Is Honesty the Best Policy?

IN the 1989 Handbook for Students, there is a short section entitled "Submission of the Same Work to More Than One Course." Although the description of the rules about dual submissions does not include an explicit rationale for the current policy, I assumed that dual submission was a way of saving time when you had an overly demanding schedule.

Unfortunately, not all professors agree with me.

WHEN I recently requested permission to dual submit an essay, I was told by one professor that my paper for him must be twice the regularly assigned length. His reasoning, he told me, was simple: dual submission is not an excuse for a student to do any less work than his or her chosen schedule demands. If I wanted to submit one paper for two classes, I had to produce a significantly more substantial piece of work.

This is not, of course, what I wanted to hear. After all, what right did this professor have to tell me how much work I should be doing? I could just as easily have chosen a lighter courseload and not had the problem of having to do two 10-pagers, a 12- to 15-page one, and a 30-page tutorial essay due for the end of the term, and he could not have done anything about it.

Of course, after my indignation subsided, I realized that it is his responsibility to worry about my workload--he is, after all, my professor, and I am his student. But the issue does not end here. The problem is, in fact, something altogether different from concern for my academic development. The problem is that, as the dual submission policy now stands, the University is punishing students for being honest.

IN my case, the courses in question are taught by two different professors in two different departments. Nobody would know if I had submitted the same paper to both of them. In fact, in a school as big as Harvard, even if the courses were in the same department, it is still highly unlikely that I would be caught.

Of course, my professor could reply to my complaints by arguing that I should not have taken the classes I did. The problem then is that I would be choosing my courses solely on the basis of the workload involved. Although this is a compromise all students must make every term, it is certainly not an inclination professors should encourage. If faced with a choice between taking a more demanding courseload while dual submitting one paper and taking a bunch of guts, I think that most professors would want students to choose the former.

Clearly, many students have used and will continue to use the dual-submission policy to slack off. On the other hand, however, when students are punished for their honesty in requesting dual submissions, then these students might as well return the favor the next time by dual submitting without permission. If the University wants to live up to its motto of Veritas, it needs to reconsider the current guidelines along which the dual submission policy rests.