The Honor Council is a student-led organization with the responsibility to promote the institution’s core virtues—respect, honesty, and courage—while also emphasizing trustworthiness and fairness by addressing instances of academic dishonesty. It also works to educate the student body about the importance of upholding the Honor Code in academic and personal pursuits.
In essence, the Honor Council serves as a mechanism for students to hold both themselves and their peers accountable for maintaining high ethical standards and fostering a culture of integrity within the school community.
Academic dishonesty comes in many forms, such as cheating off of another student on exams, fabricating data, plagiarizing, and colluding. Administrators have noted a recent uptick in Honor Council cases, but the majority of them are not due to the aforementioned examples. Instead, they are a result of students’ use of artificial intelligence (AI), specifically ChatGPT.
As many already know, ChatGPT is a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) designed to generate human-like text based on the input it receives, aiming to engage in conversation and provide helpful responses. It’s utilized for various tasks including answering questions, generating creative content, assisting with language understanding, and facilitating dialogue in a wide range of applications.
While the GPT can be used in many functional domains, its abilities can easily be abused in a school environment by a student asking it to write them an essay on a certain topic or solve a math equation they are supposed to be doing by themselves. This is cheating, as the work is not their own.
After a teacher identifies when a student fraudulently uses AI (and it is oftentimes easy for them to do so), the case goes straight to the Honor Council, and that student finds himself in an unnecessary and difficult situation.
Fourth Form Honor Council member Tommy Gowen is concerned about the increase in Honor Council cases.
“AI is very scary. No one truly understands it, and it’s always changing,” Gowen said.
Also according to Gowen, Haverford is a community built on trust, and using a tool like Chat GPT unfairly symbolizes distrust—undermining what this community stands for.
Sixth Form Honor Council Chairman Luke Fesnak believes there are ways we can improve as a community and reduce Honor Council hearings moving forward.
“I think a lot of people would say students need to be more responsible because they are the ones committing the Honor Code violations, and this is true. However, these students must be motivated to cheat by high-stress situations,” Fesnak said. “While it is in the students’ control to be honest, I think it falls upon teachers and administrators too to insert preventative measures like automatic zeros if a student cheats or moving all online assessments onto paper.”
According to Fesnak, it is possible to make cheating hard and successfully lessen academic dishonesty at the school.
Fesnak said, “Is that the direction we want to take our community because we have so little trust, or are we going to continue to give the student body more chances when they have not proven that they deserve them?”
One recent step taken by the administration is the release of an AI Integrity Policy that clearly outlines how tools like ChatGPT can be used.
Without a doubt, AI poses a dilemma: each decision comes with its consequences. Of course, the best possible option is simply not to cheat and to be academically honest.
