“What is your motto here? Boys, inform on your classmates, save your hide. Anything short of that, we’re gonna burn you at the stake?” – Al Pacino, Scent of a Woman
The coronavirus has effectively brought the NYC metro area to a standstill for well over a month now. Every facet of society and the economy has now been profoundly affected by it. Recently, I’ve thought about how the younger generation (is it Generation Z?) is taking all this and, in turn, about a particular institution that has been forced to go exclusively online for the first time ever: our school system. Learning is a subjective activity. Some people learn much more efficiently in an intimate, person-to-person setting (I count myself as one of those) while others flourish on their own in a virtual, private setting. This virus, with its self-isolating ramifications, has forced all students to pursue the latter, whether they like it or not. And, just like before, the instructor’s intention will be to grade students on what they’ve learned. And that is where I foresee a problem with regards to whose work will actually be graded – especially when it comes to university exams that carry a disproportionately heavy weight in determining final grades. You see – high schools and universities, whether they like it or not, will inevitably be forced to institute an honor system to (try to) maintain integrity during the un-proctored exams in this pandemic.
Honor. The word conjures up movie images of noble self sacrifice in the military, gun duels fought in past centuries, and court cases that shake a society to its core. For some people and societies, it is (was) central to ethics and a guiding force for action – for doing the “right” thing. For others, it is a laughable term with no basis in reality – an outdated concept that only a fool would follow in the modern world. Indeed, many of society’s most successful magnates and political leaders have shown anything but honor on their rampage to power – often trampling on ethics even after they have attained their positions. “Honor systems” can be found in many areas of society, but perhaps none have garnered as much attention as those found in some of our institutions of higher learning. The concept of honor has taken root in US academia since the time of our Founding Fathers – most notably Thomas Jefferson. I have attended two universities in my life – the University of Virginia (UVA) and Stevens Institute of Technology – and both of them employ an honor system for their students: essentially, it is a system where students are entrusted, on their honor, not to lie, cheat, steal, etc. while in school. It is part of a code of behavior, and students are implicitly mandated to follow it in various aspects of life. The penalty for failing to do so, in some of these schools, is a single-sanction expulsion. Through my years at both schools, I had the unique experience of seeing that honor system at work from all angles – both as a student bound to it…and as a TA trusted to enforce it. Since both experiences were entirely different, I’ve decided to split them into separate subsections for each school and then combine the lessons learned – and they are similar – into a final, unified conclusion. But first, it’s necessary to elaborate on the intricacies of some of these honor systems by analyzing the original one that became the blueprint for standard honor codes around the country – the UVA Honor System.
A Brief History of the UVA Honor System
How did UVA’s honor system originate? If you took the term, “honor system,” at face value you might think it came from a noble, optimistic view of society; in fact, it resulted from aristocratic, white Southern students misbehaving like common thugs from the university’s very first days. Thomas Jefferson took great pride in his university, but he was totally naïve when he decided to apply his enlightened principles of self governance as a disciplinary policy for his students – he honestly believed that “young men from the best families” could be counted on to govern themselves and behave. He was quickly disillusioned. In fact, the failure of his naïve policy and his students’ boorish behavior brought him to tears during his first address to the University in 1825. It had to be a reality check for the former US President and author of the Declaration of Independence – to mistake kids for adults. During that seminal year, student regulations quickly became necessary after an assault by his students on two professors led to the professors threatening resignation unless student conduct would be policed more effectively. But the student misconduct did not stop there. It continued into the next decade to include academic fraud, slave abuse, riots, and the harassment and, ultimately, murder of a professor on UVA’s revered Lawn in 1840. It was only then that the faculty decided to institute a universal honor code for the students. To his defense, back then, Jefferson wasn’t armed with the knowledge that modern research has uncovered – that the human brain has a ways to go in terms of development even after the student turns eighteen years of age!
So what exactly constitutes an “honor offense?” The answer to that question has apparently changed through the years. Originally, the whole concept of “honor” was associated with the Southern gentleman. Of course, as we now know, the South wasn’t exactly full of role models when it came to ethics and human rights in the early 1800s. Indeed, there were various times in the school’s history when gambling and using a fake ID to buy alcohol were considered “honor offenses” – which could result in student expulsions. In 1971, the Honor Committee wrote, “the Honor System shall concern itself solely with those offenses which are classified as dishonorable by the public opinion of the student generation involved.” Hardly a universal standard to abide by! Well that same year, a student was found guilty of an “honor offense” for stealing soda cans from a vending machine. Students became outraged at the verdict, and the Honor Committee was pressured to reverse the judgment. Clearly, the subjective / murky nature of an “honor offense” was vulnerable to capricious, biased interpretation.
In order to more efficiently manage cases of student misconduct, the honor system branched off into the Honor Committee – to handle exclusively “honor offenses” – and the University Judiciary Committee (UJC) – to handle all other student misconduct cases. The UJC was originally formed in 1948 with Jefferson’s ideals of student self-governance and a vague Code of Conduct in mind that only mentioned one regulation: to behave as young “gentlemen.” There were future attempts to merge the two organizations (since, ultimately, they were both responsible for mandating student behavior), but for practical implementation reasons (sheer number of cases) the merger never happened. Soon after its inception, however, the UJC would get a reality check with regards to exactly how much power a student-run judicial system would be allowed to exercise. In 1954, a gang rape on campus essentially nullified the UJC as the administration took matters into their own hands and ended up suspending or expelling several prominent students for their part in the crime without bothering the UJC for input – presumably because an impartial trial involving student judges may not have been possible. In the late 1990s, while I was a student there, the UJC essentially removed itself (for fear of being sued for violation of due process rights) from trying a high profile case of felony assault by three frat boys from wealthy Southern families who beat up and broke a first-year student’s jaw in a particularly ugly incident that hearkened back to the university’s first days of vicious, unruly behavior. These three defendants – one of whom was the son of FedEx’s founder and CEO – successfully managed to drag out the case for years and threatened various lawsuits along the way; in the end, it was the University President who actually adjudicated the trio and imposed the corresponding punishments – which ended up being suspensions and not expulsions. The university verdicts arrived literally years after the trio had spent time in jail for the violent crime. And, finally, in 2011 the UJC was found to have absolutely no jurisdiction whatsoever over an incident involving a student newspaper editor’s breach of confidentiality with regards to an honor system case after the defendant’s attorney accurately stated, “The Judiciary Committee may well believe that it’s a court. I assure you they are not… They will come to find out they don’t get to punish people the way judges do.” So, despite all the university’s talk of student self governance with regards to matters of student misconduct, ultimately all the high-profile cases of student misconduct at UVA have been, in fact, not adjudicated by the student-run Judiciary Committee. The adults have stepped in when real constitutional rights and accountability have been on the table, and perhaps that was/is for the best. NOTE: As to not be a hypocrite, my main reference used here was: https://honor.virginia.edu/sites/honor.virginia.edu/files/UVA%20Student%20Self%20Governance.pdf
Undergraduate Years at the University of Virginia (UVA) 1996-2000
When I first entered UVA in 1996 as an eighteen year-old naïve to the world, I found the school’s honor system and concept of self governance both novel and fascinating. The thought of a student community that was both noble and mature enough to govern itself, refrain from cheating, and generally conduct itself in a manner that would make any parent proud was something to look forward to and embrace. And while my friends and the majority of students that I would come across at the school generally behaved “honorably,” it didn’t take too long for that illusion to get shattered. As I would gradually learn through the coming years, the “honor system”…was one big joke.
My journey from naivety to disillusionment began, at least partially, as a result of an accident that I suffered on my third day at UVA which literally crippled me for the entire semester: I broke my kneecap. Disability effectively prevented me from partaking in sports, parties, and everything else that a healthy college freshman looks forward to in those first few months away from home and the scrutiny of parents. Interestingly, I now see some parallels between that period of my life and this current pandemic: the imposition of concrete boundaries on what one can and cannot do inevitably leads one to engage in other activities that perhaps would not have taken center stage in life had the constraints / limitations not been set. Today, I know some of my friends are trying out and pursuing new activities to cope with the boredom of life during the pandemic; back then, likewise, I decided to go full throttle with my academic studies to a degree I had not known in high school – and certainly would not have envisioned doing during my first year of “freedom” in college (indeed I will be the first to admit that I devoted way more time to my extracurricular activities than to studying during high school). But I decided to make the most of a bad situation – and, consequently, I learned an enormous amount during that first semester – while everybody else was out partying, playing sports, etc. – and got rewarded with a top ten GPA in my Engineering School at the esteemed university. Through the bad times, I set a standard for my work ethic and grades expectations that would carry on through the remainder of college. Academically, things got easier from there. I guess the whole concept of cheating never really entered my mind because I didn’t have to! In my view, cheating to attain higher grades was a form of subservience and inferiority that reeked of self-loathing and a lack of self confidence and self respect. Of course, back then I was an idealist; others took a very different view on the matter.
I was aware of cheating throughout my tenure at UVA. Mostly, it took the form of “group” projects / exams that were meant to be individually completed. I rarely cared – mostly because I was doing more than fine with my own grades – and I certainly never even considered ratting out anybody for it. Why? From the beginning, I always felt that the single sanction expulsion was a ridiculous remedy for the crime committed; surely, there were various degrees of “cheating” and, so, they shouldn’t all be grouped together. And then, there was the issue of having to snitch on your peers – to become a rat ultimately responsible for another student’s expulsion – an event that might very well ruin both students’ lives (if you factored in the fallout of potentially being socially ostracized after ratting out a popular / powerful student at a school where conformity was everything). I wanted no part of that, and few students would take this route. Indeed, underreporting by students is explicitly mentioned as a problem on UVA’s online Student Self Governance booklet in the section, “Challenges Facing University Judiciary Council.” Ultimately, the magnitude of the cheating would be exposed by an innovative physics professor who developed a software program that ended up busting over a hundred of his students (twice as many as had been charged in total the prior two years) for plagiarism a year after I graduated. What’s not as well known…is that the professor was initially apprised of the cheating by a student who, unhappy with her grade, finally decided to tell the professor what was really going on in the class – to rat out her fellow students. Only then did the scandal become national news. A year later, perhaps directly due to the national embarrassment, the “informed retraction” clause of the honor system – effectively the multiple sanction honor system – came up for a vote. It would take over a decade for it to finally pass in 2013. It looks like the new generation finally figured out something that took way too long to change!
In my experience, though, cheating was far from the only problem at UVA. In some ways, UVA was (probably still is) a caste system – where fraternities / sororities and sports teams were the castes – that hindered social mobility within the school and reflected many social problems that we hear about on the news all the time today: income inequality amidst unbearably high tuitions, racial tensions, homophobia, conformity versus individualism, and meritocracy versus aristocracy – to name a few. I believe the school’s honor system only served to reinforce these social illnesses by, in effect, turning a blind eye to them. A big source of the problem (as in many elite schools) was the fact that many of its students were/are legacy students – their parents went to UVA and happened to donate a good chunk of $$$ to ensure that their kids’ chances of admission would be maximized. In my opinion, this concept of legacy students is the precursor to overt bribery / corruption that the recent college admissions cheating scandal has exposed. It is a tough school to get into without connections – especially if you’re from out of state. Once you got in, though, there was a palpable sense of elitism on campus. Conformity (of the ultra-conservative flavor) was a strong underlying theme at this school – UVA was one school where you did not want to be an outsider. Conformity here meant both looking and acting the part of a clean-cut prep school student. The Greek scene practically enforced this conformity and the result was a ubiquitous sense of homogeneity.
One of the great dangers of an ultra-conformist school is that the prevailing sense of conformity may magnify inherent prejudices and bigotry. Perhaps that was a big reason why the school was, in effect, socially segregated and why relatively few minorities joined the mainstream Greek system when I was there. Although I didn’t personally “rush” the fraternity scene during my first semester (because of my injury), I will never forget my first year suitemate telling me his story of walking into one of those fraternities during open rush and having all the “brothers” literally turn their backs on him and stare at the walls to snub him. He dressed the part of a prep school student, too, but unfortunately for him…he didn’t look like a WASP (he was Italian) – and that was grounds for exclusion at this particular (highly esteemed) Southern fraternity. I myself became the target of some less-than-honorable behavior at the school on several occasions – none of which was punished. “Petie the Gimp” was a popular refrain I heard repeatedly by certain acquaintances and members of the student body as a result of my first year injury. Although I’m sure (some of) these individuals have grown up since then and would regret making these statements, somehow I doubt that in today’s environment of public shaming such insensitive comments would go over well. Similarly, while I was disabled during my first semester, I will never forget having one of these frat boys shove me (albeit lightly) during a mild argument in my dorm while I was on my crutches; that same student would go on to become no less than the chair of the university Judiciary Committee a few years later – literally in charge of the student-run body that would decide cases of student misconduct on campus! And then there was the time I decided to attend a wine tasting class during my senior year to learn a bit more about wines – only to have some Southern frat boys sneer at me (since apparently I was too low-class to learn about wines – a value no doubt passed down by their slave-owning ancestors). I’m sure there were other less-than-honorable incidents that I have missed.
There have been several high-profile incidents of student misconduct at UVA that have betrayed the school’s revered honor system since I was a student there. The incident involving the wealthy Southern frat boys breaking the first year’s jaw while I was there was big news because it highlighted the inefficacy of student-run judicial systems, the value of money in escaping justice, and the hypocrisy of expulsions at the university (since technically none of the assailants were ever expelled). Both racism and homophobia were pervasive on campus. In addition to the racial tensions touched on earlier, there were several incidents of frat boys wearing blackface at parties that only served to reinforce this reality (apparently a popular pastime at Virginia, for some strange reason, as evidenced by numerous prominent Virginia political figures being outed recently). Maybe it’s more than just a coincidence, then, that two of the main organizers of the now-infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 were UVA alumni – one of whom is the acknowledged founder of the entire alt-right movement in this country (he was at UVA when I was there). Perhaps these are factors that may help explain why the percentage of African American students enrolled at UVA has dramatically declined from roughly 10% when I was a student there to the current 6.6%. Then there was the school’s “Good Ole Song”, sung at athletic events, which always featured the unmistakably loud, “NOT GAY!” refrain woven into it to explicitly alienate the student body’s gay population and make them feel unwelcome at the games. Maybe that has changed with the times? I wouldn’t know because it’s been well over a decade since I was last on campus. I already elaborated on the physics cheating scandal. Although the infamous Rolling Stone gang rape article was proven to be a hoax, the general nature of the subject material was not. Both the magazine and the writer were reckless in carrying out their journalistic duties, but student gang rapes had occurred on campus (as previously mentioned, the 1954 affair was particularly noteworthy). I can attest that during my time on campus, every student knew about the infamous “date rape frat” on Rugby Road. And all this sense of reckless WASP entitlement was, once again, brought to popular media attention when lacrosse star George Wesley Huguely V permanently tarnished his family name in 2010 by violently murdering his ex-girlfriend, lacrosse player Yeardley Love, in an alcohol-fueled fit of rage after she had broken up with him (coincidentally, at the very same off-campus apartment complex where I had lived a decade earlier). The Preppy Killer-like murder ignited a media firestorm, but I saw it as the logical culmination of a history and pattern of unruly, dishonorable behavior by the descendants of an aristocracy that Jefferson had originally trusted to uphold his ideals. They succeeded about as well as the kids from Lord of the Flies. In the end, Al Pacino might as well have replaced the Baird School with UVA when delivering his famous speech about the pervasive hypocrisy of “honor” at the school:
Postgraduate Years at Stevens Institute of Technology 2009-2011
The Stevens honor system, with its penalty matrix (https://web.stevens.edu/honor/documents/penalty-matrix.pdf), has clearly evolved from and is much more intricate than its UVA counterpart; in my experience, though, it was just as hypocritical and ineffective. While pursuing my PhD there, I was a teaching assistant (TA) for a massive (400+ students) class that was run by two professors. Due to the sheer size of the class, I was one of several graders for the homework submissions. And from the beginning, I knew what to expect with regards to some students cheating on their submissions. I strove, on my personal honor, to devote a relatively substantial portion of my grading time to root out the problem and ensure a level playing field – at least among my students (I can’t say the same for the other TAs). Unsurprisingly, I uncovered a lot of cheating in the class.
There were several factors at play to explain the abundance of cheating among these students. The first one started from the top – a complete apathy on the part of both the professors and the TAs with regards to enforcing the mandate that students do their own work. And this apathy had continued for years. From the start, I had been instructed by both the professors and the lead TA to just indiscriminately give a “0” to any student caught cheating, regardless of level of severity. The problem with this approach was that it offered no incentive for busted students to fess up (in order to get at least some credit for the assignment while simultaneously avoiding the dreaded Honor Board) and allow the TA to get to the root of the problem. Only by distinguishing among the various levels of cheating would I be able to extract some confessions. And it worked. I quickly noticed that there were sets of similar, wildly incorrect answers on one early assignment that simply made no sense. I decided to call in the offending students for questioning, under suspicion of honor offense, to explain the suspicious answers. Eventually, through a combination of interrogation and the offer of a graduated scoring system based on the severity of the cheating and actions to remedy it, I discovered two root causes for the cheating. The first was merely a case of one student (the brains) doing the work and, intentionally or unintentionally, allowing for the release of his/her answers to several other students (the copycats). In this case, I went relatively easy on the brains of the operation while harshly punishing the copycats (based on their levels of cooperation) since only the brains had actually done his/her work. The second case was much more troubling. I quickly found out that this particular homework assignment had not been changed in many years…as several fraternities and sororities apparently had access to a cheat sheet – hence, the same (albeit wrong) answers. I decided to reward those students who had come clean, on their honor, to inform me of what was really going on with extra credit. When I informed both professors and the other TAs of the discovery…they didn’t seem particularly surprised – which was perhaps the most disturbing development of all. Furthermore, I would soon discover that one of the professors of the course was a distinguished alumnus of the main sorority at the heart of this problem. And it didn’t escape my notice that she showed blatant favoritism towards her “little sisters” – granting them leniency whenever possible. Surely, this example showcased a failure of the Stevens honor system. Basically, I had to go completely out of my way to enforce its ideals (although Stevens does state that professors are allowed to handle these types of situations as they see fit within their respective classes). Similar situations followed on some of the future assignments, semester after semester, until I evidently acquired a reputation. In general, I would only give a “0” to the most egregious offenders; I did not report a single individual to the Honor Board. I’d like to believe that, in the end, my students got the grades that they truly deserved. But ensuring fairness came at a cost: I spent countless, unpaid hours each semester rooting out the cheating – out of a sense of personal honor – to reward those students who actually did their work for their honor.
My final encounter with cheating at Stevens occurred as a (postgraduate) student in my final class – a particularly difficult electrical engineering data analysis class. Due to the difficulty of the class, students were informed that all homework submissions, quizzes, and tests would be graded on a curve – meaning that students would be in direct competition with each other for grades. Soon, to my shock and disappointment, I began to realize that I was not doing well in this class – despite spending an enormous amount of time on the background reading and homework (that, in the past, would’ve all but ensured an “A” for the class). During the midterm exam, I discovered why: the majority of the class was blatantly cheating (and along ethnic lines) while the instructors and TAs for the class were either too naïve or apathetic or both to do anything about it. After receiving yet another low grade on that midterm, I decided that enough was enough. Like the UVA student had done a decade earlier, I realized that it was time to spoil the party for the others and rat them out to the professor. Explaining to her that I myself was a TA, I couldn’t believe how shocked she was to hear what I had to say about the cheating. But, ultimately, she did reward me for the information…and the final exam environment was noticeably different than that of the midterm: assigned seats and several different versions of the exam. Unsurprisingly, most of the class was caught off guard and ended up bombing the final while I did just fine – saving my final grade and my GPA. The lesson learned was that the success of a class – and the entire honor system – depends on the diligent cooperation of the student body, the enforcement arm (the TAs), and the professors.
Conclusions
The meaning of the word “honor” needs to be revisited. Honor goes beyond abstaining from lying, cheating, and stealing; it should also include standing up for those unable to stand up for themselves, reporting an injustice, trying to right a wrong, and abstaining from any modern manifestations of dishonor (for example, online bullying or other mob mentality acts meant to publicly shame innocent individuals – a trend that has exploded since the advent of social media). Selling its meaning short is doing it a disservice. Perhaps students need to reconsider whether it is “honorable” to forcibly cry out, “NOT GAY!” during the “Good Ole Song” at UVA football and basketball games to explicitly alienate a portion of their student body. My generation did a poor job of it, and I would hope that today’s generation is doing better. Having said all of that, I was fortunate to have met some amazing people at both UVA and Stevens – students and faculty alike – who really embodied the true concept of honor.
UVA’s online booklet likes to refer to self-governance as the most significant aspect of UVA culture. As discussed earlier, the school has worked hard to try to maintain this ideal on campus – even employing independent groups to audit and re-evaluate the judicial and legislative systems at work. The problem, though, is that a college cannot be expected to have all the safeguards in place that the US judicial system has as a result of its centuries of precedent by trial and error. Can a school judicial system really be expected to somehow guard against the prospect of witness intimidation or jury tampering – especially when the stakes are high and the reputations and futures of powerful people and organizations lie in the balance? The history of high-profile cases seems to point to, “No!” There is no RICO act in school to permanently destroy recurring abuse of a system even though I would argue the gangs are there (in the form of some powerful fraternities and sororities).
As mentioned earlier, research has shown that the human brain does not stop developing until a person’s mid twenties – or later – and this directly impacts an adolescent’s evolving emotional maturity and abilities with regards to judgment. This fact is important both for limiting the powers of a college student…and for forgiving (some of) their infractions. Ultimately, they are still kids who lack the necessary real world experience and, hence, perspective to make sound judgments. And this is exactly why kids should not be adjudicating the cases of their fellow students – it gives rise to some potential Lord of the Flies scenarios where capricious emotion can easily trump reason.
I used to often hear people say that college life was a microcosm of real life. If that is the case, then the TAs absolutely are necessary to reinforce the honor system and proctor the exams because they are the enforcement arm for academic submissions. In the real word, you can’t just rely on people’s goodwill and promises to act in good faith and in accordance with society’s expectations (read laws). You need law enforcement. Otherwise, society would quickly devolve into a lawless playground for organized crime with people trying to take advantage of one another. Blindly trusting students on their “honor” via an honor system without the presence of proctors is the equivalent of blindly trusting society to always observe the laws without the presence of police. Without them, I can attest that the scoring systems would quickly devolve into a cheating free-for-all that would destroy academic merit. At the same time, though, not every driving infraction warrants a license suspension. Similarly, not every academic infraction warrants expulsion; they shouldn’t all be punished equally. It seems that Stevens is ahead of UVA in this regard with respect to their honor systems.
Finally, the role and efficacy of the “honor system” needs to be revisited. At UVA, in 1980, a committee assigned to evaluate the effectiveness of the single sanction honor system actually found that the great majority of the student body and even the faculty favored a dual sanction system where “students would be more willing to consider reporting an honor violation…” Interestingly, none of these proposals were ever formally approved by the student body (perhaps apathy?). There is a blatant, inherent injustice and hypocrisy in automatically having to expel a student caught plagiarizing for the first time…while other (wealthier) students are literally breaking other students’ jaws or committing other violent crimes and not getting immediately kicked out of the school. Ultimately, the honor system is like communism: beautiful in ideal, but horrible in practice. In fact, it serves to punish the very students who do the actual work. Let’s leave it as a personal ideal for incoming students and alumni alike…while refraining from trying to enforce a vague, outdated interpretation of it in practice.