Maintaining Academic Honesty

Maintaining Academic Honesty

Introduction

Academic honesty, as defined by the University of Illinois, is integrity and responsibility of scholarship, meaning that all academic work should be resultant of an individual's own efforts, with intellectual input from other sources being responsibly acknowledged. The purpose of this essay is to reflect upon expected standards of academic integrity, reasons why dishonest practices may be applied and their types, factors due to which such actions may go unnoticed, and measures which may help prevent such activities.

What instigates/provokes academic dishonesty and its trends?

As students move towards higher levels of education, the intensity of study required consistently increases. Whether students move from secondary to high school or from K-12 to university, they face increased pressure and stress in the form of increased assignments, coursework, projects, tests, and quizzes. With each higher level of formal study, students are expected to perform more tasks of increased difficulty.

While this is a cause of distress for many students in the first instance, this enables students to deal with a variety of work-place situations, builds their own performance benchmarks, and prepares them to deal with tasks in a professional and time-bound manner. The deadlines that students face enables them to incorporate meeting the same in their standard work codes. That being said, many students are not able to effectively deal with these pressures. While the more honest ones either take tutorial assistance, counseling, or drop out in the worst case scenarios, many students choose to deal with these scenarios seemingly more pragmatic manner. Practices such as cheating and plagiarism are commonplace in various student circles as many opt for the easier way out.

That being said, what is presented is a polarized scenario. The varying levels of academic dishonesty make it impossible to identify most instances, other than those of extreme nature. With the ever-growing stock of published materials, it is not possible to check every other source for plagiarism and most who overview the work try to check for the same in the most convenient manner.

Source: (Jones, 2011)

In another survey of 1055 college presidents by Pew Research Center, it was suggested that cyber-plagiarism is on the rise with statistics higher than previous years. Of those surveyed, 55% contend that plagiarism is constantly increasing, 40% believed that it had stayed the same, with only 2% suggesting that it had declined.

Source: (Jones, 2011)

Is it really that dishonest?

To judge academic dishonesty, two factors are taken into account: the use of unauthorized assistance; and whether the assignment graded or not. In case of the former, one must consider the fact that resources generally used, such as academic literature, calculators, internet, and specific software, are essential but under certain conditions can also be termed unauthorized assistance. Therefore, the permissibility of each resource would have to be determined by the relevant authority (Anderman, Murdock, 2007).

What undermines academic honesty?

The most common form of academic dishonesty is plagiarism. Plagiarism involves the use of someone else's material, whether words or ideas, and presenting them as our ...