The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

Prefect Council places Honor Code in classes




The Prefect Council has posted copies of the Honor Code in each classroom as part of a broader, more intricate plan to make the Honor Code more present in every day student life at both the middle and upper campuses.

The future plans include replacing the old copies of the Honor Code with new, framed copies at the entrance of each building and putting a large, visible copy somewhere where students pass by frequently, like the quad.

The copies were placed in each classroom before Thanksgiving break as a first step of the broader plan.

“The goal of the copies of the Honor Code in classrooms was just to make the Honor Code a little more visible to students,” Head Prefect Tessa Wick ’09 said.

While Wick conceded that she doesn’t think the copies will make much of a difference in deterring students from cheating, she said the goal of the project was to “give students a second thought about cheating, maybe make them think twice.”

Breaches of the Honor Code in recent years were part of the motivation to propose the new plans, but according to school chaplain Father J. Young were not “major factors at all.”

“We wanted to make the Honor Code more present regardless of what happened last year,” he said.

Part of the plan includes making the Honor Code a daily part of middle school students’ lives.

“We feel the Honor Code isn’t as present at the Middle School as much as it is here at the Upper School, and we definitely want it to be more visible and more present there,” Junior Prefect Jake Schine ’10 said.

“I guess one of our overall broad goals is to help bridge the gap between the Middle and Upper School,” Wick said.

Two weeks ago Wick and fellow Head Prefect Brandon Levin ’09 spoke to seventh and ninth graders at their class assemblies. Prefects visited the eighth graders this past Monday and stressed the Honor Code’s importance.

“We really wanted to familiarize the Middle School with the Honor Code and what it’s all about,” Wick said. “We mainly wanted to stress the positive effects of having an Honor Code and being able to have a community that is interconnected on trust; how we can be thankful that teachers can leave the room during a test and not worry about having students cheat.”

More communication between the Prefect Council and Middle School Student Council is another aspect of the plan to make the Middle School and Upper School more connected, Wick said. While at the Middle School, the Prefect Council set up a test to “see how honorable” students were when donuts were placed outside unattended, asking students who took one to place their name and ID number on a piece of paper. Since no faculty or prefect members were near the table with the donuts, the test was to see how many kids would actually pay for their donuts, and how many would take the donuts without paying. Results of the test have not yet been announced.

“We plan to use that test as a talking point and an example,” Schine said.

There has been no timetable set for when the new copies of the Honor Code will be placed at the Upper School, and it has not been decided if similar measures will be taken at the Middle School.

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Prefect Council places Honor Code in classes