Academic Honesty
To research about the topic of academic dishonesty, me and my two other partners examined a total of 3 schools, one being KAS and the two other being another school. Since I’ve already familiarized myself with the handbook of the Bronx High School of Science in the handbook post I decided to revist the handbook to learn more about how they deal with academic dishonesty to help me better understand the seriousness and importance of it. Based on the findings, all three schools really shows how important these schools view the Academic Honesty Policy as well as why they create a better environment.
High School Handbook – Bronx High School of Science
Bronx High School of Science described all forms of academic dishonesty in detail, having four different forms of cheating: cheating on homework, tests, major exams and paper or project. While varying in the degree of severity in the punishment, all result possibly suspension and the incident going on your record. Academic dishonesty on homework have 3 penalties as the project being the least major one of all possible assignments, tests having 2 penalties and major exams and paper or projects leading straight to suspension and a meeting with the principal, as well as a notification with the parents and possibly detention as well. The school handbook also emphasizes that anyone who participated or assisted the act would be held responsible as well.
It obviously shows through in this handbook that the school treats the issue with academic dishonesty very seriously and would immediately contact your parent and record down the incident on the school files even on the ‘least serious’ case, which is the first penalty for homework fraud, even having vice principals and principals meet and talk with the student to deal with the problem.
It’s also worth noting how this creates a better overall learning environment. For example, if schools give 0 credit to everyone who have violate the Academic Honesty Policy, it would keep the fairness between all students and giving everyone a sense of equal treatment, encouraging everyone to put their own efforts into their own work and to actually learn from the assignments themselves, and hopefully when students even understand the importance of academic honesty, they would willingly build up a positive learning environment for each other where nobody would even think to take the idea of one another.
Importance of Academic Honesty
The reasons why academic honesty is so important is that you can become an independent learner, which means learning all of the knowledge and skills by yourself without simply copying others’ work. Academic honesty helps construct your knowledge, understanding, and help you think transparently. Additionally, academic honesty helps cultivate learning culture at school, and trust between students and teachers can be built with specific rules set by the school.
Sometimes you might wonder to yourself why people have the ability to ‘own’ these ideas, or maybe a better way to say it could be why you couldn’t use these ideas to yourself. Which, you actually can, but there would be no point for the educational system if you’re not really learning and understanding these concepts thought out by others. By copying these things word for word down just so something could be done easier and faster doesn’t help you in any way in the end, especially if you’re caught. The best way to do things would be to truly understand and learn these things and show your understanding through perhaps paraphrasing them or to express them in homework or projects in your own words.
Going back to the idea of people ‘owning’ ideas, however, is that there are cases where you can take their ideas and rephrase it, maybe even quote it word for word, such as in report papers or articles, but it’s extremely important to understand that you would need to give the people credit for these things, since they’re the ones who actually gone through the trouble of doing the work and may even request you to take it down or give them credit if you don’t. People may not feel comfortable with sharing their own work with other people just so they could take it word for word for their own uses, but most do and it’s still important to cite them, whether it’s in APA or MLA.
So in the end, hopefully you’ve had a better understanding of academic honesty and plagiarism.