Decision Making within college life Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Decision Making within college life - Term Paper Example By learning and participating in the college curriculum, I have been able to draw gems of knowledge which are key to effective decision making. Particularly, creative thinking featured in the college curriculum and inculcated within me, awareness on the inevitable need to incorporate proper perspectives, analogies and skills. Factoring analogies in decision making helps an individual make proper comparison among the options available, in respect to the consequences that come with each option. Proper perspective entails the maintenance of objective thinking during the course of decision making. This involves weighing the options present and their consequences, without letting personal biases, feelings and personal or partisan opinion to affect the thought process or the final decision which will have been arrived at. While doing this thinking, it is important that impartiality is maintained concerning the matter at hand (West-Burnham and Jones, 2008). Experiences in Campus There are a lso several meaningful experiences which I have drawn from the college experience. Particularly, this remained a strong case when it comes to scholarly integrity, especially during exam situations. I specifically through college experience learned that not only is academic cheating and intellectual theft rife among college students, but that the allure of these vices is very strong. Several situations such as carrying small hand-held notes into exam rooms, conversing with friends during exams and lifting ideas from a fellow student’s ideas from his term paper, are some of the manifestations of academic cheating and intellectual dishonesty which I witnessed among college peers. In light of this development, it is fitting to observe that ethical decision making criteria came in handy in helping me make personal decisions which would foster intellectual and academic integrity, and not just in determining organizational and management behavior. It is against this above backdrop t hat I adopted justice as a form of ethical decision making criteria, in lieu of other options such as utilitarianism, deontology, consequantialism and fundamental rights. Utilitarianism failed to qualify the occasion since by saying that an act is ethically and morally right provided it gives the greatest good and pleasure to the greatest number (of people). Herein, I noticed that utilitarianism may easily be misconstrued as abetting cheating in exam rooms since it extends the greatest good and pleasure to the greatest number. For instance, the cheating student will have obtained good grades and the mean grade of class made to rank higher, and thereby vindicating the lecturer as competent. The fact that utilitarianism did not provide proper explanations against academic or intellectual dishonesty is a matter that drew a wedge between utilitarianism and me. In about the same wavelength, deontology failed to suffice as a possible bulwark against the allure of cheating in exams since i t only emphasized the need to do things out of duty. The emphasis that things are done out of duty assumes that humans are programmed like robots and that what entails duty is a simplistic one-way directive. However, humans are rational beings with different in-depths in personal convictions, and duties are characterized by ethical issues which are