Keepers of the Code: AI, Cheating, Academic Integrity and College Honor Councils

Colleges and universities, such as Davidson College, that maintain a robust honor code, now find themselves trying to strengthen integrity and trust on campus while it seems the world around them undermines both. Students wrestle every day with artificial intelligence, deepfake videos, false reports fueled by social media and political campaigns that broadcast lies. 

“It’s a hot mess,” said Jana Mathews, professor of English at Rollins College, discussing the efforts to understand AI and use it to improve learning, rather than undermine it. 

Mathews, who also directs Rollins’s pre-law program, joined students and faculty from 11 colleges throughout the eastern U.S. at a conference at Davidson last weekend focused on strengthening their honor councils. 

Students typically run the honor councils at the schools, from Rollins, in Florida, to the U.S. Naval Academy, in Maryland, to Haverford College, in Pennsylvania. They often adjudicate allegations of cheating, and the conference participants tried to diagnose why such cases have gotten more difficult.

They talked about the easy availability of ready-made text or papers. They pointed to the COVID hangover from students learning alone, online and finding shortcuts more tempting with no one watching. Those students also weren’t guided and pushed to find the resources essential to do the work themselves, said Elyse Warren, a junior and honor council member at Millsaps College, in Memphis.

“It’s not justified,” she said, “but you understand why it happens.” 

Caroline Yao, a Haverford senior and honor council member, said students feel the pressure of an increasing public view of college as creating an outcome — a ticket to a paycheck. The value of a degree is perceived as a solid line to a job. Liberal arts colleges, in particular, create clear career pathways. They focus, though, less on technical skills and more on deep capacities, such as analyzing and connecting unrelated problems, and connecting those skills to where students see themselves in the world. 

“How can we keep that going?,” Yao asked between sessions, “Learning for the sake of learning.”  

The honor council students shared the strain of passing down consequences to peers, knowing how it can affect those other students’ academic careers and lives. 

David Rettinger, a psychology professor at the University of Tulsa and author of Cheating Academic Integrity, reminded the students at the conference that, if they are working simultaneously for the best interests of the accused student in front of them, for what’s fair and for the benefit of everyone else, then their job should be hard. He said that their focus is not on punishment but to create the environment and provide the tools, such as time management skills, so that students will avoid the pressure-filled decision at the last minute to take an untruthful shortcut. 

“There is no creepy soundtrack in real life when you are about to make a bad decision. It’s not an ‘After School Special’,” Rettinger said. “Our job is to create that soundtrack.” 

Rettinger also emphasized the faculty’s role, offering the example of a professor offering a “redo” on one or two assignments during the semester if a student’s work falls well short of their capability. It reduces the pressure on a single assignment and, then, on the class. 

“If I convince you that I care more about your learning than anything else,” he said, “maybe you will, too.” 

Students at the conference are working so that their classmates understand the trust that exists across campus and the cost of violating it — the harm to their mentors, their friends and roommates, Yao, of Haverford, said. 

“We want them to understand that, when you break that trust,” she said, “you harm the whole community.” 

A closing panel of experts offered other steps to elevate the influence of honor codes, including:

• Working as much or more on restoring a student’s academic career as imposing consequences. 
• Raising both the barriers to cheating and the cost.
• Addressing how technological advancements, from ChatGPT to online term paper sales, lowered the bar to an existing problem of the temptation to break trust. 
• Helping tackle the much larger problem of educational inequities that leave students whose high schools left them unprepared for college desperate for help once there, even the deceitful kind. 

John McKnight, dean of the college at Haverford, reminded the group at the conference that effective honor codes live beyond a student’s years on campus. They carry it with them into influential spaces in their life. 

“This is a collective action problem,” he said, then offering a hopeful observation, as he looked around the room. “This has become, in just a two-day period, a real powerful network.”