Academic Dishonesty

Academic Dishonesty

Academic dishonesty. From the word ‘dishonesty’ we can guest it is a bad culture. Well, what is academic dishonesty? Academic dishonesty is any type of cheating that occurs in relation to a formal academic exercise. Academic dishonesty has been documented in every type of educational setting, from elementary school to graduate school. Today, educated society tends to take a very negative view of academic dishonesty. We often hear about plagiarism and cheating. Or may some of us ever do this when we are in elementary school, junior high school, or senior high school. Why we do this? Because we are student alright? It is like a culture in our school life. Now I’m going to tell you types of academic dishonesty. Academic dishonesty can include:

a.       Fabrication. Fabrication is academic dishonesty that generally does by scientist. Fabrication is the falsification of data, and information, in any formal academic exercise. A finding that a scientist engaged in fabrication will often mean the end of his or her career.

b.      Deception. Deception is providing false information to an instructor concerning a formal academic exercise. For example is giving a false excuse for missing at deadline. It also sometimes done by students who have failed to complete an assignment to avoid responsibility for doing so.

c.       Sabotage. Sabotage is acting to prevent others from completing their work.

d.      Cheating. When we have exam, our teacher or lecturer often says, “Don’t chit chat and do it by yourself”. Chit chat is part of cheating. Cheating is the most commonly of academic dishonest that students do when they have an exam. Cheating can take the form of cribbed notes, looking over someone’s shoulder during an exam, or any forbidden sharing of information between students regarding on exam or exercise. Cheating will damages the reputation of our program, hurts the morale of honest students and erodes respect for our instructor.

e.       The last but not the least is plagiarism.  Plagiarism is the adoption or reproduction of ideas or words or statements of another person without due acknowledgment. Do you remember the time when we are in the middle of OKK? The committees told us to make such kind of PKM. At the time we had a lot of plagiarist and the committees were very angry to us. Why? Because plagiarism is never acceptable. This is one of bad culture among the students. It will behave the students become lazy and make them become lack of creativity. Plagiarism can also damage relationship with students an instructor. If an instructor finds that you are plagiarized, he/she develop a serve of distrust. It is normally up to instructor to catch you begin the discipline process. On a simple assignment you may simply receive a zero on the work.

I’ve told you many kinds of academic dishonesty. But why is academic dishonesty considered bad? Here are a few ideas:

1.      Academic dishonesty makes student assessment unreliable. If a student fakes his or her own work, through plagiarism or cheat notes or whatever, the data doesn’t tell truthful.

2.      Academic dishonesty erodes the mutual trust between students and faculty. Faculty trust students to give true information about their progress via graded work. If a student cheats or plagiarizes, that student’s work is suspect for the duration — even if the student learned lesson and the suspicion is misplaced.

3.      Academic dishonesty assumes that the most important thing is GPA. In other words, the mind of the cheater is like this: “What really matters in college is my GPA. There is a lot of pressure to have a high GPA. Therefore I will do whatever is necessary to have a high GPA, whether or not it’s honest.” Well, it is the case that grades are all-important.

4.      Academic dishonesty is not in the long-term best interests of students. There is a net loss in the process of cheating or plagiarizing, even if you don’t get caught.

It is important to understand what motivates students to cheat to encourage students towards moral behavior. Below is a list of the most commonly expressed reasons for student’s academic dishonesty:

a.        Academic

ü  Semester workload too heavy

ü  Others’ cheating puts at disadvantage

ü  Professor/text did not adequately explain material

ü  Too many tests on one day

ü  The academic structural systems force the student to get high score. Grade is the important thing.

b.       Nonacademic

ü  Pressure from parents

ü  Job leaves no time for study

ü  Illness prevents adequate preparation

ü  Financial aid depends on GPA

ü  Good grades needed for job or graduate school

So guys, after we know about academic dishonesty and the consequence of it, let’s stop academic dishonesty in our culture. We have to stop, leave and remove all of academic dishonesty for our better education.