According to a recent report, cheating among college and university students is on the rise. However, Groveton College has successfully reduced student cheating by adopting an honor code, 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 a system in which teachers closely monitored students; under that system, teachers reported an average of thirty cases of cheating per year. In the first year the honor code was in place, students reported twenty-one cases of cheating; five years later, this figure had dropped to fourteen. Moreover, in a recent survey, a majority of Groveton students said that they would be less likely to cheat with an honor code in place than without. Thus, all colleges and universities should adopt honor codes similar to Groveton's in order to decrease cheating among students.
Write a response in which you discuss what questions would need to be answered in order to decide whether the recommendation and the argument on which it is based are reasonable. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions would help to evaluate the recommendation.
The presented passage discusses Groveton College’s success in reducing student cheating by institutionalizing an honor code that makes its students promise their academic integrity to not only cheat themselves but also report in case they witness other students cheating. The author, while presenting evidence of the reduction in the number of cases that involved cheating, recommends that all colleges and universities should follow suite and implement a similar honor code system to cope with academic cheating. The author should be commended for his or her efforts to tackle this vexing issue, however, the argument cannot be entirely supported as it rests upon a few assumptions. If he or she reviewed and adjusted the argument in consideration of the following points, this honor code system as a means to reduce cheating would more likely yield the desired outcomes.
First, the author assumes that the presented reduction in the number of reported cases of cheating means that students are becoming less prone to cheating. At first glance, the graduate decrease may make the argument seem plausible, but it is possible that this decrease is due to a decreased student body. To be precise, even with the decrease from thirty to twenty-one cases, the overall percentage of cheating cases could increase if the student body decreased during the same period. Without this information to demonstrate a proportional decrease in cheating, the author’s argument remains unconvincing. To provide more validity, then, the author should offer numerical data to clarify this point.
Another shortcoming of the argument is the cited survey through which students responded that the presence of an honor code system deterred them from cheating. While the inclusion of this data can be indeed useful to assess the impact of the system, the author assumes that this is reliable without providing information on its validity. For instance, a critical reader can readily argue that the sample size surveyed may not be statistically representative of the student body. It is possible that only 1% of the entire student body answered. Alternatively, another possible caveat is that only a self-selected group of students who were not already prone to cheating in the first place answered, not a type of students who can best vouch for the effectiveness. In this manner, in order to demonstrate the validity of the cited survey, the author should provide more information and elaborate on it.
Finally, based on the aforementioned points whose validity is already questionable, the author proceeds to conclusively recommend that all higher education institutions adopt the same system. This recommendation is far-fetched to say the least as the author overgeneralizes the case of Groveton to other institutions without any justification. One could argue that other institutions do not have commonalities with Groveton when it comes to academic cheating. For instance, some universities have already implemented a similar system, only to find it ineffective as students consistently lied and failed to report their peers’ cheating practices. Perhaps they have a larger, systemic student culture in which they help each other engage in cheating. Had the author demonstrated the ways in which Graviton shares similarities with other universities, the recommendation would have been more convincing.
In conclusion, while the presented argument is not entirely valid, the author should offer the aforementioned information to make it more convincing. Without doing so, all the efforts to put into the implementation of the honor code system could turn out to be futile ones. Additionally, in recommending a similar practice to other universities, the author should carefully examine whether they share the same underlying issue.
Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 1, column 515, Rule ID: ENGLISH_WORD_REPEAT_BEGINNING_RULE
Message: Three successive sentences begin with the same word. Reword the sentence or use a thesaurus to find a synonym.
... system to cope with academic cheating. The author should be commended for his or h...
^^^
Discourse Markers used:
['also', 'but', 'finally', 'first', 'however', 'if', 'may', 'so', 'then', 'while', 'for instance', 'in conclusion', 'in the first place']
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance in Part of Speech:
Nouns: 0.24537037037 0.25644967241 96% => OK
Verbs: 0.151234567901 0.15541462614 97% => OK
Adjectives: 0.0987654320988 0.0836205057962 118% => OK
Adverbs: 0.0509259259259 0.0520304965353 98% => OK
Pronouns: 0.0324074074074 0.0272364105082 119% => OK
Prepositions: 0.115740740741 0.125424944231 92% => OK
Participles: 0.037037037037 0.0416121511921 89% => OK
Conjunctions: 3.07889797524 2.79052419416 110% => OK
Infinitives: 0.037037037037 0.026700313972 139% => OK
Particles: 0.00154320987654 0.001811407834 85% => OK
Determiners: 0.125 0.113004496875 111% => OK
Modal_auxiliary: 0.0262345679012 0.0255425247493 103% => OK
WH_determiners: 0.0138888888889 0.0127820249294 109% => OK
Vocabulary words and sentences:
No of characters: 3824.0 2731.13054187 140% => OK
No of words: 592.0 446.07635468 133% => OK
Chars per words: 6.45945945946 6.12365571057 105% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.93265142912 4.57801047555 108% => OK
words length more than 5 chars: 0.423986486486 0.378187486979 112% => OK
words length more than 6 chars: 0.334459459459 0.287650121315 116% => OK
words length more than 7 chars: 0.253378378378 0.208842608468 121% => OK
words length more than 8 chars: 0.153716216216 0.135150697306 114% => OK
Word Length SD: 3.07889797524 2.79052419416 110% => OK
Unique words: 275.0 207.018472906 133% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.464527027027 0.469332199767 99% => OK
Word variations: 56.2777269727 52.1807786196 108% => OK
How many sentences: 24.0 20.039408867 120% => OK
Sentence length: 24.6666666667 23.2022227129 106% => OK
Sentence length SD: 45.2670893144 57.7814097925 78% => OK
Chars per sentence: 159.333333333 141.986410481 112% => OK
Words per sentence: 24.6666666667 23.2022227129 106% => OK
Discourse Markers: 0.541666666667 0.724660767414 75% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.14285714286 97% => OK
Language errors: 1.0 3.58251231527 28% => OK
Readability: 58.1126126126 51.9672348444 112% => OK
Elegance: 1.69736842105 1.8405768891 92% => OK
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.362166354331 0.441005458295 82% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence: 0.136894258274 0.135418324435 101% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence SD: 0.0569699808533 0.0829849096947 69% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence: 0.573669945177 0.58762219726 98% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence SD: 0.108624410644 0.147661913831 74% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.154439977749 0.193483328276 80% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0671949119039 0.0970749176394 69% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence: 0.517133179408 0.42659136922 121% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence SD: 0.0532454105222 0.0774707102158 69% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.268261470367 0.312017818177 86% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0594148049642 0.0698173142475 85% => OK
Task Achievement:
Sentences with positive sentiment : 8.0 8.33743842365 96% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 12.0 6.87684729064 174% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 4.0 4.82512315271 83% => OK
Positive topic words: 8.0 6.46551724138 124% => OK
Negative topic words: 12.0 5.36822660099 224% => OK
Neutral topic words: 4.0 2.82389162562 142% => OK
Total topic words: 24.0 14.657635468 164% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
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Rates: 83.33 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 5.0 Out of 6 -- The score is based on the average performance of 20,000 argument essays. This e-grader is not smart enough to check on arguments.
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Note: the e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.