honesty

honesty

Academic Honesty    

Axia College

Academic Honesty
One valuable research tool when it comes to academic writing is the internet. Unfortunately, the down-side of the easily available information that is attainable online is that it has become much easier for students to plagiarize their class work. With the abundance of available documents online many students think that they will not get caught if they use a document composed by someone else and try to pass it off as his or her own. Many colleges, such as University of Phoenix and Axia College, have checks in place for faculty to check student work for uniqueness. The program is available to students and faculty members and the program checks against the already turned in and uploaded documents in the database history and reports the match percentage of any paper that is turned in as compared to other papers written by other students. A study of 198 students enrolled in college found 16 different levels and kinds of cheating. Some of the ways students were cheating included passing answers during in classroom tests, copying off another student’s paper, not citing sources properly or taking credit by oneself for work done in a group. The same survey also had students respond to a question that suggested 12 reasons for academic dishonesty or cheating. These reasons included the need to attain a higher grade than they thought themselves capable of, peer pressure from others, and time constrictions to complete a project. Interestingly enough, the study revealed that there wasn’t much of a difference in frequency of occurrences where students would participate in academic dishonesty or cheating at a religious based college than there is at a secular or public school (Choong, Brown, 2007). Students who are participating in flagrant cheating, using someone else’s work as their own, are cheating themselves more than anything. Also, using someone else’s work without giving proper citation or credit is a...