Promoting academic honesty among learners
Marijo Oliva Aguilar Llobrera
The Department of Education believes in promoting academic honesty, especially during this time of the pandemic when students learn at home without the guidance of their teachers.
In line with this, the DepEd Regional Office III conducted a regional virtual orientation on maintaining academic honesty while upholding every learner’s integrity.
According to officials, this is in support of Memorandum DM-OUCI-2021-395 from the Office of the Undersecretary for Curriculum and Instruction, which reiterates DepEd’s stand on promoting academic honesty.
The orientation aims to not merely raise the level of awareness of Schools Division Offices (SDOs) on the observance of honesty in the academic performance of the learners but also to conceptualize strategies and intervention initiatives for the effective implementation of the advocacy.
SDOs are tasked to conduct similar orientations for parents, learners, and teachers.
As self-directed learning materials, the self-learning modules (SLMs) are given to learners to allow them to manage their learning through the different formative assessments. Although these are not graded and are used to monitor learning progress and prepare learners for summative assessments, cheating on the answers to the SLMs has become prevalent online, officials said.
Further, the Memorandum states that “while the SLMs have key to correction, as an inherent feature of self-instructional materials, it is not intended to be used to cheat and bypass authentic learning. Regardless of the design of the SLMs and the extent of freedom in the online space, cheating cannot be justified under any circumstance.”
Relative to this, advocacy and informational videos will be produced by DepEd Region III to help learners and their parents understand the value of academic honesty amidst the implementation of the distance learning modality for this school year.
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The author is Teacher III at San Carlos San Luis National High School