“Honesty is the best policy” – a famous saying that we often hear from the people around us who have high regards in the value of honesty and truthfullness. It is said that a person who practices honesty exhibits good behavior, is obedient in following rules, maintains discipline, speaks only the truth, and is punctual. However, honesty among the students is being tested in this flexible learning where students attend class via online platforms or answer learning modules. This is infact one of the challenges faced by our educators. Academic dishonesty became a concern in all educational environments since students work independently and teachers have less direct monitoring and supervising their actions. Some educational institutions are now designing ways and strategies that can be able to address the different forms of academic dishonesty.
According to Gallant (2008), there are five categories of academic dishonesty and these include plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, misinterpretation and misbehavior. Now that education is technology dependent this only increases the opportunity for the students to cheat or resort to what is called e-cheating. Plagiarism is the most likely to happen in online courses because of the ease of copying and pasting from the direct source of information. Thus, many schools or universities are using software like Turnitin, a company that provided plagiarism detection software, to at least check and monitor the plagiarism of the students in terms of submitting their written outputs via online.
Generally, students resort to cheating for a variety of reasons. According to Chiesl (2009), students cheat because of the fear of failure, desire to have better grades, pressure from their parent to do well in school, unclear instructional objectives, the idea of “everyone else is doing it,” “there is little chance of being caught,”and “ there is no punishment if ever I get caught.” To address this problem in our country, the Department of Education (Deped) strengthened the campaign to promote academic honesty and maintain the learner’s integrity by conducting webinars and orientation not only to teachers but most especially to parents and students. Through this the educational agency can ensure its clientele that quality education is not compromised amidst the health crisis that we are facing nowadays. The value of honesty should not be lost because this is one of the recipes in molding the future of our students.
By: Catherine L. Jongco | Master Teacher I | Bataan National High School | Balanga, Bataan
