A Question Of Honor Summary

Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Princeton . . . These are the names of some of the most elite Ivy League schools worldwide. Out of 281,060 applicants to the eight Ivy League colleges in 2017, only 10% were offered admission. For most of these accepted students, attending an elite college has been a dream of theirs and their parents from a very young age. Throughout their entire life, they have strived to maintain exceptional grades while overachieving in almost every aspect of their lives. American author, essayist, and literary critic William Deresiewicz, in his article “Don’t Send Your Kids to the Ivy League,” utilizes his previous experience as a Columbia University graduate and Yale professor in order to prompt readers to see the downside of the fraudulent Ivy League. Deresiewicz applies caustic language and tone in order to express his negative opinions of the elite schools. In addition to the language of the article, the author expresses his thoughts and empathizes with readers through the use of examples and experiences. He applies a narrative approach to this topic with personal anecdotes to prove that the Ivy Leagues have become politically corrupt and must be altered if they wish to continue to be model universities.

Every higher institution of learning has their own set of myths and history. Some of them may be vaguely true and some may be highly influential. The history of the institution may have a negative effect on those who look to apply or be a part of the institution. The history of a place sets the epitome of future enrollees. Some of the ghosts that haunt any college may have an extremely negative impact on how they are viewed today. This negative perception of the university can lead to strong economic deficits. Throughout trying to combat negative concepts that are thrust upon an institution, they have resolved issues of ethics, violence and, to most importantly, boost cohesion and moral.

In school, many people are dishonest and don’t show their integrity. One major way of being dishonest and not showing your integrity is by cheating. A study shows, that by high school, 75% of students have cheated on one thing such as a test, homework or a project. In many high schools, cheating is a big problem and many students do it. Studies show that most students start cheating when they were little when playing board games and cheating to win. In elementary school, kids start “bending the rules” and look at other kids papers. Another way that people don’t show their integrity, is by plagiarizing. Plagiarizing is when you copy someone else’s ideas and say that they are your own. Another common way of being dishonest is by complicity. Complicity is when you help someone else cheat, copy homework or papers, and giving others the test questions.

Multiple studies have found that students are spending less time on their academic studies leading to a decrease in education and an increase in temptation of academic dishonesty.  Cheating has been prevalent since mankind existed, but writer William Chace gives his outlook on the issue in his article, “A Question of Honor”. Chace is able to use adequate reasoning to engage the reader in an article that depicts perspectives from every angle. Included within the article are a sense of sympathy, through explanations and even a proposed solution of how to end academic dishonesty.

Counterfeit academics, counterfeit grades, and in fact, counterfeit universities are the theme of a scathing commentary by one Philadelphia professor. Brent Staples, a long time college professor often writes excerpts for big name magazines like The New York Times. Brent Staples article “Why Colleges Shower Their Students with A’s” is very well written but lacks extensive evidence for some of his emotionally driven statements.

The student becomes a sort of “accessory,” or “accomplice of crime”. That notion is not a solution to solving the problem of cheating, instead, it instills guilt, and consequently stress, into students who could have seen something they may not have wanted to see. Students should not be the police; it is not their responsibility. Although, it is there responsibility to discourage cheating. If a student wants to inform a superior about cheating, that should be the student’s choice, and should be based the student’s own conviction, not because they do not want to be

Add in that no dishonest students can work together and should be seated away from each other, and this will allow room for the honor code to take effect and be integrated accordingly. One might argue, that putting honest students with dishonest student will not work, because of the fact that cheating has already happened in schools that are known to have strict honor codes, such as the University of Virginia, in which Chris Khan, the author of the article “Pssst—How Do Ya Spell Plagiarism?” discovers, “Since last spring, 157 students have been investigated by their peers in the largest cheating scandal in memory. Thirty-nine of those accused of violating the school’s honor code have either dropped out or been expelled—the only penalty available for such a crime” (Source D.) However, Khan overlooks that just because an honor code is strict does not mean that it is effective in reducing cheating.

As the cost of a higher education increases exponentially, so does the impatience of the American college student. Matt Taibbi, the author of “Ripping Off Young America: The College Loan Scandal,” published in Rolling Stone on August 15, 2013, attempts to tap into an arising issue for an increasing amount of college bound students. He develops his argument by identifying two “enemies” behind rising tuition costs, using undisputable facts in the process, demonstrating his regard for logos. Taibbi also realizes his obligation to use personal stories, along with informal words and phrases, employing the pathos appeal to earn credibility among his primary audience - young Americans.

Chace askes how does cheating become accepted? Part of the answer is the type of wrong it is. “When one compares it to a violation of copyright which is punishable in a court of law, cheating in college is only morally and ethically wrong.” (Chace, W.M., 25) Even Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. doctoral thesis at Boston University was full of words from other authors and copied down section upon section in great abundance. (Chace, W.M., 25)

America’s education system has been in a state of distress for the past decade, but garnished headlines recently as the student loan debt crisis reached over a trillion dollars. In conjunction with that, tuition is no longer the only obstacle a student faces when considering their future. As generations come and go, universities have slowly, but surely, been angling their education in a way to favor profit over knowledge. Because of the new direction higher education models are taking, Magdalena Kay questions her readers, “is there a problem with students, with teachers, with administrators, or maybe

In “Is Diogenes on your Campus?” Karen Bleeker states that Community colleges must prize integrity to reinforce the behaviors of the honest students. First of all, studies shows that this widespread problem and one that may be accelerating. Both objective studies of academic dishonesty and anecdotal evidence from professors and administrators seem to show that students are cheating more often that in the past. If this continues, not only will the integrity of the academic process be threatened, but we will be raising a generation of students who think such behavior is normal. In addition, allowing such cheating to continue hurts and angers honest students. They choose not to cheat for a variety

In addition to Mark Edmundson, Danielle Weiner-Bronner, a young reporter with a history in The Wire and has made appearances in The Huffington Post and Rueters , wrote, “What’s Wrong with American Higher Education” published by Huffington Post in 2011. Bronner, like Edmundson, highlights changing expectations of the American student which consists of developing into a highly regarded, intellectual thinker to financial security (Bronner). At last, while many professionals focus on the flaws of administration’s business pursuits, Greg Lukianoff, tPresident of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Johnathan Haidt, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business wrote, “The Coddling of the American Mind” where authors

Higher education is a very profitable field, and because of that, for-profit schools have been placed under scrutiny. In the documentary College Inc., Michael Smith, the correspondent, investigates the promise and tremendous growth of for-profit colleges in the higher education industry. With the student’s best interests in mind, many people have begun to question the integrity of these schools. However, they do not take into account the benefits that these for-profit colleges can offer to non-traditional students, giving them the opportunity to obtain a quality education, and marketable job skills. For-profit colleges are continuously accepting the abundance of students who have realized

The core goal of Villanova University, in essence any university, is to cheaply produce critical thinkers while making money at the same time. Unfortunately for students, this process is not in their favor. In an increasingly capitalistic society, universities have gradually evolved into businesses. An example of this “corporatization of the academy” is the adjunct professor. Through no fault of their own, adjuncts have become pawns in a money making process which inevitably harms the students by violating their freedom and reason.

Corrupt college professors are ruining students’ chances of getting a quality education. Students will typically get that hunch that a professor might be out the get them, but in reality those professors are actually out to get the whole student body. When these decrepit professors are in the classroom, they are not hip on modern teaching methods. This is detrimental to a student who just needs a quality education to keep up with the competitive working world that we have come to today. The article “Dear Students: Don’t Let College Unplug Your Future” is an effective argument to convince incoming freshmen at Brigham Young University and current BYU freshmen not to let the academic tradition get in the way of their learning by the use of allusions, colloquial diction, anecdotes and humor to establish a bond of trust between himself and the reader.