I chose to read the article, “Ethical Decision Making” for my first core value assignment. The article is mostly about plagiarism and academic dishonesty. It talks about Jane Bradshaw and how she talked to to her ninth grade students about these two topics. She asked them what they thought academic dishonesty, copying, cheating, and plagiarism meant. The whole message of the overall article is that students should have academic integrity and be honest. They must not copy others’ work and pass it off as their own and they must not copy other student’s work. They also cannot cheat on tests or use their phones to cheat during a test or on work.

In the part of the article where Jane talks to her students about academic dishonesty, she asks them to define words like cheating and plagiarism. One of Jane’s students, Mia, said that plagiarism is “getting someone else’s work off the Internet instead of doing it yourself.” For cheating, one student mentioned that texting during tests is considered cheating. Aiden, another student, also said that copying is cheating because you’re not doing your own work, so you’re cheating yourself. All of these are good examples of how not to act. Scholars must always be doing their own work and not copying the work of others.

To me, this article is all about being ethical and moral. It coincides with the core values of surviving intellectually and developing social responsibility. To survive intellectually and make good grades, you have to be doing your own work. You can’t possibly get by with passing someone else’s hard work as your own. There are so many websites and technologies that professors can use now to check to see if that work is your own or not. The article mentioned two of them, turnitin.com and Safe Assign. These two websites are used very often by teachers all around the country to check for plagiarism in papers. For one thing, if a teacher discovers that you cheated or plagiarized, you can’t possibly get a good grade. Due to school policies, you either automatically fail the paper or you are suspended/expelled. I think it’s fair for there to be such severe consequences if a student is found to be cheating. It also isn’t a very smart choice to plagiarize or copy someone else. As a scholar, we are always expected to make the best decisions and do what is morally right.

For developing social responsibility, that goes hand in hand with doing what is right. Social responsibility, to me, means doing the right thing even when nobody is watching. As scholars, we always have to do what’s right because that is what is expected of us. If we plagiarize, cheat, or copy, we’re doing what’s wrong- not what’s right. We have to be socially responsible and make the right decisions so we set an example for others at Penn State.