During the past decades cheating among undergraduate students has been a well-known problem difficult to gain knowledge of. European research in this field of research is scarce. The aim of this paper is to present a study, investigating the frequency of cheating, the cheating methods used and the students’ motives for cheating or not cheating in a Swedish-Finnish university context. Comparisons with other higher education contexts were possible since an anonymous questionnaire, worked out and used by Newstead, Franklyn-Stokes and Armstead (1995), was translated into Swedish and used in the study. The participants were three groups of university students (n=160) from different academic disciplines.

The findings implicate that cheating among undergraduates is common and mainly is a problem of ethic character. The paper also discusses consequences of student cheating for the university staff, legislators, and society. Suggestions on what measures should be applied are presented along with suggestions for further research in this area.