r/Caltech • u/sarconefourthree • 11d ago
RIP honor code ☹️ (though i kinda fw the changes)
Caltech Students
From:
Kevin Gilmartin, Vice President for Student Affairs and Faculty Dean of Students
Date:
August 21, 2026
Re:
Revised Grading Policies at Caltech
Dear Students,
I hope that you are enjoying the summer and looking forward to the start of the fall term.
I write to share an important update from the Faculty Board. As an institution of higher education, we have a responsibility to ensure that grades distinguish different levels of student accomplishment—from satisfactory mastery of course material to truly exceptional achievement. Meaningful differentiation benefits students by providing academic feedback to best support graduate school success and for career preparation. Preserving the credibility of our grading system is an important part of preserving the value of a Caltech degree and our reputation.
CHANGES BEGINNING IN 2026–27
At its June 2026 meeting, the Faculty Board approved three complementary initiatives to improve grading practices following a report from the Academic Policies Committee.
Strengthening Assessments. Faculty are encouraged to hold in-person assessments, including seated examinations, oral examinations, in-class presentations, and other supervised forms of evaluation. The Faculty Handbook will be updated to allow proctored examinations. To facilitate the scheduling of seated exams, the final examination period in the academic calendar has been expanded from three to five weekdays.
Improving Transparency. Course grade distributions will be openly visible internally to faculty and students for courses with more than five students on letter grade. In addition, Caltech transcripts will provide contextual information for each course grade: the median grade and the enrollment in that course. More information regarding the timing of these transcript changes will be shared soon.
Preserving the Distinction of the A+. The grade of A+ should indicate truly exceptional performance. The Faculty Board resolved to reserve A+ grades for no more than five percent of the class plus three additional students. This provides flexibility for smaller courses while preserving the distinction associated with the grade. These target numbers apply to undergraduate grades only.
These changes represent the first stage of a broader effort to maintain meaningful differentiation in grading and to protect the reputation of a Caltech degree. During the coming academic year, the Faculty Board and division chairs will monitor grading outcomes, assess the impact of the new policies, and discuss whether additional steps or adjustments are needed.
I hope this information is helpful as you plan your return to campus. In the meantime, I wish you a great rest of the summer and look forward to seeing you this fall.
Sincerely,
Kevin Gilmartin
Vice President for Student Affairs and Faculty Dean of Students
William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English
Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair, Student Affairs
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u/Throop_Polytechnic 11d ago
Undergrads used to shame each others when caught cheating, now they help each others cheat. The honor code has been dead for years. The process when undergrads get caught is also a joke. We kick PhDs out when they get caught but undergrads get a warning in their email and no permanent mark on their transcript. The deans also literally harass faculty members to drop academic dishonesty reports about undergrads.
Anyone that has taught pre-COVID and post-COVID undergrads knows that the honor code died years ago. The amount of cheating since undergrads came back on campus after the pandemic has been pretty staggering, and it’s getting worse with LLMs.
Grades are also becoming meaningless in some divisions. PMA’s average is either an A or A+ on any given term. I was surprised to learn that HSS and BBE’s classes actually had the lowest average GPAs on campus with a real spread of grades from F to A+. Somehow though those two would have been the worse offenders when it came to grade inflation.
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u/sarconefourthree 11d ago
My perspective as well. My only concern is whether the limit on A+'s could be the incipience of needless, toxic competition. Also, after Princeton ended their honor code earlier this year, I thought we could be better than those ivy scrubs. guess not
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u/RedPanda5150 10d ago
Did the BoC stop actively managing honor code violations? The self-governance aspect was a big part of having buy-in among undergrads when I was there, but that was a solid 20 years ago at this point. I never interacted with the BoC directly but I knew someone who was part of it and saw how seriously they took that role, or at least how distracted they sometimes were by the weight of that responsibility.
But between the pandemic and the rise of AI - and the direction the school was headed even when I was there in the early 00s - I'm not completely surprised to see the end of trust in take home exams, etc. But it is still disappointing. If a small elite school like Caltech can't trust its members to have integrity, it's a bad sign for the future of scientific integrity in general.
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u/nicholas818 CS, Dabney/Blacker, 2021 10d ago
The BoC still exists! I'm a more recent former BoC chair who just talked to the current BoC chair earlier this year about changes that have happened in recent years. Long story short it's still a student-run process, but there have been a few changes made in response to increasing caseload. We changed the bylaws when I was secretary to reduce per-case board size from seven reps down to five. And since I graduated, they implemented a few ideas that were floating around when I was in leadership: they added a support staffer in the Dean's office for managing the more tedious parts of BoC leadership (like printing out all the evidence packets) and added an option to avoid a full-board hearing for minor first offenses in which the student accepted responsibility (at the discretion of leadership).
I would also hope that the self-governance aspect is what encouraged honor code buy-in. I remember discussing this at our honor code frosh camp presentation: the Honor Code essentially operates as a deal where we the students hold ourselves to a high standard and in exchange the faculty granted freedoms less common at other schools (e.g. no proctored exams). But the current action seems to evidence that either cheating has gone up drastically (which is definitely possible, but BoC leadership hasn't published caseload stats in a few years) or Caltech is simply seeing the same decline in human trust that we're seeing throughout the world. Just as people online dismiss genuine content as deepfakes or LLM bots created by a bad actor, I could see faculty similarly being skeptical about unsupervised student work simply knowing that LLMs exist, even despite the Honor Code.
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u/Throop_Polytechnic 10d ago
The BOC has been a joke since at least the 2010s. The deans choose what makes it to the BOC, the BOC dismisses most of the cases that make it to them. Even the cases that get convicted usually only get recommended for “strictly education conversations” which means the undergrad will get an angry email and zero consequences.
The process is also designed to wear down the faculty that makes the complaint and because faculty members have better things to do, most of them drop the cases before it makes it to the BOC.
Academic dishonesty is supposed to be the worst thing you can do in academia but at Caltech it’s treated like it’s nothing, as long and it is done by an undergrad.
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u/nicholas818 CS, Dabney/Blacker, 2021 10d ago
The deans don't choose what makes it to the BoC: the BoC operates as the initial fact-finding body. People can report to the deans who will forward it to BoC leadership, but you can also report to BoC leadership directly at boc@caltech.edu. At least that's how it worked when I was chair in 2020-2021.
I'm curious what your background here is. The issue of reps being too lenient is definitely one I've heard before, as is the ineffectiveness of the educational approach ("BoC talks"). I'm thinking back to the 2019 SFC where academic honor code procedure was one of the special topics. Designing a fair system that satisfies everyone is definitely a tricky task.
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u/Throop_Polytechnic 10d ago edited 10d ago
The deans absolutely can dismiss cases before it makes it to the BOC, the deans can also dismiss the BOC’s ruling if they don’t like it so it’s essentially pageantry. Had a case dismissed a few years ago where one of my TA caught a student copy/pasting straight from a textbook (it’s hard to find a more straightforward case of academic dishonesty) and the deans dismissed it because “his girlfriend broke up with him” and “he was under a lot of stress.” I could have appealed it to the faculty board but no faculty has time for any of that.
At any self respecting academic institution, if you are found cheating, you fail the whole class and it goes straight on your permanent transcript. At Caltech, undergrads get to re-do the assignment and absolutely no consequences beyond a private email.
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u/nicholas818 CS, Dabney/Blacker, 2021 10d ago
Yes the deans don’t have to uphold the BoC’s recommendations, but that’s very rare per published BoC statistics from the 2010s (usually just 1-2 respondents per academic year). I’m more concerned with the account that the deans “dismissed” a concern pre-BoC citing mitigating circumstances. The way that process is supposed to work is the BoC goes first, presumably easily convicts and nullifies credit if it was straight-up copy/paste, then considers those potential mitigating circumstances in the context of protection, with an eye towards how confident we are that the community won’t see another violation from that respondent. Thinking years back to my BoC rep days, I could see going for an educational approach (how to not violate the HC in stressful situations) if they have no priors and were honest from the start and up front about why they did what they did. But they still lose all credit for the assignment obviously. And no opportunity to redo the assignment; I’ve never even heard of that as an option.
If I recall from the SFC I mentioned earlier, I think the idea of a transcript annotation for loss of credit was floated, but the philosophy was that simply removing credit that was unfairly earned is enough to undo the damage. And if the student needs something more punitive to convince them not to continue violating the Honor Code, something like suspension is more effective than removing a few extra points.
Your account is not just alarming but raises fairness concerns about the whole system. If there’s some secret dismissal path that’s an end-run around the BoC process laid out in the bylaws we give every student… that would definitely be a yikes from me and presumably the Institute’s lawyers. I get the sense that this happened a while ago, but if that’s not the case I would definitely escalate that concern to anyone who would listen.
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u/TBSchemer 11d ago
So what killed it? Why did students start cheating? Did they start admitting the wrong types of students?
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u/Throop_Polytechnic 11d ago
It’s nothing specific about Caltech. The pandemic genuinely messed up a generation of students during their most fundamental years and the advent of LLM is just compounding on it. It’s a problem everywhere at every level of education.
Unless you’ve been teaching before and after the pandemic it’s really hard to understand how fundamentally different students are now. The fact that the current generation of kids has some of the most enabling parents there has ever been is not helping either.
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u/BroodingBurro 11d ago
I don't think the student body is fundamentally different now. If students have an average propensity to cheat dictated by basic, relatively unchanging human psychology, then exposing them to more ways of cheating (which is definitely evident since the advent of LLMs) will lead to a higher expected frequency of cheating, even if there is nothing different about the ethical standards or mental configuration of the students in this generation.
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u/99_beaver 11d ago
This makes me sad.
The honor code, and the norms behind it, enabled so much that was special about Caltech when I was there. Maybe the culture has changed enough that the administration had no choice. But once you lose those norms and culture, it's hard to get them back.
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u/nicholas818 CS, Dabney/Blacker, 2021 11d ago edited 10d ago
I was BoC chair during COVID and this was a huge topic of concern back then. It’s natural to hear Caltech admissions talk about the honor code and think “yeah sure, every school claims to have an honor code.” What really makes the difference is then showing up as a frosh and seeing that no, people actually care about the honor code. But you don’t get that during COVID. It’s sad to see our worst fears from back then effectively coming true.
I hope current students can work to get the Honor Code back, but it’s certainly going to be a tough fight.
Edit: I want to add that after talking to some other alumni and current students in various chats, I’ve been reminded that (despite the post title) the Honor Code isn’t actually dead. Yes, take-home exams were a major manifestation of the honor code, but the code was never confined to exams or even academics. It’s a philosophy that the community lives by. As far as I’m aware, there’s still nothing resembling a cutthroat competitive atmosphere where students not only refuse to collaborate but actively sabotage each other. So the honor code does still exist
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u/pierquantum Alum 11d ago
Without alumni help there's no way students will get the Honor Code back, particularly if the faculty can demonstrate with data that the cheating problem has been out of control.
The administration can wait out any student body, and with the high current graduation rates, they only need to wait a few years and the lack of an Honor Code will be the normal thing in 4 years.
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u/nicholas818 CS, Dabney/Blacker, 2021 11d ago
I'd love to provide alumni help in any way I can. If any current students are around and know how we can help somehow, DM me I guess? But obviously current students better understand how AI and COVID have changed the conversation, so I'm not sure what would be helpful.
One thing working in our favor is that I think the Caltech student body maintains a longer institutional memory of things to some extent. I remember discussing House traditions that hadn't actually happened since the 70s. So even if a effective lack of Honor Code is "normal" in 4 years, I hope that students can still remember back to a time when trust was higher.
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u/CharmingDuck8260 11d ago
I agree with the in person testing but all this talk of distinction and the median grade’s presence on transcripts feel like they will inevitably increase competition which is arguably Caltech’s main distinction from other very rigorous schools. 😢
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u/sperry45959 11d ago
The "Preserving the Distinction of the A+" section is curious. Are too many A+s a problem currently at Caltech? Does anyone have information about the median letter grade?
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u/kangadac 11d ago
In my undergrad days, I knew of only one A+ grade being awarded (in Ph2b; no, it was not me).
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u/nicholas818 CS, Dabney/Blacker, 2021 11d ago
I think it’s only a few classes. When I was there it was super easy to get an A+ in Ec 11, for example.
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u/FIoatz 9d ago
In my opinion, as a current student, I think it has become more common. The A+ grade is pretty prevalent among current students across a number of classes spanning the standard 4 year curriculum. There are some classes with policies that place significant restrictions on who receives an A+ though. Of course, this is just my experience, so I do not know if other undergrads would agree.
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u/Expensive-Necessary9 10d ago
I graduated earlier this year but spring term 2026, a faculty member told me that the median GPA was a 4.1.
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u/pierquantum Alum 11d ago
It didn’t used to be. But back in the day Caltech had a 5 year graduation rate in the 60-ish% range.
I’m assuming the universal culture of collaboration is long dead replaced by either cheating cartels or the kind of cutthroat competition we hated 30 years ago.
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u/Throop_Polytechnic 11d ago
The times when Caltech had a 60% 5-year graduation rate were also the times when we had multiple suicide each term. There are absolutely no reason to ever go back to that model of undergraduate education.
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u/pierquantum Alum 11d ago edited 11d ago
Agreed, but this faculty board level concern about “too many A+s” is a symptom of the same changes they’ve made over the decades that have reduced suicides and increased gender equality. So both good and bad.
When I entered Caltech touted its unique culture and curriculum. Now it has neither.
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u/Throop_Polytechnic 11d ago
Caltech still has an incredibly unique culture and probably the most unique and challenging undergraduate curriculum in the US.
Thankfully that culture has evolved away from monthly suicides and the routine harassment of women and other minorities.
Grade inflation is a country-wide problem and Caltech is addressing it before it gets to the level of schools like Harvard. Same with cheating, the pandemic broke how every student body in the US used to pass down their moral and culture onto incoming students. Nothing unique about Caltech.
A Caltech education is sought after regardless of which post-grad pursuit any student chooses, and a high Caltech GPA is still a significant achievement. Anyone that says the contrary is lying.
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u/pierquantum Alum 11d ago edited 11d ago
There have always been faculty who absolutely hated the Honor Code and students finally gave them the opportunity on a silver LLM platter
Most of what made Caltech a unique undergraduate experience is dead in favor of resting on the laurels of a reputation made by past alumni and the faculty’s long desire to make the school “normal”.
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u/mikanystrom 11d ago
As former faculty, I can say that I, certainly, never had any desire to make Caltech "normal", and I think you would find a lot of other faculty felt the same.
The "administration" however, that's another matter.
Who is faculty and who administration? Well that's a tricky question.
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u/pierquantum Alum 11d ago
I've had conversations with faculty members who firmly believed that the Honor Code was bunk and a waste of time. They weren't part of the administration at the time, and likely would never be.
The Institute is run by its faculty. Undergraduate education's priorities largely depends on who is most vocal, but for decades the aim of the administration has been to strip Caltech's unique culture away: abolish the house system, slowly but surely. Replace the Honor Code with a set of regulations "just like everywhere else".
There are definite positive movements, particularly in gender equality. But even predating my time there during the 90s, there was a definite stance by the administration (again headed by faculty), that Caltech's quirks should be sanded down.
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u/PaperRevolutionary22 11d ago
Well, I don't disagree with you. Sure there were faculty that felt the Honor Code was bunk. I am not sure they were a majority (I don't think so, but who knows?), but more importantly, I think the faculty that saw the strengths of Caltech's unique, ah, quirks, definitely would have had stronger feelings about it than those that didn't.
I think we're missing something here, though, and that's that the "administration" has changed dramatically over the years. I am putting the word in quotes because there is an official administrative order of the Institute, and as you write, faculty members who are more or less vocal. Up until the 1980s-early 1990s, the faculty WAS the administration. After that, there was a relentless push to replace faculty administration with professional administration, "educators" with no actual scientific or engineering qualifications. I am not sure where this trend has gone since I left the faculty (20 years ago) but I'm sure it hasn't abated. Professional administrators, if I remember right, tripled during the 1990s. Part of it was because of Federal requirements (contract due diligence and liabilities) and part of it was from pressure to switch to fancy IT systems (APE, Administrative Process Engineering), and finally, some Caltech-specific pressures from the Millikan-era bylaws restricting the number of academic faculty and students, making hiring "professional staff" (and postdocs) one of the few ways the institute could grow. I definitely can tell you the attitude of support staff such as Housing and Library was very different when I started as a grad student in 1994 than when I was faculty ten years later or more recently (I interacted with these folks as a student, as faculty, and as an alum.)
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u/Expensive-Necessary9 10d ago
I graduated this year - I remember my frosh year, some of us were scared to even collaborate on sets because we didn't want to get BOC'd for overcollaboration.
But by the time I graduated, I would regularly see people publicly checking out solution manuals for their textbooks from SFL and I'm *absolutely sure* that not everyone was just "using the solution manual to study", since the problems for their sets were from the textbook.
There were multiple instances as well where people would publicly discuss (i.e. in SFL, or in group chats) their plans to cheat on exams, and it felt like there must be more going on if these people feel so comfortable being public about violating the honor code - how were they not afraid of people around them reporting them?
A few years ago, this newspaper article was written https://tech.caltech.edu/2023/11/28/the-honor-code-is-falling-apart/ and since then, I think things definitely became worse.
Personally, as a recent graduate, I just don't think the honor code can survive in the current climate and I see the new changes as something positive.
Regarding house culture, I also see many of the administration's efforts as being positive in helping fix issues regarding nonacademic violations of Caltech's honor code.
When I originally decided to go to Caltech, I was anticipating being able to go through challenges in my field of interest while having capable and curious peers to struggle through those challenges with, but this was not my experience. I think the changes being made will help make future students' Caltech experience more like what I wish mine had been.
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u/Momzillaof1 11d ago edited 11d ago
I’m a current parent, and I’m glad the school is taking measures, although I truly regret the loss of the Honor Code. I think some of the older alumni leaving comments here - unless they have school-aged kids - can’t understand how fundamentally the educational landscape has shifted nationally, probably internationally, in the past six years due to issues arising post-COVID as well as the rise of AI. This is affecting all schools and not just at the college level. I hope these changes are effective. Caltech has an edge over many other institutions due to its small size. I don’t really understand how in schools with 35k+ undergraduates oversight is even possible.
Edited to add: I don’t have the link, unfortunately, but did anyone else see the Wall Street Journal article on how Caltech Admissions investigates applications to uncover dishonest claims? It was called The Caltech Fraud Squad or something similar. It came out a week or two ago.
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u/nicholas818 CS, Dabney/Blacker, 2021 11d ago
I think I found the WSJ article here.
I'm one of the alumni you mentioned who's just learning about this. When I applied to Caltech, my "why Caltech" essay was basically a second essay about why the Honor Code sounded amazing. I then went on to join the BoC with the explicit goal of preserving it. And while I've read stories about COVID and AI shifting the educational landscape and I understand the administration taking the actions it's taking (I even used to have weekly meetings with then-dean, now VPSA Gilmartin — he's great), I'd say it really saddens us to see something that was so special to our experience going away.
I've always been too optimistic, so I have hope that with effort students will eventually be able to win back the requisite trust for an Honor Code system. But it's a type of thing that's much easier to lose than it is to win back.
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u/Momzillaof1 11d ago
Yes, that's the article.
That's very fair. Honor Code is really a great part of life at Caltech. To be honest, I was hoping the school would keep Honor Code for upper level classes at least, even if it had to move to in person tests for Core and other introductory level classes. But maybe that's not practical.
I'm just bristling at anyone suggesting that the school is no longer special because the current students are not up to alumni standards in some way. I feel that most schools are currently grappling with these issues right now whether they're doing anything about it yet or not. Caltech still has plenty of incredibly hardworking, talented, empathetic, funny and original students. It's still a special place. I still boggle at the access undergraduates have to faculty. And at many other uniquely Caltech things like House culture. (One of my favorite traditions is getting a call from the House on Mother's Day. Probably not exciting for the President, but I appreciate the effort.)
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u/InfiniteInjury 9d ago
The honor code may be dead but I don't really see this as being in tension with an honor code. An honor code works better when you limit the temptations. Yes, if it suggests you don't trust them that can also be bad but per se I don't think encouraging in class exams has to have that feature.
But I also kinda feel the honor code was doomed once Caltech became much more of a 'normal' school. In the past it was more specifically just for the people for whom STEM was life. STEM became much more generally popular and changes in admissions and applications (some good some bad) means they are no longer primarily a school for students who would be out of place elsewhere.
When people have a sense of being specially bound together (ex-pats in a foreign country) it is easier to have things like honor codes because the institution and what it represents is especially important to them.
I'm sad that has been lost but at the same time it is hard to really see how they could have continued that. I mean a lot of what allowed that was the fact that being into STEM was uncool and kinda isolating in the past. I'm glad it's not anymore but it also means that Caltech is going to feel less like a magical special place they finally feel at home at and more just like another top notch school.
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u/lik_for_cookies 11d ago
I don’t go to Caltech (I did a summer program there) but I think it’s reasonable to view Caltech as a kind of early warning system for what else might be coming to other universities in the future. I wonder if we’ll see similar changes at other top tier universities in California like USC, UCLA, Cal, Stanford, etc.
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u/dedicateddan 11d ago
Caltech had a uniquely strong honor code. Students were able to take most exams on their own time in their dorm room. Most other universities wouldn't even dream of giving tests out that way!
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u/sarconefourthree 11d ago
Yes, exactly. These changes are not Caltech paving a new way in post-LLM education, rather joining other institutions in proctoring and exam policies. It's a little sad honestly.
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u/flyzapper 11d ago
I was a grad student in the 2010s and was a TA for many classes. I really enjoyed being a TA and I saw the way that the undergrads held themselves to a high standard regarding the honor code.
When taking a midterm at home one time, a student drew a line about 75% of the way through the test and indicated that time had expired at that point, but requested feedback on the remaining answers that they had completed.
I'm sad that it sounds like those times are gone.