Honor

From my old blog:
The Discipline Committee (of which the Honor System Committee is a part) is one of the great institutions at Williams. Faculty and students come together make hard judgments about difficult cases and, having done so, report to the community the results of their deliberations in detail (but with all names removed). The reports make for interesting reading. Which infractions are your favorites? Does anyone know when the 2008-2009 Report will be available?
Judging your fellow Ephs is an important but often thankless job, so kudos to all involved, especially EphBlogger Peter Just, chair of the Committee this year and former EphBlogger Will Slack ‘11.
Comment:
eph22 says:
I disagree. They do not do a good job. I have known of cases where they failed students for a minor offense. The purpose of college is to educate and if you make minor mistakes, such as not footnoting or something, you don’t ruin a persons 4 years by flunking them. You give them a warning and then if it happens again, you take action.
So while they might be praised, I do not believe they are doing students a good service.

I have no favorite infractions. I've been on the committee for 2 1/2 years now, and every hearing has been difficult. They are emotionally wearing and often frustrating, because it is so easy to sympathize with overburdened students who, at 4 AM, lost their self-control and made a bad choice.

Yet I don't regret a single one of the convictions, and I think our sanctioning method is appropriate. In fact, we're quite a bit lighter than other schools, some of which automatically dismiss or suspend a student for cheating. In direct response to Eph22, I've never heard a case where a student "forgot to footnote." These are cases of true and deliberate plagiarism and cases when a student accidentally plagiarizes by being careless, but it's much more than forgetting to include a [1]. Without the Honor Code, we wouldn't be able to have take-home exams or tests. We wouldn't have faculty give exams without a proctor, and we wouldn't have so much collaborative learning. The privileges for the Honor Code are part of the admissions package, and there are consequences for abusing those. 

What's a professor supposed to do when a student hands in a plagiarized piece and gets a warning? The honor code is the only thing every student at Williams has to sign each year - you don't get to forget about it, and no matter how tired you are when you decide to cheat, you ALWAYS have the opportunity not to turn in your problem set or essay. Failing the assignment is always an option - it's just rarely our option in assessing a sanction.

I can answer questions about how this committee works to anyone, though I have to maintain confidentiality.

2 comments:

  1. Seems like it would be good to have students be better warned about the sanctions. Are these reports distributed? Shouldn't they be?

    I would recommend that, each year, the form that students sign about the honor code include the most recently available report from the committee.

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  2. All freshman hear directly from the Honor Committee chair, and international frosh get a special briefing. All students also receive the Honor Code reports when they come out.

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