The University of Texas is planning to institute an honor code to, among other things, tackle the growing nation-wide problem of cheating:

Established in 1842, the University of Virginia's honor code is among the nation's oldest. Under it, a student must act appropriately when they are in ''Charlottesville and Albemarle County, and elsewhere at any time when he identifies himself as a University of Virginia student in order to gain the reliance and trust of others."

But the university continues to see high levels of lying, cheating and stealing, said Meghan Sullivan, who chairs the Honor Committee.

Last year, the committee investigated 72 cases, including nine that resulted in expulsions from its 23,000-student campus.

[...]

In surveys done over the past decade of more than 14,000 students at 50 colleges, McCabe found that 75 percent of the students had cheated. He also discovered that schools with honor codes had 25 to 33 percent fewer incidents of serious cheating on exams.

''If you read as many surveys as I have, there is no way they don't have an impact," said McCabe, who worked on the surveys with Duke University's Center for Academic Integrity.

More colleges are learning that honor codes have "a very positive impact" and are introducing them under the leadership of their students, McCabe said.

''Honor codes should be made a student's responsibility — not an administrator's. Through peer pressure, they really give students appropriate ways of behavior," he said.

[...]

The University of Houston has an "academic honesty policy" that encourages professors to ask students to show identification before taking exams or have them sign a pledge that they will not cheat.

I vaguely recall them asking for ID in some of the auditorium classes in my freshman year, but I have no recollection of ever signing any such pledge. While I never cheated at UH, I sincerely doubt any such pledge would have stopped me if that's what I decided to do. Chances are I signed the pledge in between signing up for classes and getting my parking pass.

I'd imagine that such pledges could be extremely useful in smaller institutions where "peer pressure" exists, but the University of Texas has the largest student body on any single campus in the country at 52,000. While there is a vague sense of student comraderie at such institutions, they are simply too big and unwieldy to have "peer pressure" for anything. An individual college or major could probably have more success than this university-wide attempt. While a UH pledge wouldn't have had any effect on me, an Honors College or College of Technology effect might have, since I actually knew my classmates, saw them on a regular basis, and therefore might have felt "beholden" to them to one degree or another. I felt no such obligation to some random junior art history major or sophomore business major. Outside of athletic or campus events and classes with hundreds of people in them during our freshman and sophomore years, for most intents and purposes we were going to entirely different universities and had little in common.

Even Texas A&M, which has almost cult-like solidarity, hasn't had any success with their honor code.

The other aim of UT's pledge deals with student social interaction, which at this point is two vague to comment on.