Words: 412
Academic Integrity in Cultural Context In a person does own his/her original words or ideas and have privileges pertaining to those words or ideas as they are regarded as the person’s intellectual property. The Copyright act (1999) seeks to protect the author and any infringement on the author’s rights is punishable by fine or even imprisonment. This law however, is not strictly enforced as evidenced by the high level of piracy in the country. Within the Academic Community, rate of academic dishonesty is quite high.
Adeoye, Olusakin and Ogunleye (2008) stated that “Academic dishonesty, a continual dilemma on university campuses, has reached epidemic proportions in institutions”. Little or no emphasis is laid on citation and referencing and plagiarism. The concept of citation and referencing is hardly taught or enforced within the student community. A student could copy a paragraph from a book and move on to the next word without an issue or even quote definition after definition verbatim without providing any references.
It is common knowledge that it is wrong to present someone else’s work as your own but this still happens in many cases. Overall, in the context, you can indeed own your words or ideas and have rights to them. However, a lot of violations of these rights occur even within the academic community and these flagrant displays of academic dishonesty is made even more rampant by the high level of corruption in the entire system. Impact of Globalization
Internet world statistics (n,d. ) show that as at December 2009, about 16. 1% make use of the internet. The percentage of people who make use of it for academic purpose is even lower (being a subset of the internet users). This figure is relatively low compared with many other countries but as low as it is, the impact is already being felt in the education sector. The use of internet has provided easy access to wide range of information and research works of other people.
This is a very good development as it provides avenue to learn and share knowledge but at the same time, this has the potential to make a bad situation worse as it is in the case because plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty is even made easier. “An example is a case where students offering a particular course from were given an assignment and 50% of them submitted work copied from the internet as their own. ” (Adeoye, Olusakin and Ogunleye, 2008).