education

As I clear up the loose ends of academic dishonesty cases from last semester, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a friend over the holidays. We were discussing schools: her daughter is about to apply for college, and my son is about to enter kindergarten. She asked about where I went as an undergraduate, and what I liked about it.

I didn’t have a good answer then, but I’ve thought about it a great deal since, and I think what was most significant about my experience at Davidson was the honor code. There were certainly some immediate benefits such as self-scheduled exams, which allowed us as students to show up at whatever exam period we chose, pick up an exam, and take it in the classroom of our choice.

The real benefit, however, was cultural. There was a culture of trust in and out of the classroom that isn’t present in many institutions. I don’t believe that the difference is generational because my cousin who went to Tulane a few years before I went to college talked about how rampant cheating was there, so I’m not making a statement about kids these days.

At my institution we are required to include in our syllabi written policies about acceptable makeup work, and the college has a policy about which absences are “excused” (and therefore will allow makeup work) as long as they are properly “documented.”

That was never my experience as an undergraduate (or graduate student, for that matter): on the rare occasions when I asked for an extension, it was granted on my word.

Now, however, I have to deal with verifying documentation of excused absences, and all too often the documentation I am given to allow a makeup is forged; usually very poorly forged.
I’m still shocked and insulted when I catch students being dishonest. Part of it is the insult to my intelligence that they would do such a poor job of cheating, but I think the bigger shock is the breach in our relationship.

I didn’t go into teaching to be adversarial. I want to trust and work with my students, not act as prosecutor. In a culture that sees cheating as commonplace and accepted among peers, the faculty-student relationship is qualitatively different for those in a more trusting environment. Education is a transactional enterprise; students try to guess what I want so they can give it to me and get a grade in exchange. Cheating is like a coupon, a way to get more bang for their buck.

I’m certain that there must have been some cheating at Davidson, but I never personally witnessed it, and if it occurred, those involved felt a cultural pressure to keep it well hidden.

Davidson is unique in many ways, but I know that it isn’t the only institution with an honor code, and it certainly isn’t the only one with a culture of academic honesty, but I believe that student experience in such an environment is more valuable than an environment based on distrust. I can see the difference in dealing with administrators who didn’t have that experience. There’s an extreme fear that we can’t know whether students in online classes do their own work. Well, we can’t. We also can’t know that students who take face to face classes do their own work, or even that the students who show up for class are really the ones who are registered.  But we carry on anyway, and in a culture of honesty, it’s not a problem.