When I agreed to write about my college experiences with the honor system, I recalled an occasion when a student asked me to report two students for collaborating on a take-home examination. The student who approached me had herself witnessed the two cheating but was unwilling to report them because she was in the same course. She did not want to be thought to be competing with them. According to the honor code at Stanford (which I remember signing several times, mostly before taking tests), one is required to report instances of cheating as well as to refrain from cheating oneself

At the time, I was the Resident Assistant in my house. The student who approached me did so supposing me some kind of authority who would deal responsibly with the violation in question. I thought about this supposition for a while and then told her that, although 1 had enough indirect evidence that the two students were violating the honor code to believe her, she was the one who should report the incident to her professor since she, not I, had actually witnessed it. She did not report the incident. I thought about confronting the two students myself, but did not. As far as I know, the two students got away with violating the honor code.

Recently, while discussing this incident with some friends, I remembered another case, one closer to home. In college, a good friend of mine regularly collaborated with her peers on homework assignments or take-home examinations; she often obtained help from friends, who were graduate students or professionals, on her programming or logic assignments, on papers, and on problems on take-home examinations. I don't think she ever looked at another student’s work during an in-class examination, but I never tried to find out. What I saw in her outside-the-classroom work was enough to trouble me. But I never reported what I saw. It never even occurred to me to do so. While it did occur to me to bring up the matter with her, I was afraid doing so would strain our friendship. I realize now that I just shut out as much information as I could.

In neither of these cases did the fact that I had signed the honor code and thereby promised to report cases of cheating move me to action or reflection. Instead, I thought about the incidents just as if I had never made such a promise: Was it fair to others for the students I knew to be enjoying this sort of advantage? Would getting away with these relatively minor cases of cheating encourage greater immorality later on in life? Did I want to associate with people who would do such a thing? But even these reflections, on my own moral terns, rather than Stanford's, did not move me to action.

I think that, had I concluded that cheating on tests was only the beginning of a morally grave downward spiral, I would at least have confronted my friend. But as it was, I assumed that my friend, a generous and kind person, would never do anything to cause serious harm to anyone. I did not consider serious the disadvantage in academic results suffered by her peers who were not getting extra help-perhaps because the disadvantage was diffuse, because I did not know them, or because grades did not seem to me so consequential.

Honor and Morality
My response to my friend's seeking help was not based on a purely moral concern about honesty. In college, I wanted to preserve the sense that my work was my own. It took me a long time to accept other students' offers to proofread and comment on my papers before I turned them in. Initially, I even hesitated to take help from Teaching Assistants. Even after I was convinced that obtaining this kind of help was standard practice and didn't give me an unfair advantage over others, I still felt that it compromised my pride, my sense that my accomplishments were my own. My queasiness involved both my sense of what was moral ("is it really morally right for me to get this kind of help?") and my sense of honor ("is it really my own work that is being favorably evaluated?").

In effect, then, the honor code at Stanford, and the fact that I signed it, did not affect my behavior at all. I know that signing it sometimes occasioned a dim feeling of pride, at the knowledge that I was being trusted and was part of a generally trustworthy community. But this feeling could not have survived serious scrutiny: people in my community stole bikes, cut pages out of library books, and cheated Xerox machines or the telephone company when they could. It was a sense of honor that kept me from doing these things-and from cheating. But my sense of honor had to do with my sense of myself as a moral person, and as above "petty cheating." It had nothing to do with keeping my word to Stanford. That was immaterial, since cheating was wrong whether or not I had signed a statement promising to refrain from it.

The same concern for my own sense of honor made me balk at the idea of reporting others to those in authority, in accordance with the honor code. I much preferred the idea of confronting them with what I thought they were doing wrong: tale-telling ran against my own sense of honor. When I think about how an ethic of honor is supposed to work, it seems to me that it depends crucially on one's peer group. Honor has to do with one's status among peers. Their opinion of one and one's consequent opinion of oneself has authority. A rule, made up and set over students by an impersonal university body is not the same thing. If this is right, the appropriate way to deal with violations of the honor code would be within the peer group: it would be to impose social opprobrium on or confront the violators in question, not to report the violation to some authority. In fact, I neither ostracized nor confronted nor reported in college, but comforted myself with the thought that people who cheat are only putting themselves in awkward positions down the line, that they were claiming to be able to do things they would later be called upon to do, and then be unable to do.

When I have discussed these issues with people who attended an undergraduate institution with an honor code, many of them have said that the honor code depends on an ethic of honor which is now dead. I agree to the extent that I do not think that most people regard giving their word as commanding their highest allegiance. I think people are quite willing to break their word, for moral as well as self-interested reasons, particularly when it has been given to an institution rather than to an individual. But this does not mean that honor is dead. In my view, one's sense of honor is bound up in complicated ways with one's sense of what it is to be a moral person. We are proud to live up to this sense, ashamed to fall short of it, and our indifference to certain rules or codes (like mine to the Stanford honor code) can come with the attitude that they are "beneath" one's moral ideal. No individual institution like the honor code can simply stipulate the content of this sense of what is involved in being a moral person. In sum, I think that I found the Stanford University honor code irrelevant because it ignored the fact that people have a sense of what is honorable and moral, superseding a university's prescriptions.