A flawed proposal
By Josh Hess and Charles Harris | February 4, 2013In a month, students will have the opportunity to vote on a proposal that would drastically change the honor system.
In a month, students will have the opportunity to vote on a proposal that would drastically change the honor system.
University students should be disappointed by the movement to protest the selection of Judge J.
Our honor system isn?t perfect. But imagine it was far worse.
THE HONOR Committee is locked in an endless cycle of self-destruction. Governed by students, a large majority of those whom come to the Committee completely new for one-year terms, the Committee has virtually no institutional memory and is destined to make the same mistakes repeatedly.
IT IS hard to maintain a successful honor system at a large, public university. The success of a system which seeks to uphold values of academic integrity depends upon its ability to continually encourage student commitment to those values.
IN THE honor system's 160 year history, no generation of University students has ever said it could no longer meet the high standard set by the single sanction.
KERNELS of growing faculty cynicism constitute one of the more worrisome trends facing the University's honor system.
THE UNIVERSITY'S honor system is strong. It is staffed by over a hundred enthusiastic students who sacrifice hundreds of man hours every year to ensure its upkeep.
THE JURY is in on the merits and demerits of the single sanction, and it remains the best sanctioning system for the University's Honor System. For the past semester and a half, the Honor Committee's ad-hoc committee for investigating the single sanction has been studying student surveys and trial jury data to attempt to address many of the concerns commonly raised about the sanction.
NOBODY who earnestly cares about the tradition of honor at the University is excited that College third years Joe Schlingbaum and Lindsay McClung get to graduate with the rest of us and say "I have worn the honors of Honor, I graduated from Virginia." In last week's open trial, both were found to have committed an act of cheating by a jury of their peers.