Academic honesty is broader than just avoiding plagiarism. To understand the concept better, it is often useful to think of learners or researchers as falling into three groups:
- Group 1: People who look for an angle and actively seek ways to cheat the system.
- Group 2: People who learn and follow the rules to avoid accusations of academic dishonesty.
- Group 3: People who aspire to best practices and who are an active part of the academic community, seeking the highest standards of scholarship and integrity.
Consider how you would you deal with a secondary citation. Someone in the first category might claim that it is a primary citation and say that he read the original source. Someone in the second group might list it as a secondary citation, which meets the minimum standards for ethical disclosure. But someone in the third group would actually access the primary source to make sure the secondary source had represented it fairly and accurately.
Your initial post in this discussion has two parts:
- In Part 1, consider what you read in the articles about academic honesty in this unit’s readings.
- Are you surprised by the results of the studies?
- Why do you think dishonesty is so widespread?
- What is your role and what are your responsibilities as part of the Capella academic community?
- In Part 2, consider the unit readings from your Becoming an Ethical Helping Professional coursepack and Critical Thinking in Psychology text.
- Identify some situations in your life outside of the courseroom in which you face ethical choices.
- Identify at least one situation in which you might be vulnerable to judging others based on your personal values.
- Describe how you could guard against this vulnerability, or, in other words, how you protect your clients, patients, research subjects, or students from being judged unfairly.