The Expected
As young children we are taught not to steal, cheat, or lie. Some children also have the privilege to be taught to work hard and diligently at all they do. Somehow this rudimentary teaching, which some think to be intrinsic to human nature, is supposed to translate into an understanding of intellectual property and academic integrity stressed by high schools and universities. I personally don’t remember a teacher explaining to the class what copy-right infringement is or what intellectual property actually embodies. The teachers assume that students are aware of what these rules and rights are, and even though there is much common sense involved, I feel that going over the rules never hurts.
Since it appears to me that many students, including myself, were not explicitly taught the intricacies of cheating and intellectual property, the student’s misunderstanding is conveyed in the manner in which work in high school is approached. Students cut corners without even knowing they do, or do so consciously knowing that they can get away with it. I have to admit that I am one of those students too. Furthermore, even the diligent and hard working students are victims of the tempting shortcuts. “Sparknotes”, “Wikipedia” and other websites make life “easy” for high school students by providing shortcuts when students need to make up for lost time. Little do they know that they are learning less than they could have doing it the right way, which is usually the tougher way.
In Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” he says:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference
It might be a cliché to say that for a student to go above and beyond the norm is the road to success, but in my short experience on this green earth it has so far held quite true. One half of the class will copy and reword a section from the biography of Robert Frost. The student taking the road less traveled by will independently research the life of Robert Frost, but also cite the biography and make personal interpretations and inferences from those works. Reading one essay from a student can show evidence of thought or the lack of it, and as cruel as it may seem, we all had to write an essay of admittance to our universities of choice that had to convey much more than the words in it.
So I ask myself, is academic achievement something we learn or are born with, or a combination of the two?
Poem source: http://www.bartleby.com/119/1.html
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