Academic Honor Code Research Paper

The Necessity of an Academic Honor Code Academic honor codes need to be preserved in order to maintain a sense of morality among students in the United States. Morales will help students excel by lowering their will to cheat or do wrong, as well as ingraining a sense of goodwill among the students. These notions, though simple, should be enough to warrant implementing an Academic Honor Code. It would go without saying that an academic honor code has students commit themselves to enforcing Academic Integrity, and requiring that they do not plagiarize or cheat in any way; they need to show that their ability to learn flourishes with original content. This does correlate with a lower amount of cheating, as a writer for Huffington Post had found the following:

That is wrong. Some colleges have much less cheating than others. And the existence of honor codes is a key factor. The lower rates of cheating at honor code schools has been observed by researchers since William Bowers wrote his path-breaking 1964 study, ‘Student Dishonesty and its Control in Colleges.’ ” (Callahan)

Researchers have, since that study was conducted, observed and found that a code does indeed reduce forms of cheating, as students wish to uphold academic integrity in their place of study. As such, schools with no code may suffer from more cheating than others. A school’s honor code shifts the views of students and helps give them a sense of integrity and morality. Enforcing an honor code, formally or not, is effective in deterring cheating, as a study conducted had found the following: “As expected, the results also revealed important differences between code and noncode campus environments. In particular, the results suggest that students at honor code schools view academic integrity in a very different way from their noncode counterparts.” (McCabe, Treviño and