The Integrity of Scholarship and Grades

After taking the course “The Integrity of Scholarship and Grades” for this semester due to my academic dishonest behaviors, I have a better and deeper understanding not only about the cheating, academic dishonesty, but the personal integrity and social consequences and future life and goals. The academic in MSU does not only means taking classes, but develop the personality and integrity as a social individual. For example, when I just come to MSU, the first week is International Students Orientation week. In this week, I have a very long to-do list to finish, such as Student ID, Check-in for resident hall, see advisor and enroll the class and listen to many academic, cultural and daily life supportive lectures. But When I was doing these, I never think about why I need to do these. I did not know these are very fundamental for my future college life and the future career life. I tried to skip the lectures or hanging on my smartphone during the lecture, which was an example of negative social behavior.  This paper will include my personal experiences, my understanding of academic dishonesty, and my future goals.

First of all, in order to avoid the plagiarize, I have to always keep the role and regulation in my mind no matter I am studying in the school or working in the office in the future just like Joseph Friedli’s understanding about the Spartan Code of Honor: “Maintain a high standard of academic integrity is a responsibility for all Spartans.”  From my understanding, the intentional or unintentional cheating is the phenomenon of lack of personal integrity, and self-education. I will list the integrity of an individual as the most priority, because I believe different people have different talent and interest, so they will be successful in their field, but by taking the advantages of other works or not being truthful to others and themselves always means failure to the person. For example, I will be very happy about my progress I made even it is just a little, because It is all I made by myself, however, I will not be happy about the result that does not belongs to me even it looks very nice and big. Being honest will make myself truly happy from the bottom of my heart.  This is all about personal understanding and feeling about honesty and integrity after read and watch the article and video “MSU General Student Regulations” and “Spartan Code of Honor”.

Before taking this class, all my understanding of cheating is just copy the homework, watch others exam sheet. This is also one of the reason caused my academic dishonesty due to lack of the knowledge of the “academic misconduct” and “academic dishonesty”. There much more behaviors meaning dishonesty for example: submit the same paper for two or more class, use other author’s ideas, words or phrases without proper attribution, and violate professional standard.  Also, by taking advantage of other’s work is dishonest, similarly, trying to help other is an impropriate way is also a cheating. For example, I am very good at mathematics, my roommate always asks me to see how did I do my homework and then compare my process and result and his check if his answers are correct. I did not know it is cheating, until I made mistake and take his class. The right way to help not cheat is to teach him how to do the homework by reading books and note and solve some other similar problem example to help him to learn how to do the questions. This cannot only help him for now, and it also help him any myself for a long-term. Because, the relationship between a personal integrity and public life.

“Cheating is a shortcut and it’s pretty efficient on in a lot of cases” from a article of CNN.com which surveyed more than four thousand high school students about their attitudes towards the plagiarize. The results and their response are really impressive and reveal a very serious problem that many young people may have in common. There are too many attraction for student to not pay enough attentions on the academic study. For example, Internet is a great tool to study, but if we use is in a wrong way, it will cause the dishonesty. Everything we used in our own work need to be quote and referenced in a certain way. Besides, The internet always attracts students like me to pay attention to other stuffs like video, game or social networking. When I surfing on Internet for too much time, I will have less time to do my own homework and study. Coming due will provide me a larger pressure, so that, I will be rush on my homework. Thus, I will not check my work enough to make sure everything is cited, and sometime it may become even worse to ask other help me doing the homework, which is a very serious plagiarize.

As a student at Michigan State University, I have a lot of opportunity to learn how to avoid plagiarize. My WRA 1004 professor teach me how to do citation in the first week of the class, and let my class experience the Writing Center in MSU which is great place to avoid cheating when we have some writing. Also keep communicating  with professor of the class, exam, and draft paper is the other way that I can think of to avoid cheating on paper and other kinds of writing.  

From a social perspective, protecting the intellectual property is the primary to encourage the creation and study. “The Intellectual property includes Patent, Copyright, Trademarks.” (All Law 2016). When a company or an individual use other’s patent without permit, it breaks the law, and the same logic, a student use other’s work without reference or citation, it breaks the academic standard, personal integrity and social environment. The only way to protect the work by someone is being honest to myself and to everyone. If everyone is cheating in this world, there will never be a progress in technology, education, and the society.

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