Honor Council working group presents findings

By Jaclyn Youngblood     9/10/09 7:00pm

After nearly a year of research, the Working Group on the Honor Council presented its findings on efficiency within the organization this week.The 11-member group - comprised of an assortment of professors, students and a representative from the Office of the President - was charged last October with evaluating the functionality of the Honor Council.

The Honor Council is a group of undergraduate and graduate students who review, interpret and oversee the Honor System and hear cases on purported violations.

Working Group Chair Evan Siemann, an Ecology and Evolutionary Biology professor, began looking into the Honor Council last year after hearing faculty members' and students' frustrations.

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"We thought it was time to take a look at whether or not the Honor Council was working as well as it could," Siemann said.

From the survey data, the group developed two recommendations that it presented to the Faculty Senate Wednesday. Discussion on both recommendations was tabled until next month's Faculty Senate meeting.

To gauge perceptions of the council's efficacy, the group conducted a SurveyMonkey.com survey of faculty, undergraduate students and graduate students from July 31 to Aug. 15. Survey questions ranged from past interactions with the Honor Council to the nature of violations with which the respondent had been involved.

A total of 205 faculty, 366 graduate students and 909 undergraduate students responded.

Based on the results for two questions in particular, Siemann said the group was able to hone in on two cases that seemed to be supported across all three demographics and make recommendations for the Faculty Senate.

The first recommendation the group proposed was to create a separate Honor Council for graduate students. Currently, the council has 30 undergraduate positions and four graduate positions and hears both undergraduate and graduate cases.

"As far as we can tell from surveying other schools with student honor systems, we can't find any other school that has grad students and undergrads being heard by a common council," Siemann said.

The working group looked into the student-governed honor systems at Princeton University, the College of William & Mary, California Institute of Technology, Sewanee University and the University of Virginia when composing the survey.

Of the faculty members who responded, 62.1 percent approved establishing a separate Honor Council for graduate students. Of graduate students surveyed, 63.1 percent were in favor, while 54.2 percent of undergraduates surveyed agreed.

Siemann said if the Faculty Senate approves this motion, the Graduate Student Association will be in charge of investigating the feasibility of instituting a separate graduate student honor council.

The Faculty Senate will also vote next month on whether certain offenses could be handled between the offending student and the faculty member, independent of the Honor Council.

"A fair number of violations that could go to the Honor Council don't go to the Honor Council," Siemann said. "[There] potentially is a huge difference in the types of penalties students are subjected to based on whether [a violation] went to Honor Council or not."

While 47.7 percent of faculty reported resolving a violation outside of the Honor Council in the past, 66.8 percent said they would "support a resolution of some violations via an agreement between the faculty member and student outside of Honor Council."

Student support for an external resolution process was higher than faculty support, with 78.5 percent of graduate students and 87 percent of undergraduates in favor of such a measure.

Baker College senior Samuel Jacobson said he agreed with the majority of undergraduate students who would support an external vehicle for conflict resolution.

"I find the Honor Council and the whole elaborate-rules thing kind of Draconian," Jacobson said. "It would be nice if the process could be simplified."

Will Rice College sophomore Al Ernst said the Honor Council seems to intimidate students. She said a process that involved only the student and the faculty member might make the student more comfortable in defending his or herself. While Ernst echoed Jacobson's support for the recommendation, she said the logistics of such a process would be tricky.

"Where do you draw the line between what goes to the Honor Council and what doesn't?" Ernst said.

Chair of the Honor Council Lindsay Kirton said it is difficult to judge the relative severity of violations because academic departments have differing opinions.

"We don't view plagiarism as worse than taking longer on a take-home exam," she said.

Kirton, a Wiess College junior, said she appreciates the efforts of the working group and is interested in studying the results of the survey in more detail. However, the ultimate authority does not lie with the Honor Council; students must vote on amendments during the general election to enact any changes.

"Amending the Honor Council constitution is up to the students," she said. "It wouldn't just be us deciding. It's up to the students to see what they want."

The responsibility of further investigating this motion, should it pass, would lie with the Honor Council, Siemann said.

Find the full graphic of the survey results in the article's pdf.

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