Throughout the semester, the Honor Committee has re-worked and re-examined many of its education efforts in the hopes of increasing awareness and knowledge about its system.
"Honor has the potential to impact a student's career ... either positively or negatively," Vice Chair for Education Rob Atkinson said. "We need to make sure students are at least getting a baseline understanding of the system and the rationale behind it."
By expanding their knowledge about the Committee and its procedures, educated students might better ensure that they are not committing honor offenses.
"Everyone needs to know and be educated so that they can abide by the rules they are expected to follow," Atkinson said.
To this end, the Committee has initiated several campaigns that emphasize education.
University-wide initiatives
The Committee adopted a new definition of plagiarism last night to include in its "green book," which defines the honor system's policies and procedures.
This new definition, which was introduced by Vice Chair for Community Relations J.J. Litchford, is intended to be more specific, especially in regard to paraphrasing without citing the original source. The new definition states that it is plagiarism if the reader can "match your words and phrasing with those of your source" and quotation marks have not been used - even if the paraphrase has been cited.
"I think the change ... is partly meant to help us with our definition but also to be educational," Committee Chair David Truetzel said, noting that the Committee will now campaign to explain the change to students and make sure they are fully aware of it.
The Committee has also publicized the procedure of filing a conscientious retraction through several education campaigns, Truetzel said. A conscientious retraction allows a student who has committed an honor offense to admit to that offense and accept the consequences without having to leave the community of trust. The admission to guilt, however, must come from the student before he or she knows that someone suspects them of an honor offense, according to the Committee's Web site.
"I think conscientious retractions are a great thing, and people might not know much about it or have a great awareness of it" Truetzel said. They are a "great learning opportunity [because they] let somebody commit an honor offense and then make amends on it without going through a trial."
The number of conscientious retractions has more than doubled since the campaign's launch, highlighting its overall effectiveness, Truetzel said.
In addition to the Committee's efforts, individual Committee representatives have taken the initiative to improve and promote honor education throughout their schools and programs of interest. Schools within the University have worked with the Committee to host events at which information about Committee procedures has been distributed to ensure that students are made fully aware of the rules and regulations, especially as final exams approach.
Targeting the community
Though the honor system applies to all students within the University's community of trust, this community is still difficult to address as a single unit during the Committee's education efforts.
The Committee is able to convey a much more consistent message, however, when it reaches out to separate groups individually. The Committee plans to target and educate several individual groups about both the honor system and how it uniquely affects them.
The first of these groups is athletes, a large University sub-group, which also constitutes a large portion of students accused of honor offenses.
Athletes "are reported on a much higher rate than the average student [because of] possible preconceived notions about athletes ... [and because they] stand out in a crowd," Vice Chair for Trials Alex Carroll said. "It's really unfortunate that spotlighting is an issue, but education is one way we can help change these things."
As a result, the Committee will continue a successful program from last year, in which it reached out to each sports team by hosting presentations to discuss the honor system, along with issues that uniquely affect athletes. For example, the presentations include basic information about the honor system, an overview of the system and a series of case studies.
The case studies are the main focus of the presentation and each highlights three specific points, such as conscientious retractions, spotlighting and situations when teammates ask one another for help on an assignment, Carroll said. This information is intended to inform and facilitate discussions among team members.
It is especially important that the "honor representatives are better informing athletes about what it might mean if a student athlete is found guilty of an honor offense, because it impacts them in a different way," said Jim Booz, associate director of athletics for academic affairs. "I appreciate the Honor Committee's willingness to spend time educating the University's athletes, and I think it's been received very well by our athletes."
De-marginalizing minorities
Like athletes, minority and international students are disproportionately reported, and so they are another significant focus group for the Committee's educational outreach.
The Committee's Diversity Advisory Board has identified four means through which it can address these issues: international student orientation, the diversity forum during Honor Awareness Week in the spring semester, translating the green book and an online diversity module that would educate faculty and staff, DAB Co-Chair Amy Sikes said.
To "revive the international students' orientation," Committee members plan to lead small-group discussions "on a range of topics which include conscientious retraction, the single sanction and spotlighting [within case studies] tailored to international students," DAB Co-Chair Yi Cai said.
The presentations will also "question the students about their perceptions of the honor system," Cai said, because "given their unique cultural backgrounds we want to see how they understand our system," which he hopes will help educate the Committee as well.
Additionally, during next semester's diversity forum, Cai hopes to invite various student groups to discuss diversity issues the Committee addresses or fails to address, so it can identify and improve in these new, emerging areas of concern.
The third project, which began last year, is the condensation and translation of the Committee's green book into different languages, including Chinese and Spanish, Sikes said, so international students can learn about honor in their native languages. The Committee plans to translate the green books into additional languages as well, Cai added.
Though the Committee has already broken ground on the other three projects, the education module for faculty and staff is "something that's been tossed around multiple times" and has not yet been created, Sikes said.
The module would "bring the statistics [about honor accusations against international and minority students] to the faculty," Cai said. Overall, the module plans to make faculty aware of the possible reasons why minority and international students are brought up on honor charges disproportionately.
"The whole idea of is it spotlighting, is it dimming, is it a lack of education," Sikes said. "Are [teaching assistants] and professors naturally picking out people because they look different?"
The module, however, may be difficult to introduce to faculty given their position at the University.
It is "very touchy, especially with faculty because we really respect them and we don't want to feel like we're educating them," Sikes said, adding that Committee members will continue to work on the module in the future.
The benefits from these education efforts are more than just theoretical, Cai said.
"I went through the process" of adjusting to the University as an international student, Cai said. "I got to know the honor system and became aware of spotlighting and the low involvement of international students in the system" through the presentations.
Though the Committee's education efforts have received positive feedback, some individuals also have raised concerns.
Claudia Quintero, supporting officer for the Minority Rights Coalition, commended Cai and Sikes for the progress they have made in educating minorities and international students about honor. Nevertheless, she noted that attendance at DAB meetings - which are open to the University community - is diminishing overall, which indicates that students are losing interest and are not being targeted enough.
"A lot of [international students] I've talked to in DAB view honor as the preppy white kids, and we can't correct that unless we educate and get them involved," Sikes said. "They can better reach out to their peers and can better understand what the honor system means to a minority student or international student, which is something others on the Committee cannot convey as well."
In addition to contacting the wider international and minority student community, the Committee recently began a discussion-based education effort with the University's black community, Atkinson said. The Committee met with the Black Leadership Institute to talk about different issues that affect both the honor system and black students.
Black Leadership Institute Chair Ashley Lewis said the meeting's purpose was to "inform students of the African-American community about honor, how it works and how to protect themselves if a charge is brought against them."
The meeting was successful in creating a dialogue between students and the Committee, Lewis said, adding that he hopes to see such discussions continue and expand in the future.
Nevertheless, she believes the Committee should continue their discussions and their education efforts.
Because this particular meeting between BLI and the Committee seemed successful, Atkinson said he hopes the Committee can apply its method to other student groups so the participants can "really focus and discuss these issues and [so] no one feels like they are being defensive and no one is accusing anyone else."
Uniting University outsiders
Finally, the Committee has targeted education efforts toward Semester at Sea participants and first-year students, all of whom come from different backgrounds but must still learn the intricacies of the system.
"One of our big projects is an education module for the Semester at Sea program that works with the Voyager's Handbook," Atkinson said.
In addition to other policies and procedures for the Semester at Sea program, the current version of the Voyager's Handbook explains the honor system used on board the voyage. The new educational module, however, will also contain questions that students must be able to answer correctly before they set sail, said Mark White, academic dean for the Spring 2010 voyage.
"By doing this, we can ensure all students on Semester at Sea have, in fact, read the materials and have affirmed that they understood it," White said.
The module will be required for students on the next voyage, which will set sail in January, Atkinson said.
So far, Semester at Sea has been pleased with the idea of using a standardized module to teach students of different backgrounds. As a result, the program may use similar methods for disseminating other information in the future, White said.
Only time will tell, however, whether these educational efforts will prove effective in cutting down the number of reported cases, he said.
If the module is successful, the Committee might create a similar system to educate first-year students about the honor system, Atkinson said. First-year students, he said, are similar to Semester at Sea students in that they come from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives and are relatively unfamiliar with the University's community of trust.
"We're trying to overhaul the way we do first-year education," Atkinson said, noting that the Committee wants to find a way to supplement its current first-year education approach of "dorm talks," at which Committee members discuss the honor system in first-year housing areas with new students.
This year's dorm talks were more successful than in previous years, Atkinson said, but he would like to see a system through which the Committee can guarantee that every first-year student is "receiving the same standard of information and can ensure that they have" seen and understood the materials. Atkinson said he believes an educational module can ensure this outcome.
Ultimately, Atkinson said, it will be important for the Committee to respect learning differences, while at the same time aiming to generate a similar understanding level within all members of the community of trust. Such a baseline could have a profound effect on Grounds, increasing fairness for students from all backgrounds and strengthening the system as it moves into the future.
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