Academic honesty essay: "...good manners, not a set of rules."

by Greg Snow - Co-Chair, Ad-Hoc Committee on Academic Honesty

Imagine for a moment: Today is the final exam for that class you dread, maybe it's PH1111 or maybe it's MA1024 (it doesn't matter). You walk into that huge lecture hall, put away all your notes, sit in an odd numbered row, and leave an empty seat between you and the next person. The clock strikes 10, and something unusual happens. Instead of your professor and her army of TAs walking in, she arrives alone. Then she says, "It has come to my attention that many of you have another exam next period. So, instead of rushing you, you may take this exam at home. I only ask three things: you don't consult any references including other students or people; you spend no more than one hour working on the exam; and you return the completed tests to my mailbox by 10AM tomorrow." She places a pile of exams on the front desk and leaves. Keep that image in mind for a moment.

Now allow me to turn to the subject of this essay: Academic Integrity. The word integrity alone has a powerful meaning. In the American Heritage Dictionary it's defined as "steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code." When it is combined with the word academic, I like to think of what Samuel Johnson once wrote: "Knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful."

If the goal of an educational institution is to instill in its pupils the desire to learn and to explore, it seems to me incomprehensible that a place of learning could be without integrity, but this appears to be the national trend. One only needs to look at the nightly news to learn of the escalation of dishonesty on college campuses.

There must be a way to combat the growing trend. Over the next few months our campus will be looking at ways to build the trust necessary in an academic community. In our search for ideas perhaps we should turn to the past. Twenty-five years ago the founders of the WPI Plan wrote that the WPI student "should be encouraged to develop a habit of intellectual honesty so that habitual assumptions and ideas can be examined critically."

They also hinted that the campus environment should "provide a congenial atmosphere for living, where the common campus morality would be good manners, not a set of rules."

I'm not sure that this portion of their vision ever materialized at WPI, but it is never too late to try it out.

What a liberating experience it would to live in an academic community with integrity at its heart! It would end the worry that professors have of students cheating on exams. It would free students from the demeaning military state that exists during some exams. It would allow us all to worry less about being taken advantage of and concentrate more on our shared educational experience. It would indeed be liberating!

In conclusion, I return to the vision of the professor leaving the lecture hall - exams still blank. Yet, I'm afraid that this situation can never truly be realized until we have created an environment in which trust and honesty reign. However, with the recent dialog on Academic Honesty, I'm confident that all hope is not lost.