Saying vs. Doing
My view on how effectively high school teachers enforce academic integrity policies.
Cheating within the high school community is widespread and very well known. Students share techniques with others and none really seem to care about completing and honest day’s worth of homework, as long as they get the grade they want. But is this all the student’s fault?
I don’t believe so. Some teachers claim to have strict no cheating policies, but do they really enforce them. Would students be less likely to cheat if the teacher actually held to their standard and followed through on their threats of failure or even recommendation for expulsion? Can certain mechanisms prove more useful in the battle for academic integrity?
These questions can never be confirmed, or rejected for that matter, as long as teachers remain passive towards the plight of cheating. My freshman English teacher always claimed to be very hard-nosed towards cheaters. “Even if I manage to overlook a questionable paper, which I won’t,” she would say, “it will catch up with you.” In my opinion she overlooked a lot of things. I saw students hand in almost identical papers and not get caught. “Cliffnotes” and “Sparknotes” were pretty much everyone’s best friend. I’ve even used these sources a couple of times, but never to write a whole paper, only to help compare what I had obtained from reading the assigned book. As for my teachers approach to just allowing the students to cheat, with the expectation that “it would catch up with them in the end,” is that an approach that someone, who is there to help guide you in your journey to obtain knowledge, should take? Wouldn’t a more head-on approach to talking the problem early to completely erase it be more useful? I know that if any students fail her class because of cheating I would have been more careful with how I wrote my papers.
Do teachers take an active role in preventing questionable activities the students partake in? It seems to me that a student is more likely to get in trouble for talking in class than falsifying a whole paper. I’ve seen classmates repeatedly get kicked out of class for texting on their cell phone. And when the due date came for a major paper, they would copy and paste majority of it. Yet, every student in that class graduated without every being held accountable for their more tan questionable papers.
My final thought is that of how these students will manage when held accountable for their work. Will they be able to survive the challenges required to attain a higher education, supersede the expectations of academic integrity, or merely get lost along the wayside? And what of the teachers who could have prevented this form happening early on by stopping it when the consequences would not have been so high. Will they continue to let the youth be lost to dangerous world of copy and pasting, or finally realize that they can make an impact on these young people’s lives? I honestly hope that thing change for the better. Because in an age where information is so readily available taking credit for someone else’s work is far to convenient, especially when no one is held accountable.
Comments
Posted by: franco
Posted on: August 30, 2007 10:35 AM
I understand that students are cheating and no one is stopping or questioning them. But is it the teacher's fault? He/she can't possibly fail the whole class, since they obviously all are cheating...Remember that video from orientation, where the teacher was fired for failing half the class? We need a way to reeducate academic integrity to students so they don't want to cheat.
Posted by: Kaneisha
Posted on: August 30, 2007 01:44 PM
I'm not saying the teacher should fail the whole class for cheating merely that they shouldn't be total pacifists either, they could possibly "make an example of", and I hate using this phrase, one student who was blatantly cheating. Or even make the assignments worth smaller percentages so if they got cheating more than once they could be brought up for possible expulsion.
Posted by: Stephen Johnson
Posted on: September 4, 2007 07:07 PM
Well, if the whole class is cheating, and they know it's not acceptable, then they should all fail. We don't need to fit everything to a curve here.