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Expect the Highest Standards
By Dario Diorio, Torrington
I know that all school systems expect the highest standards of academic honesty and that academic dishonesty is prohibited in accordance with the conduct policy set by each school system. I also know that this policy prohibits cheating on examinations, unauthorized collaboration on assignments, unauthorized access to examinations or material, and especially plagiarism, which is defined as "using another's ideas or words and representing those ideas as one’s own."
I always wonder how many students at all levels with Internet access complete their school projects by merely copying information directly from known or unknown sources and presenting whatever they copied to their teachers. Should this activity be considered plagiarism?
I read that a capable school teacher resigned from her teaching position because she was opposed by some members of the community when she gave an "F" to a student who had copied the information for his assignment word-for-word from the Internet. Of course, the parents strongly disagreed with the failing grade given to their child.
The schools share responsibility with the family in influencing a child's personal and social development as they guide students in the very complicated process of becoming adult members of our society. The school orients each child to the culture in which he lives and also provides him with the civic and vocational competencies he will definitely need in order to be a productive adult member of the society.
To conclude, I would like to say that plagiarism or any other dishonest behavior should not be permitted. The teacher who gave an "F" to the student should not have been forced to resign; she was only trying to teach the child some important values which perhaps were contrary to those of the child's family.
We know that schools receive children from all types of family background and these differences must be accommodated, but let the school teach the child a middle-class set of goals and behaviors and let the entire community enforce academic honesty by deterring plagiarism—even if plagiarism has become a widespread temptation for students at all levels! A home in which rules of behavior are rigidly enforced will definitely lead the child to see this world as a highly structured place with a clear sense of standards that must be followed in school or wherever he may go.
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