The Importance Of Cheating And Plagiarism

Students commit acts of academic dishonesty, such as cheating and plagiarism, often to obtain certain grades in courses they think they won’t otherwise receive without the dishonesty. The current prevalent use of the Internet has made it easier for students to access information while it has become difficult for academic institutions to control and discover such instances. In my paper, I talk about how cheating and plagiarism is never justified through the lenses of the deontology school of ethical thought. No matter what way a student cheats, using the Internet or not, it is still considered cheating and is ethically wrong. In my conclusion, I have proposed several ways to combat cheating and plagiarism among students, while talking about

Ethics in academia entails the avoidance of cheating or plagiarism; maintenance of academic standards; honesty and rigor in research and academic publishing. Students are expected to act according to those guidelines but, over time, through the development of the internet the ethics has changed. Students have access to many online resources that inexplicitly promote academic dishonesty. The availability of these resources has caused people to question ethics in academia, but I think that the answer is quite simple. Cheating is cheating, plagiarism is plagiarism, no matter if the cheating or plagiarism is done through the internet or not, cheating and plagiarism through information technology has led many students to feel that their actions of cheating and plagiarism are ok because information technology has made the information easily

60% of students admitted to cheating on a test during the past year and 33% of students said they used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment. Despite these high levels of academic dishonesty, 92% of students said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character (Manly et al., 2015). Students may feel that getting help from someone or copying information from some resources without citing the source is not considered unethical. For them, this may seem a smart practice that is not harmful, especially with the large amount of information available electronically and the ease of incorporating all or part of this information into one’s own work (Hosny et al., 2014).
This type of mentality will put the student further from his/her goals in his/her field. This type of behavior comes with consequences and will reveal that the student isn’t competent and will not know as much as the student who chose not to cheat or plagiarize. The non-cheating students get their degrees anyway and furthermore they get better competence in the field which puts them closer to their goals. (Colnerud et