One interesting thing about getting older is that fully-formed and possibly significant memories can lie below the surface for years, completely unaddressed and 99% forgotten, and then suddenly arise again for no discernable reason. They can be good or bad memories, but in my experience they’re usually just benign. Here’s an example from this morning: I was walking to the train when I remembered something seemingly random from college: My school had an honor code that students were expected to follow in order to discourage cheating. This is hardly unique at a college. But we were also expected to “reaffirm” this honor code whenever we turned in an assignment. How did one go about reaffirming the code? I’m glad you asked. At the bottom of the last page of any assignment we completed, we had to write “IRLUHC” and then sign our name. The letters stand for “I Reaffirm the Lawrence University Honor Code.” If we neglected to do this for whatever reason, the professor would usually hand the paper thing right back to us, saying, “You forgot the honor code.” [1] I always made sure to sign my reaffirmation in a large and excessively ornate script.

I didn’t think much of the honor code or its prescription for ethical rectitude, but I was in the majority of students who thought it was a little silly. By no means did I ever condone or contemplate plagiarism, but the reaffirmation seemed like a superfluous formality: If someone was desperate enough, or morally compromised enough, or otherwise determined to cheat, he probably wasn’t going to think twice about printing an acronym at the bottom of the page and signing his name. I never heard of anyone plagiarizing a paper or using a cheat sheet during a final and then, when it came time to “sign the code,” collapsing into a sweaty, tear-stricken heap of conscientiously fractured humanity and repenting profusely. I mean, I guess it could’ve happened.

Usually a correlative to my musings on the honor code was my consideration of the kind of money I could stand to make by writing other people’s papers. Could I ever go through with it? What would my pricing scheme be? Would I charge by the hour, or by the page? Would papers for Religious Studies or Anthro be more expensive than English or History? For that matter, who’s to say the papers I wrote would be any good? [2] I’d probably be under so much pressure to deliver a worthy product, and so wracked with guilt over the unscrupulous nature of the enterprise, that I’d produce an even shittier paper than the ones I wrote under my own name. Needless to say, I never pursued the idea past the speculative phase. Not necessarily because I’m too conscientious, or morally above it. Mainly because I am lazy and I lack an entrepreneurial spirit.

[1] It was similar to some of my middle school classes, where assignments without our full names printed at the top were automatically given lowered scores. Ah, education!

[2] I rarely, if ever, discussed these considerations with my peers, for fear they would assume my speculations were more than hypothetical and turn me over to the Honor Council. Yes, that’s what it was called.