Honor Code DBQ Essay

Professional environments such as jobs, school, or other organizations all share a common characteristic, each of which having their own sets of rules and regulations; among these could include something called an honor code, which is meant to be a promise to abide by certain rules, typically cheating in an academic setting. A lot of people want to believe that the honor code is taken seriously by at least most people, but the fact of the matter is that little to nothing is enforcing these “promises of honesty”. While many colleges implement honor codes as a means of ensuring academic integrity, it has proven to be ineffective and quite contradictory for a variety of reasons. A leading argument when addressing the failures of honor codes

There are some obvious problems with the different enforcement strategies though; when relying on students to report other peers, one would also have to consider the honesty of the reporting student, not only that but student enforcement of rules is out of their responsibility. In Source B, Alyssa Vangellia addressed that “The Earlier drafts of the honor code included specific penalties for violations of the honor code, which many students opposed. Students were expected to report or confront a fellow student if they knew that he/she had cheated, lied, or stolen. Failure to confront a student would result in a period of probation. Students opposed this obligation to take action against another student because they did not see it as their responsibility. They feared that a mandate to confront peers would create friction and that a subsequent report could not easily be kept

If a teacher or administrator needs to monitor someone to see if they uphold the honor code, that defeats the whole purpose of relying on a student's honesty, that's not an honor code anymore but rather just another written rule regarding a student's integrity. This false idea of an honor code is teased for being blatantly counterintuitive; Source A is a political style cartoon that illustrates this perfectly with a board that reads, “Using honor codes to prevent cheating” with subtext underneath saying, “Recent research has shown that a spycam can greatly improve honor code”. The idea of an honor code is so ambiguous and misconstrued to the point where the practice has fallen away from actually honoring honesty. A practice that has changed so much, there is little trace of the original idea left, seemingly having formed into just another