Abstract

Academic corruption is a major impediment towards achieving sustainable development. This study investigated stakeholders’ perception on forms and control mechanism for academic corruption in universities in Kwara State. Descriptive survey design was adopted for this study. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to select a sample of two universities out of the four universities in Kwara State and 549 respondents were selected from the population of 50,358 ( 46,507 students, 1,926 teaching and 2,925 non-teaching staff). A researcher-designed instrument was used for data collection. Percentage was used to answer the research questions while the hypotheses were tested with Analysis of Variance. The findings revealed twenty forms of academic corruption in universities, the commonest forms being plagiarism, leakage of examination papers and examination malpractices. Majority of the Stakeholders (85.1%) perceived encouraging students and staff to raise concerns about any issue of plagiarism or suspicion of malpractice/misconduct at the earliest possible stage as the most effective control mechanism for academic corruption. 75.6% perceived punishing any form of academic corruption as a control mechanism while 58.5% stated the use of ICT to conduct examination as a control mechanism. Also, the perceptions of the stakeholders were not significantly different as tested in the hypotheses. The study concluded that, there is a fast growing trend of academic corruption in Nigeria education sector. The implication is that corruption in the education sector is more detrimental than corruption in other sectors of life. It is therefore, recommended that university authorities should give proper orientations to newly employed staff and admitted students. Mentoring of junior staff should be encouraged as a worthwhile academic culture.