Why Schools Should Have Honor Codes

Schools should establish and enforce honor codes for their campuses. With rules in place students will be less likely to cheat on tests and other important assignments.

 

“We see significantly less reported cheating on campuses with honor codes compared to those without,” said Pavela and McCabe, writers for Newport News in Virginia.

 

Based on a student run survey in 2007 at a small public school, 40% of students admitted to having broken honor codes without being caught. Even if schools do put honor codes in place, not all students will be honest and follow rules.

 

“Roughly two-thirds of students acknowledged one or more incidents of explicit cheating in the last year,” said Pavela and McCabe.

 

With it so easy for students to cheat, an honor code that is strict enough and able to be highly enforced may be hard to create. With easy access to the internet students have resources at their fingertips.

 

“The internet provides an inexhaustible source of information, and it is tempting to simply insert phrases directly into reports,” said Altbach, a higher education scholar at Boston College.

 

The students at Desert Vista may not have a lot of problems with cheating but there is certainly a lot of students with the resources to cheat. Whether it is a friend who studied or a paper on the back of an ID students have plenty of helpful material to go around.

 

“Sitting in my English class last year the girl next to me had the vocabulary list printed in her phone case so she could look at it but also hide it when the teacher came by,” said Freshman Aries Tryner.

 

Students are coming up with many clever ways to cheat, hopefully teachers and administrators can come up with a plan to eliminate most if not all ways to cheat.