Comment by hammock
11 hours ago
There is an easy solution to Princeton’s problem, and it’s to have an honor system with a backbone. The way honor historically worked.
At my private high school, and at my university (although they later gutted it), we had a “single sanction” honor code.
That is, if you were caught lying, cheating, or stealing - in any way, and in or out of school, though usually it was in - you were immediately expelled. No mitigating circumstances. No negotiation.
To many of my peers this sounded very harsh, especially since these were very good schools you worked hard to get to and succeed in. But part of why they were good schools was because of this.
We do zero tolerance for so many things but integrity is the one thing that misses it for some reason.
"Zero tolerance" policies like that are much more prone to the kind of excessive leniency in application that's described, precisely because the penalty for being found to have cheated is so very high.
In those cases, the academic integrity committee is much more likely to demand a very high standard of proof of cheating, and it can ironically result in more people getting away with it again and again, where, in a system with (say) a "three strikes" policy, they might be more likely to be expelled, because the committee would not hesitate to give them their first and second strikes—and after that, they're clearly a repeat offender.
This only works if the school doesn't accept meaningfully large donations from families of some of its students.
> We do zero tolerance for so many things but integrity is the one thing that misses it for some reason
Look at the type of people in positions of power these days? If we enforced any kind of integrity they would be screwed, but since they're in charge they can undermine policies that would hold them accountable as much as they like
Having integrity in elite colleges helps society. If people graduate from these places by cheating, and they see others graduating by cheating, cheating becomes a norm in elite society. If students are observed to be honest, and those that aren't are usually caught and punished, the graduates leave with a norm of honesty.
Do we live on the same planet?