Integrity Essay

The word integrity is defined in the dictionary as “adhering to moral and ethical principles” or simply, “honesty.” It is having a state of mind where a person believes in doing the right thing even if no one is paying attention. These are the people who have set morals for themselves, and they stick to them no matter how tempting it may be to disobey them. It’s all about self control and making sticking to your morals a habit. Making habits starts when people are young and impressionable, such as in high school. High school is a time where teenagers are moldable into anything their surroundings tempt them to be. Most have about eight classes a day and each requires them to do a large amount of work per day and a heap of knowledge to retain

One of the very first friends I’ve made at Sacred Heart told me about her first test in Italian class. She was sitting in between two people who decided to cheat. They were whispering around her, asking for the letter answer to a multiple choice question. My friend, knowing that they were both excellent students who were most likely striving for a perfect score at any cost, looked down at her paper and saw that she didn’t have the same answer as the girls who cheated. Despite the tempting chance to seemingly get a question right, my friend knew her standards and morals that she set for herself and did not change her answer. Her response to this situation was an example of integrity. Many other people cannot resist the temptation of cheating. This could be for a plethora of reasons, whether they are overwhelmed by their looming workload or they simply did not have the impetus to study. My literary genre teacher told my class about a student he had a couple years ago who was extremely desperate to receive a good grade on her vocabulary test. She wrote the answers on a piece of paper and stapled it inside her skirt. This unique way of cheating is a very clear example of dishonesty. As for her, my teacher had caught her and immediately lost all trust in