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本帖最后由 Neptune2010 于 2009-6-11 10:04 编辑
TOPIC: ARGUMENT242 - The following appeared as an editorial in the student newspaper of Groveton College.
"To combat the recently reported dramatic rise in cheating among college and university students, these institutions should adopt honor codes similar to Groveton's, which calls for students to agree not to cheat in their academic endeavors and to notify a faculty member if they suspect that others have cheated. Groveton's honor code replaced an old-fashioned system in which students were closely monitored by teachers and an average of thirty cases of cheating per year were reported. The honor code has proven far more successful: in the first year it was in place, students reported twenty-one cases of cheating; five years later, this figure had dropped to fourteen. Moreover, in a recent survey conducted by the Groveton honor council, a majority of students said that they would be less likely to cheat with an honor code in place than without."
WORDS: 453
TIME: 00:26:00
DATE: 2009/6/10 23:55:11
In the above letter, the author suggests that other institutions adopt the measure similar to the Groveton's for the purpose of reducing the number of cheating. Although he cites evidence regarding the decreased number of cheating in Groveton after such adoption as well as a recent survey conducted with ostensibly affirmative results to support his assertion, his demonstration suffers from certain logical flaws that make it far from convincing.
In the first place, Groveton’s decreased number of cheating after implementing honor codes is less supportive than it appears, because it lacks those figures between the first year and the fifth year. If they generally did not accord with the supposed decreasing trend, it can be well concluded that the number of cheating in Groveton after adopting honor codes was not decreasing but rather fluctuating, making the author's evidence unsupportive at all.
Even if one accepts Groveton’s decreasing trend of cheating from the author's evidence, it is not an indication that the adoption of honor codes contributed to it. First of all, the author's evaluation contains no comparison between the teacher's ability to spot a cheating and the students’ ability to do so. It is possible that the students are less capable of doing so under the exam condition, that many cheating was actually unspotted. Secondly, if Groveton’s students intended to cheat after the adoption of honor codes, they might cooperate together to turn a blind eye on others for their "mutual benefits". If so, it well explains why the figures were decreasing while the number of cheating could be increasing. Thirdly, there is also no information regarding the difficulty of Groveton’s exams in the successive years after the adoption of honor codes. Students would be less likely to conduct a cheat if the exams are easy, thus, the decreased figures might ascribe to the decreased difficulty, not honor codes. In short, without precluding the above consideration, the author's suggestion is based on an incomprehensive analysis, being much less persuasive.
Lastly, the ostensibly affirmative results from the recent survey conducted by Groveton is again unsupportive, if one consider the common sense that students would not confess on their cheat or intention to cheat, especially if they knew they were surveyed in the first place, because it was not a graceful things to tell about. In this respect, we can not figure out whether information from those surveyed students was reliable or not.
In sum, the author's demonstration is seriously limited by the aforementioned logical flaws, even though, the adoption of honor codes might indeed contributed to better condition of students' cheating. In order to further substantiate it, he needs to conduct a more comprehensive survey by including cheating condition in the whole successive five years, difficulties of exams, and so forth, before he can draw valuable conclusion.
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