Research On Students’Academic Integrity In Colleges And Universities:a Perspective Of Ethics

Academic misconducts have been plaguing the academic communities for a long time. In recent years, the frequent domestic academic scandals coming to light, not only harm the academic activities, but also make the situation of the scholarship and teaching and learning in Colleges and universities full of social doubts. The current researches and practices on academic misconduct in China mostly concentrate on a Macro level of policies, measures, laws and regulations, or a micro level of individual moral education. But the overall effect is unsatisfactory.This paper attempts to conduct a study from the medium level of ethics. Firstly,"ethics" in this paper is defined through the comparison of "ethics" and "morality" from the perspective of semantics, history, philosophy and education. Ethics, under the guidance of superior value, is a consensus of members and the rule of conduct, which can produce a great driving force and be misused at the same time leading to an uncontrollable situation. Also, the tradition that the society is organized ethically and social issues are solved from ethical perspective both are traced historically, in order to explore the reasons why "morality" develops as a mindset in Chinese society.Secondly, the academic community is constructed from ethical perspective."Academic integrity", redefined as the union of academic merit and academic norms, which targets at academic sustainable development. The CUDOS set of Mertonian scientific norms is analyzed and classified as academic merit. The academic norms are defined as the rules of conduct and bottom line of the behavior, which should be formulated by the academic community and followed by all members. Improving of students’academic integrity in colleges and universities is the key to reduce academic misconducts.Thirdly, the successful cases of students’academic integrity improving in US universities are introduced theoretically and practically. The research course of students’academic integrity in US colleges and universities during the recent100 years is reviewed. Nowadays, implementation of academic integrity in American universities can be divided into traditional honor code and modified honor code. Through the comparison of the implementation of honor code in University of Maryland and in Princeton University, the characteristics, rules in composition and evolution of students’ academic integrity in US colleges and universities are concluded.Last but not least, enlightenments of American students’ academic integrity implementation in theory and practice in colleges and universities from the perspective of ethics are applied to Chinese situation. This paper proposes the establishment of virtue-norms-legal academic integrity protection mechanism, the responsibility of colleges and universities to improve students’ academic integrity, building a feedback mechanism of existing academic integrity, so as to reduce the ever-emerging academic misconducts, and cultivate qualified citizens for the society.