According to a resent report, cheating among college and university students is on the rise. However, Groveton College has successfully reduced students cheating by adopting an honor code, which calls, for students to agree not to cheat in their academic

While it may be true that an honor code, which ask students in colleges and universities to promise being honest and encourage them to expose others who will or may cheat in an exam,is more useful than the system based on the teachers monitoring, but this argument rife with holes and assumptions. This discussion is not strong enough to prove the honor code is perfect and useful absolutely. We should not ignore the problems as follow.

First, the promises from students are really important and necessary. It is a foundation for everyone to judge what should they do, or shouldn't.But if the promise can really play the role of fundamental principle--which I take leave to doubt--there would not be so many students cheating. In the honor code, a new system to avoid the phenomenons of cheating, is based on the promise of students. If they give up their promise when they need a high score, the institution, which called honor code, will fall. Moreover, the honor code is also encourage students to expose others cheating behaviors, the weakest link of the code, will not be useful as we hope. Is there anybody will betray their friends? I do doubt it.

Second, the number has been reported of cheating cases in Groveton College and the comparison between different system and different years, are not strong proofs to indicate the honor code is better than teachers monitoring, because we cannot sure the authenticity of them. Assume an opposite situations with the author's result: if the number of cheating cases increases after Groveton College use the honor code and it is still increasing this years without the monitoring of teachers; the only reason for the dropping figure is nobody want to notify faculty members about the cheating cases. It is impossible for us to get the real number of cheating cases until we find a way to protect students, who expose cheating behaviors, will not be hurt by their classmates for the right thing they do.

Finally, I really happy to heart that there are more students express they would less likely to cheat under the institution of honor code in place than without. But the survey,if it is fully representative in Groveton College, is also not enough to get the conclusion--all colleges and universities should use the honor code of Groveton College to decrease the cheating among students. After all, the difference of different students, who have various backgrounds, make it difficult for honor code to adapt so many situations.

To draw a conclusion, the argument is not strong enough to support the idea of pushing Groveton College's honor code to all of the colleges and universities to take place the system of teacher monitoring for decreasing cheating cases. We need more study about it.