Towards an Honest Excellence

There are certain distinguishing marks of finals time.  For example, there’s that student who hasn’t changed his clothes or shaved in two weeks, the FTOC who wanders around bleary-eyed mumbling soon-to-be useless facts to himself over and over, the guy-who-may-have-been-in-your-class-but-hasn’t-been-seen-for-two-months-and-has-now-reappeared-to-do-an-entire-semester’s-worth-of-work-in-four-days, and the caf store is running perilously low on Starbucks Doubleshots^®.

This period also generally sees an increased awareness of and concern for cheating. The stress and difficulty of many assignments and final exams lead to an environment where some students either feel forced to cheat, or decide to cheat in order to simply lighten the load.

The undergraduate community at Yeshiva now enters this intense period following a semester with a disturbing number of specific incidents where there was a lack of academic integrity, which was itself preceded by a year full of such cases. 

In this issue’s Student Pulse, 76% of respondents were in favor of a university Honor Code.  However, some students expressed the view that the rampant cheating on campus bespeaks the fact that YU is not yet ready for an Honor Code. 

We have arrived at a very simple solution:  STOP CHEATING.  JUST STOP.

It goes without saying that we are referring to shameful overt cheating practices, such as buying or commissioning papers, or glancing over your friend’s shoulder during an exam.  There is no excuse for such heinous offenses.  Personal difficulties, family issues, a tremendous workload, mountains of stress – none of these justifies doing this to yourself and your peers.  There are absolutely no possible circumstances under which these behaviors are acceptable.

Period.

Equally unacceptable are ‘lesser’ forms of cheating, those which even Yeshiva students who would not engage in the abovementioned types of overt breaches of academic integrity would be less hesitant to violate.  Some circumvent attendance policies by having their friends sign them into class, and others use websites like www.swapnotes.com (which contains much otherwise-legitimate content) to download old lab reports and submit them verbatim.

We demand that the members of the undergraduate community at Yeshiva stop cheating, in all its forms.  When we have done so, we shall live and learn in a place free from such a gross burden, and together we will strive for honest excellence.