WELCOME to another year of single sanction debate, in which reforms will be proposed, and the Honor Committee will respond by vaguely promising to involve the community in a discussion about the meaning of honor at the University. This semester is off to a typically lame start: In response to the overwhelming passage of a referendum in favor of alternatives to mandatory expulsion for honor offenses, Honor formed an ad hoc committee that promises to study the effects of the sanction yet again.
We don't need additional research to know that the single sanction has been failing students and professors for years. The newly indoctrinated first years will soon hear tales of everything from parking pass forgery to flagrant plagiarism, and they will soon learn that almost no one is willing to report on their friends and classmates because of the single sanction. In a 2002 survey of University students, 29.4 percent of respondents said they had witnessed an honor offense, while only .51 percent said that they had reported it.
Beyond the failures of the system to actually work as intended, we should consider what the single sanction says about us as a community. We have students who, for various reasons, feel compelled to be dishonest and to take shortcuts at a time when they should be striving to achieve their personal best. The single sanction says that there is something wrong with these people: These members of the community are flawed, therefore we must eliminate them. This solution does nothing to address the reasons that people cheat, and it does nothing to help the students who have succumbed to their worst temptations.
Almost every year, a widely publicized scandal reminds us that the University honor code fails to stop cheating. This summer, for example, almost an entire class of graduate students in the Economics Department allegedly used online answers on homework that was supposed to reflect their own work. In between class-wide cheating rings, individual students quietly and anonymously leave the University, to be remembered only in that year's honor trial statistics. Combined with reports that honor violations are hugely underreported, we have evidence that a significant number of students are simply not buying the honor code.
While it's possible that all of these students are simply evil, the sheer number of reported and unreported offenses points to an uncomfortable truth: College is inherently conducive to cheating. When success is measured not by our efforts or by how much we have learned, but rather by our grades on tests and assignments, cheating becomes a rational (though still immoral) path to take. Ideally, college students should be motivated by their passion for learning, but the system encourages us to prioritize our GPA. Under such a system, it becomes practical and efficient to copy homework if it frees up time to research a paper.
Against all of these pressures and temptations, we have the honor code, a standard of honesty and morality that should inspire us to do our own work no matter what. We give students a show at convocation and expect everyone to fall in love with honor. Then when students cheat anyway, we respond with more preaching and more sanctimony, only to face another scandal the next semester.
None of this is to say that the honor code itself is flawed. Lying, cheating and stealing are wrong and we owe it to ourselves and to each other to be honest at all times. But the reality is that simply having these standards has not stopped cheating, and the single sanction has failed to address the problem in a way that discourages future violations.
It's not easy to question the usefulness of the single sanction in these highly authoritarian times. Anyone who speaks out for reform is reflexively accused of being soft on honor, tolerant of cheating and indifferent to the proud traditions that shape our fine institution. But in the tradition of nuanced intellectual discourse, we should rise above a discussion of whether or not one values "honor" and think about the reasons that people succumb to dishonesty. Only then can we reform the honor system in a way that makes cheating undesirable not only because it is wrong but because it contradicts the entire purpose of higher education.
Cari Lynn Hennessy's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at chennessy@cavalierdaily.com.
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