USING CIVIC AND ETHICAL EDUCATION TO CURB UNETHICAL ACADEMIC PRACTICES AMONGST UNDERGRADUATES IN NIGERIA

Corruption and unethical practices remain one of the critical challenges facing Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) in Nigeria. There are concerns about the lack of academic fidelity in the HEIs arising from scant interest in academic rigour and leading to academic dishonesty. Efforts towards addressing these problems in the HEIs have not produced lasting solutions. Aside the crucial applications of education in turning students into employable adults, education should also serve as a behavioural framework for inculcating values, rigorous academic-culture and ethical practices to aspiring scholars. So, employing civic and ethical education in HEIs for addressing the problems of corruption and unethical practice remains crucial. In spite of the prospects of ethics and civic education in addressing the problem as stated, ethics and civic education may not be functional at the HEIs presently. The paper therefore examined the extent to which this applies and appraises the challenges of unethical practices in the HEIs and the option of using a general studies approach to address this problem using survey method. The study design adopted a four-scale Likert-type questionnaire administered to 120 undergraduates of Universities in South West Nigeria. Data were analysed using the descriptive statistics and findings indicated that ethics and civic education have optimum potentials in addressing corruption related problems, especially among fresh undergraduates. It is therefore recommended that, higher education authorities and stakeholders should leverage on the prospects of the fresh students to introduce and deploy sufficient resources to this programme in the HEIs.