Ethical Dilemma



Ethical Dilemma

As a Stony Brook University student, I was honored to be an One-Year exchanged student at the second best private university in Japan, Waseda University. The whole year was grateful. I have done an internship on teaching English at a countryside local elementary school that only has 50 students from 1st grade to 6th grade. For those kids, going to school is already a gift to them. Their commute was awful and they didn't have good economic support,etc. I learned how to appreciate to even just have basic education. Also, I learned lots of Japanese culture and my Japanese improved a lot through out the year. Yet, my Japanese was not formal enough to write a excellent paper in Japanese.  Throughout the year, I never miss any class assignments. However, during the last semester's Final weeks at June 2006, the instructor of my "Japanese Economy and Asian Economic Development" class asked us to complete the paper in Japanese. He mentioned that he won't pay too much attention on Japanese grammar, but rather the content of the paper. For example, he wanted to know whether we understand the basic concept, the roles, and the structure of "World Bank Group". 

I was definitely able to write a good paper in English for that topic, but to write in Japanese at that time was brutal to me. During the Final weeks, when I was trying to crack that paper, my American friend Elina was asking me to go shopping with her. Elina was also an exchange student and she took the same "Japanese Economy and Asian Economic Development" class with me. I answered that I didn't have time because of the paper. I asked her didn't she had the same problem? Yetm she answered that she already finished her paper because she asked her Japanese boyfriend to complete the paper for her. She said that she could ask her boyfriend to do the same thing for me. She also said that nobody would really care about study abroad works or grades. It was the most ethical temptation I have faced in my life.  I wished I had someone who could complete the paper for me in Japanese as well. After all, no one would know that the essay was not written by myself, and it if was, Elina was the one who gave me this idea. However, after Elina left my ...