Since all students at Stevens have now gone through the Convocation ceremony, and been formally inducted into the Stevens Honor System, it is important to look at just what the honor system means.
The honor system was originally intended to be an indication that faculty could trust students not to cheat or unfairly collaborate on tests, projects, and homework assignments. In exchange for writing a pledge at the top of every assignment and piece of work, students were to be given the freedom to work as they saw fit, with a loss of honor being the punishment for violating the policy. Under this policy, exams were not proctored; in fact, the professor or TA for the class would not even be present in the testing room.
Today, however, things are different. While exams are not officially proctored, professors are allowed to remain in the room during the test. Homework assignments are now checked by TAs and graders to see if they are truly original work, and not copied from someone else's assignment or from the Internet. In the computer science department, graders have a special program to check if two programs are the same, with only the names of variables changed.
Despite these checks against cheating, Stevens maintains the honor system. The pledge is still required at the top of every assignment and test, and the written penalty for not having it is a failing grade on that assignment.
What this all boils down to is that Stevens does not trust its students. The honor system, despite the apparent trust it puts in students, in reality has quite the opposite effect. The supervision used with both exams and assignments assumes that students are cheating and that constant checks are required to deter and catch it. Not writing the pledge is assumed to have been done because of cheating.
At every step in the process, students are not being trusted. The reason for this is that a lot of cheating and other "competitive advantages" do take place here at Stevens. Perhaps the administration and faculty is right in not trusting students.
Whether or not students can be trusted is not the larger issue here, though. The Stevens Honor System presents a facade of trust, which is not actually present. Stevens can continue to promote the honor system as another selling point for the school, but to say that the school trusts its students is a lie.
Either Stevens needs to start trusting its students again, or it should abolish the honor system. Maintain it in such an atmosphere of distrust is a lie to both prospective and current students, and we should not stand for it.