Loss of Honor

Count me as one of many horrified old alumni when I read the article in The Wall Street Journal about Princeton abandoning its century-old honor code. While it is actually the case that unproctored exams were effectively proctored by the students themselves, this was true as long as the students reported violations. Now it appears that a culture of fear of social ostracism has developed, akin to self-censuring in classroom discussions. AI has certainly contributed new methods of cheating, but one would have expected that our astute faculty could provide clever countermeasures on a course-by-course basis, rather than broadly dispensing with a well-regarded tradition. When I was a professor of aerospace engineering, for large classes I used to give exams as open book/open note. Students with a better memory for complicated formulas no longer had an advantage, and surreptitious access no longer mattered. I would imagine that history courses, for example, do not depend on rote recall of dates. Demonstration of mastery of material in problem solving or learned essays in exams may be replaced by AI. Has this reduced students to stenographers? Is repeating what a professor said different from transcribing from a chatbot? The challenge is faced now by faculty to teach beyond AI, and should not require a loss of honor by students.