That the Provost establish a joint committee of faculty, students, and administrators to investigate the need and possible advantages to changing the Honor Code, such as allowing for alternative ways to adjudicate minor violations of the Honor Code.

The bulk of the Task Force's time and recommendations focused on the need to communicate to the university the existence, functioning, and significance of the Honor Code. There was considerable agreement among committee members that the Honor Code was currently underutilized.

The time consuming and problematic portion of the Honor Committee caseload is composed of those cases in which the student claims he or she is not responsible for the offense. Resolution of these charges involves a full hearing requiring the presence of five student judges, a faculty advisory, the faculty member or student who filed the charge, witnesses, and the accused student. There were 107 cases filed in the 2000-01 academic year, 43 of which involved these full hearings. In the 2001-02 academic year, 54 of the 158 cases involved full hearings.

Graduating seniors are given priority processes since they cannot graduate until their case is heard. The last month of a semester sees a major spike in cases filed with approximately 80% of the Spring caseload filed between May 1 and June 1. While the Honor Code Committee tries to get local cases heard over the summer, student and faculty departures mean that the May case load is not typically resolved until much later in the next academic year. Apart from this apparently unavoidable problem, the Task Force did not find evidence that the current procedures were administratively unmanageable or operate too slowly.

Recommendations:

Recommendations:

16.

That the Provost, Vice President for University Life, and Honor Code Committee endorse the following change to the Honor Code and submit it for a vote to the student body: When a student acknowledges responsibility for a first offense of plagiarism, the student will be given the option of waiving the sanction hearing to have the faculty sanction imposed directly.

• What factors foster adherence/allegiance to a code of ethics that translates to or facilitates the Honor Code?
  • Institutional loyalty: The "corporate university" model, where students are clients who are paying for a service or product, encourages them to look for the easiest and most economical routes toward finishing their degrees. Students who adhere to the older liberal arts model of a university are more likely to see their degree, the process toward that degree, and by extension the university itself as things directly connected to their formulation of self and are therefore more likely to employ an ethical code.
  • Closer contact between students and facu1ty: Both students who violate the honor code and students who don't (but choose not to report known violations) do so in part out of a conviction that faculty are largely unaware of student culture; they have no idea what students are thinking or doing, because
    1. They live in ivory towers, removed from the "real world"
    2. They are overworked, underpaid adjuncts or graduate students who don't care about students
    3. They are underworked, overpaid, elitist snobs who don't care about students
  • A radical reconfiguration of what it means to be "honest": strict adherence to the honor code, or to any code of ethics that emphasizes intellectual honesty and academic integrity, is not outdated, puritan conformity to abstract and largely meaningless rules. Rather, it means taking control and claiming full responsibility for one's own intellectual - and therefore political - freedom. Using another's paper, paragraph, sentence, ideas, instead of one's own, is a way to avoid thinking and erodes the ability to make informed, critical decisions at any level - it turns people into sheep.
• What can we do to foster a culture where the honor code - and academic integrity in general - is a respected and viable part of university life?
  • Faculty buy-in: teaching faculty need to actively manage their students' understanding of issues concerning intellectual property and academic integrity:
    1. Plagiarism warnings on syllabi are good, but they aren't enough. Discussions of academic integrity, its nuances and pitfalls, need to be an explicit, integrated, and ongoing part of the classroom curriculum.
    2. Faculty whose own institutional loyalty is understandably tenuous (adjunct and contract faculty) need to be helped to feel that this is not a thankless task. If full-time, tenure line faculty feel in some ways more powerful than their students, adjunct and contract faculty often feel less powerful and less enfranchised on campus than their students, who have power over them in the form of course evaluations. These people are also often piecing together a living teaching part-time at several institutions, all of which makes strict enforcement of the honor code an arduous and risky undertaking for them. At the very least, the university needs to be understanding of the constraints on part-time and contract faculty, when bringing them into the converstaion about helping to foster and "honor code" culture at George Mason.
  • Open, organized forums for discussion at all university levels: one example might be a conference that addresses explicitly questions of intellectual property, creative and academic integrity in a postmodern cyberculture. Something that takes place over several days and involves a variety of units - faculty, administrators, and students from the undergraduate to the graduate level (AVT, NCC, CS are good possibilities).
  • Some kind of campus-wide campaign that focuses on the ideological implications of academic dishonesty ("don't be a sheep",etc.). Posters?
  • Student input: perhaps a "focus group" composed of students on bot sides of the question - those who already believe in and support the honor code (Honor Committee members, for instance) and those who don't know it, don't care about it, challenge it, etc. Knowing what students are thinking and saying about this will help us to formulate a campaign.

Traditions Committee
Honor Committee Subcommittee: Amy Snyder, Zavin Smith, Elizabeth Patten

Monday, February 4, 2002

Shirene Rasheed, Lauren Parker, and Jerry Mulherin met with the subcommittee to detemline how the Honor Committee might be assisted in reaching its goals and developing new initiatives to increase awareness and educate faculty, staff and students about the Honor Code and Honor Committee.

Initiatives listed by Honor Committee include: Programs

• Plan an "Integrity Week" with programs designed to increase awareness to include mock trials, speakers from the School of Law workshops, etc.
• Workshops focused on the Honor Code, process, Honor Committee, etc., during Orientation and other appropriate student events
• Faculty Workshops to include a mock trial and detailed description of the process and the faculty role

Publicity

• Web site with link from the main GMU page
• Design a logo that can make the Honor Code and Honor Committee easily recognizable
• Develop a brochure to educate reader about the Honor Code and process and offer information outside of the hearings. Georgetown has a brochure that is an example. The Honor Committee brochure would be distributed to faculty, staff, and students.
• Continue to be present at Student Organization fairs such as Patriots Day to establish the Honor Committee as a student organization rather than hearing board for Honor Code violations
• Banner in the Johnson Center
• All classrooms will have laminated signs with brief Honor Code statement. Each year the Honor Committee student leaders go through academic buildings and create new signs for those classrooms without one. The cost to print permanent signs estimates approximately. 75-$1 per sign for over 100 classrooms just on the Fairfax campus.
• Permanent plaque in the Johnson Center (similar to that of Dr. Johnson) with Honor Code

Promotion

• Publish an actual case, keeping confidential information sensitive, in the Broadside in an effort to illustrate the abuse/misuse of the Honor Code, the process, and the potential consequences
• Include a brief statement about Mason as a Honor Code University on the 4GMU telephone registration system
• Include the brief Honor Statement on the Mason Photo ID Card
• Establish a mandatory meeting of the whole freshmen class with a detailed explanation of the Honor Code
• Each course syllabus should include the Honor Statement and reference for complete Honor Code
• Incorporate a University-wide Honor Code pledge on exams

Other Initiatives

• Establish a foundation fund to finance an annual conference, such as West Point sponsors, to create a forum by which other institutions and student leaders can address the issue of academic integrity in higher education. West Point hosts an annual forum for discussion each Fall and attendance is requested by invitation only. The student leaders (Honor Committee chairs) usually attend the conference and all expenses are paid by the West Point foundation fund. The information this year's chairs received indicated that George Mason University is more advanced in its development, promotion, and implementation of the Honor Code.

Limitations that exist for the Honor Committee:

• Funding
• Space
• Staff
• Time - most of the time for the Honor Committee is spent on cases and meetings.
• University-wide existing culture as it was noted that there seems to be an issue with attitudes and misperceptions of the Honor Committee and Honor Code among faculty, staff and students.

Top "wish list" items:

• Graduate Assistant for Educational Purposes to coordinate, under the direction of the Honor Committee chair, all programming efforts and space issues. This position would allow for the Honor Committee to be more active with programming and promotion rather than spending all its time in hearings and reviewing cases.
• Establish a permanent hearing room in a location with high visibility and ability to offer privacy for just the Honor Committee to use with capacity for at least 15 people (JC 116 would work with blinds that cover windows). The hearing room would have a permanent sign identifying it as such with complete scheduling authority by the Honor Committee and Graduate Assistant. It was noted that it seems appropriate to have such a space when other space has been allocated for such organizations as student media groups to have a conference room in SUB I.
• Publicity pieces which include: web site linked to main page, brochures, more permanent signs and plaque in Johnson Center, banners, representation at meetings, fairs, events and opportunity to program for faculty, staff, and students University-wide.

return to table of contents

Appendix B

Background

Charge to the Provost from the University Task force on Academic Integrity (2000-01):

"Establish a joint committee of faculty, students, and administrators to investigate the need and possible advantages to changing the Honor Code, such as allowing for alternative ways to adjudicate minor violations of the Honor Code."

Charge from the Provost to the Honor Code Task Force (Spring 2002):

"Consider whether the flexibility of the system could be improved by identifying some offenses as 'locally manageable,' though still reported to the Honor Committee."

Honor Code Task Force Discussion

"Locally manageable" is here defined as faculty/student resolution of plagiarism cases when the student acknowledges responsibility for the plagiarism.

Cases in which the student denies responsibility for plagiarism and accusations of cheating would continue to be forwarded to the Honor Committee.

Resolving matters at this level would be advantageous insofar as:

1. It would provide an opportunity for faculty involved to clarify the Honor Code and its operation with the student
2. It would provide an opportunity for dialogue between the student and the faculty member about "close calls"
3. It would underscore the educational aspect of the Code
4. It would prevent an escalation of matters to a level beyond the gravity of the original incident
5. It would take less time for cases to be resolved
6. It would promote the involvement of more faculty in matters of academic integrity
7. It would not disrupt the academic schedule or student's academic standing
8. It would be a formal recognition of existing practices

Resolving matters at this level would be disadvantageous insofar as:

1. It would be difficult to identify second-time offenders, and would thus require adherence to a centralized reporting procedure
2. It risks faculty unfairness to students
3. It risks inconsistent sanctions for similar offenses
4. It deprives students of the experience of sitting before a jury of their peers
5. It risks the possibility of students receiving a more severe sanction than the Honor Committee would dispense
6. It requires the continuous education of university community

Implementing this system would require:

1. Reporting to central database
2. Faculty commitment to check with central database for prior offenses.
3. Systematic Provost/Dean/Director sponsored education of new faculty and T A's
4. A central unit responsible for faculty education, maintenance of reports, sanction guidelines, and monitoring/assessment of processes
5. Institutional guidelines regarding appropriate sanctions for plagiarism of a particular amount or significance (e.g., plagiarism of final paper vs. piagiarism of first paper)
6. Faculty agreement to notify/advise students beforehand about plagiarism

Instituting a new system would require:

1. Taskforce approval and recommendation to the Provost and VP, University Life
2. Their recommendation of new system to Honor Committee
3. Honor Committee endorsement and submission to a vote of the student body
4. 2/3 of voters approving the recommendation