An unfair honor code

The Honor Code is one of the things Princeton advertises to potential students. The University boasts that students here are not only smart, but self-sufficient, too, adhering to a code based on honor, with proctorless exams and timed take-home tests. This verbalized standard is useful to us in that it makes us conscious of the dishonor of cheating, with the hope that this conviction will carry on with us into our future careers and everyday lives.

Appropriately, the code separates cheating from getting caught, emphasizing that your honor is on the line even if your academic career is not affected. However, Princeton is a high-stress environment with high-achieving students, and the question of how we deal with violations is an important one. It turns out that Honor Code discipline can be a messy business, involving methods that ultimately detract from the purpose of the code.

In the American penal system, crimes and sentences are arranged in a hierarchy of severity. But as our code is now, you can be given a one-year suspension for any violation by which you “gained an unfair advantage.” These violations range from not citing a fact to lifting an entire passage from a book and calling it your own work in an essay.

This one-size-fits-all policy can lead to disproportionate University responses. This past semester, someone I know was accused of violating the Honor Code. The crime, as described by the person who reported her, seemed impossible to prove with anything but eyewitness testimony. Moreover, given the situation described, it was unlikely that anyone was watching this student. Nonetheless, the formal inquiry went on in accordance with the Honor Committee regulations. The proceedings were time-consuming, stressful, and even expensive, as the student was at home when she got the call and had to buy last-minute tickets back to Princeton.

As she gave me the details of the hearing, I was surprised at how much it was like a criminal trial. I had always imagined accused students sitting before a panel, explaining themselves. But she informed me that there were opening and closing statements, a student representative (essentially a lawyer), witnesses called in to testify on behalf of the accused and a review of evidence before the committee gave its verdict.

She was acquitted in the end, but just after this I learned about another student serving a one-year suspension for a similarly small violation. I always thought that one of the purposes of punishment was to let the perpetrator know that what he or she did was wrong. In this case, however, the student honestly seemed to have misunderstood the requirements without intending to take credit for something that was not rightly hers. I have difficulty seeing the purpose of such a harsh sentence. It seems that the meaning of giving out these punishments has been lost in the protocol, robbing them of their intended effect.

Ultimately, these excessive punishments may undermine the integrity of the honor system itself. The threat of academic probation or a year’s suspension may truly be what motivates some students, more than any sense of honor. For people of that mind, however, there are opportunities to cheat in private — take-home tests, for instance — that they will not hesitate to take, and will likely never get caught for. For the rest of us, though, being honest when we sign the pledge is the main incentive. These harsh punishments send the message that it is only the fear of punishment that drives us.

I fully support the notion that the harshness of the punishment should be enough to make the perpetrator feel the gravity of their violation. This might mean giving a harsh punishment for an infraction that did not affect anyone else (for instance, those cases where the violation did not affect the person’s grade). That said, we should take some cues from the American penal system and adopt a more hierarchical sentencing approach. If this is going to be the law of our land, we need to make sure that it is as fair as possible and that it is upheld with honor.