Our take homes must be completed within 24 hours of being checked out, but a professor may place restricitons on it, such as you should only spend 4 hours on this exam. There is no way to enforce it, but that's the whole tension with an honor code system.

One thing I noticed while visiting Wash U in St. Louis is they published their judgments regarding allegations of honor code violations. There were a shitload of them. I can't think of any honors code violations here, but if there were any they were handled sub rosa. So perhaps we need the Texas Death Penalty approach to honor code violations.

According to the Times article, the quote about law school is from Nicholas Lemann, not David Klatell. Apparently misreading this article is easier than one might think. :-)

By the way, Flip has backed off of the statement you cited.

Kidding aside, it still strikes me as a fatuous and insulting remark from Lemann. Whatever the practice generally at the J-School, this was an exam and the students did have to hit a certain level on it in order to get a passing grade (and to eventually get their degree). Obviously, the cheating students DID believe that the marginal benefit associated with cheating was important to them, and the fact that they were seeking to obtain a P instead of an F, as opposed to seeking an A instead of a B, doesn't strike me as a meaningful distinction.

Lemann's remark is equivalent to the statements one often sees from small-town officials after a gruesome homicide in their jurisdiction, saying "This isn't like New York; things like this don't happen here." Clearly, the subtext is "we think we're better than those people in that other place." Yes, well, they might like to think that, but there's still been a crime committed in their backyard, and it seems like it would be wiser to deal with it rather than try to change the subject.

Tom T.,

Thanks for the correction; I wrote the post quickly, and incorrectly assumed that the Times spoke to someone lower down the totem pole than Lemann. Glad to see that Flip has backed off, and wish other blogs like Wake Up Americans would do the same.

As a law student, I had no sense that Lemann was saying the journalism school was "better," only that it was different in a way that made cheating more unexpected because the reward seemed so little. Failing a single course at either school does not preclude graduation*, but at the J-school an F on the transcript, particularly in courses like media law or ethics, will get a shrug from employers if the student's portfolio is good. You can be an awesome lawyer in practice, yet an F on your law school transcript immediately cuts you off from opportunities that would have existed otherwise. (Even a C is cause for being deemed unemployable by most of the federal judiciary.) Therefore if you fear failure at the J-school, the chance of getting caught cheating normally would outweigh the benefit of a guaranteed pass, whereas for a law student, the cost-benefit analysis is reversed. Hence Lemann's explanation of why he was surprised that students were concerned about how they did on the exam.

* Failing a required course at the law school does require a student to re-take it, but this seems to me a generous policy given the alternatives. Students can graduate from the J-school as long as they pass Reporting & Writing I, Master�s Project, Advanced Reporting & Writing Seminar and Media Workshop -- none of which involve an exam, unlike the law and ethics courses.

Thanks for the correction. I mistakenly assumed ethics was a required course like at law school, rather than an elective.

Still, I think you're working too hard to defend Lemann. He could have made the pass-fail, no-grades point without dragging in a law school analogy. To me, he's clearly saying "we aren't a bunch of cheating lawyers."

Jschool students are required to take the ethics and law classes, but can graduate despite having an F in them.

As for the law school analogy, I guess I just don't have the impression that Lemann or others in the J-school administration have a negative attitude toward law school/yers/professors. The law class is taught fairly autonomously by a law prof, and that it is a requirement, albeit not one that demands a passing grade, indicates that law is something the J-school's curriculum takes a little seriously. It seems to me an obvious analogy: a school where your employment opportunities are judged based on work product, versus one where they are judged based on grades. Medical school wouldn't be an apt analogy because if you manage to graduate from any medical school, you still can do well for yourself even if your grades weren't great, whereas to be mediocre in law school, you better be in the top tier. B school is team/ project oriented -- do they even have exams?

Fair enough; you may indeed be right. I guess I just found it jarring that he reached for an analogy at all, and came up with that one.