The Honor Code

Setting a High Standard

By: Kessler, Tim

Posted: 5/14/09

There is a lot of talk these days about what kind of standards business leaders should be held to, and what role business schools should play in "teaching" these standards. There is a general agreement that the bank CEO should be held to a higher standard than the bank teller, but, as Dean Snyder explains, a major challenge of business schools is finding a way to incorporate this belief into repeatable actions in our day to day lives. The Honor Code could solve this problem, but we are wasting our chance to capitalize on this powerful resource.

The Honor Code is so rusted from lack of use it no longer performs its elemental function. Designed to make members of an institution accountable to no one but each other, it should prompt us to adhere to the higher standard that is found lacking every time another fraud is uncovered or another company destroys its shareholder's money. The rub is, in order to make it effective we need to believe in it and follow it in our daily routines, which we simply are not doing now. Understanding and abiding by the Honor Code is the first step we can take towards becoming the responsible business leaders of the future that this school hopes to produce.

An honor code doesn't fix the economy or prevent corporate fraud, but it is what we can do now, and it is how we can incorporate the same integrity that will be needed to maintain the trust of our shareholders and customers in the future into our lives today. For instance, current discussions of how to reform banking regulations often collapse with a lament that there will always be an incentive for companies to outwit those to whom they are made accountable. But with an honor code we are accountable to each other, and we do not feel a need to find new ways to deceive our classmates. This is a higher standard that could, and should, be a valuable operating model for the business world. This should be one of the lessons from business school that we reflect on throughout our careers. Before we can have something to reflect on though, we need to strengthen the Honor Code so that it can do what it is meant to do.

The Booth Honor Code, in its current form, will never achieve the goal set out above because it does not place any responsibility on the students and because the faculty and administration appear to place little value on it. As students we cannot take it seriously when no one knows the repercussions for breaking it, and we cannot be responsible for enforcing it when we do not know the process for so basic a step as reporting violations. Our professors exhibit a fundamental distrust of the Honor Code by proctoring our exams. When a professor (or TA) is in the room, we are absolved of responsibility for policing ourselves. The concept of a higher standard is defeated if we are not even being asked to hold each other accountable for something as obvious as cheating on an exam. Finally, our administration has ensured that the Honor Code is far from anyone's mind by embedding it in a single form you must sign when you enroll and then burying it in the Student Handbook. It severely limits the potential of the Honor Code by not emphasizing its importance in upholding the ideals of our school. These shortcomings must be corrected before we can realize the full value of the Honor Code.

Living by a higher standard, both in our personal lives and in our future careers as business leaders, is not too lofty a goal. Many of us went to undergraduate colleges that had much more stringent honor codes than Chicago Booth, and found that they did make a concrete difference in our concept of integrity in education. As future business leaders, it is time to move beyond education and consider the application of the honor code to our professional lives as well. The path is right in front of us; all we need is the will to walk down it.