Monday night, Sam Leven and Rachel Carr represented Hoos against Single Sanction to justify their proposal for a multi-sanction revision to the honor system, which appears as referendum four on the ballot this week. Josh Hess, founder of Students for the Preservation of Honor, and Jay Trickett, Vice Chair of Trials for the Honor Committee, argued in opposition to the change. After a valiant effort by both sides, I was left wishing there was a way to vote "neither".
The proposal's goal is to establish the potential for multiple sanctions to allow varying degrees of punishment for students found guilty of act and intent. The idea is that juries, most often a random selection of University students, better represent the student population and can best decide how to punish an offense too trivial to warrant expulsion but not trivial enough to ignore. The arguments for such a system ultimately fail.
Allowing multiple sanctions allows jurors to let their empathy take hold of them and sentence their peers based on their perception of the convicted student. This creates immense room for bias in convictions without eliminating possible bias in reporting.
To standardize punishments between trials in a multiple sanction system, the privacy we have in the system now must be violated by allowing precedents or we must eliminate the random student jury and let Honor do their job. Since triviality is often the focus of sympathetic voting among random student jurors, the decision should be left to trained judges. If multiple sanctions are fairer, the chance of bias can be eliminated by leaving the decisions to Honor representatives. These individuals are still students and they have more experience with the rules and with other cases.
Both sides of Monday's debate agreed that over the last four years a multiple sanction system would have altered the outcome of between five and twelve cases out of roughly 150. This is at the expense of increased room for discrimination in the system and decreased privacy as precedents become more necessary and old cases are opened. With random student juries, this proposal has little to offer and plenty to cost.
The single sanction system as it stands is not a much better alternative. With low and biased reporting rates, flaky jurors, and a decreasing amount of respect, something has to be done to save honor.
Surveys show that students would be more likely to report honor offenses if not for the single sanction. Leven and Carr argue their proposal will help rectify this issue, but a greater question looms beneath this phenomenon.
If the student body truly wants to enact a community of trust, why would any student not report a witnessed offense? It seems students are in support of an honor system that expels cheaters, but have a notion of cheating far removed from their personal lives. Cheaters are not you. Cheaters are not your friends. Cheaters are not good, upstanding citizens who only had thirty minutes of sleep and give to the community and maybe copied one paragraph from the internet on an essay that would have ruined their life if they had done otherwise.
The problem is that almost every honor offense has a sob story and a justification. The truth is that it is still cheating. When students see their peers cheating, they don't think about an individual violating their community of trust. They think of possible justifications and do not want to get involved; this leads to low reporting rates and many jurors admitting they would have voted differently if not for the harsh punishment of the single sanction.
Allowing for multiple sanctions does not fix this. As long as nonreporting and poor juror decisions are seen as anything but honor offenses, the system is based on a flawed design. If your friend watched somebody steal your things and never told you, you would likely view that as a breach of your trust. On a University level, students evidently value their slight personal convenience and pressure not to tattle more than the community of trust we all share.
Maybe honor can be preserved by more sanctions with limited power for random student juries, but the power to punish granted in the current proposal is not the right answer. Low reporting and biased decisions are abominations that show students do not want a real honor system at all. To advance, Honor needs to consider juror failure and careless nonreporting as the offenses they really are. Honor is faced with the option of making students actually act honorably or changing and weakening until it eventually becomes the same thing honor is at plenty of high schools and colleges across the nation
Read More
WILLIAMS: Donald Trump will be a threat to student loan forgiveness
By Ryan Williams | 11 hours agoTo be sure, this is not a problem of the University’s making. Nevertheless, understanding the uncertainty of financial accessibility in education, the University must step up to the plate.
PATEL: Personal development courses support students beyond the gradebook
By Heer Patel | 5 days agoThe University must rethink its approach to education beyond traditional major-specific requirements and mandate personal development courses.
EDITORIAL: Commercialization threatens U.Va.’s educational mission
By Editorial Board | 6 days agoAfter all, measuring the University’s worth in terms of accrued capital, operational efficiency and numerical rankings molds this space into just another cookie-cutter institution.
