Importance of Academic Honesty and Presenting Original Work - Research Paper Example

Academic Integrity – Importance of Academic Honesty and Presenting Original Work Academic Integrity Trust is one of the foundation stone of society. Complex societies essentially require higher level of trust within each and every profession and act of their members. Trust plays very vital role in academia also because it determines that the students have acquired their degrees purely on the basis of their abilities, efforts and skills and they have not adopted any illegal or unethical way for their achievement. The term academic integrity possesses great importance in this context because it assures the absence of plagiarism and cheating in completing the academic requirements (John et al, 2007). Academic dishonesty is a major problem that harms academic integrity and gives students several ways of achievements by crook. Academic dishonesty has been defined as “unintentionally unethical behaviour” and violating behaviours like cheating and plagiarism etc. Furthermore, the violation of an institution’s policy is also regarded as academic dishonesty and different ways adopted by the student to present unoriginal work indicates the practice of academic dishonesty that is condemn at every ground by the educationalists and experts (Baird,1980). Academic integrity refers to academic honesty and stresses upon the importance of presenting original work free from plagiarism and cheating and prepared using own efforts and skills. Academic honesty means that a work is free from any unacceptable academic conduct and there is no violation of values in presentation of the work. Academic integrity is mainly affected by the practice of plagiarism. The issue of plagiarism has gained the attention of people because it is the most common problem identified by the experts that hinders academic integrity. Plagiarism involve submission and paper that is someone else academic work but any person present it with his own name and tries to take the credit of some other person’s work (John et al, 2007). There are many form of plagiarism and it is not necessary that it occurs when a person present the complete work of any other person with his name. Plagiarism includes failure to credit the source while using any part, in whole or in paraphrased form the published or unpublished work of any author. It means that a material is reproduced from any source and proper citation and acknowledgement is not included with the work giving false impression that the material has been created from scratch without seeking information from any source (John et al, 2007). Purchasing work from any agency or presenting the essay offered free on the web is also a form of plagiarism and academic dishonesty. In some cases, the students get access to ample information about their topic on the web and they rearrange it and combine as essay to present as their own work. In this case also, the students have not presented the original work and they attempted to take the credit of the work for which they have not exerted any effort. Cheating is also an important factor that affects the academic integrity and promotes academic dishonesty. Cheating include copying material from the work done by the others or to allow any other person to copy the material written by you. In both of these cases the student is liable for cheating because eventually a material is presented by a student that is not his own effort. Cheating also allows the students to present work that is not actually outcome of their own efforts and thus they are wrongly evaluated on the basis of someone else efforts and skills (Bunn et al, 1992). All of these issues possess great importance for the academic experts and the common practice of the academic dishonesty has raised concerns among the academic experts regarding the prevention of academic dishonesty. There has been several research studies also conducted to find out the trend and reasons behind lack of academic integrity at many of the educational institutions. It has been revealed from the review of literature that academic dishonesty prevails like epidemic across most of the colleges and educational institutions and majority of the students remained engages in some sort of academic dishonesty at some point during their academic careers (Bunn et al, 1992). Academic integrity is an important issue for the education specialists for decades however, over the last two decades the concerns of the experts over this issue have considerable increased due to the realization that academic dishonesty has become a part of most of the educational institutes and students commonly get involved in the activities that could gain them success by exerting less efforts, time and skills. It is very sensitive matter because the increasing trend of academic dishonesty means that the finished products of the colleges and universities might not be capable of skills and fundamental information implies by the transcript. The degrees attained by the students might not match with their skills and capabilities and the society will get the services of incompetent people. The preparation of work using full potential, time and skills assures that the work will truly represent the student and it would be easy to judge a student on the basis of his presented work. However, in case of practicing any type of academic dishonesty the work would no more be representative of a student and the judgments based on the analysis of the work would not be truly implacable to the student. It implies that presenting original work is also important to have the actual image of the student in front of the analyst and academic experts (Brown and Howell, 2001). Hence, it implies that academic integrity is the most important element that assures the credibility of an academic institution and the degree hold by a student. Lack of academic integrity creates doubt about the credibility of the degree and the value of the acquired degree or diploma also decreases in case of identification of academic dishonesty. On the other hand, the practice of academic honesty affirms that the student is skilful and truly holds the degree being granted to him. The presentation of original work assures that it has been prepared by the student with all their efforts, time and skills and it would become easy to truly judge the skills and capabilities of a student on the basis of his work. References Baird, J. S. (1980). “Current trends in college cheating”. Psychology in Schools, 17, 515-622. Brown, V. J., & Howell, M. E. (2001). “The efficacy of policy statements on plagiarism: Do they change students’ views?” Research in Higher Education, 42, 103-118. Bunn, D., Caudill, S., & Gropper, D. (1992). “Crime in the classroom: An economic analysis of undergraduate student cheating behaviour”. Research in Economic Education, 23, 197-207. John N. Gardner, A. Jerome Jewler, Betsy O. Barefoot (2007). Step by Step to College and Career Success. Cengage Learning, 2007 Read More