Dean Dabiri's article in the January 12, 2015 edition of The California Tech deeply worries us. The title “Does the House System Violate the Honor Code?” is aggressive and incendiary. SDI takes the Honor Code very seriously; it is written into our governing documents. We believe that Honor Code violations must be addressed, and the implication that a violation has occurred deserves discussion. However, systems do not violate the Honor Code; people do. Dragging the Honor Code into this discussion is an unfair way to provoke a knee-jerk reaction and makes productive conversation about the underlying issues difficult.

Putting aside the inflammatory language, we are not certain what, exactly, the problem is or if there is a problem at all. The statistics quoted in the article are rudimentary at best. To have a proper, science-based discussion of the issues, we need access to the data. Without such access, the results are not repeatable, and that's not science. Full data are needed because the limited data that are available are very noisy, as shown in the graph below. Any conclusions are not obvious and will require non-trivial analysis.