Academic Honesty

Sebastian is taking an Economics course. He starts off doing well and is enjoying the course. As the semester wears on, however, he begins feeling overwhelmed by the demands of coursework from his different classes, as well as his athletics and extra-curricular activities. Next week Tuesday there’s an important project due. As he sits down to work on it the Thursday before, he gets a text that his mother has been in a car accident. She’s fine, but Sebastian is shaken and has a hard time concentrating. He puts the project away, talks with friends, and then works on his other assignments, all due the next day. On Friday, he sits down to work on the Economics project again, and again has a hard time concentrating. He forces himself to do so, however, and begins to realize that he doesn’t understand the course material as well as he thought he did. He ends up spending a few hours reviewing old concepts before going out with friends. On Saturday, he realizes that he is really unsure how to even start the project. Beginning to panic, he talks with his teammate Antonio who took the course last year. Antonio says that he did the same project last year and would be happy to meet up with Sebastian on Sunday to help him. On Sunday, however, Antonio cancels saying he has to scramble to get other work done and can they meet on Monday? Sebastian is now very worried, but spends his time on Sunday getting the work done for his other classes. Monday evening, Antonio again cancels but this time sends Sebastian an email with a copy of his project from last year attached. Antonio says, “Sorry I can’t meet, but maybe this will help.” Sebastian reads through the document and decides that Antonio’s thesis is excellent. He decides to reword it slightly to make it his own. He uses Antonio’s argument as the basis for his own paper but changes two of the main examples (but still coming to the same conclusion Antonio did). He submits his paper on time thanks to Antonio’s help.

Celia is in the second semester of IB Chem HL. She isn’t really enjoying it, but needs it for her university pre-med application. She’s much more into her biology class (also needed for med school.) As the semester progresses, she begins to hear about classmates in Chem working together to write their final lab reports on experiments they conducted together even though the teacher has instructed that each student submit an independent and original lab report. Apparently, other students have been doing this since last semester and the teacher has not noticed. Celia feels angry that she’s been putting so much work into a class she doesn’t really like and is getting grades that are worse than her classmates who are writing their reports together. Celia seeks out her friend Sue to complain. Sue listens and then suggests that they just work together on the next lab report, since it seems to not really be a problem.

Matt is in his first-semester of TOK. He is supposed to write a paper on the question “The production of knowledge is always a collaborative task and never solely a product of the individual.” Discuss this statement with reference to two areas of knowledge.” Unfortunately, he’s procrastinated on writing the paper and it’s now the night before the first draft is due. He doesn’t really have many ideas on what to write. He comes up with a few ideas but he realizes neither of these are going to go anywhere useful, so he turns to his older sister who graduated the IB Diploma several years earlier with an A in TOK. Matt’s sister is very helpful and talks him through the question. She even gives him all his real life examples and breaks them down for him. As he struggles to get started, his sister writes him an introduction that includes his key Knowledge claim and Knowledge question. Paraphrasing the RLSs and explanations provided by his sister during their discussion he puts together a paper and meets the submission deadline. He does not include any citations because he did not access any secondary sources on the web or in book form.