Adam Goodman | Cheaters never win - unless Penn lets them

I hate cheaters.

I generally believe they belong in the lowest circles of the Inferno, chilling with Judas, Brutus and Cassius in Satan's mouth.

But, unlike many professors at this fine institution, I'm realistic. Cheating exists everywhere, and Penn's no exception. Which is why the honor code needs to be abolished. Immediately.

The honor code - by which I mean any instance in which a professor or TA relies on a student's sense of "honor" not to cheat - simply doesn't work.

Case in point: the OPIM 101 scandal that took place at the end of the Spring 2007 semester. Students were allowed to work in groups of up to two or three for their final case of the semester, but collaboration between groups was strictly prohibited. Once the cases were turned in, a statistical model was run over all the cases to ensure such collaboration didn't take place.

The result? As reported by the Daily Pennsylvanian in September, roughly 15 to 20 percent of Wharton's entire class of 2010 was brought under investigation by the Office of Student Conduct for having a 60-plus-percent overlap with another group's case.

Almost every Wharton student I talked to said that collaboration between groups (which, no doubt, often means good ol' plagiarism) was commonplace and that the OSC's numbers were probably underestimates. In fact, many felt that this kind of collaboration wasn't really "cheating," despite what the University's Code of Academic Integrity (which essentially functions as Penn's honor code) has to say about it.

It's not that Wharton students are black-hearted, morally bankrupt charlatans who just can't wait to take part in insider trading and corporate fraud (although this is true); it's that the honor code brings out the worst in people.

Give students a chance to cheat and they will. According to a widely-cited CollegeHumor survey which polled almost 30,000 college students, approximately 61 percent of students have cheated (and only 27 percent said they felt bad about it).

But here's the real shocker. At schools with an honor code, 67 percent of student admitted to cheating; at those universities which don't have an official honor code the number was 41 percent.

Sounds unbelievable, right? Why would an honor code exacerbate cheating? But I wasn't surprised.

Relying on students' honor needlessly tempts those who otherwise wouldn't cheat (probably most offenders). Worse, in instances where cheating is easy, many students assume they'll be at a disadvantage if they don't break the rules.

Here's the sad and unavoidable truth: cheaters do prosper.

According to the CollegeHumor survey, the average GPA of cheaters was a 3.37, while the average of non-cheaters was a 2.85. Relying on honor codes simply further incentivizes cheating.

And most inexcusably, toothless honor codes punish those with strong enough moral compasses to never cheat under any circumstances. For this last group the honor code supposedly builds character; for the rest, it builds cheaters.Forgive me, but I'd rather build character in less harmful ways.

Don't get me wrong. I wish that we all had such robust moral compasses. I wish that those antediluvian notions of honor and rectitude which yielded the honor code still permeated our society. I wish the word "integrity" was something we actually believed in, rather than merely paid lip service to.

But that's not the world we live in. Perhaps past generations merited the honor code; ours doesn't deserve it.

Of course, the honor code can never be truly abolished and doing so would only be a symbolic measure. Responsibility lies with professors and TAs who need to recognize that cheating is a serious problem.

"I think professors could do more to deter cheating," wrote Caitlin Devlin, the outgoing chairwoman of the University Honor Council, in an e-mail.

Devlin's right.

That means no more take-home tests. It means not using the same test for the 17th year in a row that everyone knew about before they even enrolled in the class. It means checking calculators before exams (or Penn providing its own). It means TAs actively monitoring tests, not listening to their iPods while they chip away at a moderately hard Sudoku.

Finally, it means doing away with reliance on a counter-productive and meaningless honor code. Penn doesn't need to publicly lead a nation-wide crusade against cheating, but is it too much to ask for our professors to stop facilitating it? Cheaters are here and they're here to stay. The sooner the higher ed community can figure that out, the better.

Adam Goodman is a College junior from San Diego. His e-mail address is goodman@dailypennsylvanian.com. The Devil's Advocate appears on Thursdays.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.