On March 26, the Honor System Review Committee its preliminary findings regarding the — which were passed with overwhelming support by the student body — at a Council of the Princeton University Community meeting. The Committee took great issue with the first and third referenda, which would reduce the Honor Code’s standard penalty of a one-year suspension to academic probation and exonerate suspected students if their professor claimed they did not violate the Honor Code, respectively. The Committee “revised the wording” of the second referendum, which “originally required two pieces of evidence in order for a case to move forward.”The condemnation of the first referendum is particularly striking.
Welcome to the online home of Princeton University's Honor Code. In 1893, the Honor Code was established as an agreement between faculty and students to uphold a high standard of academic integrity at Princeton. While the words of the Honor Code Constitution have evolved with time, the underlying spirit of trust and commitment to original. All Princeton students pledge to adhere to the Honor Code in the conduct. However, much of your work at Princeton—from papers to problem sets to the senior.
The Committee claimed the referendum was problematic, as it “would create a disparity between punishments from the Honor Committee, which focuses on in-class violations, and from the Committee on Discipline, which focuses on a broader range of out-of-class infractions.”It is highly disappointing that the first referendum would create this inequitable disparity. Likewise, the first referendum, if enacted, would retain a standard penalty (albeit a less punitive one) for all first-time offenses. A standard penalty is dangerously unfair, as it treats all Honor Code infractions as equally immoral and severe — without accounting for intent or motive. Some Honor Code violations are malicious and premeditated, but others are completely unintentional and simply careless errors; the latter violations should be treated with a reasonable level of mercy rather than with the more punitive responses the former violations warrant. All in all, I believe that Honor Code punishments should be equalized between the Honor Committee and the Committee on Discipline and that the penalties for Honor Code infractions should be degraded in proportion to the severity of the offence. Outside of the University’s Honor Code proceedings, the principle of proportional, degraded punishment is the framework for policing legal and ethical violations. A ten-year-old who steals Tic Tacs from a local candy shop is punished less harshly than an adult who robs $1,000,000 from a bank at gunpoint; although both people committed a form of theft, the ten-year-old’s offence is objectively less harmful than the bank robber’s.
Thus, the ten-year-old is likely to be punished less severely, if convicted.The same principle should exist within the Honor Code. All acts of cheating, of course, are wrong. But some acts of cheating are significantly less malicious than others.
A first-year student who accidentally violates the Honor Code on a problem set has committed a less severe ethical offence than a senior who intentionally plagiarizes an entire chapter of a senior thesis to gain a qualitative advantage.