Taking the Honor Pledge

Duke has had an honor code since 1993 and an honor commitment since 1983, but the emphasis on academic integrity and ethical conduct was stepped up a notch when the Class of 2004 arrived on campus last week.

While the 1,600 first-year students had privately signed a copy of the honor code as part of the admissions process, they did it again publicly last Thursday when they filed out of Duke Chapel following convocation. It was the university's first Undergraduate Honor Code signing ceremony.

"I think it was a good idea," said Jamie Krzyzewski, a first-year student from Durham. "We weren't just looking at it and saying, 'Oh, okay.' We really had to think about it before signing."

The public request for freshmen signatures was an initiative by the Duke University Honor Council and Kenan Institute for Ethics.

"We wanted to have a ceremonial event to impress upon first-year students how highly Duke holds the honor code and how highly they should hold it," said sophomore Melissa Walker, chairwoman of the Duke University Honor Council.

Any first-year students who missed the signing ceremony will have the opportunity to add their names during honor code orientation sessions to be held in freshmen residence halls next month.

Later this fall the 16 pieces of parchment signed by the first-year students will be hung ‚ along with a copy of the honor code ‚ in the East Campus Union. To make room for subsequent classes' signatures, the parchment pages will be bound at the end of each school year and stored.

"We really hope it will be a new tradition," said Elizabeth Kiss, director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics. "It gives their signature a certain significance and a certain 'gravitas.' Convocation is the one moment that the entire class is in one place. We thought it was important for them to ponder individually and as a class to uphold academic integrity."

Signing the honor code in front of classmates was a far different experience from signing it at home along with meal plan requests, housing surveys and other admission-related documents, said Allison Becker, a first-year student from Hingham, Mass.

"When they sent it to me with a bunch of other papers, I didn't really think about it," she acknowledged. "But after convocation I really looked at it and thought about it."

Classmate Alivia Sholtz, who signed a similar code while attending high school in Durham, agreed. "When you see everyone else signing and you know they're going to follow it, that'll make you think twice later," she said.

The initiative stemmed, in part, from an ongoing pilot project coordinated by the Center for Academic Integrity, a program affiliated with the Kenan Institute for Ethics. Officials from the 12 universities and colleges taking part in the program, including Duke, met in April to discuss, among other topics, effective ways to raise the campus profile and awareness of existing honor codes. The dialogue dovetailed with a proposal by a Duke student in the Honor Council to stage a public signing ceremony.

"If a student is tempted at some point in their Duke career to cut academic corners or to cheat, our hope is that they will think back to that day and the signing ceremony," Kiss said.

As an additional reminder, first-year students also received commemorative pens at the signing ceremony emblazoned with the words "On My Honor" and "Class of 2004."

"I think the ceremony helped bring us together as a class," said Wallis Avalone, a first-year student from Irvington, N.Y. "And it should dedicate us to the code as a class."

For the complete text of Duke's Undergraduate Honor Code, check out the Office of the University Registrar's web site at http://www.registrar.duke. edu/registrar/honor.htm.