Chicago Business

Issue date: 5/14/09 Section: GSB News

The Booth Honor Code, in its current form, will never achieve the goal set out above because it does not place any responsibility on the students and because the faculty and administration appear to place little value on it. As students we cannot take it seriously when no one knows the repercussions for breaking it, and we cannot be responsible for enforcing it when we do not know the process for so basic a step as reporting violations. Our professors exhibit a fundamental distrust of the Honor Code by proctoring our exams. When a professor (or TA) is in the room, we are absolved of responsibility for policing ourselves. The concept of a higher standard is defeated if we are not even being asked to hold each other accountable for something as obvious as cheating on an exam. Finally, our administration has ensured that the Honor Code is far from anyone's mind by embedding it in a single form you must sign when you enroll and then burying it in the Student Handbook. It severely limits the potential of the Honor Code by not emphasizing its importance in upholding the ideals of our school. These shortcomings must be corrected before we can realize the full value of the Honor Code.

Living by a higher standard, both in our personal lives and in our future careers as business leaders, is not too lofty a goal. Many of us went to undergraduate colleges that had much more stringent honor codes than Chicago Booth, and found that they did make a concrete difference in our concept of integrity in education. As future business leaders, it is time to move beyond education and consider the application of the honor code to our professional lives as well. The path is right in front of us; all we need is the will to walk down it.

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