There is a gap between society’s aspiration to implement ethical and responsible standards and the unethical behaviors often exhibited by university students—such as cheating on exams, plagiarizing papers, hiring companies to complete assignments, or using new technologies to copy during exams. In this context, we focus our attention on Business Administration students, as they are the future managers of companies and their behavior is likely to shape the ethical conduct of the organizations they will lead.

Our study analyzes the academic integrity of university students in Business Administration in order to identify the most common unethical behaviors and the main reasons behind them. In addition, we examine the effect of students’ identification with their university (Mael and Ashforth, 1992) on these unethical behaviors. We argue that university identification could be a powerful factor in reducing academic dishonesty. Our hypothesis is that when students strongly identify with their university, they are less likely to cheat, as their sense of belonging motivates them to protect its reputation rather than jeopardize it.

To test this, we conducted a survey in April 2024 among Business Administration students at the University of Burgos. The results show that receiving information about an exam from someone who has already taken it and completing an assignment for another student are the most common unethical behaviors. The survey also reveals that the main reasons for cheating are: when students perceive that the teacher does not care about their learning, and when the subject matter is difficult to understand.

Finally, we test a positive relationship: the stronger students' identification with their university, the more likely they are to consider cheating behaviors as immoral. These findings suggest that fostering a strong sense of identification with the university may be an effective policy to promote academic integrity and discourage unethical behavior among students.

Keywords: Academic integrity, academic dishonesty, student cheating, university identification, business students.