Honor Code Dbq

Fear breeds dishonesty and dishonesty breeds dishonor. Today's students often find themselves as unwilling informants and police officers, serving as honor watchdogs upon their own classmates out of fear of the consequences they will face if they don't. This student on student judgement solely cultivates a culture of distrust and suspicion instead of one of honor, integrity and respect. For the honor system to be truly effective, it must be revised to have classmates solely serve as each others judges, through honor councils. The honor code itself also must be redefined so that it can serve as a guideline of the values members of the community should uphold, instead of a system of rigid rules and consequences and do’s and don’ts, meant to terrify

As stated in Source B, students from Lawrence Academy did not feel comfortable reporting their friends and rejected an honor code proposal completely until this provision was amended. This unwillingness to police friends is a pattern that I see in my own high school, and in the high schools of my friends across the country. Not only do students not feel comfortable reporting honor code infractions committed by their classmates, in a survey (Source E), only 8% admitted they ever would. This illustrates another fundamental issue. The honor code is constantly being broken by those who refuse to report their classmates. This constant, knowledgable breaking of the honor code not only strips the honor code of its true meaning, it demonizes it into something unfair and unjust. Therefore, in order for the honor code to retain its intended meaning, it must be amended to not penalize students who do not report their classmates but instead, to have students serve as judges in honor councils. This implementation of honor councils would allow peers to recognize the true cost of their actions without demonizing the values of the honor code as well as assist in redefining what the honor code truly

The honor code is often viewed with disdain by students who see its purpose solely as another set of rules to dutifully abide by. Administrators see it as a way to prevent cheating as seen through Source F where it states, “a number of colleges have found effective ways to reduce cheating and plagiarism… many of these colleges employ academic honor codes to accomplish these objectives.” This philosophy itself demonstrates a major flaw in the major purpose behind the honor code. The purpose of implementing an honor code should not be to eliminate cheating through making examples out of, mainly through expulsion and suspension, those who act with academic dishonesty. The purpose of the honor code should be above all, to foster a community where values such as integrity, honesty and respect are held in the highest regard. Though signing a piece of paper will most likely not result in the immediate adoption of such qualities, an honor code should seek to remind students of the morals they have promised their school, their friends and their family to live by. It is necessary to have an honor code as it reminds students not of the consequences that come with cheating, but of the importance of the morals and the values that they have promised to