McCabe, Donald, and Gary Pavela. “New Honor Codes
for a New Generation.” Inside Higher Ed. Inside
Higher Ed, 11 March 2005. Web. 20 March 2013.
The following is excerpted from an opinion piece published in an online publication focused on higher education.
Research confirms recent media reports concerning the high levels of cheating that exist in many American high
schools, with roughly two-thirds of students acknowledging one or more incidents of explicit cheating in the last
year. Unfortunately, it appears many students view high school as simply an annoying obstacle on the way to
college, a place where they learn little of value, where teachers are unreasonable or unfair, and where, since
“everyone else” is cheating, they have no choice but to do the same to remain competitive. And there is growing
evidence many students take these habits with them to college.
At the college level, more than half of all students surveyed acknowledge at least one incident of serious cheating in
the past academic year and more than two-thirds admit to one or more “questionable” behaviors—e.g., collaborating
on assignments when specifically asked for individual work. We believe it is significant that the highest levels of
cheating are usually found at colleges that have not engaged their students in active dialogue on the issue of
academic dishonesty—colleges where the academic integrity policy is basically dictated to students and where
students play little or no role in promoting academic integrity or adjudicating suspected incidents of cheating.
The Impact of Honor Codes
A number of colleges have found effective ways to reduce cheating and plagiarism. The key to their success seems
to be encouraging student involvement in developing community standards on academic dishonesty and ensuring
their subsequent acceptance by the larger student community. Many of these colleges employ academic honor codes
to accomplish these objectives.
Unlike the majority of colleges where proctoring of tests and exams is the responsibility of the faculty and/or
administration, many schools with academic honor codes allow students to take their exams without proctors
present, relying on peer monitoring to control cheating. Yet research indicates that the significantly lower levels of
cheating reported at honor code schools do not reflect a greater fear of being reported or caught. Rather, a more
important factor seems to be the peer culture that develops on honor code campuses—a culture that makes most
forms of serious cheating socially unacceptable among the majority of students. Many students would simply be
embarrassed to have other students find out they were cheating.
In essence, the efforts expended at these schools to help students understand the value of academic integrity, and the
responsibilities they have assumed as members of the campus community, convince many students, most of whom
have cheated in high school, to change their behavior. Except for cheating behaviors that most students consider
trivial (e.g., unpermitted collaboration on graded assignments), we see significantly less self-reported cheating on
campuses with honor codes compared to those without such codes. The critical difference seems to be an ongoing
dialogue that takes place among students on campuses with strong honor code traditions, and occasionally between
students and relevant faculty and administrators, which seeks to define where, from a student perspective, “trivial”
cheating becomes serious. While similar conversations occasionally take place on campuses that do not have honor
codes, they occur much less frequently and often do not involve students in any systematic or meaningful way.
Why do you think these sources are the most relevant for your argument?
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