Editorial: Intent to cheat

Currently, when a student goes before the Honor Committee, the first job of the committee is to consider the guilt or innocence of the student. A student is guilty if he or she attempted to “gain an unfair advantage” on an exam for “themselves, or others.” Only after conviction, when determining the level of punishment, does the Honor Committee take “extenuating circumstances” into account — such as whether the student actually intended to cheat.

When determining guilt, then, the Honor Committee may treat students who, say, fail to hear a professor ask them to drop their pencils, or who reasonably misinterpret directions as to what materials or calculators are acceptable for use during the exam, as on par with students who commit egregious and intentional Honor Code violations. Intent bears no weight, and if convicted, both groups of students — the accidental and the intentional cheaters — are necessarily subjected to punitive measures extending beyond the class in which they cheated, the mildest of which is probation.

There is little purpose to subjecting accidental cheaters to probation or, at the worst, expulsion. Because the cheating is accidental, such punishment cannot be justified on retributive grounds. Nor can it be justified on the grounds that it would make other students more wary of accidental cheating, as it would be unfair for the University to intentionally subject one student to an unjust, artificially inflated punishment for the purpose of deterring other cheaters.

We believe that, while perhaps professors should penalize students who unintentionally cheat by lowering their exam grades, students should not suffer broad punitive measures as mandated by the current system. The proposed referendum fixes this problem by redefining violations such that students will be found guilty only if they could “reasonably have known” that they were creating an unfair advantage. Intentional cheating is fundamentally worse than accidental cheating, and although perhaps the Honor Committee does unofficially take this consideration into account when determining student guilt, the practice is nowhere codified. The referendum would bind future committees to ensure they convict only those who had reasonable knowledge that they were cheating.

With the wording change, there certainly will be students who claim that they did not realize they were violating the Honor Code during the exam when in reality their violations were intentional. However, we think students routinely make this claim during the punishment stage even with the current wording, and we trust the Honor Committee to separate those who intended to cheat from those who did not. This referendum would make Princeton’s honor system more fair, and it should be voted on and passed.

Correction

An earlier version of this article stated that the proposed referendum "would bind future committees to ensure they convict only those who had reasonable knowledge that they were cheating." In fact, the referendum "would bind future committees to ensure they acquit those who reasonably lacked the knowledge that they were cheating."