Maintaining Academic Honesty

Academic honesty is doing the right thing by making sure that everything you present to your lecturers are your own work. Maintaining academic honesty can be achieved by avoiding the use of other people’s work.

Plagiarism is one of the things that hinder academic honesty. It is stealing someone else’s work. Plagiarism is unethical and all students should avoid it. One can commit plagiarism in different ways. You may copy your friend’s assignment but use your own words, one can also go to a computer and research what she/he wants then download the information and present it the way it is or change some of the words to avoid being discovered.

The student may not want to do this, but most of the time they are under pressure by parents, guardians or scholarship to perform well and get good grades. This forces them to resort to copying someone’s work instead of working hard to get good grades from their own hard work. It is wrong to plagiarise as it the same as stealing and we are all taught since childhood that it is wrong to steal. This issue can be eliminated by encouraging those who feel that they under pressure, and the lazy ones, who don’t like working hard to produce their own work that it is wrong to steal someone else hard work. Strict measures should be put in place so that if a student is discovered to have plagiarised someone’s work they should be punished accordingly.

Many students are tempted to cheat when doing an online examination. This is because most the answers to the questions they are asked are readily available in the internet, and most will be tempted to go the easy way, instead of working hard to get a good grade through their own hard work. Students should believe in their ability to read and be able to perform well in an examination. They should invest more time and effort in their studies just as their lecturers invest their time in them.

Family and friends also play a role in maintaining academic honesty. A student may be facing difficulties in their academic work and tell a friend or relative who has done the work before. They might offer to give them the work they did for them to copy or volunteer to do the assignment for them. Most of the students will accept this whole heartedly because they won’t have to work hard. Such behaviour should be condemned as it encourages laziness amongst the students.

Students may be forced to plagiarise someone else wok due to the limited time given for a research paper to be completed. They will resort to copy pasting any work they find so as to finish the work in time. To avoid this, a student should manage their time properly by allocating enough time to finish their assignments instead of other leisure activities.

Taking a test is an important part in the academic world. However, some students are tempted to let someone else sit for an exam on their behalf. The student may not believe that he/she is capable of sitting for an exam and pass hence resorting to having someone do it for them. This can be remedied by encouraging those, who don’t have faith in themselves and those who fear failing an exam, that passing an exam through the hard work of someone else is the same as failing the exam.

Anyone found cheating in an exam should be expelled from school, this will discourage those who want to benefit without working hard. It is however, the feeling of satisfaction that you have when u see that due to your hard work you have managed to pass an exam that should be given priority by the students and not just passing the exam. It is more valuable when you know that the grade in your transcript is your own hard work than when you know that it is not your work but someone else. Passing an exam is not getting good grades but making sure that those grades are genuine and not stolen from anyone or anywhere.

The student should be aware of need to research sources, properly format their work and reference. They should not just pick any work and use it as a reference but should read the material and provide the correct information according to the source they used. The formatting style used should be correct according to the instructions given in the question. Wrong formatting and reference show that a student did not do the work but instead went and copied someone’s work. This portrays a negative image of the student. It means that a student cannot be trusted, is not reliable, untruthful and dishonest. The consequence of this may be being expelled from school, and I don’t think one deserves to be thrown out in college or university level after a lot of struggle to get there just because one is too lazy to do an assignment.

Some students may sabotage other students from completing their work by either cutting off pages from reference books, or destroying materials required to complete the assignment. They may have personal reasons for doing this, but they end up dragging other students into their own mess. Such students should be punished or expelled. Professors can also cause educational dishonesty as by allocating grades unfairly or even selling exam papers to students. Such behaviour should be stopped and can only be achieved when we all practice good moral behaviour. Students should know that nothing is for free and that they have to work hard to be successful.