Everyone is probably all familiar with this term especially when teachers start a whole long speech about this at the beginning of every school year. However, besides being honest in your work, what else does it cover? Why is it so important that teachers are willing to spend a whole bunch of time on this every semester? Don’t worry though, you will not be seeing long documents about the Academic Honesty policy here, I’ll be breaking up this topic into different parts for you to better understand. Hope you enjoy! 🙂

According to The Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI), they stated the values for academic honesty clearly as, “academic integrity is a commitment, even in the face of adversity, to five fundamental values: honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility.” As students and faculties reach these values, an academic community flourishes and integrity would then be achieved. Along with the mission statement and policies of each school, academic integrity helped aid the smooth working of a school by promoting a healthy learning process and the desire of seeking the truth. As a conclusion, academic honesty does not merely ask us to be truthful when turning in assignments but to also be honest individuals that could eventually constitute a high-quality learning environment and a delicate societal order.

Here’s how each value that is mentioned as a part of academic integrity works in school:

1. Honesty
   • Honesty is the foundation for the achievement of other values. It begins with oneself and extends to another. It isn’t only limited inside the classroom, but to everywhere in the campus, and outside the campus. In school, honesty could be fulfilled when students and faculties remain truthful to each other, such as giving each other sincere feedbacks, works, grades, etc. Cultivating honesty could eventually train us into someone who is fearless in accepting responsibilities and making difficult choices.
2. Trust
   • As students and teachers remain honest to themselves and each other, trust among each other could eventually be built. A clear set of guideline is helpful in promoting a climate of trust, and this comes to the responsibility of the school. When a school sets clear mission statement and academic standards, students and teachers would eventually be able to collaborate well together. With trust, ideas could be shared freely, and individuals would not need to worry about their research to be stolen or their career to be ruined. Trust enables people to reach their highest potential.
3. Fairness
   • With a clear guideline for promoting academic integrity, fairness should be expected within. For students, fairness comes from predictability, clear expectations, and the courage to respond from acts of academic dishonesty. On the other hand, for teachers, they each maintain rights to be fairly treated by students, colleagues, and the school.
4. Respect
   • Just as the concept of honesty, students and faculties should also remain respectful to themselves and their surroundings. In school, students express respect by showing up on time, full attendance and participation, accepting different perspectives/ideas/opinions, turning work on time, and performing their best no matter what. For teachers, they should show respect towards students by taking their ideas seriously, teach with patience and enthusiasm, give honest feedbacks, and value them as individuals. However, respect does not only limit in living beings, members of the school community should also show respect towards information by providing recognizable citations.
5. Responsibility
   • Everyone should understand their responsibility as a part of their learning progress. Holding a responsibility upon themselves indicates the prevention against wrongdoings; it could be as simple as not cheating on a test, to reporting others on plagiarizing or cheating.

Below is a presentation made by me and my partners, Belinda and Eric, about the importance of academic honesty.

This presentation we made talked about academic integrity as a whole, and separately explained what each form of academic dishonesty is. With quotes as support, we interpreted why performing acts of academic dishonesty is not an option to be considered. Overall, I think my team did pretty well in sharing ideas. Through discussions, my teammates and I were able to decide which google slide theme works best for us; the content we should present that is able to demonstrate our understanding, and the images we should put. Also, I think it was a pretty good idea to insert quotes since it could strengthen our points. However, I think our presentation is too general after all. Even though we tried our best to find suitable images, we still had the struggle to come up with a more unique and attractive content.

Since we had basically covered everything about academic honesty so far, let’s take a look at the academic honesty policy of different schools.

First, Kaohsiung American School (KAS). According to the handbook from KAS (2017), it stated, “Academic honesty reveals itself through a transparent, appropriate, and responsible approach to academic work” (pg. 32). By the mean of being transparent, appropriate, and responsible, KAS wishes students to give proper identification to outside sources, and consider whether if it is appropriate to collaborate with others on the given assignment. I truly agree with this policy. With a variety of matters and excuses, many students have always neglected the guidelines. Eventually, cheating has become more and more common. According to ICAI, 80 percent of high-achieving, college bound students have cheated. Overall, this policy clearly stated out the expectations for students; therefore, I think it’s really important and essential. With the outline of this policy, the school expresses its goal to create a learning environment with a strong climate of trust and positive learning attitude as its base.

Secondly, Morrison Academy Kaohsiung (MAK) and Morrison Academy Taichung (MAC) both convey their mutual desire to create a healthy environment that is beneficial in nurturing future successful individuals. According to their handbooks, “Morrison Academy’s Vision for Our Learners states that a maturing Morrison student will develop into a moral and ethical citizen”. I acknowledge their mission statement. Educating youngster into delicate citizens who performs well socially and academically is the ultimate goal of the school. With the biblical values taught together, I firmly believe students from Morrison Academies would always be able to act accordingly to their moral standards, which is definitely a pleasant phenomenon and outcome to see under the continuous effort on enhancing education.

Finally, academic honesty is an essential component of the culture of each school. No matter how much their consequences may differ, every school all upholds a mutual goal to cultivate successful individuals for the future. Despite school’s strong promotion of these academic values, as students, we should also have full realization that it’s our duty and responsibility to reach our highest academic potential in class, in order to become useful citizens in our later life.

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Citation:

• “High School Student Handbook.” Kas.tw. N. p., 2017. Web. 4 Sept. 2017.
• “High School Student Handbook.” Kaohsiung.mca.org.tw. N. p., 2017. Web. 4 Sept. 2017.
• Ugc.futurelearn.com. N. p., 2017. Web. 4 Sept. 2017.
• Sqonline.ucsd.edu. N. p., 2017. Web. 4 Sept. 2017.
• Academicintegrity.org. N. p., 2017. Web. 4 Sept. 2017.