Honesty And Honor Codes

Students cheat. But they cheat less often at schools with an honor code and a peer culture that condemns dishonesty.

By Donald McCabe And Linda Klebe Treviño

A recent editorial in the Cavalier Daily, the University of Virginia’s student newspaper, opened with the statement, "The honor sys-tem at the university needs to go. Our honor system routinely rewards cheaters and punishes honesty." In the wake of a highly publicized cheating scandal in an introductory physics course at the university, it was easy to understand the frustration and concern surrounding Virginia’s long-standing practice of trusting students to honor the university’s tradition of academic integrity.

We could not disagree more, however, with the idea that it’s time for Virginia or any other campus to abandon the honor system. We believe instead that America’s institutions of higher education need to recommit themselves to a tradition of integrity and honor. Asking students to be honest in their academic work should not fall victim to debates about cultural relativism. Certainly, such recommitment seems far superior to throwing up our hands in despair and assuming that the current generation of students has lost all sense of honor. Fostering integrity may not be an easy task, but we believe an increasing number of students and campuses are ready to meet the challenge.

Although our belief may be rooted in idealism—some might argue naïveté—it is supported by a decade of research in which we have surveyed over 14,000 students on 58 different campuses, from small liberal arts colleges to large comprehensive universities. Much of this work has focused on traditional academic codes of honor—the kind that routinely reward cheaters in the view of the Cavalier Daily—and their impact on student dishonesty in the class-room. Although the details of these codes vary from campus to campus, they resemble Virginia’s in that they place the primary responsibility for cheating on students.

Traditional codes often mandate unproctored exams, a judicial process over which students have majority or complete control, and a written pledge requiring students to affirm they have completed their work honestly. Many traditional codes also place some level of obligation on students to report incidents of cheating they may observe among their peers, although such clauses are infrequently enforced.

Some schools use rituals and ceremonies to generate greater student commitment to their honor codes. Vanderbilt University, for example, has instituted a unique signing-in ceremony. Following an honor code orientation, each first-year student signs a class banner indicating a personal commitment to the Vanderbilt code. The signed banners for each of the four classes currently enrolled at the university hang in a prominent location in Vanderbilt’s student center as a constant reminder to students of the commitment they made.

Modified honor codes, a more recent innovation, have appeared on some campuses in the past decade. Recognizing the difficulty of developing a campus culture that can support a traditional code, these codes aim to develop a sense of community responsibility for academic integrity, particularly among students. Unproctored exams and the use of a pledge are usually at the instructor’s option (and often found only in smaller upper-division courses, if at all).

But two elements, common to all modified codes, are critical. First, a campus must communicate to its students that academic integrity is a major institutional priority. Typical strategies for doing so include "integrity seminars" and presidential or other high-level involvement with the issue of academic integrity. Some campuses have even staged "pep rallies." The University of Maryland at College Park held such rallies to focus student attention on its new modified honor code. The participation of the state’s governor and the university’s president in the inaugural rally sent a clear signal to the campus community of the institution’s level of commitment to the principle of academic integrity.

Student participation in campus judicial or hearing bodies that review alleged infringements of the honor code is the second critical component of modified codes. Students should also have a voice on task forces or committees charged with informing other students about the purposes and philosophy of the code, and they should play a major role in its development and implementation. But the support of faculty and top administrators is also essential. As we have noted, academic integrity must be promoted as a basic campus priority.

The impact of honor codes, both traditional and modified, is surprisingly strong on many campuses, suggesting that an ethical appeal to students—rooted in a sense of community responsibility—can help reduce cheating. Although high levels of cheating are found on many campuses, we know of institutions at which cheating is simply not a fact of everyday student life. And some of these campuses, from small private schools like Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania to large public universities like Kansas State, have only recently implemented honor codes or similar initiatives. These experiences suggest that such efforts can succeed— that it is still possible to develop cultures that instill academic integrity. Certainly, at least one of the students we surveyed thinks so: "I believe [my school] to be a rare example of integrity in college. . . . The biggest factor . . . is our honor code. By signing the honor code . . . we all agree to conduct our studies, as well as our social lives, in an ethical manner. This results in an atmosphere of trust between students and faculty."

Rise in Cheating

The evidence that academic dishonesty among college students is frequent, and growing, is compelling. In the early 1960s, sociologist William Bowers conducted a landmark study of cheating among college students for his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. Bowers surveyed over 5,000 students on 99 campuses and reported that at least half of those in his sample engaged in some form of academic dishonesty since coming to college; he believed this estimate was conservative. And although he acknowledged the importance of factors such as students’ high school experience and value orientation and institutional size and selectivity, Bowers felt that students’ college peers had perhaps the most powerful effect on their attitude toward cheating. He argued that "students are less apt to cheat as the campus wide climate of disapproval [of cheating] increases." Indeed, Bowers believed it was peer pressure that explained why schools with honor systems generally had lower levels of cheating.

Our research has corroborated Bowers’s major conclusions, but it has also documented significant increases in student cheating over the past three decades. For example, in a 1993 survey of students on nine campuses included in the Bowers study, we found disturbing increases in the level of serious cheating on tests and exams. In 1963, 26 percent of the students on the nine campuses, none of which had honor codes, acknowledged copying from another student on a test or exam; by 1993, the percentage had grown to 52. In addition, we observed a fourfold increase in the use of crib notes, from 6 to 27 percent.

Given this rise in cheating, it is more important than ever for faculty and administrators to understand the potential of honor codes to reduce it. The research results are clear. The level of self-reported cheating by students on honor-code campuses, even those with unproctored exams, is significantly lower than that on campuses without codes, where exams are often carefully monitored. For example, almost half of the students we surveyed on seventeen noncode campuses reported one or more instances of serious cheating on tests or exams, compared with fewer than one in three on fourteen code campuses surveyed. The difference was even more dramatic among students who admitted to more than three incidents of serious test cheating—one in six students did so on noncode campuses versus one in sixteen at code schools. Not only do more students cheat on noncode campuses, but those that do, cheat more often.

Research suggests that many faculty members fail to take adequate precautions to deter cheating or ignore suspected incidents, so perhaps these results are not surprising. Often, a low level of peer disapproval is the only thing standing between a student on a noncode campus and the decision to engage in academic dishonesty. Unlike their peers on code campuses, these students compete in a culture that attaches little or no social stigma to cheating.

Culture of Integrity

Simply having an honor code means little if students don’t know about it. It must be introduced to new students and made a topic of ongoing campus dialogue. The level of trust placed in students on honor-code campuses establishes academic integrity as a clear institutional priority. The high value attached to honesty and, perhaps more important, the privileges accorded to students under traditional honor-code systems creates a culture that makes cheating socially unacceptable among most students—Bowers’s concept of peer disapproval.

Like Vanderbilt, some honor-code schools use rituals or ceremonies to develop such cultures. These strategies are particularly popular at traditional women’s colleges that have honor codes, including Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley. At Washington and Lee University, prospective students are informed of their expected obligations under the campus honor code as part of the admissions process. Even in this day of intense competition for the best students, the university’s admissions literature suggests that if applicants cannot abide by the provisions of the campus code, Washington and Lee is probably not the right school for them. Members of the student honor committee at Rice University orient new faculty to the student honor code and keep department chairs apprised of any changes in the committee’s emphasis.

Although such strategies may work on campuses that already have strong honor codes, they mean little on those that do not, especially large campuses and those at which many students attend part time or live off campus. Developing a shared culture of any kind is more difficult on such campuses, because many students cannot, or do not, participate in campus life. We surveyed 1,800 students on nine campuses fitting this general description in 1993 and found very high levels of cheating. Almost two-thirds of our respondents acknowledged one or more incidents of serious test cheating in the previous year, and one in four admitted to more than three incidents of serious test cheating.

Although many, and probably most, students, faculty, and administrators at noncode campuses seem convinced that an honor code would never work on their campus, we believe such attitudes are overly pessimistic. In affiliation with the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, we recently surveyed 2,200 students on 21 different campuses. Nine of these institutions did not have an honor code, eight had traditional honor codes, one used a code that is a hybrid between a traditional and a modified code, and three (large public universities) had modified honor codes.

Based on their size and the greater percentage of their students who were enrolled part time or who lived off campus, we normally would have expected to find the highest levels of self-reported cheating on these three large campuses. But self-reported cheating was actually lower at these three schools compared with the nine non-code campuses surveyed. One-third of the students at the large universities acknowledged one or more instances of serious cheating compared with almost half of the students at the noncode schools. One in ten students at the universities acknowledged repetitive serious test cheating versus one in six at the noncode schools.

We believe such data suggest that most schools can develop strategies to reduce the level of student cheating. The data also underscore the importance of bringing students into campus conversations about academic integrity and involving them in any effort to change institutional culture. Success depends on getting students to accept responsibility for academic integrity, both their own and that of their peers. They do not necessarily have to monitor and report on their peers, but they do have to help create and sustain an environment where most students view cheating as socially unacceptable.

Pressing Issue

Right now is a critical time for colleges and universities to address the issue of academic integrity. Recent research suggests that cheating in American high schools is on the rise. In particular, new technologies are raising difficult questions, for both students and teachers, about what is and is not appropriate behavior. For example, a recent survey of 4,500 high school students suggests that the Internet is creating new dilemmas for students concerning plagiarism. The same survey reports that many students are dealing with what they perceive as unreasonable workloads by collaborating on assignments, even when they are asked for individual work, or by copying someone else’s work. The students say they feel that some teachers simply give too much homework even though they know many students have jobs, extracurricular activities, and active social lives.

Now more than ever, students arriving at our colleges and universities need guidance to help them think about academic integrity. We know that moral development can advance dramatically over the four years of college, but such advancement depends on a student’s experience both in and outside the classroom. We believe that student engagement in an environment that values honesty can contribute significantly to moral development.

Faculty members have an important role to play in creating such an environment, but students report wide variations in how faculty address academic integrity in the classroom. Many students who cheat blame faculty for their transgressions, especially professors who fail to respond to what students consider obvious incidents of cheating that occur in their courses. In today’s highly competitive environment, otherwise honest students can persuade themselves that they must cheat to keep the playing field level. The following student comments are not unusual:

I think the cutthroat competition of getting good grades, getting into a good grad school, are the two most important factors in what drives students to cheat. Pressure from parents/family/professors . . . makes you think about cheating. It really is such a shame that society has turned us into such deceitful people.

I feel that there is so much cheating going on, the only way to remain competitive is by cheating. I don’t think it’s fair that students with better GPAs than myself because of cheating deserve get-ting into grad schools over people who don’t cheat.

Although dealing with student cheating is difficult, faculty can address some concerns simply through good teaching—by, for example, challenging academic dishonesty when it occurs in their courses and fostering an environment of trust in their classrooms.

We understand that skeptics, many of them faculty on our own campuses, feel little can be done to improve student integrity in the classroom. But the data are clear: faculty and administrators can work with students to create a campus culture where trust is higher, cheating is lower, and students learn to behave more ethically. Honor codes, both traditional and modified, seem to be an effective approach. But we also know of several noncode schools that have reduced academic dishonesty among students. Although they lack a formal code, they subscribe to the basic strategy we have suggested: they communicate the campus’s commitment to academic integrity and make it an active topic of discussion among students and faculty to help them understand that every member of the campus community is responsible for promoting it.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a good example. In the early 1990s, some upper-class students developed "bibles" for selected courses that included solutions for homework problems and other information that could allow students to improve their grades inappropriately. Rather than ignore the problem, MIT used it as an opportunity to reexamine the issue of cheating. And after surveying students and faculty, the institution initiated a yearlong discussion of the state of academic integrity on campus. The discussion led to several policy revisions and a heightened state of understanding among students and faculty about the importance of academic integrity.

Of course, simply having a code or updating your policy will not guarantee reduced student cheating. Creating a culture of academic integrity takes years to achieve and demands the commitment of all members of the campus community. Once attained, such a culture requires constant attention and renewal. Rules must be developed when new issues, such as those raised by the Internet, present themselves, and the rules must be en-forced. Moreover, the greatest benefit of a culture of integrity may not be reduced student cheating. Instead, it may be the lifelong benefit of learning the value of living in a community of trust.

Donald McCabe is professor of organization management at Rutgers University’s Business School. Linda Klebe Treviño is professor of organizational behavior and Franklin H. Cook Fellow in Business Ethics in the Smeal College of Business Administration at Pennsylvania State University.

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