University Honor Systems

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how nearly every institution of higher education has some form of an honor system with varying degrees of student participation, predetermined harshness and procedure, and sets of guidelines governing student conduct and integrity. It employs the interpretive paradigm as an approach to understanding the motivations and actions of James Madison University's honor system's most intimate agents. It attempts to show that what we learn about the agents of the honor system is most telling when drawn into sharper relief with less intimate, less permanent, more occasional agents, such as witnesses, professors, and defendants. It focuses on the culture of the JMU honor system's more intimate agents and on the more attenuated participants and argues that the honor system's internal agents embrace a culture of guilt, whereby agents weave into their framework a stronger presumption of guilt for accused parties than those external to the system and a greater taste for severity of punishment.

From the Paper:

"Cheating is prevalent at American colleges and universities. Rutgers University professor Donald L. McCabe is an expert in the field of academic integrity. Research that he conducts published in The Chronicle of Higher Education indicates that nearly 75 percent of students at top colleges and universities have cheated at least once in their adult academic career. (The Chronicle, Oct. 15, 1999). Unless James Madison University is substantially different in some relevant respect from the compilation of schools McCabe's evidence is based upon, there is no reason to think that the rate of cheating at JMU is a substantial deviation from what McCabe reports the national rates to be. (This of course is if we relax any potential criticism of McCabe's internal validity for the time being)."

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