Why Academic Honesty is So Important to Higher Education

Learning is the key to success. Shown time and again, those who are most knowledgeable and have the greatest ability to apply their knowledge are the most successful. However, one is not simply born with vast amounts of knowledge. Acquiring knowledge takes time and dedication in some sort of education system. While nearly every American child goes through a formal education through grade school, it is in higher education institutions where true ambition and thirst for knowledge is tested; but higher education faces a constant problem.

That is, academic dishonesty. Academic dishonesty can take many forms and have various consequences, both on the academically dishonest student themselves, and the educational system as a whole. The following paper will explore why academic honesty is so important to higher education. Academic dishonesty takes many forms. As such, it is difficult to pinpoint one specific way that academic dishonesty is conducted and therefore difficult to come up with a concerted effort to eradicate it completely.

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This means that in many cases of academic dishonesty, the culprits are never found out. When students realize they can get away with some form of cheating, it propagates further dishonesty. (Finn and Frone 2004) This exposes a very real problem: the issue of fairness. Students who don't practice academic honesty and yet never get caught aren't being directly punished for their actions even though they didn't follow the rules. Consider the following example. Two students are enrolled in a math class. Both students desire to earn a good grade in the course as it will have a positive effect on their GPA and later their chances of getting into a good graduate school.

The first student goes to every class, paying attention during the lecture and taking good notes. When it's time for tests, this student studies the material thoroughly, practicing every type of problem and making sure all of the appropriate equations are memorized. The second student rarely attends class, and even more seldom pay the unaware first student without getting caught.

Both students receive a very good grade in the course, even though only one deserved the grade. On their transcripts, however, they are identical. This poses an obvious problem of injustice in the classroom and appeals to one's inherent sense of right and wrong. This brings the discussion to another reason why academic honesty is so important to higher education. The primary and obviously most important goal of the education system is to impart knowledge of the subject matter. Higher education is supposed to cultivate a learning environment and academic dishonesty deprives higher education of this goal. (Maramark 1993) Students who are dishonest do not become educated nearly as well as those who actually put in the time and effort to learn. Recall the example in the above paragraph. Even though both students received a very good grade in the course, both did not receive a good education. Although on paper their scores reflect that they both knew the subject matter equally well, one obviously had a much better understanding of the math class. The student who cheated is robbing himself of a quality learning experience, which is the primary reason why the higher education system was created.

Performing academic dishonesty in this sense ignores the very purpose at the soul of education. Other forms of academic dishonesty display the same problem. Someone who plagiarizes an essay, for example, is not learning the material. They are not correctly processing the information in order to write about it. They are, instead, using someone else's thoughts and opinions on a subject and passing it off as their own, which brings about the next problem with academic dishonesty. Plagiarizing is loosely defined in this context as taking some individual's work and pretending that it is your own. (Kisamore, Stone, and Jawahar 2007)

This is not only harmful for the reasons above, but for another, less often considered rationale. Reconsider again the first example, except this time assume that instead of a graded test, the math class requires that a paper be written on a certain subject. Now say that the first student wants a critique on his paper before he turns it in to the teacher so he gives it to the second student to look over and correct. The second student, instead of critiquing the paper, puts his own name on it and turns it in as his own work. The first student, upon finding out about this, will certainly not give any of his essays to the second student anymore after seeing that he is being plagiarized. This small example represents the same problem on a much larger scale that happens often in the real academic world. That is, when an individual releases an academic research or opinion paper and his/her ideas are plagiarized, this individual will be less likely to share their ideas with the world next time they write a paper. (Finn and Frone 2004)

Although this seems logical, and at the very base it is, it displays an extremely dangerous problem. As mentioned before, the whole purpose of education is to cultivate an unbiased learning environment. However if people are too afraid to release their findings/ideas at the risk of being plagiarized then the only one who is exposed to the information is the author themself. It is clear that academic honesty is extremely important to higher education for all the reasons mentioned above. First of all, academic dishonesty it is unfair to students who actually put in the effort to achieve good grades in their courses. Second, behaving in an honest way helps further the mission of higher education, which is to correctly educate students. Finally, if plagiarism is running rampant, people won't want to contribute to the knowledge base that characterizes higher education. Obviously, these concerns should not be taken lightly and one must strongly think about the consequences before they commit any academic dishonesty.

References

• Why Academic Honesty is Important
• Learning and the Brain