditation, enrolment and grade frauds. Curbing this situation seems not to have had much attention in practice like it is on print therefore threatening the quality of higher education to stakeholders. This assertion finds support in the works of Damtew (2018) that, there have been public outbursts on the level of falling standards in higher education in Africa which has been associated with academic fraud. These observations seem to be reflective of the general heights that academic fraud has attained in recent times in the higher education space in Africa. In their work Curbing Student Related Academic Corruption in Sub Saharan Africa, Awaah and Abdulai (in press) did not depart from the opinions of the earlier authors; they argue that the culture has been heightened by the demands for excellent certification with good grades rather than education. In conformance to this culture, academic stakeholders have been found in diverse dishonest practices that are reflective of the words of Okebukola (2016) that academic corruption is any type of cheating those accords a person undue advantage in an academic enterprise. Whiles the above authors have observed the phenomenon from other lenses; little has been done in the area of rating the identified forms of academic corrupt practices relating to lecturers specifically in their classroom duties. Anchored on the Social Learning theory examines the most recurrent form of lecture classroom-related academic corruption. Data were obtained from an online questionnaire with 114 respondents. The findings show that the most recurrent form of lecturer classroom related academic corruption in Ghana higher education is lecturers not making available to students their Interim assessment grades before the main examination (53.5%), followed by lecturers not completing syllabus before close of semester (22.8) and in the third place was a number of practice including lecturers coming to lectures late, not completing syllabus within the semester amongst other with 23.7%.