Honor Council seeks student feedback

By Anita Alem     11/4/15 3:23am

The Honor Council Working Group may consider major structural changes depending upon the responses gathered from the Survey of All Students, released on Monday, Nov. 2. According to Honor Council Chair Alex Metcalf, the working group hopes to hear from both student and faculty experiences to explore the Rice community’s understanding of the honor system.

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Dean of Undergraduates John Hutchinson, the Co-Chair of the working group, said the Faculty Senate established the group as a joint effort of the faculty, Student Association, the Honor Council and the administration.

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“The working group is charged with reaffirming this core value [of academic integrity] by assessing the vitality of the honor system,” Hutchinson said. 

Hutchinson said the group has met throughout the fall semester and plans to present recommendations in the spring semester.

Metcalf said most students are aware of the honor system at Rice only in terms of the honor code that they sign on assignments and exams.

“Everybody signs an honor code, everybody is under the honor code at all times,” Metcalf said. “It’s when it comes to enforcement that it gets a little hazy in most people’s minds.”

The Honor Council recently held its annual Consensus Penalty Structure meeting, a public meeting allowing students to discuss the factors the council considers when administering sanctions. This year, members of the Honor Council brought up several concerns and proposed changes, which have been passed on to the Honor Council Working Group, according to Metcalf.

At the meeting, Metcalf expressed concern over the number of cases left in the semester. Metcalf said the receipt of a statistically significant number of cases at the end of the spring 2015 semester has led the Honor Council to have difficulty reviewing every existing case within this semester.

“The receipt of that many cases has made our job more arduous this semester,” Metcalf said. “They all share a common thread — they were not all just random cases.”

An investigation begins when the Honor Council receives a letter of accusation from a professor or student. The accused student is called in to an investigative meeting to look through the letter of accusation and provide a verbal opening statement; the student later provides a written statement that can be used as evidence. If Honor Council investigators decide to proceed with the hearing, they reach out to professors, teaching assistants and Owlspace administrators. Expert depositions serve to clarify assignments, according to Metcalf. Honor Council Secretary Isabel Alison said it can be difficult for Honor Council members to be involved in cases regarding technical subjects with which they are unfamiliar.

“Expert depositions rely on context for the case, and it’s difficult to convey this for complex, technical cases,” Alison, a Duncan College sophomore, said. “Expert depositions can be unhelpful in those cases.”

Metcalf said there are currently no plans to limit panels regarding technical cases to members with technical background. He said he encouraged members to instead continue to ask for more information from professors.

If nine members unanimously find the accused in violation, they move to penalty deliberations, requiring a two-thirds consensus. Student Judicial Programs and the Office of the Registrar are responsible for implementing sanctions. Metcalf said investigations can span from days to months, depending on when accusations are submitted.

“We have language that strongly encourages people to submit accusations in a timely manner,” Metcalf said. “We occasionally receive accusations from professors after a semester is over.”

Martel College Honor Council Representative Elliot Baerman said he felt there should be a deadline or statute of limitations when a violation occurs requiring a professor to report the violation within a certain deadline.

“There are issues with [accused students] where they forget what occurred and we could potentially lose key information,” Baerman said. “This could sway us one way or another with regards to penalties.”

Metcalf said he agreed that the possibility of a statute of limitations and other changes deserve more consideration.

“Changes within the honor council are important to the rest of the community,” Metcalf said. “If we are going to modify [our constitution], we want to make sure that whatever proposal we have has common acceptance from the students, faculty and Honor Council.” 

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