Honor Code Dbq

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In the pursuit of education, many schools and academies have found themselves subject to the same issue: cheating. Plagiarism, unauthorized assistance with work, and all forms of cheating have been engaged in a great war against actual learning, which schools have been fighting to counteract. Some institutions have decided to implement honor codes, and legislatures to instill anti-cheating rules. Although reports of these codes have described improvements, honor codes are unnecessary; they don’t support actual honor, they aren’t taken seriously by their own enforcers, and they aren’t even the most likely cause of decreased cheating in schools. Removing them entirely, would filter out a pointless system. Honor systems don’t support actual honor, …show more content…

Needing to incentivize or even force others to act honorably in their work isn’t actually honorable; not for the enforcers nor the affected. A true system of honor places trust in the subjects that they will abide by the rules, based on their own honor, not negative reinforcement. Source A, a satirical English comic, agrees with this prospect, sarcastically stating in its own words that “a spycam can greatly improve the honor code.” Yes, heavy measures of enforcement can cause more people to follow orders, but it once again removes the aspect of honor; what makes the code different from a regular law system? Without honor—the honor code. is just a code. It shouldn’t have to be disguised or portrayed as something unique and …show more content…

My own school, Weddington High, in order to motivate students to report to one another, has to resort to turning students into bounty hunters, offering financial compensation to report others to officers, which still has little advantage. The honor system is built on a pillar of student-led self-sufficiency, a pillar, that more often than not, doesn’t care about functioning. Chief among the various fallacies of school honor systems, is the possibility that in schools who experience decreased cheating, an honor system may not be the actual cause. Assuming that a school with the code doesn’t adopt the stereotype seen in source A’s comic, a controlling, authoritarian approach that constantly monitors students, all of the sources that have cited decreased cheating, share a common key-phrase that doesn’t have to have anything to do with the honor code: “environment.” Decreased cheating stems from promoting the “responsibility to perform honestly in the school environment,” as source B argues; values of honesty “made Jefferson’s school a richer academy,” claims another student-led In all of the academies’ descriptions of their honor, the honor code isn’t the absolute root of the cause; the environment

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