Tuesday, October 9, 2001

Honor code required to curb cheating
Commentary by Jaime Walker

Establishing an honor code won’t stop students from cheating. It won’t even stop them from trying. But by outlining the specific consequences students face if they cheat, the policy holds them directly accountable for choices they make in the classroom.

TCU’s current policies concerning academic dishonesty are flexible at best. Professors all warn against it in their syllabi. The TCU Student Handbook vaguely outlines the university’s stance against academic dishonesty. But the responsibility for catching and punishing individuals believed to have committed acts of academic misconduct lies almost solely with individual faculty members.

A strong honor code might help shift the burden where it belongs — with the students.

The prevailing feeling among students at TCU and universities nationwide: “I’ll take my chances. If I get away with it, which I will, then who will be the wiser?” For the most part, students are getting away with it. For each reported case of cheating and plagiarism hundreds more go unreported.

Students are cheating and plagiarizing, helping others and looking the other way.

Doing so doesn’t save face or save grades. It undermines the very foundation of a college education. With each act of cheating or plagiarism, students give up an opportunity to learn for themselves.

At its core, academic dishonesty is a symptom of laziness. Cheaters are full of excuses. They’re too busy or too overwhelmed with other work. Their parents pressure them to get better grades. They’ve never done well on math or science tests. They don’t write papers that earn As. Even valid excuses can’t replace integrity.

Integrity can’t be found or formed by signing a piece of paper. But it can be enforced.

If the Faculty Senate can somehow convince the student body an honor code is a good idea, either by trusting their credibility or through some sort of marketing genius, they empower the university to uniformly and strictly punish students who participate in academic misconduct. Rigorous enforcement is essential.

Melissa Young, Academic Excellence Committee chairwoman for the Faculty Senate, said in a recent article that student support for an honor code would be “imperative.”

She is right. Students need to hold each other accountable for their personal integrity as well as the integrity of TCU.

At the University of Arizona-Tuscon, students who knowingly ignore academic dishonesty can be severely punished along with the students involved, including expulsion in extreme cases. According to a book released in 1999 entitled “A Professor’s Guide to College Cheating,” universities with formal ethics codes experience a decrease in cheating and plagiarism. Institutions whose codes hold students primarily accountable for their own fate see the number of instances drop dramatically.

Since TCU officials seem eager to put our mission statement into practice, designing an honor code would help define the perimeters for responsible and ethical leaders.

The mission statement aside, an honor code will benefit both students and faculty.

Professors could focus more energy on the material presented in class and less on fighting the uphill battle of academic misconduct.

Students would hopefully learn bosses or colleagues do not tolerate misconduct in the real world. At TCU it will no longer be tolerated in the classroom, by professors or peers.

Jaime Walker is a senior news-editorial and political science major from Roswell, Ga. She can be contacted at (j.l.walker@student.tcu.edu).