🚀 go-pugleaf

All this discussion about cheating and honor systems prompts me to
post two items from my past.

First, honor.  My undergrad school was Rice University (actually I
started at Rice Institute, but since they changed names in 1960 I
wouldn't admit that for fear of giving my age away ...).  Rice had
(and as far as I know still has) an incredible honor system.  Any exam
or homework that was covered by the honor system included a signed
"pledge" saying (I still remember it after all these years) "On my
honor, I have neither given nor received any aid on this exam."
Any work which was NOT pledged was fair game for anything you could
sneak by the TA's.  Anyway, the up side of the honor system was
wonderful:  Taking an exam and the room is too hot?  Take it over to
the air-conditioned library and bring it back at the end of the hour;
no questions asked.  I even had some timed, closed-book take-home
exams!

Unfortunately, the down side was that if you were caught in ANY breach
of honor (and NOT only pledged work) then there was one and only one
punishment: you were out of school.  It rarely happened, but it did
happen often enough to keep everybody well aware of the consequences.
The most interesting example was my senior year, when a friend and his
girl were both among the Top Ten Seniors, up for election by fellow
students for some yearbook honor or the other.  Since my friend was an
editor of the yearbook, he took the opportunity to stuff the ballot
box so his girl would be among the winners.  Unfortunately, he got
caught, and poof, OUT!  The last semester of a cum laude career, and
he is gone!  The guy showed amazing guts, though, and came back a year
later (the expulsion was only for one year), took all of his senior
year courses over again (all courses were full-year courses, not
individual semesters), and graduated.  A bit like the old joke about
the farmer that counts to three and shoots his horse, then turns to
his complaining wife and says "That's one."  Sure the penalty was
gross, but believe me, nobody I knew ever even THOUGHT of cheating!

Now one on the other side.  I teach part time in the graduate school
of a local private university (that I'll leave nameless for obvious
reasons).  A couple of quarters ago I had a student say he was going
to be out of town for a couple of weeks around the mid-term, and could
he take the exam late?  Sure, says I, I'll leave a copy with the
department and you can take it there when you get back.  Note however,
says I, this will be the SAME exam as everybody else got, so be sure
to NOT talk to anybody about it.  Okay, he says.  Then I get the exam:
it is OBVIOUS that he has cheated.  How do I know?  Well, I always
hand out a complete solution to my exams the week after, when I return
the graded ones.  And his paper contained some of my solutions almost
verbatim!!!  (Talk about STUPID!)  (And by the way, I also hand out
this same solution BEFORE the mid-term the following quarter, to help
those who are NOT privy to the "archives" of previous exams!)  Anyway,
I went to the department head and asked him what he wanted to do about
this.  There IS some concept of an honor system, although nothing as
formal as at Rice, so I wanted to see if the guy was going to be
expelled or if an F would be sufficient.  The department head's
reaction?  He actually suggested that I give the guy a make-up exam!!!
Needless to say I was LIVID, and the cheater got an immediate F.  And
I still haven't resurrected any respect for the (now ex-) department
head.

wayne

  Wayne Hathaway            
  Ultra Network Technologies     domain: wa...@Ultra.COM
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