I made the below comment on the post and wanted to preserve its content.
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I commend you for posting about this (I was starting to think that this was a news site only for "positive" Mormony stuff).
I've read the comments so far and will chime in with my own perspective/experience. My experience at BYU taught me that if people wanted to break the honor code, they would do so (present company included). Punishment for violations is rather arbitrary and inconsistent. Let me give you an example. During the student body campaign season of my final year at BYU, the front-running student body president and his VP running mate were abruptly disqualified from the running when a roommate of the ex-gf of the VP went in to the honor office and reported him for a curfew violation six months earlier. This happened at about the same time that BYU did virtually nothing about numerous gang rape allegations that had been made against players on its football team. Is anyone surprised?
Let's not fool ourselves about one thing: the honor code is a mechanism of control, nothing more. Mormons are already expected to abide by the covenants they've made in their church. The honor code simply gives BYU (and the LDS church) leverage to ensure that their adherents remain obedient. It also adds many things to the "forbidden" list that would not otherwise constitute violations of any covenant (e.g. curfew, room/bathroom restrictions, dress/grooming, etc.). Such a control mechanism is seemingly inconsistent with a religion that so heavily emphasizes the importance of "free agency" and the notion of teaching people correct principles and then letting them govern themselves. The church already has a system in place to deal with (punish) covenant breakers, and it long predates the honor code.
BYU, or the church that runs it, has to make a decision. Does it preserve this culture of victim blaming, or does it sacrifice its mechanism of control? If students' academic progress could no longer be threatened by honor code violations, would that result in more "sin"? Perhaps, but like I already said, if people want to sin, they're going to find a way to do it. When an organization strives so hard to exert control over the behavior of its members, it looks less and less like a church, and more and more like another "c" word.
