Middlebury's Honor Code and the Faculty and Student Relationship
Susan Campbell
September 2005
Good afternoon. I am very happy to speak with all of you today as you prepare to sign the College’s Honor Code. I believe that the Honor Code is a defining feature of the Middlebury College experience, and I am grateful for the opportunity to try to explain what it means to me as a faculty member, and how I think faculty and students alike benefit from it.
I suspect it doesn’t surprise you that a college professor would endorse the notion of academic honesty. You’ve probably been told by teachers, parents, and other adults for most of your life that cheating is wrong, immoral, and dishonest. And those same adults probably created circumstances that protected you from whatever impulses you might have had to cheat. As a small child, your mother or father might have gently admonished you when you denied responsibility for your own misbehavior. Your teachers in high school might have paced the aisles of the classroom while you took exams, trying to discourage cheating by suggesting you’d be caught if you tried. Now, however, as a student at Middlebury, signing the Honor Code means that you are committed to behaving with integrity and honor, not because your parents or your teachers tell you you should, and not because someone will catch you if you don’t, but because you choose to.
Why make that choice? What do you gain from behaving with integrity in your academic pursuits? There are many obvious good answers to that question, but I’d like to suggest one you may not have considered. I believe that one benefit of your commitment to academic honesty is the nature of the relationship between students and faculty at Middlebury.
In an effort to explain what that relationship is, let me first provide a counter example. I attended graduate school at a large research university, a school with no honor code. During my years there, I served as a teaching assistant for many undergraduate courses. One job of the T.A . was to compose, proctor, and grade exams. My fellow teaching assistants and I undertook those tasks with the presumption that many students, and possibly any student, might be prepared to cheat if not subjected to vigilant surveillance. We randomly assigned students to seats in a large auditorium so they couldn’t sit with friends who might provide answers to test questions. We prowled the classroom while students completed a test, looking carefully for evidence of wandering eyes or suspicious behavior. We banned baseball caps during tests because we feared that notes for cheating might be written on the underside of the brim.
Now, you can imagine that when every student seems to be a potential cheater who may care more about getting a good grade than about learning or being fairly evaluated, the relationship between teachers and their students is haunted by the specter of mistrust. In that atmosphere, there is a distance between students and faculty; we become potential adversaries, seeming to work at cross purposes.
When I left graduate school and came to Middlebury, I found a very different set of expectations. I was surprised when I was told as a new faculty member that the faculty do not proctor exams. The Honor Code, it was explained to me, means that there is a contract of trust between students and faculty: Students pledge that their work is their own, and faculty respect the seriousness of that pledge by allowing students to complete exams without surveillance. I was somewhat unnerved by this at first, but I have come to realize that we all benefit immeasurably from that contract. I can work with students with the assumption that they want to learn and are willing to take intellectual risks. I can assume that when a student writes “I have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid on this exam” that it is true. I can trust that the tactics that I used in graduate school to catch cheating students are no longer necessary, and are in fact antithetical to the nature of the faculty/student relationship at Middlebury. We all benefit because we are no longer potential adversaries; we are partners in the educational enterprise.
I want to be clear that I am not naïve. Although I assume that a student who writes the Honor Pledge is being truthful, I know that there are students who may choose to cheat on an exam or plagiarize a paper. I know because I have discovered it in my own classes. I will tell you, however, that the experience is rare, and when it does happen, it feels like a painful breach of faith, faith that is built on my experience with hundreds of students who have upheld the Honor Code and valued the reciprocal trust it engenders, and who make me feel privileged to be a part of this community of learners.
I urge you, then, as you sign this pledge today, to consider carefully the commitment you are making, and to respect the sense of community that depends on it. It is a community that we are all honored to be a part of and into which we are happy to welcome you.