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 author of this argument recommends that all college and university should adopt an honor code by which Groveton College authorities was able to decrease the number of cheatings among students. However, the reasons that the author has claimed based on them are neither cogent nor plausible since his assumption arise many questions in mind. In what follows, I will mention some of them.
Before anything else, the author has supposed that the situation of Groveton College is as similar as other colleges. And, he has recommended that all college should adopt such system as honor code. Maybe this adoption fails to be practical between other college’s students. Can we say all students from other colleges are the same as the students of Groveton College who respect the honor code? Besides, maybe there are other crucial factors in decreasing the number of cheaters. It should be answered whether all college situation are the same to put in a similar scope to recommend such thing as honor code or not.
Other critical consideration which is neglected by the author is the number of the students. We should find out that the number of students in the experiment of Groveton College on which the recommendation based. If it is held among the limited number of students, how can we conclude so or how can we generalize the it to huge number of student. In other words, when the author fails to provide enough information about the number of the students, maybe the total number of them in Groveton College is about 100. Consequently, the decrease of the number of cheaters from 30 to 21 seems not huge, so not credible enough to prescribe an adoption of honor code for all universities in a country.
It is obvious that adoption of such rule as honor code has its own impact on dropping of the number of students who cheats regularly in Groveton College; however, it is not proportionate to over-estimate the decrease. what is not mentioned here by the author is that the way of effectiveness of the honor code on students. Do the student feel relaxed or they were under pressure of not cheating during this 5 years? This may alter the situation and after a while cheating may relapse again.
In final analysis, the author recommendation of adopting honor code among other universities according to the evidences gathered from one college is unconscionable, as it was shown in the paragraph above the number of assumptions on which the recommendation based on are untenable since some questions remain unanswered. If they can be answered cogently with enough information may be we could prescribe honor code as a proper thing to truncate the number of cheats among students in other colleges respectively.
Other critical consideration which is neglected by the author is the number of the students
Another critical consideration which is neglected by the author is the number of the students
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argument 1 -- OK
argument 2 -- not OK
argument 3 -- not OK
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Attribute Value Ideal
Score: ? out of 6
Category: Poor Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 1 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 19 15
No. of Words: 459 350
No. of Characters: 2213 1500
No. of Different Words: 194 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.629 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.821 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.725 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 156 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 121 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 88 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 43 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 24.158 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 12.119 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.421 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.378 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.573 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.188 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5