Honor Code Issues

An honor code is a set of rules or ethical principles governing an academic community based on ideals that define what constitutes honorable behavior within that community. Honor codes are thought by some to be unreliable, but when executed in different situations they have been proven to work. Honor codes have worked by reducing the amount of cheating and plagiarizing by building trust, using peers to enforce the code, and improving the standards for academic dishonesty therefore the honor code system should be maintained. For instance, honor codes build a trust between students and faculty that reduce the dishonest rates of cheating and plagiarizing. It is said that “we [need] an environment where students and faculty [can] live in complete trust of one another” and this environment is created with honor codes (Vangelli). One of the problems that have risen was that of the student’s approval: how to get the students to follow through on such a code. However, the approval of students increased when formal penalties for honoring the code were eliminated and a repetitive but not excessive pledge was performed at the beginning of each semester for each student. The …show more content…
Various schools not only have honor codes, but the “enforcement is handled by an all-student court” so that students are held accountable by their peers (Dirmeyer and Cartwright). The peer accountability was thought to work by students who would decide whether or not to cheat by weighing the costs and benefits with their own “innate level of integrity” (Dirmeyer and Cartwright). The success of the honor code in this account would be the based off of the perceptions students have on their peers, but still have had a decline in the amount of cheating present. Therefore peer accountability has a positive effect in maintaining honor codes with a decline in cheating