Charting a Middle Course

Many college students wouldn’t think twice before feigning illness or computer malfunctions to explain to a professor why an assignment is late. But at the University of Virginia, that could get you expelled.

“On your application, you [agree] that if you decide to come to the University of Virginia, you pledge not to lie, cheat or steal,” explained David Truetzel, who chairs the entirely student-run Honor Committee. “It’s very black and white.”

Virginia’s Honor Code, unlike Princeton’s, extends far beyond the classroom and applies to all aspects of student conduct, on and off campus. All students who violate this code — whether by cheating on a test or stealing M&Ms from the campus convenience store — receive the same punishment: expulsion.

At the other extreme, Yale has no honor code. Jill Cutler, the university’s assistant dean of academic affairs, said most students convicted of academic dishonesty are put on probation while “almost no cases” result in expulsion.

With a disciplinary system administered by a combination of students, faculty and administrators who hand down punishments ranging from probation to expulsion, Princeton charts a middle course among peer institutions with its standards of integrity.

At the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., the 230-year-old Honor Code governs both students’ academic and personal lives, as at the University of Virginia.

“The jurisdiction of the council is anything of interest to the college,” said Bailey Thomson, the chief justice of the Undergraduate Honor Council at William & Mary. Freshmen at the college file into the iconic red brick Sir Christopher Wren building and recite: “As a member of the William & Mary community, I pledge, on my honor, not to lie, cheat or steal, either in my academic or personal life.”

While honor pervades every part of life for students at these two Virginia schools, other institutions, like Yale and Georgetown, have much less rigorously enforced codes of conduct.

“I think Yale quite consciously does not have an honor code,” Cutler explained. “It’s not lacking an honor code. A decision was made at some point in time not to have one.”

She added that the university has no plans to develop an honor code and that she does not believe members of the campus community are eager to see one instituted.

“I don’t hear a groundswell of opinion around Yale College for having an honor code,” Cutler said. “It doesn’t seem to be a problem for students.”

Georgetown’s honor system was established only 13 years ago and is “fine-tuned virtually every year,” said Honor Council executive director Sonia Jacobson, who serves as the assistant to the provost for academic affairs.

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The disparities among Georgetown’s four schools in the enforcement of academic integrity standards prompted the university to develop a standardized undergraduate-wide system, Jacobson said.

“Each school had its own processes, and it was actually a business student who went to two theology faculty [members] and said, ‘I think this is not fair,’ ” she explained. “What happened in one school wasn’t comparable to another school.”

Though students pledge to abide by the university’s standards of academic integrity by signing an honor pledge that they must send in with their initial deposit, exams at Georgetown — unlike those at Princeton — are proctored by faculty members.

“It’s a tradition that we don’t have unproctored exams,” Jacobson explained. “I sort of don’t know that we’re ever not going to have them.”

The Georgetown honor system is administered by a 17-member Honor Council executive board that arranges hearings and is composed of eight students, four faculty and five deans. The Honor Council deals only with academic integrity violations, and it sees between 90 and 100 each year. To try a student, at least four members of the council must be in attendance at the hearing, including at least one dean, one faculty member and one student, Johnson said. A separate committee, she added, deals with behavioral offenses like “lying, stealing [and] stalking.”

At Stanford, however, a Judicial Hearing Panel — composed of four students, one faculty member and one staff member drawn from a pool of 75 — adjudicates both academic and non-academic rules violations and hears roughly 120 cases per year. Student conduct, however, is governed by two separate tenets: the Fundamental Standard, which outlines standards of behavior, and the Honor Code, which was written by students in 1921 and regulates all aspects of academic integrity.

As with Georgetown’s Honor Council and Princeton’s Committee on Discipline, Stanford’s Judicial Hearing Panel includes students, staff and faculty, but at William & Mary and Virginia, the disciplinary process for academic infractions is entirely student-run.

Twenty-four student members, elected by popular vote each February, sit on the William & Mary Undergraduate Honor Council. Candidates are not allowed to campaign, and students vote based on brief statements and photos posted online, Thomson said, noting that the election process has been a source of controversy on campus.

At Yale, all cases brought before the 13-member Executive Committee must be initiated by a faculty member. Students who wish to report other students must bring their concerns to the attention of a faculty member, who can inform the committee of a possible infraction, Cutler said, adding that the committee hears between 15 and 35 cases of academic dishonesty each year.

In sharp contrast, it used to be the policy at Virginia that only students could report violations of the Honor Code, and faculty members had to bring their accusations to the Honor Committee’s attention through a student, though this policy ended with the passage of the 1974 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

A non-toleration clause in the Honor Committee’s constitution required students to report any violations that came to their attention, Truetzel explained, adding that this clause was removed during the Vietnam War. “In that period, no honor offenses were reported because the stakes were a lot higher.”

Virginia students who have been charged with violating the honor pledge can choose either to be tried by a jury of their peers or to admit guilt and leave the university, Truetzel said. Roughly 150 support officers assist Honor Committee members in investigating charges of Honor Code violations, preparing cases for hearings and educating the student population about academic and behavioral regulations.

Students who choose to go before a jury are questioned by the 12 student jurors during a hearing, Truetzel explained, adding that at least four-fifths of the jury must vote to find students guilty for them to be convicted. A majority of the jury must also find that offenses committed were “non-trivial” before students can be expelled.

Changing the mandatory expulsion penalty would require amending the Honor Committee constitution, Truetzel noted, adding that all of the previous referenda aimed at creating a system of tiered punishments have failed.

Unlike Virginia, which mandates that a student’s guilt be demonstrated “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the standard for conviction at Yale is a “clear preponderance of evidence,” so the Executive Committee can potentially be “as little as 51 percent convinced” of a student’s guilt before it votes by secret ballot to convict, Cutler said.

Cutler noted that students convicted of academic violations are usually put on probation and are rarely suspended or expelled. “People who are suspended are people who have every reason to know better,” she said, adding, “For some students, meeting with the Executive Committee represents the sum total of the moral education they receive at Yale.”

Georgetown’s punishment standards for academic violations, like Yale’s, tend to be more lenient than those of some peer institutions.

Georgetown students convicted of first-time offenses, including plagiarism, are only suspended in “egregious circumstances,” Jacobson said, explaining that this would entail “lots of plagiarism in a big assignment.”

“The majority of the students who [are] reported are in violation, and of that group, a majority admit they’re in violation,” she said.

The most common punishment handed down at Georgetown is a notation on convicted students’ transcripts stating, “Censure: Violation of Honor System,” though this notation may be removed two years after the violation by completion of a Sanction Reduction Program, which can include workshops on writing or time management, Jacobson noted.

Georgetown’s Honor Council also takes into account a variety of mitigating factors when determining a guilty student’s punishment.

“If Mom calls you and says, ‘We’re getting divorced,’ that would be a pretty jarring piece of news, so that would affect the student’s ability to concentrate and do the right thing,” Jacobson explained.

At William & Mary, the disciplinary system is “as educational as possible with a punitive aspect,” Thomson said. As at Princeton, a one-year suspension is the average punishment for violations of the Honor Code at William & Mary, and students’ guilt must be proved “beyond a reasonable doubt,” as at Virginia.

The same burden of proof is required at Stanford to convict students of violations of either the Honor Code or the Fundamental Standard, Judicial Officer Rick Yuen said in an e-mail.

“The standard sanction for a first time violation of the Honor Code is [a] one quarter suspension and 40 hours of community service,” Yuen said, adding that he believes the Stanford Honor Code effectively deters students from violating the university’s standards of academic integrity.

Cutler noted, however, that cheating was still a significant problem on Yale’s campus.

“I think if I went out of my office and asked 10 students if people are cheating at Yale, eight of them would say yes,” she said, though she added that she does not think the purpose of a disciplinary system is to act as a deterrent against future violations. “I think Yale starts from the position that people have to trust each other until it’s proved otherwise,” she explained.

Calling Yale’s disciplinary procedures “quasi-legal,” Cutler stressed that the Executive Committee does not function as a court of law.

“This is an educational institution, so we’re not trying to treat our students as criminals,” she said.

This is the fourth article in a five-part series on the Honor Committee and the Committee on Discipline.Please clickherefor the rest of the "University Justice" series.