It’s 720 school days later, and you’re walking down that stage—hair set, outfit ready, with twelve honor cords draped around your neck. You collect your diploma and pause for a picture. No one knows your cords are fake.
Graduation honor cords, a staple that never goes out of style, have been around for decades. While they are meant to recognize your achievements and dedication throughout your high school years, in reality, they hold little professional weight or importance. No employer will ask how many cords you had, and no college admissions officer looks into it either. So why are students suddenly buying packs of cords online?
A new TikTok trend shows hundreds of students buying cords with their captions flaunting phrases like “work smarter, not harder” or “buying cords because I deserved them.”
A lot of the examples I’ve seen are just students who wanted to preserve their reputation or outer appearance—choosing to buy cords to look cool in pictures or to validate themselves for their lack of participation in school activities. Yet, some students present a different perspective: they buy cords to represent certain clubs or classes that did not give any out in the first place.
While I understand why someone who put so much effort into their club would want some recognition, the truth is that the cord they buy still isn’t the official one. The person who buys it is still promoting the same act that those who didn’t earn cords are doing. The same can be said for athletes who bought cords since they spent their time in high school focused on sports rather than participating in clubs or classes that hand them out.
This obsession with “cord-collecting” has turned graduation into an unnecessary race, as some seniors make it their mission to collect as many as possible, by any means. Ironically, some of the cords given are just purely for participation, not grades or excellence in a class. If you join a specific club, there’s a high chance that you’ll get a cord just by being in it. While this may satisfy students who joined solely for the cord, it devalues the hard work of students who put in an effort to earn theirs. It also frustrates students who dedicated their efforts elsewhere without receiving recognition.
Ultimately, even though the cords seem fun and exciting, they won’t ever measure up to what you actually accomplished. They serve mostly as an eye-catching piece in your room or your photos; however, they don’t measure how much you gave to the school or the many memories you built in those four years.
Instead of dwelling on how to hop on the latest trend, students should enjoy their remaining time as seniors, appreciating what they have achieved in their high school years, regardless of whether there is a piece of colored silk around their necks to represent it.
