Academic Integrity In Today's Society

“The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too”. (Stephen Covey) In today’s society academic integrity has become a problem. More than 70% of students admit to cheating. Some of this is due to pressure from society to get good grades. Studies show that the cheating starts as young as middle school. Google defines academic integrity as “the moral code or ethical policy of academia. This includes values such as avoidance of cheating or plagiarism; maintenance of academic standards; honesty and rigor in research and academic publishing”. Academic integrity is broken when the student cheats, or plagiarizes. When the plagiarizer is caught, they not only are not trustworthy to the teacher …show more content…
When you cheat, or even when you ask someone if you can cheat off of them you are not only putting yourself in a very bad situation, but you are also putting everybody else who was involved in tough situation regardless of whether or not they actually participated in the act of cheating. My junior year of high school I was taking a math class with a lot of my friends so we never paid attention. When it came time to do the final a friend and I decided that we were going to evenly split up the study guide and then copy off of each other the next day. Needless to say when we showed up to class the next day we both thought that we were experts on our section. We both noticed that the problems were different on our sheets, but for some reason we still thought that we could get away with it. When the class ended we found ourselves in a knotty situation when our teacher asked us to stay after class was over. After a lot of meetings with the hierarchy of the school and since it was our first major offence my friend and I both ended up receiving a P in the