▶ Your Answer :
The statement proposes that adopting
honor codes that is similar to Groventon College will reduce the cheating among
students because the number of students caught cheating has been reduced in
this college after this college adopted the honors code. However, there are few
shortcomings in the reasoning.
First,
Groveton’s honor code was a replacement of the teachers proctoring their
students during exam. What this honor codes does is that it asks students to
agree not to cheat and have students to notify when they see other students
cheating. If the agreement to the honor codes is just a mere agreement without
having any negative consequences such as legal actions, not many students who
planned to cheat will not decide to give up cheating because it doesn't involve
any negative actions. Also, it will be hard for students to report cheaters
because if they are on the exam then they will probably be more focused
finishing the exam rather than wasting their time looking around the room to
find cheaters for the day. Even more, we don’t know if these students who
report cheaters will be protected anonymously in this honors code. Some
students, even if they caught someone cheating, they might be worried that the
cheaters know their name and do something bad to threaten them.
Second,
the statistics that the statement is referring is under a question. After
employing the honor codes, it was reported that the average cheating cases has
been continuously dropped. However, it may be the case the average of the
cheating cases has been dropping continuously even before employing the honor
codes. We don’t know the statistics of average cheating cases at least few
years prior to the start of honor codes. It may have been increasing, but also
there is a possibility that the average number may have been decreasing.
Third,
the recent survey reported that majority of Greveton College’s student answered
that they would be less likely to cheat because of honor codes. However, we
don’t know if the students are evenly representing all the students in the
college because not all students in the college participated in the survey. For
example, the survey may have over representation of the students from the art
department or creative writing department. Given that the students majoring in
art or creative writing would be less likely to take an in class exam because
the nature of their major, which is graded on their artwork or writings, they
might not consider honor codes which focus on the cheating on exam taking being
not applicable to their situation and answer not as seriously.
If
other universities or colleges were to adopt honors code from Greveton College,
they need to take a critical look at the argument that this statement makes. We
don't know if the honor codes includes legal actions against cheaters and
provides protections to the students reporting cheaters. Also, we are missing
few years of data on the number of cheating cases prior to the honor codes
starts. Finally, we don’t know if the recent survey is evenly representing
population in the college or over representing certain population in the college,
which makes this survey reliable or unreliable.
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