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How to Write the Haverford College Essays 2023-2024

Haverford College has two, short supplemental essays: one about your intellectual interests, and one about Haverford’s Honor Code. As a small, academically rigorous school just a short train ride from Philadelphia, Haverford attracts a competitive pool of applicants, so you want to make sure your essays stand out. In this post, we’ll break down both prompts, and explain how to write strong responses to each one.

Haverford College Honor Code

Before we dive into the essays, we want to provide some background on the Haverford Honor code. Here’s what you need to know.

Haverford College has one of the oldest and one of the very few student-run Honor Codes in the U.S. Our Honor Code is not a set of rules, but rather a statement of shared values centered on the concepts of trust, concern, and respect.

Our Honor Code serves as an educational tool in and of itself and provides a powerful framework for our community, emphasizing and supporting qualities we see as essential to a Haverford education. Among other things, the Honor Code at Haverford shapes:

Academic Freedom: The Honor Code fosters an atmosphere emphasizing academic integrity, collaboration over competition, and the cultivation of intellectual curiosity. Differences and disagreement are respected, valued, and embraced, and open discourse is seen as fundamental to the academic endeavor.

Student Agency: The Honor Code upholds a culture in which students are deeply trusted to take substantial ownership of their education and to profoundly shape and define the Haverford community. Student ownership is reflected in self-scheduled exams, in the fact that every student completes a Senior Thesis, in shared responsibility for the residential experience, and of course in oversight of the Honor Code itself.

Community: The Honor Code establishes a supportive environment for living and learning, where the community experience plays a central role in one’s education. The inherent value of every community member is recognized, and diversity in all respects — including diversity of background, experience, and perspective — is nurtured, celebrated, and embraced.

Leadership and Engagement: The Honor Code allows every student to find and develop their own voice, to practice ways of improving community and acting on issues of importance, to learn methods of problem solving and conflict resolution, and to examine the ways they can and will impact the world beyond Haverford.

Before delving into Haverford’s supplementary essays, it is extremely important to have a solid understanding of Haverford’s Honor Code and its role in Haverford’s community. At first glance, Haverford’s Honor Code may appear to be an explicit set of rules that are designed to govern the lives of students, forcing them to comply with specific guidelines and standards. However, the goal of the Honor Code is not to restrict students, but rather to allow for more freedom.

The Honor Code fosters a community grounded in honesty, fairness, and respect. These values create an environment where students feel not only comfortable, but confident sharing their own ideas, opinions, and beliefs. Diversity in thought, belief, culture, and perspective are not only recognized, but accepted and celebrated.

The values of the Honor Code afford students an unprecedented level of control over their education and community. Since it is expected that students adhere to a high degree of honesty and integrity, students are trusted by the administration as well as their professors and peers. For instance, Haverford students don’t have RAs in their dorms, are allowed to take tests without proctors, and are able to schedule their own final exams. These freedoms and privileges can exist because of the values of the Honor Code.

Haverford’s Honor Code also presents an opportunity for self-governance. At Plenary, an all-student “governing” session, students can debate and vote to revise the Honor Code. In this way, students have the autonomy to change and improve Haverford’s campus.

While Haverford’s Honor Code is taken seriously, consequences for infractions are not seen as punishments, rather as opportunities to instill lifelong lessons. Consequences are decided upon by the Honor Council, composed of students, not members of the school administration. It is the hope of the Haverford community that through this process, students will take ownership for their bad decisions, learn from them, grow as community members, and realize that they have the power to control their circumstances both inside and outside the classroom.

As you write your supplemental essays, keep Haverford’s values in mind. Incorporating their values into your essays not only shows that you did your research, but also creates connections between yourself and the Haverford community. For instance, Haverford’s collaborative environment could enable you to work with your peers to understand complicated mathematical theorems. Or, Haverford’s respectful and accepting community could empower you to debate the best policies to solve climate change. Regardless of the interests you choose to express in your essays, it is always a good idea to connect your thoughts to Haverford’s Honor Code and core values.

Haverford College Supplemental Essay Prompts

Prompt 1: Tell us about a topic or issue that sparks your curiosity and gets you intellectually excited. How do you hope to engage with this topic or issue at Haverford? (150-200 words)

Prompt 2: We have highlighted for you some of the values that shape the Haverford community. What are some of the values you seek in your next community? How do Haverford’s values, as demonstrated through our Honor Code, resonate with you?

As you think about how to answer this question, you might draw from how you have been influenced by other communities you have been a part of, experiences you may have had within your communities, or opportunities you have had to shape or even change your communities. (150-200 words)

Tell us about a topic or issue that sparks your curiosity and gets you intellectually excited. how do you hope to engage with this topic or issue at haverford (150-200 words).

This prompt is an excellent opportunity for you to showcase your interest in a specific subject or topic. Although it is not a “Why Major?” prompt, as you have the freedom to write about any of your intellectual interests, not just your intended major, the overall structure of the essay will be similar: you want to select one of your interests, which could be as obscure as Victorian fashion or as common as math, and explain why and how your topic excites your intellectual curiosity, as well as how you’ll be able to continue learning about it at Haverford.

Starting your essay with an anecdote is a great way to show your interest in your topic to readers, rather than simply telling them about it. For example, you could begin by telling the story of how you became interested in art after your first visit to an art museum. Or, you could describe what thoughts and emotions you experience when creating art. Since you’re dealing with a low word count, your story should be pretty simple, as you don’t have the space to flesh out something complicated.

The next part of your essay should focus on the deeper reason why you are so interested in your topic or subject. In other words, what specifically about your topic makes you excited to learn more? Maybe you love science because it explains how everything in the world works, from plants growing to playing tennis. Or, maybe you’re passionate about music because it has the power to inspire and connect people.

While this essay is a short one, you ideally also want to explain, at least briefly, what you do to satisfy your curiosity about this topic. Do you read every available book on Egyptian pyramids? Do you debate the most successful political campaign strategies with your family at dinner? This extra detail will give your reader a clearer sense of how your interest in your topic manifests on a daily basis, which will make your interest feel more tangible and genuine.

Finally, you want to connect your interest in your topic to your potential future as a Haverford student. Hop onto Haverford’s website, and do some research on classes, clubs, or other opportunities at Haverford that will allow you to keep learning about it. Since you probably won’t have much room left by this point, you want to pick just one or two things, as otherwise the end of your essay will feel cramped and rushed.

For example, you could talk about how the College Year in Athens study abroad program would deepen your understanding of Greek mythology, by allowing you to see firsthand many of the sites that were most important to the Ancient Greeks.

Alternatively, you could write about how the clubs Charcuterie Union and Food for Thought would expand upon your interest in cooking, and help you develop a more comprehensive understanding of the role food can play in different people’s lives.

We have highlighted for you some of the values that shape the Haverford community. What are some of the values you seek in your next community? How do Haverford’s values, as demonstrated through our Honor Code, resonate with you?

Brainstorming Your Topic

This prompt tells you pretty much exactly what it wants to know: the values you’re looking for in a college community, and how those values align with Haverford’s. However, while the questions are clear, answering them thoughtfully may take some time, as you’ll need to reflect on what your values truly are.

With a question as open-ended as “What do you value in your communities?” sometimes asking yourself related, slightly more focused questions can help you brainstorm more efficiently. Here are some examples of those kinds of questions:

What are some of your favorite communities you’re a part of? What makes you love them so much?
When you think about your friends, what qualities do many of them share?
Look at your complete college list—why are you applying to this particular set of schools, out of all the colleges in the United States and across the world?

The actual values you choose are much less important than those values being genuinely important to you. One applicant might write an excellent essay about trust, while someone else might write an equally strong one about open-mindedness. But if you try to force a connection to something that isn’t really one of your primary values, your reader will be able to tell you aren’t being fully authentic.

Finally, as you’re brainstorming you’ll likely come up with a list of several different values. But because this essay is so short, you’ll want to focus on just one, or two at the most, once you start writing. Otherwise, you won’t be able to give each value the attention it needs, and your essay will end up feeling all over the place.

Tips for Writing Your Essay

In your actual essay, the most important thing to do is connect the value or two you’re focusing on to Haverford’s values, specifically those laid out in the Honor Code. If you’re having a hard time doing that, you may want to go back to the drawing board. For example, valuing a good sense of humor is a wonderful thing, but doesn’t connect super well to anything in the Honor Code.

A better thing to focus on would be, say, speaking up about what’s important to you. You could easily connect that value to the following two lines of the Honor Code:

“The Honor Code allows every student to find and develop their own voice, to practice ways of improving community and acting on issues of importance.”
“The Honor Code upholds a culture in which students are deeply trusted to take substantial ownership of their education and to profoundly shape and define the Haverford community.”

Once you feel confident that you’ve linked your own values to Haverford’s, you want to think about how to clearly explain that link to admissions officers. Here, Haverford is once again being considerate, and telling you pretty much exactly how they want you to do that, in the second paragraph of the prompt.

To summarize, that paragraph is telling you to use concrete examples and anecdotes to explain how you came to have this particular value. In other words, show, don’t tell, because otherwise, your reader won’t really understand what you having this value says about your personality as a whole. Plenty of people value outspokenness, but the point of the college essay is to distinguish yourself from other applicants. So, you want to show what the value you have chosen means in the context of your life specifically, and why that value’s importance in your life has inspired you to apply to Haverford.

For example, you could talk about how you hated attention as a kid, and preferred to just spend time with your family’s pets. But during the pandemic, seeing people adopt pets for company without knowing how to take care of them frustrated you to the point that you started your own YouTube channel, to explain how to avoid making common first-time pet owner mistakes. To your surprise, the channel became extremely popular, and many people wrote comments thanking you for your help. Speaking up is still hard for you, though, and being on Haverford’s campus, where outspokenness is encouraged, will help you continue to get better at it.

Mistakes to Avoid

Because this prompt is so explicit about what it wants, it’s pretty hard to get totally off-track. The only thing you really want to be wary of is using your space in an inefficient way. 200 words will disappear quickly, so you want to make sure you’re being thoughtful about how long you spend addressing each part of the prompt.

Otherwise, you may end up accidentally using 160 words explaining how you came to have the value you’re focusing on, and then have to cram in the connection to Haverford at the very end. There’s no one correct breakdown of how long you should spend on each point of your essay, as ideally one thing flows naturally into the next. Just make sure the connection to Haverford gets enough room to breathe, as, since that part is likely going to come at the end, it’s at the most risk of getting cut short.

Where to Get Your Haverford Essays Edited

Do you want feedback on your Haverford essays? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays.

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools. Find the right advisor for you to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!

What is an honor code and why is it important to academic integrity?

Honor codes reduce instances of academic misconduct. Research has shown that honor codes must be enacted in a supportive manner. When students have a sense of belonging, feel motivated, and have knowledge of academic integrity, they are less likely to engage in academic misconduct. Honor codes are part of this culture of integrity. So, how does this translate to online learning environments? What are some guiding principles to update honor codes and policies in online learning environments?

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An honor code, like the one above, is a promise that all work is the student’s own, a concrete commitment to academic integrity. Students resort to academic dishonesty for various reasons, and the solution is both complex and simple: we need to make academic integrity a core value in our classrooms and/or institutions , beginning with a promise.

I’ve sometimes added an honor statement at the top of student assignments or exams as a visible reminder of the honor code. But what exactly does it mean, and how is this statement reflective of the adopted institutional values? A true honor code is more than a signature dashed off at the top of an assignment or a poster hanging in the classroom. Intended as an ever present reminder of academic integrity to students, does this statement, often present and often unexplored, really make an impact on students ?

Too often during my tenure as a teacher and literacy coach, I was approached with the question, What do I do when I catch someone cheating on an assignment? After the fact is essentially too late because then the solutions tend to be punitive, and the lesson learned isn’t what it could and should be.

It’s best to be proactive about establishing academic integrity within our classrooms. Without making an honor code a living, breathing part of the classroom--ideally within the whole institution--we educators and students find ourselves in a vicious cycle of policing and punishing after the fact. The honor code needs to exist in a formative space that nurtures awareness of academic integrity throughout the learning journey.

An honor code is a fundamental step to establishing a culture of academic integrity. Ideally this occurs on the institutional level, but it is a must for our individual classrooms. The complex part is making that honor code a continued collaborative effort between the students, us as educators, and the assignments themselves. The honor code allows all stakeholders to know, understand, and participate in commonly held standards of academic integrity.

How does this happen? Do your due diligence. Early and often. Purposefully. Collaboratively. Reflectively. It is only through the steady infusion of these collaborative conversations that students and educators develop a strong understanding of academic integrity that can be put into practice.

What are steps towards establishing a formative space that integrate honor statements to the learning journey within our classrooms?

Establish a culture of integrity. Establishing a common understanding of academic integrity by drafting an honor code, and making it an integral part of the academic community, is a strong first step. Stakeholders such as students, parents, fellow educators, and administration can establish an honor code that is foundational to an educational community. It must then be implemented within individual classrooms with consistent, intentional steps such as explicit instruction and building an awareness of how and why academic integrity is important. This shared understanding between and among all levels of stakeholders helps us build a culture of academic integrity throughout the institution and/or within the classroom. What happens if your institution or other educators don’t institute an honor code? Can we still establish one in our own classrooms? Absolutely yes! When we begin with concrete steps such as creating a shared definition of academic integrity and what it looks like within our classroom, we establish clear understandings of how we can create a culture of academic integrity within our classrooms. The conversations and practices that we establish collaboratively with students are a key factor in the success of the honor code moving forward. While it is our responsibility to introduce these conversations, without student input the honor code will likely be reduced to that dusty old statement that only lives in the header of our assignment!
Center students. Centering students is critical to centering academic integrity in classroom practice. Best practice dictates not delivering the honor code in a neat little package with all the “right” answers already filled in for students, but encouraging students to contribute their knowledge. When we seek input from students about what academic integrity is and what it does--and does not--look like, students are more likely to understand the intent and come to a common understanding of what practicing it in the classroom looks like. Using collaborative activities to establish what the classroom values are, what it looks like (and does not look like) in the classroom, and how violations will be handled will lead to better student engagement and practice. We build a commitment to academic integrity collaboratively by implementing carefully planned discussions and practices and using resources that will support our class’s commitment to maintaining that honor code.
Model academic integrity. Modeling academic integrity must be an intrinsic part of classroom practice in ways both visible and subtle. Although many think academic integrity lives in the English classroom, academic dishonesty can manifest itself in every discipline, including examples such as code plagiarism, non-citation of sources, improper attribution, to name only a few ways that academic dishonesty typically appears in student work. Teachers should credit others in our classrooms and work to model the norm we expect in student work. More than simply an act of attribution, we can offer up fair and inclusive assessments that challenge students to demonstrate their knowledge in ways that are fair and invite students’ best efforts. By demonstrating explicitly how academic integrity lives in daily work and assignments, we model how academic integrity is not just one more requirement to be addressed for the “big” project, but simply some deliberate steps as a regular part of our classrooms.
Commit to working together. Committing to working together within this intentional and formative space is what will determine the role of academic integrity within the classroom or institution. Commitment may look different from classroom to classroom, and that’s perfectly all right. Commitment may take the form of a signed contract, or it may simply be the continuation of discussions regarding what academic integrity does and does not look like. Regardless, renewing that commitment and keeping it in the forefront of students’ minds and work is the goal. And If it’s not working as originally drafted? Then we need to model how to revisit, reflect, and revise so that the honor code can reflect the growth and commitment to academic integrity that we share with our students.

Remember, do your due diligence. Early and often. Purposefully. Collaboratively. Reflectively.

Join us for our upcoming webinar on October 20, 2021, the International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating (IDoA) to learn more about implementing and maintaining honor codes and Turnitin’s newest tools and resources. Turnitin actively encourages positive conversations on academic integrity and is proud to support the International Day of Action. For further information on other activities taking place, visit the IDoA website and share the following hashtags on social media #IntegrityMatters #ExcelWithIntegrity #MyOwnWork

Home / Essay Samples / Life / Honor / The Significance of Honor Codes

The Significance of Honor Codes

Category: Life
Topic: Honor

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