The university contends that he changed an answer after the conversation. Before he turned in his paper, he spoke to the others. Clayton, then a sophomore, was one of three students who had missed the test and were making it up.
Clayton argued that his rights under the Princeton honor code were denied after he was accused of cheating on a biology laboratory exam. No proctors are present in classrooms during exams. At the end of each exam, students are required to sign a pledge saying that they have not violated the code. A ten-year-old who steals Tic Tacs from a local candy shop is punished less harshly than an adult who robs $1,000,000 from a bank at gunpoint although both people committed a form of theft, the ten-year-old’s offence is objectively less harmful than the bank robber’s.The honor code, to which each Princeton student must pledge support, says that students will not cheat on examinations given in class and will report any students who do cheat. Outside of the University’s Honor Code proceedings, the principle of proportional, degraded punishment is the framework for policing legal and ethical violations. All in all, I believe that Honor Code punishments should be equalized between the Honor Committee and the Committee on Discipline and that the penalties for Honor Code infractions should be degraded in proportion to the severity of the offence. Some Honor Code violations are malicious and premeditated, but others are completely unintentional and simply careless errors the latter violations should be treated with a reasonable level of mercy rather than with the more punitive responses the former violations warrant. A standard penalty is dangerously unfair, as it treats all Honor Code infractions as equally immoral and severe - without accounting for intent or motive. Likewise, the first referendum, if enacted, would retain a standard penalty (albeit a less punitive one) for all first-time offenses. The Committee claimed the referendum was problematic, as it “would create a disparity between punishments from the Honor Committee, which focuses on in-class violations, and from the Committee on Discipline, which focuses on a broader range of out-of-class infractions.”It is highly disappointing that the first referendum would create this inequitable disparity.
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