Princeton will end 133 years of unproctored exams on 1 July, when staff begin supervising in-class tests. The reason is a reporting gap. Hegel wrote that plagiarism has to be held in check by honour, and a new review of a book on plagiarism revives the line. Our reading: proctors fix the exam room, where a witness can stand, and Hegel's remark, on the reading of the reviewer Benjamin Madden, concerns the work no proctor can watch.
The reporting gap explains the change. WHYY reported that 44.6% of seniors said they knew of honor code violations they chose not to report. As Inside Higher Ed reported it, only 0.4% had reported one.
The cheating rate is the other half. In the Daily Princetonian's 2025 senior survey, about 30 percent of seniors admitted to cheating, roughly one percentage point more than the Class of 2024. Inside Higher Ed puts the sample at 501 graduating seniors.
What did Princeton change?
Inside Higher Ed reported on 15 May that the faculty had voted to require that “in-class exams shall be supervised by instructional staff.” According to Entrepreneur, the no-proctor rule dated to the 1893 honor code. WHYY called the move “the most significant change to the school's honor code since it was implemented in 1893.”
Before that, only individual and small-group exams were proctored, the Daily Princetonian reported in March. Dean Gordin's memo, as WHYY quoted it, put the problem bluntly: “if students alone are present in the examination room and students are unwilling to report, then there is no check against misconduct during assessments.” WHYY also reported his view that AI lowers the barrier to cheating and that fear of doxxing deters open reporting.
Professor Kim Lane Scheppele was quoted by Inside Higher Ed as saying “AI was the breaking point”. Princeton is not alone. The same outlet noted that Stanford's Faculty Senate voted in April 2026 to allow proctoring, while a Middlebury proposal failed in December 2025.
What did Hegel actually say?
In the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, published in 1821, the Remark to §69 sits in the discussion of property. In the translation on the Marxists Internet Archive it reads: “Hence plagiarism would have to be a matter of honour and be held in check by honour.”
Property belongs, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, to Abstract Right, the first substantive stage of Hegel's account of right. There crime is an infringement of right and of mutual recognition between persons. The entry does not discuss honour and plagiarism at all. The remark reads as an aside in the earliest stage of that account, not a doctrine of academic integrity.
Benjamin Madden, an Adelaide University senior lecturer, reviews Roger Kreuz's Strikingly Similar (Cambridge University Press) for The Conversation and gives the remark more weight. His verdict: “Hegel was right: plagiarism has to be a matter of honour.” As Madden reports it, Hegel held that such questions cannot be precisely determined in law. The point, as we take it, is that authorship has no exact edge for a rule to enforce: borrowing, echo and homage shade into theft by degrees.
Does the case against detection undo Princeton's proctors?
Madden says “AI detection software is widely judged unreliable”, so a procedural response looks futile to him. It does not touch what Princeton did. A proctor is not software inferring authorship from a text. By Inside Higher Ed's account, proctors act as witnesses and report to the Honor Committee, and students remain bound by the code. The change repairs one thing, the missing witness, and leaves Madden's problem untouched. An exam is a place and a time, so someone can stand in the room; an essay is written anywhere, so no one can.
The best case for the proctors comes from those who made the decision. Gordin's memo says students are unwilling to report, and the survey figures above fit that. Nadia Makuc told the Daily Princetonian in March, “What we have right now maybe isn't working,” and Entrepreneur reported that Gordin's letter called cheating on in-class exams widespread. Supervision is the one fix that does not depend on the people who have stopped reporting.
What is the strongest objection to proctors?
John Byron Kuhner, writing in First Things on 13 May, argues the vote ended something it could not replace. “The old honor system has been replaced by open cheating and a general culture that does not care enough to report it.” His case is that honour is an internal ethic enforced socially, and that honesty cannot be rebuilt without a culture that enforces it. He quotes Fitzgerald on what the old code produced: cheating “simply doesn't occur to you, any more than it would occur to you to rifle your roommate's pocketbook.”
Kuhner is right that a witness does not make anyone honest. His own sentence concedes the proctors' point, since a culture that does not care enough to report leaves nobody to enforce the code. A 0.4% reporting rate, as Inside Higher Ed reported it, suggests that the shared habit of enforcing the code had thinned before any proctor arrived. The two men do share a diagnosis, that the culture has weakened. What they dispute is the remedy: Gordin would supply a witness now, while Kuhner holds that a witness cannot restore the thing that was lost.
Our verdict
Proctors and Hegel answer different problems, and Princeton chose correctly for the one it has. Exam cheating is an observable act, and a witness restores the check that Gordin said was missing. Plagiarism is a question of authorship, and Hegel's remark, if Madden reads it rightly, points at the work no proctor can watch: the essay written alone, where his judgement of detection software applies in full.
Watch for the next Daily Princetonian senior survey. If the share of seniors who say they know of unreported violations stays near the 44.6% WHYY reported, Princeton will have added a witness without rebuilding the culture Kuhner wants.
Where to read next
- Madden's review of Kreuz, on The Conversation.
- Hegel's text, §69 Remark, on the Marxists Internet Archive.
- Abstract Right, property and recognition, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- The vote and the Stanford and Middlebury context, on Inside Higher Ed.
- The case for honour, on First Things.
- More from our Philosophy desk: UCT weighs expelling Oppenheimer: what Mill’s harm principle says and Should a theory of justice have a list? Nussbaum vs Sen.