In an effort to better inform the University community about the honor code, the Honor Committee will be recruiting new educators this spring. Recruitment is always done in the fall for educators, counsel and investigators, which means this will be the first time in recent memory that the Committee conducts pool recruitment in the spring.
After expanding the roles and duties of educators last fall, the Committee felt it would be beneficial to recruit more educators to create and implement outreach projects, Vice Chair for Education Ryann Burke said.
Honor Committee Chair Jess Huang said the Committee also wanted to recruit another class of educators throughout the spring before the Committee transitions in March.
Burke added that she thinks students are not as busy in the spring than they are in the fall and may prefer to try out in the spring.
“We felt that in the fall it’s a little overwhelming for first-year students and international students who are getting acclimated,” she said.
The spring recruitment will be solely for educators, Huang noted, explaining that recruiting counsel and advisors in the spring would be impractical because of the nature of their responsibilities.
“The nature of the counsel and advisor pools ... if they were trained in the second semester, they wouldn’t have the opportunity to take cases and practice what they learned [during the spring semester],” Huang said. She explained that educators, meanwhile, who are trained during the spring semester would still have the opportunity to use what they learned in training and create and implement outreach projects during the spring.
To become honor educators, students take a test composed of multiple choice and short-answer questions. There is no set score that a student must receive to move on to the next round. Rather, Burke said, the Committee uses the students’ responses to the short-answer questions to deduce how interested students are.
Students who are selected then move on to the first round of interviews during which they are asked a series of questions regarding their understanding of the honor system and their interest in serving as educators. Second-round interviews are then held and final selections are made.
Burke said while she has no set number of how many educators the Committee will take, she would like to recruit somewhere between five and 15 new educators.
Once selected, new educators will undergo training, part of which includes planning and carrying out a new educator project. Educators who were recruited last fall, for example, planned a conscientious retraction campaign in which they handed out fliers explaining what a conscientious retraction was and talked with students on Grounds about the topic.
Burke and Huang said they would like spring educator recruitment carry on in years to come.
“I think it’ll be great to see how it turns out this semester,” Burke said. “It’s definitely something that could be continued in the future.”
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