For the first time since 1921, Stanford is moving away from its unproctored past, where students were fully trusted to deliver on academic honesty. The Faculty Senate (FacSen), Undergraduate Senate (UGS) and Graduate Student Council (GSC) have voted to allow exam proctoring in all Stanford classes following the results of a pilot program from the Academic Integrity Working Group (AIWG), a group formed to combat academic dishonesty.

The University has historically drawn on the Honor Code, written by students in 1921, to maintain academic integrity. The code established that students were expected to hold themselves and each other accountable. Instructors, in turn, would “not take unusual or unreasonable precautions to prevent academic dishonesty,” which previously included proctoring exams.

Yet based on a report by the Committee of 12, the precursor to AIWG, students reported cheating peers at a high rate. The new program, developed after the pilot, aims to address the problem.

“Over the years, I have unfortunately had a number of students come to me after exams terribly upset that they had witnessed someone cheating,” wrote AIWG co-head Jennifer Schwartz Poehlmann Ph.D ’08 to The Daily. “Because the class was large, they often did not know the student’s name or would feel uncomfortable being a witness, so there was nothing we could do.”

The 2020-21 academic year saw 393 honor code violations, none of which were student-reported. This marked an uptick from the 2018-19 academic year, in which there were 136 honor code violations, two of them reported by students.

“The entire basis for the [Honor Code] system was this idea that students would rat each other out, and that had been broken here for a long time,” said mathematics professor Brian Conrad, a member of AIWG and the Committee of 12. Conrad sees the expansion of proctoring as a chance to reset Stanford’s academic culture.

Kathryn Stoner — a professor of political science, senior Hoover Fellow and the director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law — recently introduced online proctoring technology in her “Understanding Russia” course to address potential academic dishonesty.

“I requested to be included in the proctoring and lockdown test programs because I was concerned about student overuse and misuse of AI in completing take-home exams,” wrote Stoner after moving away from a take-home midterm format for her class. “I wanted to ensure that students were actually going to get the critical thinking and writing skills they should with a Stanford education.”

Supriya Patel ’28, a student in “Understanding Russia,” acknowledged the importance and general success of proctoring practices amid the rise of AI. Still, Patel wrote that she “had technical difficulties with the program during a recent midterm and had to write the exam, which was essay-based, by hand.”

“It was frustrating, but the program worked for the majority of my classmates,” Patel added.

In Conrad’s view, the rise of AI and chatbots like ChatGPT will likely complicate the task of improving academic integrity in the coming years.

“[AI] is a challenge for colleges everywhere, and I think it’s very unfortunate that course grades probably now have to rely far more on timed assessments than in the past, when you could have homework be a much larger fraction of the grade,” said Conrad. “But unfortunately, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

The emergence of ChatGPT played a significant role in passing the proctoring pilot in student government because it clarified pre-existing issues of cheating and plagiarism at Stanford, he added.

The Office of Community Standards’ (OCS) past handling of academic dishonesty cases has drawn some pushback from the Stanford community. In a recent letter published in The Daily, one alumnus argued that the process wrongly begins with an assumption of guilt and functions as a disciplinary system rather than a judicial one.

“Those of us who practice administrative law believe that a culture continues to permeate OCS that presumes guilt and therefore drives students to plead guilty,” wrote Bob Ottilie ’77, who founded the Student Justice Project.

Princeton University, another institution that has historically not proctored exams, is now undergoing a similar change in proctoring rules.

Professors at Stanford are eager, though, to get started with proctoring.

“Among faculty, people can’t wait until next fall,” said Conrad. “There have certainly been some people…who are very keen to even get started [with proctoring] right now.”