The Conflict Between the Desire to Help one’s Friends or Family and Compromising one’s Personal Integrity, and How this Varies among Cultures
Introduction:
College education can ne a milestone in a person’s life. In some degree, whether an individual has experienced the college education decides the social status of the person, in not only America, but also my home country- China and maybe most cultures. The reason why college education enjoys so much attention is not limited to what knowledge and skills students can learn from the courses. To build the personal integrity of students is another function that makes people trust college education, and makes people believes that colleges can create educated and ethical persons. Just like what MSU wants its students to be, “Educated persons accept the responsibility to practice personal and academic integrity.” (MSU, 2008)
Since the major activity that college students do is still studying and doing academic researches, academic integrity policies are the most basic rules that students have to fellow. These policies also remind the students the importance of an honest personality, and academic honesty is the first step to achieve an honesty personality. However, the violation of academic honesty rules still exists in colleges. In the last 10 year, MSU received 400 cheating reports (Dr. Tomasi, 2010). In these report, many of them happened on international students. This paper, I examine this phenomenon in more detail.
I am an international student who violated MSU’s Academic Integrity Policies by helping one of my friends cheating during his test in 2010 spring semester. After I reviewed MSU’s Academic Integrity Policies and realized how wrong this, I would like to think more about how that happened on me and what caused my unreasonable behavior. Two elements will be expanded to illustrate how they affect the decision of cheating activities, and they are the conflict between the desire to help one’s friends or family and compromising one’s personal integrity, and how this varies among cultures.
Conflict between the desire to help one’s friends or family and compromising one’s personal integrity:
“’Integrity’ refer to a quality of a person’s character. (Cox, Caze, Levine, 2008) In general, whether a person has good personal integrity is a standard of measure if a person is a kind and honest person. However, there is also a conflict between one’s desire and his personal integrity. At these times, a high integrity can lead the person to the right direction and make right decisions. Otherwise, “If one simply acted at each moment out of the strongest current desire, with no deliberation or discrimination between more or less worthwhile desires, then one clearly acts without integrity.” (Cox, Caze, Levine, 2008) For students, cheating is the desire to of getting better grades in dishonest way. For some students and helping to cheat – the desire to helping one’s friends or family are may also lead them to violate the academic policy and their personal principles. The latter situation is a very special case which may be caused by many different reasons, especially for international students. These include the lack of self-confidence, a close relationship and the way one person weights the social relationships and his personal integrity.
Firstly, lack of self-confidence can make a person fear to say “no” to others asking, even thought he clearly knows it is wrong or conflict with his personal principles. Mark Gorkin summarized ten barriers causing fear to say no: “Societal Norms, Family Values, Sibling Order and Attitudes, Fear of One’s Own Aggression, Fear of Retribution and Rejection, Fear of Justification, Fear of Being Labeled, The Boundary Issue, The Inability to Know to Trust One’s Gut, Fear of Being Alone or Abandoned and Fear of Standing Out (Orkin, 2006). It is easy to see that most of those elements that make it hard to say no are about fears of how other people think about them. In common sense, a person cares too much about how people think about him lacks self-confidence. For short, those fears connect the self-confidence and academic honesty together. A person who leaks self-confidence cares too much about the relationships with others and is much more likely to say “Yes” when someone requires help with cheating.
Moreover, the closeness of relationships is also a very important factor that affects the desire of helping others in a way conflicting with one’s personal integrity. For example, one of your friends called you for help because his car broke down on the road on a cold night. Unfortunately, you just drunk a couple beers with other friends. Although you feel ok to drive, you understand that you will be in big trouble if you are caught by policemen. How are you going to make this decision? Most likely, you will say sorry and tell your friend your situation. However, if the person needing your help is your wife, your decision may be different. You may decide to take this risk for her because you really care about her. In other words, the closer the relationship is, the more likely a person will accept a help request even if it might with one’s personal integrity.
In additional, different people weigh the social rules and social relationships in different ways, and that will cause different decisions. For example, people graduated from law schools may weigh social rules (laws) higher than others because they know clearly how tough the social rules are. In whatever cases, they will keep the social rule in their minds. On the other hand, for the others, when the social rules or personal integrity conflict with the relationships of friends and family, they may put a little more weight on the friends and family side. The difference may be not only caused by educational background, since personal experiences might include punishment for violating social rules, or in an academic integrity case, a sanction for violating the academic integrity policy. Overall, how likely a person is to violate the social rules and personal integrity to help his friends and family also depend on how seriously he/she takes the social rules and personal principles.
The role cultures are playing in academic integrity:
For international students, their cultural backgrounds can also affect the ways they think about academic integrity, and how they deal with the conflict between the desire of helping friends and family and personal integrity. I think culture affects international students in three apects: different academic rules’ strength, closer relationships with same culture friends and cultural differences of weighting the social rules and one’s personal integrity.
Firstly, not all cultures have strong academic rules to regulate the actions of students. For example, in China, because the educational system is not well-developed, there are not very strong academic integrity rules for students’ daily study, and academic integrity is only applied to big tests which will be graded. Homework and small quizzes usually mean little even nothing in students’ grades. That causes both teachers and students not to pay any attention to academic honesty in small quizzes and homework. Therefore, it becomes a “habit” to “help each other” in these quizzes and homework. If students try that in big test and got caught, they will be in big trouble. (Especially in American educational system, academic integrity policies work on every small test and assignment.) That situation also happens in developed countries, such as Japan (Diekhoff, LaBeff, Shinohara, Yasukawa, 1999). Another factor that causes cultural differences in academic honesty is the social pressures on the students. Asian people like Japanese are extremely duty oriented to do well to honor their families. (Diekhoff, Labeff, Shinohara, Yasukawa, 1999) In addition, the higher level of competition because of its High population density, the education level means much more for them to survive than it means in America. In other words, the income-distances and social statuses between high-educated persons and low-educated persons are extremely far. That brings them more desires to find out “shortcuts” to achieve, which can be cheating for students. The students from this kind of academic environment find it hard to take academic integrity seriously when they come to America. In that case, the deterrence of academic integrity policies does not work well on them.
In additional, closer relationships with friends caused by a smaller circle of friends in a different culture also affects the decisions whether one is going to help his/her friends cheat. When a foreign students come to America, the first change they have to face is the switch of the culture. Because of that, at the beginning, they only want to make friends with persons from the same culture. That phenomenon causes international students to have very small circles of friends. In those circles, people get closer than ever before. As mentioned above, a closer relationship can make one more likely to help his friends when it conflict with personal integrities. In other words, international students’ academic integrity problems can be caused by their close relationships with same culture friends.
Finally in different cultures, people weigh social relationships differently. Kamal (1998) says China has “a uniquely Chinese normative social order which is based on the particularistic structure of relationship as characterized in Confucian ethics.” That means Chinese people don’t like themselves to be very different and be left out. Other research says that Asian people are more “aware of their social, group, and familial obligations.” (Diekhoff, Labeff, Shinohara, Yasukawa, 1999) The conclusion is that Asian society is based on social networks. Those two cultural habits make people from Asia weigh higher on social relationships, friends and families. It can also be more difficult for them to resist when a friend asks for help to cheat. In that case, international students from similar cultures could be more likely to help them.
Conclusion:
Overall, cheating behaviors can be cause by variable factors affecting a student. Especially, cases involving one student helping another to cheat are very unique. This can be explained by the conflict between the desires to help friends and personal integrity. These factors include three parts: self-confidence, a close relationship and the way of one person weighs the social relationships and his personal integrity. At the same time, one’s culture can also affect those three factors. Therefore, the culture does play some kind of role in academic dishonesty cases. No matter what, academic integrity is a very basic and important rule in American Colleges. Both understanding how serious the rules are in America and understanding the thinking that leads to academic dishonesty will help to keep students from cheating.
Lastly, as an international student, I would like to share some advice from advice which might help when someone is hesitating whether to require or accept help from friends for cheating. For students who are thinking about cheatings, cheating activities always mean to cheat the cheaters themselves. It is more valuable to learn from your own mistakes or wrong doings than try to cover them by cheating. What’s more, if you think someone is your good, don’t make him/her take the risk for you. Otherwise, you may carry the guilt for your friend for your whole life. For those students who are asked for help to cheat, most of the students who are asking for your help know what they are doing is wrong and still hesitating if they really will cheat. If you “yes”, you are making a decision for them to cheat. In that situation, you may not want to watch your friend fail in a test, but you definitely do not want to watch your friend fail in his/her whole life. Be brave to say “No” in that case, and tell yourself that what you are doing is the best way to be a good friend.
References Cited:
[1] Missouri State University. STUDENT ACADEMIC INTEGRITY POLICIES AND PROCEDURES. N.p.: Missouri State University, 2008.
[2] Dr. Tomasi’s Lecture
[3] Cox, Damian, Marguerite Caze, and Michael Levine. “Integrity.” Integrity. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 Aug. 2008. Web. 24 Nov. 2010.
[4] Orkin, Mark. Why Is It Hard to Just Say No. LICSW, 7 July 2006. Web. 26 Nov. 2010.
[5] KAMAL, SHEEL. UNDERSTANDING “HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS” IN CHINA. Gyan Publishing House, 1998. Web. 27 Nov. 2010.
[6] Diekhoff, George M., Emily E. Labeff, Kohei Shinohara, and Hajime Yasukawa. “COLLEGE CHEATING IN JAPAN AND THE UNITED STATES.” .N.p., 3 Nov. 1999. Web 30 Nov. 2010.