Academic Dishonesty In Schools

When coming through the public school system, we often find that students are trying to find ways around actually doing the work, and as teachers (or future teachers in my case) we want to know what drives these students to the point where they can justify academic dishonestly. There are common associations with academic dishonesty students who work part time jobs, students who are only focused on college acceptance, and (at higher levels of education) students who are just simply not prepared. In today’s public school system students are being given the opportunity to justify academic dishonesty because they are overloaded with work, not being prepared Higher Level Education, and are being judged for college acceptance based off a number (otherwise known as their grade point average). First let me start by giving background information on the school system. The average school in the US is on the 10-point grading scale. This grading scale means that an 90-100 is considered an A, 80-89 is considered a B, and so on until everything blow a 60 is considered failing. This recently changed in the state of South Carolina. These grades directly relate to a student’s Grade Point Average (or GPA for short). This differs than college, because the GPA is related to the letter grade and not the number grade. This means that when students are in high school. When it comes to college acceptance, students are based off of three major criteria: SAT/ACT, GPA, and Class Rank. When a student has the perception that they are only admitted based off of these criteria (which is not true, however it can be perceived this way) it can be a motivator to receiver better grades. Essentially, better grades equal a better college is how students see this system. Previously, the US has had a bill entitled “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) which says that children that are entered into a school in K5 have to graduate in 13 years. …show more content…
The students that don’t graduate, will have a negative effect on the school report card. This can lead to schools losing funding and accreditation. Cornelius Lee conducted a study on NCLB in lower income schools. His results proved that students were passing classes due to the fear of the school losing funding. “For many urban districts, the data was extremely sobering because, when disaggregated, the data uncovered a large gap in the academic performance of black children from low-income backgrounds and their more affluent white peers” (Lee). This also puts a pressure on teachers to make sure students pass classes. Now, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has been overturned by a new national standard, but this raises the question of how many students passed classes that they should’ve failed because teachers were afraid to fail them. This new system that is in place is called Common Core state standards. These standards have been put into place to generalize education so that every student receives the same education. Karen Eppley did some research on the faults of the Common Core standards and has found 7 flaws with them. The largest one being that the standards allow for professional judgement of teachers. While this sounds like a positive, calls for a very specific format of lesson plan. This very specific lesson plan along with unclear standards can create classrooms where the content isn’t being taught to the students in a way that they understand. The Common Core becomes a personal trouble instead of a social issue when teacher engagement with the Standards is limited to the school and class- room. Priorities such as implementing new commercial …show more content…
As I stated earlier, taking these kinds of classes also creates more work for the students because of the added homework time. At the same time, students are discouraged from taking extra-curricular activities because they do not offer the extra GPA points that the honors and AP classes do. This creates a continuous cycle of to take or not to take the extra-curricular activities, because of all the push to “be involved” in other activities but at the same time, not take into consideration that these activities might affect the GPA that has such a large weight on college