Academic Integrity in High School...
“If you all don’t learn how to cite your papers correctly before college, you will fail out of freshman English and probably get expelled,” the teacher of my high school Literature and Composition class warned us.
We had all heard the threat before. Our teachers continuously reminded us that plagiarism, even unintentional plagiarism, led to events too horrific to relate. I think my high school teachers believed that fear would keep students from cheating. In all honesty, plagiarism was not very prevalent in my high school, but I don’t think this had anything to do with our teachers’ attempts to instill us with a fear of cheating. On the contrary, most students were more concerned with how their peers would respond to cheating.
Although my high school teachers threaten to punish us to the fullest extent of the law if they caught us cheating, I don’t think anyone took the warning too seriously. Chances were our teachers would never find out if we stole a research paper off the internet or copied someone’s essay; however, our classmates would inevitably discover the truth. In a class of only fifty-eight students, news travels fast, and everyone seems to know everything about everyone else. The rare instances of cheating in my school were greeted with a general outpouring of contempt from students. Maybe we valued intellectual creativity and the freedom to come up with our own ideas. Or perhaps we were simply noble minded scholars concerned with the academic integrity of our school, but for the sake of honesty, I will offer a different view on why we didn’t tolerate cheating. A student who stayed up late to finish writing a lab report for physics couldn’t respect the fact that one of her classmates merely copied someone’s report. Students faced the issue of academic integrity with an attitude that said, “If I have to work hard, so should everyone else.” The fact that cheating wasn’t socially acceptable did more to build up our school’s academic integrity than anything else.
I guess you could say we all acknowledged an unwritten code that demanded some degree of integrity. When the administration decided to impose a new honor code, few students supported the idea. It wasn’t that we wanted to foster rampant cheating, but most people felt that the honor code was a somewhat insulting worthless piece of paper. “Why do we need a paper to tell us not to cheat? Why can’t people just trust us?” students continuously asked. I must say that I agreed with them. A piece of paper doesn’t demand integrity, but friendship does. Still, for the sake of my high school literature teacher’s sanity, I sincerely hope we all learned how to cite our papers so we won’t fail out of our freshman English classes in college.
Comments
Posted by: Leigh
Posted on: December 17, 2007 09:50 PM
boo, that is so true.
p.s. I am your biggest fan. you should know I can see you right now.