Without Honor

Last week in The Crimson, Tehshik P. Yoon '96 naively called for the introduction of an honor code in the College. In his idyllic vision of a Harvard based on personal honor, Mr. Yoon too lightly dismisses the stereotypical image of the blood-thirsty pre-med willing to do anything for an A. From my experience, this caricature is far closer to the truth than Mr. Yoon admits.

It is ironic that Mr. Yoon and I shared a section last semester in which his point was proven completely false. The class was dominated by "high-speed" pre-meds as well as engineers and other natural science concentrators.

A small but important part of the class was the weekly problem sets which comprised 20 percent of the final grade. I found them difficult and usually spent four to six hours a week attempting to complete them. Many of my classmates found a much easier way--and received better results.

Most good teaching fellows in the sciences understand what it is like to be on the other side of the podium. In many cases, they sympathize with the workload imposed by two or three natural science courses and are willing to give students a break.

Upon request, the section leader allowed the entire section to turn in homework assignments from six hours to a couple of days late. There would be nothing wrong with this minor forbearance except that complete solutions to the assignments were distributed to the entire class in lecture--minutes after the problem sets were originally due.

Thus, a dishonest student with an extension would have little difficulty ensuring that his set was perfect.

The section leader was aware of this problem from the beginning. But he trusted the class. When he asked us not to look at the solution set before we turned in our homework, we all shook our heads in agreement. He got burned. Obviously, he mistook Harvard for kinder, gentler university.

I'm not sure who it was that broke the agreement between our section leader and his section--and I don't really want to know. The fact is that several students thought it worthwhile to cheat on a problem set worth less than 1.5 percent of their final grade in the class.

This example raises the question of the honor of students at Harvard. If students cannot be trusted on an assignment so minor, how can they be trusted on a final exam?

My classmate, Mr. Yoon, witnessed the identical series of events and believes they can. He states that students at the College were "the cream of their high school classes" and have "certainly never had to cheat for their grades. "Yet most of these students had never faced classes graded as harshly or workloads as intense before coming to Harvard. And a significant number of students probably must attribute a fair amount of their past and present success to skillful cheating.

In some cases, students go over the line. A recent study at MIT found that more than 85 percent of students were guilty of cheating, though most violations were minor. The numbers are probably similar among students of the natural sciences at Harvard.

While I have no firsthand evidence of blatant cheating, the stories of ruined experiments and "borrowed" homework are not just myths told to impressionable first-years. They are regular occurrences.

With cheating so easy, one might wonder how anyone can resist. To some extent, fear keeps students honest. I have had professors specifically state that my assignments in Computer Science classes will be examined for unusual duplication of other students' answers. I don't find this surprising in light of the cheating scandal in an introductory computer science class that rocked MIT a few years ago. If caught, punishment is harsh and the blemish irreparable.

With an honor code, an intelligent student would be able to cheat, knowing that he will never be detected. Seventy percent of Harvard students were valedictorians in high school, but far fewer are Group I now. It would seem very tempting for students to reclaim the academic success that once came so naturally by bending the rules just a little bit.

Though annoying, exam proctors are effective. Being completely unknown, they have no conflict of interest. Teaching fellows might be tempted to look the other way if they were proctoring the exam of someone who had struggled mightily in their course. A TF in a relationship with a student might even aid the cheating. It is not uncommon to be friendly with a TF, and friends just cannot proctor friends' exams with complete objectivity.

If an honor code could work anywhere, it would be at the nation's military academies. There academic and moral training extends 24 hours a day. The honor code of the Naval Academy is simple: "a midshipman does not lie, cheat, or steal."

But three years of training was not enough for dozens of juniors at the academy last spring. Their alleged offenses ranged from obtaining an advance copy of the test to receiving email stating that it might be a good idea to study certain problems on prior exams. The pressure faced by these academy students is probably quite similar to that faced by many premeds here at Harvard.

Mr. Yoon claims that the student body at Harvard would be effective at dealing with these types of incidents. The prestigious student body of the Naval Academy certainly did prove effective--effective at whitewashing their recent cheating incident.

It was not until public outrage led the Inspector General of the Navy to investigate that the truth began to be uncovered.

If the Naval Academy cannot make an honor code work, it seems unlikely that "a brief statement about morality, conscience and academic duty to be printed somewhere in the Handbook for Students" along with a short inscription on the inside of each blue book will be an effective substitute for the watchful eye of Mother Harvard.