What Makes Great People Great
February 12, 2010Daniel No Comments »Yesterday I had the opportunity to talk to a group of international students at Duke about academic integrity. I gave the talk on behalf of the Honor Council, which is an organization that promotes the Duke honor code.
The academic culture in the US is pretty different from many other countries– it’s very different from Singapore, that’s for sure. As such, a lot of international students in the US don’t have a good idea of what kind of behavior will result in severe consequences if they are caught.
In fact, the number one excuse that international students give when brought before the conduct board for academic dishonesty is that they “didn’t know that this constituted cheating.”
That’s something I find very hard to believe. As an international student myself, I can safely say that copying someone else’s work during a test is cheating in Singapore, and it is also cheating in the US. Copying and pasting a sentence from someone else’s essay and passing it off as your own writing is plagiarism in Singapore, and it is also plagiarism in the US.
The difference lies not in what constitutes cheating; rather, the difference lies in what constitutes something serious enough to warrant severe punishment.
So, 99% of the time, when international students who have been caught for cheating say that they “didn’t know that this is considered academic dishonesty,” what they really mean is that they didn’t know that this was so serious that they might get kicked out of school if they were found out. I’m almost certain they knew that their behavior was unethical.
Thus, eradicating academic dishonesty comes down to students making a personal decision that they will do the right thing no matter what the circumstances, rather than deciding that they will not do a “bad enough” thing that might get they expelled.
As leadership expert John Maxwell says, what sets great people apart is that they make great decisions early on in life, and they spend the rest of their lives managing those decisions. If you don’t make a conscious decision that you are going to be an honest person, chances are that big enough temptations will arise that’ll make you behave in a dishonest way.
Truly, greatness is a decision; it doesn’t happen by chance.
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