 |
Academic Honesty doesn't Pay Off |
Home > Academic Honesty doesn't Pay Off
|
|||||
|
In her junior year Kim had finally decided that she would go in advertisement. She was very good at drawing and really enjoyed her creative design classes. When hired for one advertisement agency as a logo designer, she was soon making $15 per hour and working full-time almost always, so the end of each semester was a real catastrophe for her, since she felt too much pressure from her deadlines both at work and at college .
Kim didn't feel that there was something wrong with hiring people for writing her academic papers, which were not of particular interest or relevance to her career. However, she never cheated on her creative design assignments. She held them sacred and was truly the best student in her group. Perhaps, it was her father's influence, but Kim valued her time and was quite picky with how she spends it and whom she spends it with. None of Kim's friends, including me, could tell that she was lazy or had a lot of disposable income to spend on her custom written papers. For Kim these services were the only way to ensure that she wouldn't loose her job spending half of the day writing her paper on a subject of no relevance to her, and than turning it with no guarantee of a passing grade and no reward for her time. At the end of a semester with so many writing assignments coming from different classes it was not just a matter of making some extra money, but a question of life and death: either she writes all assignments herself and goes broke next month, or she survives the pressure by delegating some of her essays to other people. Even if it looks like an academic dishonesty for other people, I know Kim was always honest to herself in pursuit of her goals, and after all it's the only thing that matters. These are just few examples of how the perception of plagiarism as a disastrous crime can be challenged if viewed from different perspective. I don't think that plagiarism is the best solution for students and I do not defend its practice, however I do believe that the roots of plagiarism should not be looked in the nature of modern students, but instead - in the nature of modern education system, which values grades higher than knowledge and is designed to respond to the national standards rather than student needs. Thus, plagiarism detection software may help to combat plagiarism in a short-term run, however, unless we re-evaluate and improve the existing system of education, the root of plagiarism will not be extirpated for a long-time benefit. |
|||||
