Academic Honesty

Academic honesty
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ACADEMIC HONESTY
Academic honesty, which also refers to as academic integrity, means responsibility and honesty in scholarship. The faculties, as well as students are both required to obey statutes of honest scholarship. This plainly means that all the academic results and work should come from the effort of an individual. The intellectual involvements from others ought to be acknowledged responsibly and consistently and academic work that is completed in other ways is considered as fraudulent. Academic honesty is the most basic principle as well as an essential foundation for all institutions of learning. This happens specifically in the institutions that are dedicated to education that is based on independent projects. The integrity of each individual is very important in academic environment since education entails the exploration and knowledge acquisition and understanding (Zemliansky & St, 2008). Students need to be evaluated on their level of their understanding and knowledge, as this is a crucial process in the teaching process. There are various means of maintaining academic honesty, and ways in which these ways are violated, leading to academic misconduct.
Academic honesty is the root principle of any academic institution that strives towards excellence. It starts from the faculty and flows down to the students. Without this important principle, or its violation hinders the violators from a great opportunity of obtaining positive command of the things that they ought to have known. In addition, the students deprive their classmates of their deserved rewards as well as recognition. They also demean the awarding degree; debase the institution among other disadvantages of violating academic honesty. Thus, this should be a matter of mutual and great concern to all members of every academic institution. There is a need to put a concerted effort with the motive of maintaining high levels of integrity. This is important in order to guard the worth of the educational development that many people are engaged in, as well as to uphold the credibility of each institution. The tangible measures used to evaluate students on their knowledge include examinations, reports, as well as homework. Any conduct or act that interferes with such evaluation process through misinterpretation of the connection between the work that is being evaluated and the state of knowledge of the student. This can be considered as academic dishonesty. Genuine students carry themselves out with integrity and are unjustified when others cheat. Their efforts are leveled the same as the ‘cheaters’ or even lower after the assessment of their knowledge.
Cheating is harmful to every academic institution in numerous ways. The students that are honest in their work often feel frustrated with a fact that cheating is unfair, which goes undetected as well as unpunished. The students who are dishonest in their academics distort the class’s grading curve, which result to lower grades even for students that are diligent and do their work without cheating. The students who cheat fail to understand that they deprive themselves of a real education. They not only rob themselves the general knowledge, they as well lack an experience of studying on how to learn, the exact thing that causes the bachelor’s degree very precious to employers. The university’s reputation and the value of a degree are distorted if the employers realize that the graduates lack abilities that their degrees guarantee. Such universities are often at stake because even the honest students who studied there may face slim chances of job opportunities.
Many professions bear codes of ethics and standards in which individuals are required to adhere when working. Every academic institution should exercise the integrity that students may demonstrate afterwards. Academic misconduct may mostly be considered as presentation of work in which is not an original material of a certain student, or own presentation of work that a student did not do. Helping another student to cheat is as well considered as academic dishonesty.
One form of academic dishonesty that is very common is referred to as plagiarism. This is the usage of another person’s ideas or words without appropriate citation. In plagiarism, students may use ideas of another writer without appropriate citation without an indication using footnotes or the use of other means of direction of the source. There is also citation of one’s self source, but coming up with the same, words that can be found in a printed source lacking and quotation marks. This may suggest that a student has paraphrased instead of borrowing the exact words of the author. Similarly, borrowing part or all of a fellow student’s material or usage of students’s outline in writing their own material is considered as plagiarism (Anderman & Murdock, 2007).
Moreover, the usage of a service of writing or letting a colleague write on a student’s behalf, is unacceptable. Irrespective of whether the student pays a stranger or whether a friend does it, this would be breaching of academic honesty because the student will hand in work, which is not genuinely done by the student. Plagiarism practice entails so many things but the most important notice to students should be ...