Haverford: Community and values (Honor Code)

150-200 words

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?

What it’s really asking

Name the values you actually want in a community, then connect them to what Haverford's Honor Code really stands for (trust, self-governance, restorative conflict resolution) and to a moment when you personally lived those values. You may also draw on communities you have shaped, changed, or been changed by.

Why they ask it

The Honor Code is the heart of Haverford's culture. They want students who understand it as a daily practice of trust, not a slogan, and who will help sustain a small community where people resolve conflict through honest conversation rather than authority.

Three ways in

Read the Code first

Before writing, read the actual Honor Code. Write about what it really means, trust and restorative conflict resolution, not just the word integrity.

Anchor in one real moment

Build the essay around a single time you chose honesty or trust when it was hard, or helped a community handle conflict well, rather than listing values you admire.

Make it two-way

Show both what you want from a community and what you would give to it, so the essay reads as a fit, not a wish list.

✕ Weak opening

“I have always believed that honesty and integrity are the most important values a person can have.”

✓ Strong opening

“The hardest thing I ever said to my robotics team was that the design we had spent six weeks on, mine included, was the reason we kept losing.”

✦ Annotated example · The unproctored exam. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

At my school, every test is watched. A teacher paces the rows, and we learn early that honesty is something enforced from the outside. ¹So when I read that Haverford students take unproctored exams and trust each other to keep their word, my first reaction was disbelief, and my second was a kind of longing. ²I want a community where integrity is assumed about me, not extracted from me. I think people grow into the expectations others hold for them. ³I have felt the smaller version of this on my debate team, where we report our own time violations because the round means nothing if we cheat to win it. ⁴Haverford's Honor Code reads to me less like a rulebook and more like a promise the whole community makes at once. ⁵That is the next community I want: one where trust is the starting point, and where I would be trusted to deserve it.⁶

1Starts by naming the contrast, which sets up the Honor Code as a genuine shift rather than a slogan to praise.
2Admits real doubt before admiration, which reads as honest and self-aware rather than flattering, matching trust lived not preached.
3States the value she seeks in plain language and gives a reason for it, showing reflection instead of buzzwords.
4Grounds the abstract value in a specific lived experience of self-governance, proving she already practices it.
5Reframes the Honor Code in her own terms, demonstrating she understood it rather than just looked it up.
6Closes on a quiet, earnest line that loops back to the trust theme without overstatement, fitting Haverford's understated values.

Stuck? Start here

When did you choose honesty or trust even though it cost you something, and what happened?
After reading the Honor Code, which specific feature (self-scheduled exams, self-governance, restorative conflict resolution) actually resonates with how you already live?
What is one thing you would give to a community, not just take from it?

Before you submit

Did you show, through a real moment, a value you hold rather than just naming it?
Did you reference what the Honor Code actually means instead of praising integrity in the abstract?
Is this story different from the one you used in your first essay so the two give distinct windows into you?

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