The Increased Need for Academic Integrity in the Digital Age

It was a Thursday afternoon and I was sitting at the desk in my classroom during student teaching reading through the papers students had written about Gulliver’s Travels. The papers were getting repetitive and I was about to call it a day when I saw a paper that seemed insightful and interesting. I read through it and found that one of the most interesting things about it was that it contained whole sections that were in gray instead of the standard black typing. It also had purple words that were underlined.

I should regress and give you a little bit of background on the assignment. The class was a senior level English class that was scheduled to graduate in a few short months. The assignment was a paper to accompany a presentation about Gulliver’s Travels. This particular student was working on the interpretation of the satire of the book which we had been working on and researching for several weeks. Accompanying the assignment was also a rubric which stated in bold letters that any student caught plagiarizing would receive a zero on the assignment.

Imagine as a new teacher how upset I was to actually be challenged to enforce a rule that no teacher wants to enforce. I immediately went to the internet and typed in a couple of sentences from the student’s paper. The website pulled up and showed how word for word she had copied and pasted into her paper. I printed off the website and highlighted the similar words on both papers. I then took the papers to my mentor teacher expecting her to back me up on the zero the student should receive. She suggested we call the parent and explain what had happened and what the consequences were.

We made the call and what happened next shocked me. The parent was furious that I, a student teacher, would accuse her daughter of cheating. She then demanded to see the paper. We faxed over both the paper and the website printout. She called back and demanded that the student be able to redo the assignment, saying that her daughter was a senior and about to graduate and why would we give her a zero and bring her grade down to a D. Probably the most unbelievable thing about this was that this parent was also a teacher! My mentor teacher decided we should go with the parents request and allow the student to redo the assignment for less than full credit.

This situation taught me a very valuable lesson. Integrity in this digital age is incredibly important and it is we, the teachers and parents, who need to be sure to teach and enforce it. What lesson does the student who was given a redo learn as she graduated high school and moved onto the much tougher college atmosphere? She learns that if you get caught you get another chance anyways so why not at least try to cheat. She also probably learned to change the font to black and take out the underlines. As Indiana University senior Sarah Wilensky said regarding plagiarism, “The main reason it occurs, she said, is because students leave high school unprepared for the intellectual rigors of college writing.” 1 As a high school teacher I have to be the one to hammer that home so students don’t leave my classroom or school unclear about how to cite things in their assignments. I also need to make sure they learn that there are rules and that if they don’t follow them there are severe consequences. I am glad that as I started my career I had an experience that really helped to show me the direction I needed to take in regards to plagiarism.

1 Trip, G. (2010, Aug 1) Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age. Nytimes.com
Retrieved August 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/education/02cheat.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2