The Honor System

“I pledge my honor as a gentleman that, during this examination, I have neither given nor received assistance.”

On the academic side at least, probably the most vivid memory of the typical alumnus is the frantic cramming for final examinations in all-night black-coffee sessions, then pouring out new-found knowledge in three-hour ordeals. At Princeton this frenetic anguish is intensified by a further temptation: under the Honor System there are no constraints (except those of conscience), and it would be perfectly simple, even logical, to walk over to the Library and look up the answers.

            The proper nature of exams will always be a subject for debate, but almost all will agree they are necessary (evils?); in educational terms the results are worth the effort since they compel the student to review, integrate, summarize, assimilate the course material as a whole. The experience of writing and thinking under pressure and against a clock is also a salutary if strenuous experience.

            The irony of the whole procedure, however, is that no one knows what the rewards are worth – nobody understands what is the quality that grades measure (except that this ability has no relation to success in business, as opposed to the professions). Every professor has had the disconcerting experience of discovering that what are apparently some of the best minds in his class for some reason do not score well on examinations; conversely, some of those receiving high grades are unfortunately not very “bright” in the sense of possessing intellectual curiosity.

“I was a professor once myself,” wrote Henry Adams, “and blush for the memory of it.” So was and does the Ed. – author of this slightly jaundiced piece. On the opposite page and continued on page 12 are the remarks of Waler W. Stevenson Jr. ’35, President of the National Alumni Association, and Caspar Wister ’32, Chairman of the Alumni Council’s Committee on Undergraduate Activities, at the meeting held the first week of school last fall to introduce the new freshmen to the Honor System. Anyone who has taught at a state university knows that examinations there are policed as if they were conventions of convicts; to catch the peculiar flavor of Princeotn exams, with their aimless wandering about and casual conversation, we called upon the services of Betty Menzies’ candid camera. – Ed.

            This paradox was recently confirmed by a study undertaken by the Dean of Admission at Amherst, who asked the faculty to give him the names of the “creative, imaginative students, of the sort they enjoyed teaching.” By analyzing their collective records he would discover their common characteristics and thereafter in the admissions process try to seek out more boys with that elusive set of qualities and discriminate against those not possessing them. Amherst professors would like their students ever after and the place would become a teachers’ paradise.

            The faculty named 141 boys from the three upper classes, 20% of the three groups (proving incidentally, that they do not enjoy teaching 80% of their students, including almost half of those in the academic top quarter). Of these 141 slightly over half were in the top quarter, over one fifth were in the second quarter, and over one fifth were in the bottom half! The Dean’s disconcerting conclusion was that “intelligence test scores and marks in school are not always true indicators of the worth of a student nor even of the power of his intellect.” What is even more disappointing, from his statistical analysis these 141 “creative, imaginative” undergraduates had little in common that could be detected by the admissions procedure ­– Amherst professors will continue to get students they don’t like, and the ones they do will appear by random accident, not by design. *

            It could be argued that what we are measuring by our examinations, in too many cases, is not the hoped-for combination of intellect, comprehension, imagination, skill, sympathy, and diligence but nothing more than the simple ability to pass examinations ­– a not particularly useful knack of exhibiting random scraps of information on demand under “game conditions,” plays the ruthless determination to get high grades as an end in themselves. Academic society rewards the A-earners, regardless of how little of their learning they may retain or use, while it disapproves of, and may even separate, the C- and D-earners, no matter how much of lasting and pragmatic value they may have received from their studies.

A Cheating Mania

            Now a new factor has entered the picture: what we are measuring, apparently, is not simply the ability to pass examinations but also the talent to cheat on them. Like the dancing mania of the Middle Ages, college cheating has swept the country, has become what the Saturday Evening Post called in a celebrated article last year (January 9th) an “American Disgrace.” Among the causes are a widespread and alarming shift in American moral standards, touching gown as well as town; the most shocking revelation in the TV-quiz scandals was not the fact that they were rigged – illusion has always been a part of show business – but that the principal offender was a liberal arts faculty member teaching a humanities course at a famous Ivy League university, a man who held the Ph.D., had written a book in American history, and was the product of a distinguished family of intellectuals, writers and professors. Some of his students could not see that he had done anything wrong or why his university was obliged to suspend him.

            Another reason is the extreme weight placed upon high grades in the present admissions scramble. A college degree has become a quasi-necessity for a junior executive in the business society, and for a professional career graduate school – where two thirds of present-day Ivy League seniors are bound – is obligatory too. The A.B. diploma has become a work permit, the college transcript has been sanctified as a passport to the good life. But the transcript must bear respectable grades, since graduate school deans too have more applicants than they have places; even though we don’t know what they measure, grades are mathematical, “objective,” and can be used as precise yardsticks for rejecting prospective students and deciding between close cases.

            In these ways cheating has become a common phenomenon on American campuses. In his widely cited book, Changing Values in College (p. 23), Professor Philip E. Jacob finds that “frequent cheating is admitted by 40% or more at a large number of colleges” and overall it appears that one third cheat “rather regularly.” In Rose K. Goldsen, M. Rosenberg, R. M. Williams Jr., E. A. Suchman, What College Students Think (page 76), undergraduates at a selected number of universities (not including Princeton) were asked by secret questionnaire. “Have you ever used crib notes or copied in an examination while at college?” Some of the results, unquestionably understated: Wayne 49%, Texas 43%, UCLA 39%, Cornell men 38%, Dartmouth 26%, Yale 24%, Harvard 11%.

            What seems equally striking, often there is no sense of apology or wrongdoing. While students are not exactly proud of cheating or claim it is moral, there is no apparent relationship between the religious values and moral standards of the individual student and whether he cheated or not: the “religious” students cheated as much as the “irreligious.” It seems to be regarded, at worst, as a sort of minor sin – everybody else is doing it, not to take advantage of the opportunity would be to penalize oneself.

            This dismal situation is a very serious one; bribery in business and graft in politics are old stories, but as the Saturday Evening Post pointed out, “Large-scale humbug in our seats of higher learning is far more serious. Here we train the nation’s moral, intellectual, commercial and professional leaders. Fundamental damage in these vital centers could in today’s world climate produce a self-destructive spiral spinning us toward national suicide.”

            Finally, how have these swirling tides of change affected Princeton? Old Nassau is very much a part of the national scene now, especially since the social composition of the undergraduate body has undergone a radical shift: before the war 75-80% came from prep schools with their tyrannical moral codes and nosy prefects, now over half are from public high schools where the extreme pressure to get into college and the more relaxed standards make the practice of cheating common.

            Has the Honor System been able to survive these pressures? On the surface the scene is the same as in older days: the professor arrives at the beginning, hands out the tests, answers questions, and takes his departure, returning three hours later to pick up his blue books; students stroll out for a smoke, chat quietly, even go for a walk. Not a single student, professor or administrator I talked to thought there were any violations of the Honor System whatsoever. The appearance is the same, and so is the reality.

            Changing Values in College charges that American colleges are simply failing to do their job: 75-80% of undergraduates fail to have their values changed, or even challenged, by the college experience. But within this larger pattern Professor Jacob finds a few interesting exceptions, in some private colleges of relatively modest enrollment. A handful of colleges have a “peculiar potency” in changing values, but this influence stems not so much from the classroom as it does from the intellectual, cultural, or moral climate of the campus. Student values, he says, are redirected not by being “taught” but by being “caught” – from the distinctive moral weather and social atmosphere of the college community, a cultural concept wholeheartedly accepted by the student body.

            Here, perhaps, is Princeton’s “peculiar potency.” A Presbyterian symbol of Reformation (on this level, at least), it stands a fundamentalist rock of order in a sea of change. Literally reactionary, it redirects student values back to those of an earlier day, to respect the integrity of a code of honor larger than themselves – back, say, to the year 1928. When Scott Fitzgerald (who himself had flunked out) could write to Dean Gauss: “If next year there should be a Princeotn class which hasn’t felt the Honor System as a part of them – the chain is eternally broken and something has gone out of the life and pride of every Princeton man.” In the same vein he said: “Princeton’s sacred tradition is the honor system, a method of pledging that to the amazement of outsiders actually works, with consequent elimination of suspicion and supervision. It is handed over as something humanly precious to the freshmen within a week of their entrance. Personally I have never seen or heard of a Princeton man cheating in an examination, though I am told a few such cases have been mercilessly and summarily dealt with. I can think of a dozen times when a page of notes glanced at in a wash room would have made the difference between failure and success for me, but I can’t recall any moral struggles in the matter. It simply doesn’t occur to you, any more than it would occur to you to rifle you roommate’s pocketbook.”

* The reason college admissions standard unconsciously discriminate against “creative” persons is suggested by the letter from Mr. Pierson on p. 5 and these quotations from an article in Time about the youthful backgrounds of “creative” people: “‘Creativity does not result from being reared in a warm, cohesive, supportive home,’ although such homes do tend to produce good lawyers, humanitarians and politicians. But ‘ten of eleven famous novelists came from fragmented, stormy homes. Humorists come from tragic homes. Future poets and military leaders are often sickly, mother-dominated boys…Children who are to become eminent do not like schools or schoolteachers.’ Many famed men found their own homes more stimulating, preferred to skip school and read books omnivorously. Today’s ‘regimented schools’ would not consider them college material…All of this turmoil may have more to do with fostering creativity than does a high IQ.”

This was originally published in the February 10, 1961 issue of PAW.