Honor Code

Ted Hill, Pushing Limits (2017; rpt. Minneapolis: Wise Ink, 2020), pp. 42-43 (at West Point):

Surviving the Honor Code often depended on luck, since even trivial violations were grounds for dismissal. Just at the end of our Plebe year ordeal, a good friend of mine from Los Angeles, an excellent scholar and champion rope climber, had been convicted of saying he had shined his shoes when he had not. Awakened from a nap to hand deliver a message to another division, he stumbled out into the corridor with the message. In the hallway an upperclassman challenged him with "Did you shine your shoes before you left your room, mister?" In a daze he gave the standard answer "Yes, sir!" when in fact he had not. In a state of shock, he soon admitted as much. It was never a question of whether his shoes were shiny — they were — but just what he had said. He was on a Greyhound bus back to the outside world within twenty-four hours.

I graduated from a school with a strict honor code, administered by students without faculty or staff involvement. There was only one penalty for an infraction — expulsion. Most of the expulsions (one or two per semester on average, as I recall) were for cheating, a few for stealing. Cheating is reportedly so common at colleges and universities today that, if all cheaters were expelled, hardly any students would be left.