Good morning, everyone! My name is Tamunopriye Dakoru-Bala and today, I’m going to talk about an essential concept that greatly affects every student’s education and personal growth. 
To start with, integrity is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. It involves consistently doing what is right, even when no one is watching, and staying true to one’s values and commitments. In other words, integrity is about:
- Honesty – Being truthful in words and actions.
- Trustworthiness – Earning trust through reliability and dependability.
- Consistency – Acting in accordance with one’s values in all situations, even when it’s challenging.
- Moral Courage – Standing up for what is right, even in the face of pressure or adversity.
Integrity is the foundation needed to building trust and respect in personal relationships, professional settings, and academic environments. People with integrity are known to be principled, reliable, and fair, making it a core value for ethical and effective leadership, learning, and collaboration.
Integrity comes in various forms which include political integrity, financial integrity, academic integrity and legal integrity. Our focus this morning will be on aacademic integrity.
Academic integrity is a set of values and practices that requires students, teachers, and other members of the academic community to act with honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility during examinations and other academically related activities. Academic integrity is fundamental to maintaining a fair and honest academic environment.
The opposite of academic integrity is academic dishonesty, in common terms, examination malpractice. It refers to any form of cheating, deception, or unethical behavior that violates the standards of academic integrity. It undermines the principles of fairness, honesty, and respect that are essential for learning and intellectual growth.
Academic integrity is important because it:
- Builds trust: Academic integrity involves being honest and engaging with the examinations so as to complete them on your own. It also involves giving credit to others when you use their ideas.
- Contributes to a community’s credibility and reputation: Academic misconduct can undermine the reputation of an academic institution.
- Demonstrates maturity: Academic integrity shows the preparedness of a student to face future prospects. This is a very strong characteristic because it shows that the student has developed properly and can be responsible for his/her actions.
- Helps students develop fundamental understanding and skills: Academic misconduct can make a student miss out on the opportunity to develop the fundamental understanding and skills required for their field.
Academic dishonesty has a wide range of negative impacts that can affect both individuals and the broader academic community. Examples of such impacts are:
- Damaged Reputation: Once a student is caught cheating, his/her credibility is significantly damaged. Teachers, peers, and other members of staff may view them with suspicion, thereby questioning their honesty and abilities. Being known for academic dishonesty can have long-term consequences on one’s academic and professional reputation, making it hard to regain trust or credibility. It will be difficult to trust the person again even when he/she turns a new leaf. Even if you have been a great student for a long time, one act of academic dishonesty can ruin everything and all your previous records can be withdrawn from you. In sports, we have seen athletes lose all their medals and honours when they were caught cheating or doping. We know of Paul Pogba and Marion Jones.
- Hindered Personal Growth: Cheating prevents students from learning and developing critical skills, such as problem-solving, research abilities, and time management. Without these experiences, students may struggle when faced with challenges in their careers.
Also, academic dishonesty robs students of the chance to engage fully during class activities and learn deeply. This can have lasting effects on their intellectual growth if they do not make positive effort to change.
- Unfair Advantage and Unethical Environment: Students who engage in dishonest practices during examinations undermine the integrity of the academic system. They gain unfair advantages over their peers who work hard and follow examination rules and regulations.
- Consequences for Academic Institutions: Widespread academic dishonesty can lead to a decline in the reputation of schools, making it harder for graduates to secure jobs or further education opportunities. Basically, academic dishonesty can ruin JMC and nobody will take us seriously anymore.
- Psychological and Emotional Consequences: Students who engage in dishonest behaviour often experience feelings of guilt, anxiety, or shame, especially if they are afraid of being caught.
Consistent academic dishonesty can lead to over-dependence on cheating in the future. In a case where you have some minor examinations to write, and you decide to cheat in all of them. Then you finished the examinations without getting caught. You might begin to have the mindset that you are smart and cannot be caught engaging in examination malpractice. When it is time to sit for bigger tests later in life, you might be too overwhelmed to prepare and end up depending on various forms of malpractice. These shortcuts to success are never sufficient and, in worst case scenario, you might get caught which could leave you with a lot of regrets.
Professionally, you cannot sustain a career with academic dishonesty. You cannot study medicine and cheat your way all through medical school. You will kill people. You cannot cheat your way through law school. All your clients will go to prison. You cannot cheat your way through school of engineering. All our buildings will collapse and people will surely die.
There have been cases of examination malpractice in JMC, and the school management has done everything possible to curtail and discourage us from engaging in it. Each and everyone of us here know that we won’t like to see us, or our friends go home just because they passed a paper to someone or whispered an answer to someone during an examination. As we all know, there have been many cases of examination malpractice this regime and so many students have been suspended due to such practices missing out on classes and more curricular activities they could have experienced. More popularly, the Continuous Assessment Test for the second regime has been termed null and void by the principal on the grounds of gross academic dishonesty. We have been warned so many times to give good and honest accounts of our learning, yet the hard work of the honest students have been thrown away due to the malpractice of others. This incident didn’t only affect the students but had an impact on the teachers as well. The teachers who spent their time and energy marking theses scripts and assessments, sweating every minute and even staying extra hours, every day have just seen their efforts go to waste due to dishonesty of a lot of students. This has been the biggest case of malpractice in the school and as we can all see it has affected the whole school community negatively.
In summary, academic dishonesty has far-reaching consequences that can affect a student’s personal development, the integrity of academic institutions, and the overall learning environment. It is essential to uphold academic integrity to ensure a fair, equitable, and productive educational experience for everyone involved.
Ending with a story is too cliche for Virtues of the week, so I would like to end with a quote instead.
“Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.”
-W. Clement Stone
Thank you!
TAMUNOPRIYE DAKORU-BALA
Class of 2025