Princeton’s vaunted Honor Code can sometimes feel like the butt of a running joke. Despite the policy’s insistence that students report in-person cases of cheating, there’s still a sense that academic dishonesty runs unchecked on some exams.
Last semester, rumors about potential cheating scandals seemed to reinforce skepticism about the Honor Code. And according to students I’ve spoken with, cheating on in-person exams comes as no surprise in some engineering and economics classes. One student told me that in one Economics exam, there was a line out the door to use the men’s bathroom — suggesting that cheating was ubiquitous.
With rumors like these, it might be tempting to suggest sweeping solutions — like proctored exams or no-technology policies. But academic integrity policies at other schools demonstrate that we shouldn’t give up on allowing students to monitor themselves. Rather than emphasize surveillance, Princeton should attempt to build a collaborative Honor Code that is integrated into broader student life and places true trust in students, instead of forcing them to police each other. For such a policy to function, we must commit to a student culture that prioritizes learning for its own sake above grades and post-graduate achievement.
The students I spoke with already recognized instances of cheating as unfair to them and their classmates who don’t cheat. But despite what the Honor Code stipulates, no one wants to be a tattletale — a longstanding aversion of Princeton students. Rather than reporting, some students turn a blind eye to cheating, or deliberately avoid sitting near the back row of a lecture hall to avoid catching their peers in the act.
On their face, these anecdotes may sound like an indictment of the feasibility of honor codes. But such policies aren’t inherently doomed. In The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper chronicled how Haverford College’s remarkably lenient honor code has not led to widespread cheating. In fact, Haverford and Bryn Mawr — a nearby college with a similar policy — stand apart from many other schools in that they have minimized academic dishonesty, even in the AI age.
Like Princeton, Haverford does not proctor exams; their honor code allows students to take exams at any time, without any time limit. But the culture underpinning the policy extends beyond academics. Renewed by a student body vote each spring through a months-long deliberation process, Haverford’s honor code serves as an embodiment of its Quaker values and creates a baseline trust between students and professors. At Bryn Mawr, too, the honor code is explicitly advertised as a “living document.” Both schools host an annual ‘Plenary’ process in which students discuss, amend, and re-ratify the Honor Code.
This stands in stark contrast to Princeton’s Honor Code, which can only be amended via a referendum process requiring vote margins of 75 percent of either the student body or Undergraduate Student Government, hidden behind a 200-person petition or Honor Committee initiative, respectively. It’s no wonder, then, that Princeton students feel no fealty to the Honor Code: most of us never meaningfully agreed to it in the first place. Indeed, the current Honor Constitution — the Honor Code’s guiding document — has not been touched since 2022.
Princeton’s Honor Code is also notably more cynical than Haverford’s — and narrow in its focus on academics. Although it’s framed as a vehicle for student integrity, it centers student-on-student reporting, treating mass dishonesty as an inevitability. On the other hand, Haverford’s honor code offers similar privileges to students while outlining a broader culture of “trust, concern, and respect.” In this way, it deemphasizes punitive policy in favor of an emphasis on broader community trust. As one Bryn Mawr professor put it, it gives students “the benefit of the doubt.”
These differences may seem insignificant. But an honor code can only be a meaningful part of student culture if it truly trusts students to conduct themselves with integrity. If an honor code doesn’t trust students, how can students trust it?
For this reason, Princeton should work toward implementing an honor code that is integral to student identity, not just a perfunctory pledge that we memorize and write on the first page of our exams. That means implementing an honor code that serves as a cultural agreement between students, beyond academics. Like at Haverford and Bryn Mawr, such a policy should also emerge through a collaborative student body process. While a yearly student conference may be difficult at Princeton, which has more undergraduate students than Bryn Mawr and Haverford combined, the University could implement a regular, student-led review process every five years.
A change in policy alone, however, won’t be enough. Haverford and Bryn Mawr’s honor codes do not exist in a vacuum; they are bolstered by cultures that place intellectual growth above material achievement. As a community, we should strive to emulate these priorities, and dispense with our competitive, results-oriented culture. It would be entirely foreign to encounter, as Harper does at Haverford, a Princeton student that cares so singularly about their learning they don’t even understand why one would cheat. Our excessive focus on grading, achievement, extracurriculars, and post-graduate plans renders it difficult for students to value knowledge for its own sake.
With a problem this widespread and abstract, improving campus culture will be challenging. But as my colleague Siyeon Lee pointed out in November, we can all start by caring more about process than perfection. If we decentered the importance of our own grades and embraced learning for its own sake, classes would feel less like a competition, and cheating might not be so rampant.
Princeton’s Honor Code won’t be fixed in a day. Haverford’s success is seemingly a result of a unique, centuries-old student culture. Even with a new institutional policy, it would be difficult to replicate this culture at Princeton, let alone prevent cheating entirely.
But Haverford’s example shows that, even in the digital age, it’s possible to create an honor code — and an accompanying culture — that fosters trust and discourages dishonesty. Moving forward, we should consider ways that Princeton, as an institution and a student body, can build its own academic culture of trust and knowledge for its own sake.
Shane McCauley is a sophomore associate Opinion editor from Boston. He can be reached at sm8000[at]princeton.edu.
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