Current trends in college teaching or challenges facing college students today - Article Example

Article Critique This paper presents a critique of the article “A Question of Honor: Cheating on campusundermines the reputation of our universities and the value of their degrees, Now is the time for students themselves to stop it” by Chase William. In the first paragraph, this paper presents the summary of the whole article focusing on the main arguments. The other paragraphs present a critique of the paper. As demonstrated in this paper, chase present arguments on key issues that result into college students teaching.

However lack of objectives, hypothesis and a strong thesis statement weakens his arguments. The author has also failed to provide statistical data and proper reference to support his claims. Summary The article “A Question of Honor: Cheating on campus undermines the reputation of our universities and the value of their degrees. Now is the time for students themselves to stop it” was written by American Scholar, Chase William. In this article, the author explores different challenges facing higher education in the United States of America.

Specifically, the author has demonstrated how declining education quality, decreasing funding and declining student and faculty moral affect college students. The author also discusses plagiarism and cheating as the major social challenges facing students and urges the leadership of the universities to take strict measures to curb academic dishonesty. Through critical analysis of the data related to cheating among college students, Chase explores ethical and moral elements associated with aims of higher education in America.

Analysis This article presents a number of issues in the abstract that are assumed to be the representative of the whole paper. This paper presents arguments on how college financial decline, decline in the quality of education, moral, ethical and cheating affect college students. The author has discussed these issues accordingly and has presented clear discussion on how they impact on college students. However, some issues outlined in the abstract are not discussed in-depth in the body of this article.

The author’s abstract does not accurately represent the whole article in general because of inclusion and omission of important themes in the abstract and the body of the article respectively. For example, this article talks about student and faculty moral as some challenges of college students. However in the body of the text, the author has not demonstrated how faculty and student moral affect students them. Moreover, the author has not included the aim and objective of this investigation thus the intended audience is not certain.

The author of this article has made a number of conclusions based on secondary data. Despite basing his discussions and conclusions on secondary data, this article does not present accurate references for such information. In this regard, a follow up or interrogation of the information presented in this article is not possible. Moreover, the researcher has not presented the methods used to collect, analyze and present such information. Credible research outlines how data is collected, analyzed and presented in a research design thus accurate conclusions are based on factual information.

In this regard, obtaining fact is the basis for authentic information in research design. While secondary sources are also used in credible research as sources of information, primary sources would have been important in this article based on the accuracy it deserves. This article would have been improved by sampling and conducting interviews and using questionnaires to collect information from college students and faculties. The discussion in this article has focused on a wide number of issues which are very critical in supporting the point of argument.

For example the writer cites from previous research on the same topic as well as statistical data .This is important since the references gives strength to the arguments being advanced by the writer. However, some are either contradicting or just not relevant to the topic of study. For example, the writer talks about a declining financial allocation to the public university by Obama government while the same time how Universities have continued to recruit more professors and staffs. In fact, the article quotes statistics that contradict the position in this article.

When the author support financial decline by a quote from Pew research centre, "education system fails to provide good value for the money students and their families spend," (Chace, 2012 p.23) it implies that the challenge after all is not the declining financial support but good value for the finances spent. The article does not present solid arguments with facts to support its stands on most issues. Moreover, the author refers to very limited statistics and does not explore in-depth analysis of what he relied on and what other authors have documented about the same topic.

This article focus mainly on three challenges: declining finances, declining quality of education and reduction in the faculty and student moral in relation to academic dishonesty, cheating and increasing plagiarism. The author would have given financial statistics for the fund disbursed to support students for the past five years. With these statistics and their related data, the writer would have come up with a very strong argument to support his claims. Moreover, the quality, authenticity of the few cited statistics cannot be traced by other scholar due to failure to provide accurate references.

Application In conclusion, this article outlines fundamental issues affecting college students today which need to be looked at further. This article will be useful to faculties, college administrators and college students as well. Taking a stand against cheating in academics and plagiarism is important to education quality thus this article outlines issues necessary to consider in developing policy on academic cheating and plagiarism. However, the author cited limited number of resources thus most arguments are not based on any data.

Even though this article is based on secondary research, failure to explore and analyze various statistical data renders most claims made in this article weak. While we acknowledge author’s effort to cite research by other scholars on the related topic, it is worth noting that those articles are difficult to trace due to lack of proper references. Moreover, the researcher does not demonstrate how the data was collected analyzed and presented. Further research can be conducted based on this article to analyze various variables further.

Reference Chace, W. M. (2012). A Question of Honor: Cheating on campus undermines the reputation of our universities and the value of their degrees. Now is the time for students themselves to stop it. American Scholar, 81(2), 20-32.