(December 20, 2002) — In hoping that students will gain an experience from interacting with the working environment, Clark’s health and guidance classes requires students to complete 10 hours of community service as a class assignment. Some students may gain a positive experience from helping their community, but getting hours for helping out the community defeats the purpose of voluntarily doing good deeds. Research shows that there are few negative aspects of mandatory community service, but research, such as statistics showing how economy has been affected positively, are simply not enough to portray integrity and morality. Mandatory community service motivates students to fulfill their own selfish goals rather than promotes an altruistic desire to add to the benefit of the community. The truth is simple: some students only do community service because they expect their beneficiaries to give them an indirect reward in return. Students do not receive money for working at hospitals, libraries and other non-profit organizations, but they are getting paid in hours. Ultimately, the student will work for hours rather than for the good of their community. When students only do community service to fulfill their hours requirement or just to impress colleges the personal relationship that they have with the task at hand is diminished. If the student works for hours then eventually he will feel a relationship with the reward and not the task that he is doing. If this was the case then it does not matter what or how a type of community service is done, but just that it is done. When students are motivated by the final product and not how that product was conceived, they fake their way through the process. Students with “connections” in an organization can often get credit for a community service task without doing anything at all. All they have to do is get a paper signed and that is supposed to show that the job was done. This is forgery and shows a flaw of character rather than the strength that service learning was supposed to build. The strength of a truly good character bears no boundaries. A piece of signed paper marked with possibly meaningless hours is simply not accurate in determining that strength.