As I acknowledged last week, it has been a long time since I finished my undergraduate studies: forty years. Much has changed since then in the world and in the lives of students. How many times did I make this walk?
Princeton University announced this week that beginning next fall it will proctor all exams, reversing a mandate that had been in place since 1893. So confident in the honor code was the university community in those days, faculty and students alike, that there was a rule forbidding the monitoring of students taking exams.
Not anymore. The advances of information technology, the internet, and most recently artificial intelligence, have made cheating so easy and so pervasive that desperate measures are being sought to force the students to think, write, and prepare their own assignments and exam responses rather than present something they
obtained from another source. Such cheating may obtain a passing grade, or even an excellent one, but it undermines the whole purpose of being a student: to learn.
My college, too, has (or had) one of the most effective and rigorous honor codes in the nation. Marked by the “single sanction,” that is, any violation would obtain the unique penalty, expulsion from the school, it was also administered entirely by the students in a clearly constituted process. Arrival on campus of new freshman was the occasion of rigorous instruction in the expectations and consequences, along with the institutional and personal pride that membership in this society of trust bestowed.
One of the proverbial benefits was that a student could leave his wallet on his library carrel for an hour or a week without fear of losing it or any of its contents to sticky fingers. I knew several guys who tested this proverb, and they did not find it wanting.
The most practical benefit for me that I quickly identified and learned to exploit was that all exams were student scheduled, since we didn’t have to take them together as a class or in the presence of the professor or any proctor. Since foreign language knowledge was most perishable, I would place that exam in the first available slot, always Saturday afternoon. Then my hardest subject would be Monday afternoon, allowing two days and nights for intensive study but also some rest. Freshman year that meant my calculus exams, with which my strategizing met its match. After resting Monday afternoon, I would take another hard exam Wednesday morning, then my last one on Thursday. The plan served me well for four years and many brutal (three-hour!) exams.
But the best illustration of the honor system came fall semester of sophomore year when I took my first economics class. Of course I got the hardest instructor, Prof. Gunn, whose nicknames were “Tail-Gunner” and “Gunner John.” Late in the semester, our second section quiz fell on a Friday, and that morning a chronic medical issue I had nursed for weeks became acute. Minutes before the exam was to begin, I presented myself in Prof. Gunn’s office to ask to be excused from the test. When he heard what I was dealing with he sent me off with a worried “Don’t bother with the exam – go take care of yourself!” Later that afternoon, after a dramatic hour or two at the hospital produced a very happy result, I returned to the professor’s office. He took a copy of the exam he had given to the rest of the class that day, put it in an envelope, and handed it to me and told me to give myself ninety minutes and complete it anytime over the weekend. There are few exams on which I recall working so hard, or so carefully.
As you can doubtless see, all this led to my career as a bigwig economist (hah!). No, it was part of a great and fruitful educational experience that taught me that whereas most people must develop long-term relationships in order to build trust, I was able to offer and enjoy trust as the foundation for forming and enjoying excellent long-term relationships.
The trust I enjoyed motivated me to work harder and more carefully on everything I did, as on that economics exam. This resulted in in my obtaining some pretty good grades, though I admit there were a few clunkers, too. But mainly it helped with what was my number one priority: to learn.
I pray that students in this time of artificial intelligence find a way to enjoy the same.
Monsignor Smith
