THE HONOR system at the University needs to go. Our honor system routinely rewards cheaters and punishes honesty. A good honor system would do just the opposite: It would punish cheating by, for starters, not offering incentives to cheat. A good honor system would not systematically punish honest students. If you think these are attributes of a good honor system, then their absence in our honor system is a good reason to scrap the system altogether.
Up front, with or without an honor system, cheating is not a good thing. Cheating is punishable at every school. The only difference between the University and other schools is we understand that we live in a so-called "community of trust." But this very community of trust breeds incentives that encourage, perversely, cheating and dishonesty.
At the University, professors are more likely to give take-home exams or unproctored exams, for one, because they believe - or they hope to believe - that everyone will conduct themselves with integrity. Research, however, indicates that the notion of everyone being honest is fiction. Rutgers Professor Donald L. McCabe is one of the founders of the Center for Academic Integrity. He reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education that "as many as 10 to 20 percent of students would qualify as habitual cheaters. ... Half of that number or less would fall into the category you describe as incorrigible."
Yet, with take-home and unproctored exams, it is easier for these "habitual" and "incorrigible" cheaters to cheat. In the absence of a faculty member at a testing site, cheaters can more blatantly cheat and get away with it than if they were deterred by the presence of a supervisor and hence the risk of detection.
Take-home tests and unproctored exams reduce the cost of cheating. So, when cheating is less costly, it is more profitable for cheaters to cheat. So, some non-cheaters would be induced to join the class of cheaters, thereby increasing the absolute number of offenses. In this sense, the honor system rewards cheaters.
Because it rewards cheating and people cheat more, cheaters tend to get more spots at the higher end of their class curves. No matter where the honest students lie on the class curve, having people get higher spots on the curve only can hurt them. When those higher spots are secured by those who are dishonest - partially by virtue of our community of trust's inherent leniency - the harm to the honest student obviously is intensified. So the honor system not only rewards cheaters but it tangibly punishes honest students by lowering their grades, their GPAs and their class ranks.
However, this is not to suggest that we get rid of punishments for cheating or that we eliminate a judicial body that punishes cheating. Punishments discourage cheating. But what isn't good is building up an ideal about a "community of trust" that professors buy into. That "community of trust" is what gives cheaters a green light to walk all over honest students. Essentially, a system with punishments for cheating and supervision is preferable to one with punishments for cheating and no supervision. Our honor system favors the latter, but it is that lack of supervision and that implied trust that negates the good effects of punishing cheaters.
But the following objection could be made: "The honor system has been a staple of University life for so long; it is part and parcel of our long standing tradition of student self-governance." It's true that the honor system is dear to many students. Most of these students probably are Honor support officers. The dearness of the honor system, in any case, is no argument for preserving it with its immensely wayward results. Slavery too was part and parcel of a longstanding tradition of subjugating other human beings and it too was near and dear to many of its closest advocates. So why should we even give second thought to the argument that rewarding cheating and punishing honesty is near and dear to many, especially to the institution of students governing themselves? If anything, this is bold testimony to students getting things wrong.
This is not to say that permitting cheaters to harm honest students is a tragedy as large as chattel slavery was. But the analogy remains intact - doing a bad or backwards thing isn't right even if some people do cherish it.
The Committee could take a first step to improving this by encouraging faculty members to proctor their exams and to avoid take-home exams and to read papers over more carefully for plagiarism (or even to use Prof. Bloomfield's program). It definitely should stop selling our school as a "community of trust" as that creates a host of problems for them.
Whatever the case is, the honor system as we know it is a tradition we shouldn't mind discarding.
(Jeffrey Eisenberg is a Cavalier Daily opinion editor. He can be reached at jeisenberg@cavalierdaily.com.)
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