By Mohammathnasiet Sales
What are ethics? Ethics are embedded in all fields such as, school, business, communication, sports and so on. Ethics are the ideas about what is morally right or wrong. For instance, you can say that an athlete is not ethical if he uses drugs to boost his energy prior to the game or competition. Another example of something that is not ethical could be a company trying to trick customers to purchase its product by saying that it is environment-friendly while it actually has negative impacts on the environment. However, in this article, we will only discuss the ethical issues spotted in education, such as cheating and assisting cheating, false assessment and unfair treatment.
During a quiz, test or exam, there are still some cases where students get a chance to cheat by surfing the internet to look for the answers to the questions, opening the book or looking at the answers of the student next to them; yet they are not caught or warned by their teachers while the teachers are actually aware of the case. Likewise, teachers may unintentionally even help their students with cheating; they might give the students some hints to the answers, fail to warn them that plagiarism is not okay at school or allow the students to use their phones to seek the answers just to be sure that their students will pass the test or exam. These are totally unethical.
Another relevant issue occurring at school is false assessment. When marking or checking the students’ exam papers, teachers might give additional points to an exam taker who happens to fail or gain low grade to make them pass or they could unfairly deduct some points of a top scorer to adjust and provide a better curve for all the students in class. By so doing, it does not help the students at all due to the fact that such assessment is not employed to test the real ability and understanding of the students about the lessons they have studied in class. On top of that, teachers do not know which student desperately needs help or a sponsorship program from them if this false grading happens.
Unfair treatment is also a serious problem that should be taken into account. Sometimes teachers are seen to show bias and care to a group of students but neglect the other group in class. Some teachers might pay more attention to the students whose parents have offered them with money or presents and give those students higher grades in order to keep their parents satisfied. As educators, we must avoid them at all cost because it shows the students that they do not need to work hard in life as long as they have money; they do not value concerted effort and perseverance.
It can be concluded that students’ dishonesty during the exam, wrong judgment made by teachers on the students’ exam papers and treating students differently in class are still the common issues that happen at school these days. If this continues to exist and we do not take any action about it, it will surely weaken our educational system, ruin our next human resources and affect our society as a whole.