Karazin University held a meeting of its undergraduate and postgraduate students with the Adviser for Press, Education, and Culture of the US Embassy in Ukraine, Conrad Turner, and the Head for Cooperation with Educational Institutions of the Microsoft Ukraine company, Natallia Dorosh on academic virtue.

Mr. Turner told about the project for promoting academic virtue in Ukraine initiated by the American Counsils for International Education and under the aegis of the Ministry of Education of Ukraine. The project will be implemented at ten higher educational institutions and realized within four years. “Academic virtue is one of the greatest issues in the educational sphere in our world. Cheating, plagiarism and corruption in different countries are being fighted against in various ways. There are strict systems that provide for student’s exclusion or lecturer’s dismissal. Though, we suggest another point: it is important that the meaning of academic virtue and consequences of ignoring its postulates to reach the University community,” stressed Mr. Turner.

A graduate of Karazin University, Nataliia Dorosh, appealed to the students, “It depends on you whether you want to get knowledge or grades, to graduate from the university with a diploma and look for a job for a long time or be a good specialist who will be invited by employers to take a decent position during your final-year study. Its guarantee is academic virtue as well”.

Postgraduate students pointed out that the problem of plagiarism is caused by the lack of knowledge, which often emerges in connection with the lack of motivation, which, in its turn, can be explained by uninteresting and incomprehensible materials given during a lecture. The participants discussed issues of education quality improvement, existence of “ballast” disciplines and implementation of IT-technologies into the educational process.

Moreover, there was held a press conference with the journalists of Kharkiv participating. During the conference, Mr. Turner presented the All-Ukrainian National Program for Popularization and Learning Foreign Languages, including English, “Ukraine Speaking.” He emphasized that no matter what kind of profession you have or how old you are, knowledge of English is very important. He also encouraged Ukrainian people not to be afraid of making mistakes and to practice spoken skills.