Starting on Jan. 1 judges serving on the Pennsylvania state appellate court, county courts and the Philadelphia Municipal Court will all have more homework. Judges will be required each year to earn a minimum of three hours of continuing education credits in judicial ethics, and nine hours in judicial practice and related areas.

The updated requirements also include the formation of a judicial board that will set up the courses and track judges’ attendance. Those who don’t comply could find themselves before the state’s Judicial Conduct Board.

This isn’t the first time Pennsylvania judges have been sent back to school. In July continuing education laws were updated to require 1,000 district judges take a course on how to handle autistic defendants in the courtroom.

The reason for the update was to respond to a specific trend. A 2009 state census by the Pennsylvania Health Department’s Bureau of Autism Services showed that about 20,000 people with autism were receiving state services. By 2014 that number had grown to 55,000 — the majority of them children.

There’s another trend that needs to be addressed: scandalous and unethical behavior by those on the bench. In the last three years the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has lost three justices to scandals.

First there was former justice Joan Orie-Melvin, who in 2013 resigned her seat after being convicted of using her staff to do campaign work.

One year later former justice Seamus McCaffery retired amid the “porngate” e-mail scandal and allegations that he tried to fix a traffic ticket for his wife and may have allowed her to collect legal referral fees while she served as his chief legal clerk.

Then, in 2015, former justice J. Michael Eakin retired amid an investigation into inappropriate e-mails he sent and received on a private e-mail account — another casualty of porngate.

Once is a mistake, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern — and that’s just on the Pennsylvania supreme court. For some time now Pennsylvania has struggled to improve upon a judiciary plagued with nepotism and corruption.

In 2014 it finally instituted long-overdue reforms to its judicial code of conduct, addressing administrative hiring practices and banning judges from serving on corporate boards.

It’s been more than 2,500 years since the Greek philosopher Socrates argued that ethics can be taught. Today we’re still debating whether such classes work for everyone from MBA students to prison inmates.

What’s not up for debate is that Pennsylvania jurists clearly need a refresher course on acceptable versus unacceptable behavior. At the very least we can hope the classroom time — and the formalization of the system tracking judges’ participation — will serve as a reminder that people are actually watching and marking their behavior on the bench.