What is "academic honesty?"

I recently had the assignment to teach a senior English
class.  I assigned them a research paper to work on, and gave them 6 weeks to complete
it.

I showed them examples of research papers, gave them
examples to use, and spent almost two weeks on how to not plagiarize other's
work.

Being seniors, they did not think they should have to
do much in senior English, but unfortunately, I didn't think that way.  So, the
assignment was given.

When the papers were due, I had more
than half of the class that hadn't even start, and then, when they did turn in the
papers within the next three days, most of them were copied, word for word, without
documentation, from the internet.  They wouldn't even read a book to get information. 
Of course, their grades reflected their work, but they didn't understand.  Their
thoughts and verbalization on this was that the internet was for anyone to copy what
they wanted.

At the beginning of the semester, I had a
student tell me that he didn't need senior English because he'd already taken a course
online for another student.  I spent the rest of the year trying to convince the
majority of these senior students that copying work or letting someone else copy their
work was dishonest.  This young man plagiarized every word of his research paper, but he
made one hundred dollars taking an online college class for another student, and he was
proud of himself for that accomplishment.

So, what is
academic honesty?  It's simple.  It is you doing your own work and getting your own,
hard earned grades.  What it isn't is copying other's work, letting them copy yours or
having them do your work for you.  That's just plain old
cheating!