Academic dishonesty is an issue that has attracted national attention and it is considered a serious educational problem among Nigerian students. Though legislative sanctions have been made to curb it, yet the phenomenon has not abated. There is the need therefore to seek psychological solution to the problem by identifying the attributes that may pre-dispose individuals to academic cheating. This study therefore examined the combine and singular contributions of locus of control, mental ability, and achievement motivation to the prediction of potential for academic cheating. Such knowledge will help in an early detection of the problem and the setting up of appropriate psyco-educational therapy to control the behaviour from getting to criminal level. Five hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance to address the problem.

The survey research design was adopted for the conduct of the study. One thousand two hundred (1200) respondents selected through a multi-stage stratified random sampling procedure were used for this study. Four validated instruments were used in the collection of data. These were: Rotter Internal-External Locus of Control Scale; Raven Progressive Matrices; Academic Need Achievement Scale; and Hassan Potential for Academic Cheating Scale.

Data from the instruments were analysed using multiple regression.
The results from the analyses showed that: (i) locus of control, mental ability, and achievement motivation significantly combined to predict the potential for academic cheating of secondary school students. They jointly accounted for 68% of the total variance found in academic cheating (R = .801; r2 = .645; R2 (adj) = 0.68; f(3.296) = 33.68 p < .001. (ii) achievement motivation was the most potent of these predictors of potential for academic cheating. This was followed by mental ability, while locus of control contributed the least variance for the prediction of potential for academic cheating.

Further analysis of the data revealed that externally oriented students with between low and average level of mental ability but who have high level of academic motivation were more disposed to academic cheating than others.

It is recommended that school authority and counsellors should cooperate in early identification of students with these traits. Then psycho-educational intervention programmes can be mounted to arrest the tendency for cheating before it becomes fully blown.