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Confessions of an Honor Code Tattletale
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I did it. I turned someone in. I am one of those 15-20 Princeton students that lodge a report with the Honor Committee each year. Even now I am unsure if I did the right thing. I have only one excuse: I did it for you.
The period of time before and shortly after I made the report was an extremely difficult one for me. I confided in a friend of mine who literally begged me not to continue participating in the investigation. He appealed to my sense of charity and told me that I could not hide behind the Honor Code and claim that I was merely mechanically carrying out my obligations. In taking the stand against someone else, I was actively choosing to punish him/her. I wondered if I should have, essentially, exercised prosecutorial discretion and chosen not to participate in a system of rules that might prescribe punishments that were disproportionate to the infractions committed.
Other people I happened to mention this to seemed nonchalant. Nobody provided encouragement or support. Nobody expressed outrage or even displeasure at what I had witnessed. Edward Tenner ’65, presenting a speech about the history of the Honor Code in 2002, said that the Honor Code, after its adoption in 1883, “was not a code but a student declaration that cheating would not be tolerated” (The Daily Princetonian, "Tenner discusses evolution of student-initiated Honor Code", October 24, 2002). I cannot help wondering if that remains the case today. Is cheating now tolerated on this campus?
According to an anonymous survey conducted in 1978, “17.1% of Princeton students admitted to having violated the Honor Code at some point during their careers and that 65% would not turn in a friend if that friend committed a violation,” while a similar Daily Princetonian survey reported that a much larger percentage, 34%, had violated the code (The Daily Princetonian, "In pursuit of perfection", January 15, 2001). If this data even comes close to corresponding to the situation today, the Honor Code isn’t just in deep trouble-—it’s dead.
Perhaps the numbers belie the severity of the situation. Perhaps Princeton students today are, on the whole, so motivated and hardworking that students no longer cheat in order to get out of a difficult academic situation. Perhaps they cheat on easy, “stupid” tests that require rote memorization and nothing more, because the tests aren’t worth studying for. Perhaps they look over at a friend’s script when the answer to a question just barely eludes them, hovering annoyingly at the tip of their tongue. Perhaps they cheat even though they’re PDFing the class and know they are going to pass regardless—-just for fun. Perhaps students self-regulate, cheating only when they know it won’t really make a difference to their grade or disadvantage other students.
Even if this is not the case, one may legitimately wonder if a one year suspension from school is too severe a punishment for most Honor Code violators. Only in extenuating circumstances (which, according to the Honor Committee Constitution, “include, but are not limited to, instances in which the committee fails to conclude that a student would reasonably have understood that his or her actions were in violation of the honor code”) can the punishment be reduced to probation. In fact, given the low rates of reporting, the punishment can seem especially arbitrary and unfair since so many offenders presumably get away with it.
I’m not sure what I feel about this. However, if the statistics reported above are anything to go by, I think most students feel the punishment is too draconian. My hypothesis is that it is this worry that prevents students from reporting violations when they observe them, especially if their friends are the violators. I have no real evidence to back that up, except my own experience as an Honor Code tattletale. I did not know the student I reported. I am generally a stickler for rules and laws; all in all, I am a goody two-shoes. Yet I almost decided not to make a report because I felt the punishment might have been too harsh.
Therefore, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, I propose that the minimum “regular” punishment, that is, when there are no extenuating circumstances, be reduced to one semester’s suspension. This will, in my opinion, improve the system, for several reasons.
Firstly, attempts to gain an unfair advantage can come in degrees of unfairness. Even without extenuating circumstances, the committee may determine that the offender was genuinely repentant and had never really meant to disadvantage other students or give himself an unfair advantage that would make a difference. Reducing the minimum regular punishment would allow the Committee to give a more lenient sentence when probation is considered too lenient or when extenuating circumstances cannot be established. By increasing the range of punishments available, it allows the committee to tailor the punishment to the severity of the transgression.
Secondly, if the minimum sentence is less harsh, students are more likely to report violations they observe. This will make the reporting of offenders less dependent on who you happen to be sitting near to and therefore more fair. It will also reduce the likelihood that the Committee will feel the need to impose harsh punishments on people who do get reported in order to increase deterrence.
Finally, I believe it will make the system more effective. So few students are caught that even the threat of a severe punishment may not serve as an effective deterrent. In real life, it is often costly to increase enforcement of, say, parking rules. The most efficient alternative may thus be to increase the severity of punishment. But in the case of the Honor Code, I think we can increase enforcement, and hence deterrence, without significant costs, and while in the process increase the fairness of the system.
Professors may be uncomfortable with this proposal. According to the Daily Princetonian, “In 1998… professors demanded further review of the Honor System constitution… With pressure from the faculty and the intimation that some professors would abandon the Honor System, the committee began to review its procedures and decided to strengthen its power to convict when overwhelming evidence prevailed despite unclear intent” ("In pursuit of perfection", January 15, 2001). Since academia is their domain, professors obviously care a great deal about academic integrity.
There is absolutely no doubt that academic integrity is a principle that an institution like Princeton can compromise in any way. But my own feeling is that the right way to protect academic integrity is not to push for more convictions of students who do get reported—because that may lead to miscarriages of justice—but to make enforcement more across the board.
My second proposal is that the Committee needs to operate in a more transparent manner while protecting the confidentiality of witnesses and defendants. Currently, the Committee maintains case records on investigations and hearings that lead up to a conviction (if the accused is acquitted, the records are destroyed) that serve as a reference for future Honor Committees. I believe that these records should be made accessible to undergraduates after a period of, say, four years, once names and other identifying information have been expunged. Secondly, the Committee should present a report to the USG Senate each year with the number of cases reported and the number of convictions that resulted. This data thus becomes part of the public record.
I think these reforms are crucial for several reasons. The first is obvious. It is not enough that students know what the Honor Committee constitution says. They also need to know how the Honor Code cases are tried in practice to know if modifications need to be made to the rules.
The second is that with a public record of the number of reports and convictions, members of the Undergraduate Student Government or interested students will have access to historical data that allows them to make more educated conclusions about the effectiveness of different formulations of the Honor Code, as it gets amended over the years. It is precisely this lack of historical data that makes it impossible for me to do more than hypothesize about why the number of reports per year is so low.
The Honor Committee is the closest thing we have to a real government. The student body, by reaffirming the Honor Code before every exam, and not exercising its right to amend the Honor Committee constitution, gives legitimacy to the rules under which we all operate. The Honor Committee interprets and executes those rules, and imposes binding punishments on students who are convicted (subject to appeal to the Dean of the College). In that sense, it has more power than the more visible USG Senate, whose main source of power is its ability to dole out money and advocate on behalf of students. It is remarkable that we know so little about how the rules we the student body sanction work in practice.
If you think you would not file a report even if you witnessed a violation because the system is overly draconian, arbitrary, or not transparent enough, consider this: by sitting back and doing nothing about the current Honor system, you create for witnesses like me obligations you have, in fact, no interest in holding us to. “It is a common understanding among Princeton students that, where the honor system is concerned, an individual’s obligation to the undergraduate student body as a whole transcends any reluctance to report another student,” says the Rights, Rules, and Responsibilities booklet. If the Honor Code is no longer something that we the student body believe in and are willing to uphold, we should change it. Otherwise, students like myself will continue, rightly or wrongly, to file reports to the committee—-in your name.
Ed. note: Due to the author's continuing involvement in the proceedings, he or she has chosen to remain anonymous.
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