I was a student at Rice from 1978-1982; I don’t know if the honor code survives there still or not. It was liberating at the time because it meant that we were presumed honorable until proven otherwise. For example, we could, and sometimes did, have timed, closed-book, take-home exams.

The honor pledge sharpened the division between cheating and being honest. If I had cheated, then written the pledge on my assignment, I would have had to tell a bald-faced lie in addition to my cheating. While it is often easy to rationalize sin, it’s harder to rationalize, then lie about it to someone else. This is why accountability groups are effective.

However, I don’t think the honor code and pledge would have meant anything without the moral foundation provided by the first three factors. They amplified the instincts of my conscience, but if I didn’t think cheating was wrong in the first place, it wouldn’t have stopped me.

I just have two words for all of you. No DUH!

Just because you slap the label Christian on something, that doesn’t mean it’s automatically heavenly bleached perfect. We all cheat, at some point. (I can’t say I’ve “cheated” in college per se, but I DID wait until the last minute to do my math papers almost religiously.) And I did do some cheating in my (Christian) high school. You’d be surprised how well you can code title/author match-ups in your literature class desk.

I remember one kid in my high school or maybe middle school class. We did an assignment about birds. While all the other kids paraphrased sections of books and encyclopedias, one kind whom I’ll call Scooby (Because that was his nickname anyway) decided that birds were too borin for him to research. SO he printed out the Encyclopedia Americana article on birds. My teacher failed him horribly because a) he KNEW Scooby didn’t write THAT well, and b) Scooby, being the genius that he was left the web address at the bottom of EVERY PAGE!

To be fair, I did plagiarize a little bit of my final term paper for my English class. Seems I thought what a particular organization wrote pretty much summed up what I wanted to say, so I slapped it somewhere in the middle of my report. Later, the teacher said my 18 page paper (About 90% of which was my ideas anyway) was too long and had to be cut. So the plagiarized material was scrapped anyway. Maybe that was God giving me a chance to redeem myself. It worked. I hadn’t cheated since. (Procrastinated maybe. Cheated, no.)

The University’s honesty policy has been revised and transgressions must be reported upstairs and create a file that follow the student’s performance in all their classes so that cheating in one class becomes part of their permanent record rather than an isolated case that no one else ever knows about.

Good article, Jim.