Comment by Forgeties79
12 hours ago
I went to a school that actually tried to enforce it, and unfortunately it ended up being enforced wildly disproportionately along racial lines. My school had a very simple rule: if you were caught cheating, you were expelled. No strikes, no exceptions.
That is a massive burden to put on an educator.
Getting expelled from your university is a very serious, mandated fork in the road for anyone it happens to. So what do they do? If they relate to/empathize with the person, they try to handle it without reporting it. If they don’t, they reported and “let the system handle it.”
As any reasonable person would expect, white people were not reported and marginalized groups were. Privileged groups also got exceptions (the football team had a massive cheating scandal that should have expelled about 15 players, and the professor reported it! But mumble mumble uhh they learned their lesson).
After over a century they finally ended the system recently and honestly? Good. I appreciated what they were attempting to do, but it didn’t work.
You could just... make punishments more proportionate? If people are regularly circumventing your punishment system because they feel it's too harsh, maybe take that as a sign.
That’s exactly what they did. Switched to a multiple strike system. Still, it was a very controversial change.
The point though is these “honor codes” can become incredibly discriminatory and often, when scrutinized, prove not be effective at stopping cheating.
The obvious answer would be to make the punishment more proportionate. Caught cheating in an exam? Lose half the marks for that exam (for example).
Expulsion is far too harsh if cheating is widespread but there should be some penalty.
Agreed. And they finally changed it to a multi-strike system with different punishments. Which is good!
What is your evidence for your assertion that it was enforced along racially discriminatory lines? Or did you go to school in 1964?
What, did racism end with “I have a dream…”?
Public high schools in Georgia were still holding segregated proms no more than 10 years ago.
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The elimination of personal racism in towns of less than 1,500 people in rural georgia isn’t a prerequisite to be skeptical of the claim that a university, which is subject to tremendous legal scrutiny and liability, is treating people differently based on race with regard to rule enforcement.
Especially so when you’re invoking the specter of racially discriminatory enforcement as a reason against rules that would be highly beneficial for everyone. You can’t invoke unproven allegations of racism to argue against having rules and enforcing them. That’s just a red herring for people who don’t like rules.
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