[impendia]

I was an undergrad at Rice where we had a very strong honor code. Unsupervised exams were common, and to the best of my knowledge cheating was very rare. If you were accused of cheating then you went before the Honor Council, which was run entirely by students.

I considered this an enormous success. It created an atmosphere where we were treated with respect, and where we were expected to treat others in the same way. If someone did cheat, then they would certainly be too ashamed to admit to it. It was a community where I was proud to spend four years.

Yes, I would say that Rice students are honorable -- without the scare quotes.

How is this achieved in practice? Wish I knew. This is the sort of thing that every university, and every organization, wants to achieve. Trust is very difficult to build if it's not already there; and it's much easier to erode.

[RonanTheGrey]

> How is this achieved in practice?

You were accountable to each other, not to an authority. Authority gets you enough to do the bare minimum to not get fired or not get caught.

Being accountable to each other feels very very different. It's tough to explain in an HN post but anyone who has felt the difference knows what I meant. You care what your peers think. You care about that authority only enough for them to leave you alone.

Never let it be said that shame isn't an effective tool.

[smogcutter]

> Never let it be said that shame isn't an effective tool.

This is true, but at the same time I think shame as a motivator is often really unhealthy. People can do all kinds of terrible things to avoid shame: at the extremes, witness things like family annihilators or so-called “honor killings”.

I’ve been reading a book about Midway lately so this is on the brain, but a culture of shame is part of the complex that prevented the Japanese from reeling in insubordinate but “patriotic” junior officers, and from realistically assessing their own and their opponents’ capabilities. Meanwhile the modern process for evaluating air accidents (constantly applauded on HN) explicitly removes the question of blame and shame.

So, I’m not really saying anything about Rice university. I’m sure they don’t have to worry about honor killings on campus. This has just been on my mind lately. Just saying that without social release valves for shame you can get some really wild consequences.

PS for anyone interested in Midway, read Shattered Sword for everything you ever wanted to know about early-war Japanese flight deck operations.

[_8091149529]

> How is this achieved in practice? Wish I knew.

I think my take-home from this discussion is that the honor code can be made to work in the right circumstances that exist, at least, at Caltech, Rice, etc.

At the same time, I believe it is impossible to induce the requisite "cohesion" in other contexts such as 100% remote learning or high-stakes mass testing (entrance exams etc.), even if the student body stayed the same.

[908B64B197]

> high-stakes mass testing (entrance exams etc.)

That's because it's done wrong.

There are countries where they simply sort by descending scores on whatever standard test they came up with to admit. As if the test was perfect and results could be compared at an infinite decimal place (hint, stats and physics disagree with that!).

So the test basically becomes a measure of how someone is good at taking the test and you start to see min-maxing behaviors. It's a contest to see who can pour the most time into maximizing its results. The incentives for cheating are simply so high. The downside of cheating is that you don't really learn, but since the only skill these tests teach you is taking the tests, you are really robbing yourself of a skill that becomes useless 3 minutes after the test.

My advice is to throw these tests in the trash.

[progman32]

Fellow Rice graduate here. Looking back, being treated with trust and respect - after a decade of the opposite treatment at the hands of middle and high school - was a real turning point for me. We were trusted to make our own choices, and expected to reciprocate. In my experience, this leads to fewer cases of anti-social behavior. Which is more trustworthy - a company that simply expects tasks to be completed well and on-time, vs. a company that takes screenshots of everyone's machine and tracks bathroom breaks? I find it's overwhelmingly the former. Granted, the causal arrow may go either way.

The council does have teeth. My friend was sent in and found guilty of cheating on a test. They got kicked out in short order. The straight-A student they'd allegedly copied the answers from got a few months' suspension. I never got an explanation as to why the sentence differed.

No system is perfect.

A professor questioned me as a witness at the "student council" hearing. I expected a student to do the job. The questions were all worded to make my testimony skew towards a guilty verdict, calling my own integrity into question. This is expected if there was a mechanism for an organized defense, but I was never questioned by the "defense attorney". I left the questioning disturbed and frankly afraid for the safety of my own academic record despite not having done anything wrong. Guilt by association. It felt like a witch hunt and a front for implicit faculty power. My friend still denies wrongdoing and had to rebuild their degree from scratch at another institution. They are still proud of the time spent at Rice, even though they feel their degree was taken away unfairly. The only evidence I heard against my friend was that they had made the same mathematical error as the other implicated party.

My first take-away from the situation was that organizations based on trust work well, but it is critical to have robust mechanisms in place for dealing with moments where that trust gets called into question. It is human nature to take trust away faster than it is given, even if it turns out there was no wrongdoing.

My second take-away is that organizations based on trust tend to punish violations disproportionately, especially if the violation reflects badly upon the group.

My third take-away (only realized years after the fact) was that trust-based systems tend to create a tyranny of implicit rules that tend to exclude newcomers (like students) unless specifically addressed.

I'm still very much in favor of a high-trust environment, but it is far from a cure-all. I find it's a prerequisite to a robust system, but must be paired with counterbalances.

For my beef with the Student Council, Rice was an overwhelmingly positive and nurturing experience. If I ever decide to get another degree, that's where I'll go, and I always recommend it to prospective students with an independent streak.