The Honor Education Committee will distribute a letter to faculty members this week urging them to make clear what they expect from students regarding the Academic Honor Principle.
The committee aims to increase general awareness about students' obligations and to highlight some of the Honor Principle's commonly neglected aspects, according to committee member Ali Levine '07.
"Our hope is that if professors place more of an emphasis on the Honor Principle in their classes, students will take the Honor Principle more seriously," Levine said.
Since students can be found "responsible" or guilty by the Committee on Standards for unintentionally violating the principle, Levine suspects that preemptive discussion about what constitutes a violation may reduce their occurrence.
"We hope that through the faculty, we can help students to better understand what the honor principle entails so that in the end we can limit the number of honor principle violations," Levine said.
During the 2002-03 academic year, the COS heard 21 cases of alleged academic honor principle violations. Six students were found not responsible, one student received College discipline and 14 students were suspended for three or more terms.
The proactive nature of the letter to the faculty and the committee's future plans will likely decrease the number of students found responsible, according to committee member Todd Rabkin Golden '06.
"Most people only encounter the policy once they've already gotten in trouble, " he said. "Part of the problem is that it's hidden in the middle of the handbook and it's not visible."
The letter been signed by all the committee members and numerous student organizations -- including the Inter Fraternity Council, the Greek Leadership council, Student Assembly, all four class councils, the Afro-American Society, the Dartmouth Asian Organization, the Pan Asian Council and Dartmouth Hillel. Rabkin Golden said that he was very pleased that so many student groups support the cause.
"It's good because it's an issue that all students deal with," he said.
The committee plans to put plaques stating the policy in various locations on campus, Rabkin Golden said.
Alison Kelley '04 runs the Academic Honor Committee through the Office of Judicial Affairs. Kelley went before the COS her freshmen year for an academic honor principle violation and was found not responsible. Now a member of the COS, Kelley says she understands the position that students are in on both ends of a hearing.
Kelley has worked with undergraduate advisors and various residential clusters to introduce the policy. She said the committee is interested in developing a program to formally introduce newly matriculated students to the policy and to outline what is expected of them.
The 31-year-old Academic Honor Principle was last updated by faculty vote in May of 1999.
The policy states that "any student who submits work which is not his or her own violates the purpose of the College and is subject to disciplinary actions, up to and including suspension and separation." The second resolution requires faculty to provide guidelines and "promote procedures and circumstances which will reinforce the principle of academic honor."
The principle specifically denotes four types of violations -- cheating on examinations, plagiarism, use of the same work in more than one course and unauthorized collaboration.
Unauthorized collaboration can entail anything from partner work on labs, problem sets or reports when individual work is requested to excessive editing on a paper by a friends or acquaintances.
The Honor Education Committee was founded in response to a 2001 study that showed that 48 percent of students admitted to behavior that may have violated the policy. Many of the admitted violations, however, were deemed "trivial," such as lying about an excuse for an extension.
