Abstract:

Academic cheating remains one of the serious threats to validity of assessment at every level of Nigeria educational institutions. Significant efforts have been made towards the control of this menace. The normal disciplinary and the administrative approaches to control the situations have proved ineffective. Also the nation legislative approach, which declared academic cheating as illegal act that should be seriously punished, had been without much positive result. The phenomenon has become high pandemic and pervasive. There has therefore been the attempt on effort towards providing psychological solutions to the problem. It is the furtherance to this approach that this study is designed to determine the contribution of emotional intelligence academic cheating among Nigeria university students. Such knowledge will further strengthen the basic for psychological approach to the solution of problem. Four hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance to address the problem.
The survey descriptive design is the platform upon which the study was conducted. Three hundred (300) respondents selected through a multi-stage stratified random sampling procedure were use for the study. Four validate instruments were used for the collection of data. There were: (i) emotional intelligence scale by schutte et al, (ii) academic self efficacy scale, (iii) a living situation scale designed to measure academic stress, and (iv) examination reaction scale designed to measure potential for academic cheating.
The result from which data analysis from the instrument shows that; (i) emotion intelligence, academic self-efficacy, and academic stress combined to predict academic cheating of university students. They jointly accounted for 25% of the total variance found in academic cheating (R = 0.512, R2 (adj.) = 0.254; F (3,296) = 34.08, P<.001). Academic stress contributed the highest variance in the prediction of academic cheating. Both the emotional intelligence and academic self-efficacy scales made very little contribution to the variance predictive of academic cheating. Further examination of the data revealed that both the emotional intelligence and academic self-efficacy, because of their initial negative correlation with academic cheating appeared to he cancelling each others effect in the prediction of the dependent variable.
The implication of these findings is that academic stress of students when reduced to the minimum may help to reduce the degree of cheating among university students.

Keywords:

Emotional Intelligence, Academic Self-efficacy, Academic Stress, And Academic Cheating.