Community outreach, faculty education and Semester at Sea may become the most talked-about issues for the Honor Committee in the next year.
As this school year winds down, the Committee is looking ahead to a new semester and a new class of students and faculty who will need to be introduced to the honor system.
The Committee plans to use the faculty survey completed last semester to gain a sense of community understanding of and involvement with the system.
"It will have sweeping effects for our committee," Honor Chair Ben Cooper said. "It's hard to judge -- unless you get a survey like that -- where we're succeeding and where our shortcomings are."
The survey sought to illuminate the correlations among faculty experience, knowledge and opinion, former Chair Alison Tramba said.
To build on knowledge gained from the survey, the Committee plans to build stronger relationships with department chairs and the Faculty Senate.
"I hope that the current Committee is conscious of its results and takes those into consideration when working with faculty members both in cases and in training and communication," Tramba said.
The Committee will also focus on its educational programming for teaching assistants and graduate students, who demonstrated low levels of engagement with the system in the survey, Cooper said.
He added that the Committee will spend time during the summer working on orientation programs to educate incoming students and preparing administratively for the upcoming year.
Cooper said he may also spend time at the orientation for the summer Semester at Sea voyage as a student representative of the honor system.
Semester at Sea presents a "unique situation" for Honor, Cooper said. The majority of students on the boat are not from the University and therefore may not have the same concept of student self-governance as University students, he added.
"The first part we have to address is getting them to get out of the status-quo mindset and let them know that here at Virginia, we have a student-run system," he said.
Administrators are responsible for conducting investigations on the ship, but trials are conducted by University students in Charlottesville.
The Committee will not only focus its efforts on students who have never before experienced the honor system; one of the Committee's primary initiatives for the next year will be improving its relationship with the entire student community, according to Cooper..
Last year's Committee also focused on improving community relationships, Tramba said.
"I would say that our communication with the student body was something our Committee did well ... trying to look at Honor from a current perspective and really address the issues that students, faculty and community members saw as important," Tramba said.
She added that the Committee worked to increase transparency in Honor proceedings and simplifying its procedures.
"Trying to reach out to the University is a broad and vague goal to have," Tramba said. "And that's what makes it into a challenge, turning it into concrete tasks that can be accomplished."
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