I KNOW what you’re thinking: “Oh no, not another honor column complaining about some little facet of our community of trust.” Even though it may seem The Cavalier Daily has a weekly quota to meet of columns pertaining to honor, this is not one of them. This one is about t-shirts too.
Three psychologists — one a professor at the University of North Carolina and two professors at Duke University — carried out a study designed to elucidate the psychological forces behind cheating and dishonesty. That’s where the t-shirts come in play. One of their manipulated variables involved different t-shirts’ colors and school affiliations. The study showed how instrumental a simple t-shirt can be in influencing students to cheat.
Why do students cheat? Why forfeit your dignity and honesty for a measly multiple-choice answer on a final exam? These questions have haunted teachers, administrators, and students themselves for years. The Josephson Institute surveyed a little fewer than 30,000 high school students in 2008 and asked whether or not they had cheated on a test in the past year. The numbers are growing. Sixty-four percent, up from 60% in 2006, admitted to doing so once and 38 percent, up 3 percent from 2006, confessed they had done so two or more times. Michael Josephson, the institute’s founder, remarked, “In a society drenched with cynicism, young people can look at it and say, ‘Why shouldn’t we? Everyone else does it.’” There are plenty of reasons why not to, but today’s rising pressures and competition in school and the trembling job market can tempt about anyone to take a shortcut here or there.
This study looked a little further and attempted to make university students cheat. A complex math problem set was given to these students to finish in an impractical amount of time and they would be paid for each answer they solved. They did not know, however, a paid actor was in the room that would “finish,” announce it to the room, collect the money, and leave. This blatant dishonesty insinuated that he must have cheated, leaving a moral dilemma to the students stuck with blank answers and no money. Would they cheat?
Cheating surged as students watched the actor march out of the room with the cash without consequence. The calculation of cost to benefit was surely leaning on the benefit side, but then the researchers thickened the plot. The actor in the next few experiments would wear different T-shirts — sometimes of a rival school, sometimes of that school’s colors — to see if group identity would play a factor in cheating trends. It did. If the actor donned the rival school’s gear then cheating would decline, as they were perceived to be outsiders, while if they saw someone of their own, cheating levels would rise. This goes to show that we don’t really want to cheat, but it can be frightfully contagious.
So it’s hopeless: as long as cheating University students are wearing their Hoo Crew or Sean Singletary special edition t-shirts, everybody’s going to cheat, right? Not at all. There are students here and everywhere who will always cheat to get ahead, and there are those who live the honor code sun-up to sundown. We need to target the average student who wants to stay true to that document we signed the first day of school, but who still needs to beat that curve. We need anti-cheating t-shirts.
Inevitably people cheat here at the University, but the fact that they are still walking among us and have not been expelled stains our community of trust. To restore the faith that there are those of us out there who still abide by our code, a visual reassurance is essential. Looking around during a test or exam and seeing a united front against cheating would be a conscientious reminder and you would no longer have to wonder whether that girl or guy was cutting corners. I asked David Truetzel, the newly elected Honor Chair, how he felt about the proposal and he commented, “I think that to some extent we already have reminders in place. Most, if not all, rooms have a plaque with the honor pledge written on it. Additionally, students typically must write out the pledge on all of their exams and assignments and sign it.” While very true, pledging your paper has become somewhat of a robotic behavior and the plaques need a little dusting off. We need to renew and revitalize the idea of honor at this university. T-shirts have long been used as an outward form of people’s expressions, thoughts, feelings, beliefs — the list goes on. So why not use them to express our commitment to the one thing our school holds so dearly?
There are plenty of slogan ideas. “I’m not cheating, are you?”, or “If you can read this then your eyes should probably be back on your paper.” Whether you go the guilty route or even the funny one, the principle remains the same. In the spirit of Honor Awareness Week next week, we need to band together to show our unequivocal adherence to the honor code. And for the cheaters out there, we’ll get you some maroon Beamer Ball shirts.
Bobby Laverty’s column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at b.laverty@cavalierdaily.com.
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