Higher Education and Student Honor – a Work in Progress
In early December, Furman University Assistant Professor Darren Hick gave his philosophy students a take-home essay assignment. Suspicious of one paper turned in, Hick confronted the student, who admitted using ChatGPT. Advanced free software, ChatGPT uses artificial intelligence to produce essays and answers to questions that can be hard to distinguish from those by humans. Hick failed the student and turned him in to the academic dean. Furman has an Integrity Pledge in which students subscribe “to live lives of humility, respect, and responsibility.”
While accurate statistics are hard to come by, research with anonymous respondents suggests that as many as 80 percent of college and university students admit to having cheated. Fifty percent say it’s OK, especially when done to stay competitive.
Honor codes have been designed to promote more honorable behavior since the first one at the College of William and Mary in 1736. Thomas Jefferson studied there and the University of Virginia (UVA) he founded has had an honor code since 1842.
Honor codes can be a positive force. Many students take pride in their school because of them, and there is some evidence that they encourage honorable behavior. Research by Donald McCabe at Rutgers University and Linda Trevino at Penn State found that only 11 percent of students at schools with an honor code report helping someone with answers on a test, half the rate at colleges without a code (23 percent).
UVA’s Honor Code is designed to foster a “community of trust.” Run by students, it includes an Honor System for dealing with alleged violations. Those found guilty of their pledge “never to lie, cheat, or steal” are punished. Yet what may sound straightforward is not, and the UVA experience illuminates issues with preventing cheating and the broader question of what constitutes honor on campus.
Over its lifespan UVA’s Honor Code has changed from the “single sanction” of expulsion for violators to a two-semester removal with the possibility of re-admittance to the university and its “community of trust.” The code now applies only to students who violate it, not as previously to students who “tolerate those who do”. An “informed retraction” option allows someone for whom a violation has been reported to confess and make amends before a trial, again incurring a two-semester absence from the university.
Many students take the Honor Code and Honor System seriously - yet not all. A 2022 UVA Virginia magazine article, “Honor Up Close,” reported that most students don’t vote on ballot measures that affect the system nor, in what it called a “code of silence,” do they report potential violators, the great bulk of whom are thus reported by faculty. For their part, many faculty members avoid using the Honor System because it takes them considerable time with uncertain consequences for those who they believe have cheated.
By placing students in charge of the system and abiding by student decisions, UVA signals its trust in and students’ responsibilities, an important step. Yet UVA is by no means alone in struggling to foster an “honor culture.” Doing so requires not just a code and system but a deeper and shared understanding of what “honor” means.
A 1991 look at UVA’s system by a team from Stanford grappled with that issue. “We recommend that less attention be paid to the trial and strictly judicial aspects of the Honor System and that more attention be paid to what we have discussed as the Honor Spirit,” its report said. This included, study authors noted, “the high values of trusting and being trusted, of being honest in one’s dealings with others, and the allegiance to intellectual honesty.” Put another way, honor should entail more than just the negative of “don’t lie, steal or cheat.”
When Jefferson ended the Declaration of Independence with “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” he was talking about a broad conception of honor, one that deals with one’s character and reputation. The goal of living honorably in a college or university community must involve clarifying what honor means. It must include ethical education and behavior infused into the curriculum and other aspects of campus life. It must extend to faculty and administrators not just students. It must recognize honor exemplars in the community and create incentives for living honorably. In short, a pledge and system to deal with violations is not enough.
How honorably students behave in higher education impacts how honorably the society they will lead behaves. A 2012 Josephson Institute of Ethics study of 23,000 high school students found 57 percent agreed that “in the real world, successful people do what they have to do to win, even if others consider it cheating.” Colleges and universities carry part of the burden in reversing that unethical view on integrity.
Worried by ChatGPT, Princeton University senior Edward Tian recently developed GBTZero, software to detect if a student product has been created in whole or part with ChatGPT. That may help professors spot student cheaters but it will not do much to foster honor on campus. Honor must come from a moral commitment to living an honorable life, and no software can produce that.
Photo Credit: The Rotunda and Lawn of the University of Virginia, Carol Donsky Newell
