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<p>That’s rather unsavory, particularly considering the sentence that follows:</p>
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<p>Nothing builds community like knowing that potential informants are everywhere!</p>
<p>If your sense of community depends on having people around you who will tolerate you breaking the rules, maybe the fault lies with you.</p>
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<p>All bureaucratic systems run the risk of clouding the importance of integrity; after all, you’re teaching people that it’s important to follow rules and regulations, which is important. For people who lack integrity, when they see rules and regulations all they can think about is loopholes (“Can I apply binding ED to three schools and see what happens? What can they really do to me?” “What if I make up the ECs? Can they really check out everyone’s activities?” “What if I lie about the number of credits? How can colleges check? Can they expel me if I’m already enrolled?”)</p>
<p>loco10- Remember that all the people you know at your current college will know of your move to a new American school. They can drop an email to your US school if they hear you entered under false pretenses. And yes, you would be expelled, or if after graduation, your degree would be revoked, and your reputation ruined. Not a good start to adult professional life.</p>
<p>loco…I might ask why you want to go to school in my country? Is it because it’s a great nation with a longstanding history of honest patriots/forefathers whose uncompromising ethics and morals are what have shaped it into the fine country that my husband and father have served selflessly – my grandfathers have given their lives for – my tax dollars fund the basic elements INCUDING the great universities? For you to seek to gain unscrupulous passage and possibly jeopardize many hardworking ETHICAL young American students’ chances in their own homeland is repugnant to me. My advice, either follow OUR rules or stay in your own country and attend college there!</p>
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<p>That’s the standard and predictable distortion of the posted remark. I’ll leave it to the Honor Code informant crowd to determine whether to pursue your prosecution for the Terms Of Service violation contained in the speculation on (alleged) ethical faults of particular individuals. As to the point actually made, prior to distortion:</p>
<p>The sense of being in a properly functioning community does depend on the people around being free to exercise their own judgement as to whether to report crimes, and that judgement being balanced by some degree of social discouragement against over-reporting of transgressions. Especially in cases where the punishment and crime are mismatched, such as expulsion of a student for seemingly victimless behavior such as low-level marijuana or alcohol use.</p>
<p>Chill out, I was just asking because of my unfair situation as this could prevent me from studying in the US. It would be very mild anyways…I just wanted to know if I could sort of erase that semester in college.</p>
<p>Anyways, I would never risk my position once being inside a university so I most likely wont lie.</p>
<p>don’t expect to succeed if you don’t take any risks.</p>
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<p>It is “the same for all” only if you don’t examine too closely. Universities take as first-year applicants people who have done grade 13 (where it exists) or a “postgraduate year” at a boarding school. For example, </p>
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<p>A year at Exeter is comparable to, and in many ways designed to simulate, the experience of attending college. You can split hairs over whether the two are the same in every respect, but certainly some applicants are more equal than others in their ability to utilize this path.</p>
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<p>The thing is, this doesn’t actually happen. People do not in fact get expelled for failing to report that their friend committed an honor code violation, and don’t get expelled for honor code violations nearly as much as colleges with honor codes claim. And in fact, your “low-level marijuana or alcohol use” isn’t even a violation of many of the honor codes I’ve seen. The hypothetical community where everyone immediately reports all infractions of any size is bad, sure, but that’s not actually what happens.</p>
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<p>According to the following, quite a few students at UVA are investigated (or even put on “trial”!) for Honor Code violations, of whom a substantial fraction “leave [the university], admitting guilt”.</p>
<p>[The</a> Honor Committee](<a href=“http://www.virginia.edu/honor/wnew/stats.html]The”>http://www.virginia.edu/honor/wnew/stats.html)</p>
<p>Apparently most of the departures are cheating cases (famously including a plagiarism scandal in 2001 that led to about 200 students investigated and more than 30 “leaving admitting guilt”). </p>
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<p>It does not follow that there is no constraint (created by Honor Codes and Honor Courts and Honor Kangaroo Trials and whatever effects these have on the campus culture) on people’s natural judgement of whether to report. The language of the Code quoted above is clear and refers to an unequivocally required “immediate reporting” of all violations directly known to the student. At the Davidson Code webpage there is an additional, somewhat medieval sounding, Honor Pledge certifying that a student knows of no Honor Violations associated with a given paper, exam, etc (such as other students cheating). It seems to me that if a wider UVA-like cheating scandal were to develop, then students who failed to report it could face reprisals. In such situations, students, in addition to following their internal ethical instincts, would have consider the strategic implications of possible Honor Code penalties when deciding whether to report the misconduct. It’s the latter consideration step whose presence, or imposition through a code, is opposite to any notion of ethics.</p>
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<p>The UVA numbers show that “leaves”, whatever those are in particular cases, are occuring every year for Honor Code violations. If there is an Honor Code with teeth it will, inevitably, have serious (and not necessarily fairly judged or competently investigated) ramifications for some of the accused violators who are informed upon by fellow students. Any source of pressure on some community members to volunteer accusations against others is very, very unsavory.</p>
<p>loco10 -</p>
<p>Each college/university in the US sets its own policy about who is, and who isn’t, eligible to apply as a first year student. You need to contact each of the places you think you might apply to and ASK THEM WHAT THEIR SPECIFIC POLICY IS!!! They will tell you whether you must be considered a transfer applicant or not.</p>
<p>Then, you can decide if you want to apply there badly enough to do so as a transfer applicant.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
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<p>That would seem to me to be a good thing. What is wrong with people who admit they were cheating being dismissed for cheating?</p>
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<p>Yeah, and almost all colleges are have very clear and unequivocal language that alcohol may not be served to people who cannot legally drink it. That doesn’t mean that people under 21 can’t easily get alcohol on a college campus, because what is written down and what is actually done don’t necessarily agree. I highly suspect that when someone is actually expelled for failing to report an honor code violation, it’s more like “oh, I let him use my dorm room because I didn’t think he should get caught”.</p>
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<p>Do you have a system in mind that always results in fair judgment and competent investigations? That can catch cheaters without anyone being willing to report cheaters?</p>