The Pros And Cons Of The Honor System

The largest motivator to employ some sort of honor system is to decrease the act of cheating, stealing, and plagiarizing, by implanting “punishments ranging from suspension to expulsion” for the violators ( Dirmeyer and Cartwright ). Although students shouldn’t feel the need to cheat or steal someone else’s work, every student has or will cheat at some point in his or her academic career. Plus, the schools want to believe all of their students will do the “right” thing, however, just in case, adding this system will end the urges to cheat or anything academically immoral. Rules will be broken whether they’re officially set or not. For example, Chris Kahn reveals that the students attending the University of Virginia have to pledge to never
It’s understandable of why some people believe the system is effective, the only thing they ruled out, like I previously stated is people are going to do whatever they want no matter what the rules are, plus a majority of violators will get away with it. We have police officers and laws and judges to assure people follow the rules and are properly punished but the system is unfair and justice isn’t properly served, so why would adding the honor system work? “The enforcement is handled by an all-student court”and violators receive punishment by their peers. The creators and supporters believe if their peers knew they cheated it create a sense of humility resulting in the end of cheating by shaming them ( Source C ). The shame on violators from their peers doesn’t matter to them, it’s disappointing the people they look up to by cheating or whatever they did. Some students believe it’s not their responsibility to report someone else cheating, because it’s not their business to interfere on his or her’s life or decisions (Source B). So not only is controlling the students urges to cheat impossible, but getting their peers to join in and report the violator of the system. If “the success of the honor code, then, depends on the expectations that students have of their peers’ behavior,” then the students on the board have to comply as much as the reporters (Source
Schools shouldn’t have to resort to a system that coerces scared kids into being the perfect students. The school system enforces everyone to being the same exact person. Every single student needs to have perfect grades, balanced extracurriculars and involvement in social life, perfect planned future, going to the perfect college, having the perfect job, dying leaving a perfect structured life, with people saying “good job, they lived this life perfectly, following all the rules.” Sad part is no one is the same. No one is perfect. We are all meant to follow different paths and having perfect grades will occur for some and others will struggle to scrape by receiving that diploma. So in the end, having a system that punishes violators isn’t going to change the way people act and believing a student that signs “a piece of paper will suddenly cause a cheater to change his ways” is an ignorant thought; furthermore, the students that cheat aren’t going to live their live through success because they will never work for what they have. Everything will be cheated and they’ll lack true intelligences and end up being another wasted brain that was popular in high school and cheated their way through school, only to end up working a job unhappily for someone else, and the honor codes will be some mere