From moral awareness to academic integrity in Latin America

Academic Integrity has not been widely studied in Latin America, this chapter gives a brief account of the most recent studies and broadens the horizon through the presentation of the results of a quantitative exploratory, transversal, non-experiential research carried out with a sample of 1,008 undergraduate students from four private universities from Chile, Colombia and Mexico that was thought based on two ethical notions which served as analytical axis: akrasía (Cortina) and the principle of alternate possibilities (Frankfurt). There is a wide open field for future research. Latin Americans students have not been born genetically programmed to cheat so we need to understand why they do it, what can lead them to report academic misconducts, how does academic integrity relate to professional performance at the workplace and to the culture of legality of our countries in the region.