Doling Out Discipline

During her freshman year, Julia Neufeld ’10 plagiarized her roommate’s computer code — and got away with it.

“I was very worried about getting caught [but] I did it in such a way that I was fairly confident that I was not going to be,” she said. She completed the course without incident, but one year later, Neufeld turned herself in to the Committee on Discipline (COD) for the violation.

Neufeld waived her right to a full hearing before the committee, opting to have her case heard only by its chair, Dean of Undergraduate Students Kathleen Deignan, who sentenced her to two years of disciplinary probation.

“I was expecting to receive a harsher penalty,” Neufeld said. “I read that the typical punishment for plagiarism was suspension, so that was the punishment that I was expecting to receive.”

Last year, Neufeld was one of 10 students who were not asked to leave the University even though the COD ruled they were guilty of academic integrity violations; suspensions and expulsions were handed out to 22 other students, and the University withheld the degrees of three second-semester seniors. There are two or three instances each year when the committee exonerates accused students of academic violations, Deignan said.

At an institution that prides itself on upholding high standards of academic integrity, several students and faculty members said they believe the punishments doled out by the Honor Committee and the COD for academic violations are unnecessarily severe. Members of the committees, however, defended the disciplinary sentences, explaining that their decisions are based largely on precedent and that they take into consideration a wide variety of factors when determining penalties.

Wilson School professor Stanley Katz, who has advised several students tried by the COD, said he thinks the committee often hands down punishments that are too extreme in light of the offenses committed.

Katz recalled representing a student who was accused of collaborating on a homework assignment and who, like Neufeld, waived the right to a full COD hearing and was tried by Deignan. Unlike Neufeld, this student was suspended for one year.

“The homework assignment [he allegedly collaborated on] was one problem on one of multiple homework assignments,” Katz explained. “I’m willing to accept that he may have been wrong about that, but how such an infraction translates into suspension for a year is simply beyond me.”

“This struck me like giving the death penalty for jaywalking,” he said. “To me, it’s a system that has somehow gone mad.”

But COD member Joel Alicea ’10 said the penalties imposed by the committee are always deserved.

“I have not participated in a single case where I left the hearing room thinking that the punishment we imposed was unjust,” he said.

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COD member Vishal Chanani ’11 also said he thinks the committee’s sentences are fair, adding that he gives serious thought to deciding what punishments are handed down. He explained that, though he considers himself to be one of the more lenient members of the committee, it is often the student members who advocate for harsher penalties.

“I can really understand as a Princeton student [that] being suspended would be crushing … [and that] being expelled would be debilitating,” Chanani said. “I like to be very, very sure before I do something of that magnitude.”

Chanani said that during the course of the deliberations, he asks himself, “Can I find a way to use precedent, to use the circumstances of the case, to justify not giving the student an unduly harsh punishment?”

He added that, though the COD is “not literally bound” by precedent, the severity of their punishments is “strongly influenced” by previous cases.

But Shafiq Kashmiri ’10, who is currently serving the first weeks of a two-year suspension handed down by the COD for plagiarism in connection with unauthorized collaboration on a final project, said he believed his punishment was inconsistent with previous sentences delivered by the committee in similar cases.

“After performing a comprehensive, nine-year analysis of undergraduate discipline from discipline reports published by the ... Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students ... it has come to my attention that the adjudication of my case was not consistent with that of similar offenses, or the penalty imposed for said offenses with like charges and like circumstances,” Kashmiri said in his February appeal to Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel.

Kashmiri, whose appeal was denied, said he was upset by the “draconian” nature of his punishment.

“Two years is just crazy,” Kashmiri said. “Two years for what I did?”

Kashmiri added that he thought his sentence may have been more severe because he had a previous academic integrity violation on his record from when he was suspended for a year for failing to use proper citations in a writing seminar paper.

Associate Dean for Undergraduate Students Hilary Herbold GS ’97, who serves as COD secretary, noted that the committee considers previous violations when determining penalties. But she added that these offenses are not disclosed until the committee has found a student guilty.

Kashmiri said he had hoped the influence of this previous offense on his sentence might have been mitigated by his decision to self-report his plagiarism. Neufeld said she believed her decision to turn herself in was likely part of the reason she was not suspended.

But Herbold said the COD sometimes regards the very few students who report their own infractions with skepticism.

“A student who might turn himself in … after submitting the paper but before getting a grade in the course … is still not in a position to know whether it’s going to be detected,” Herbold explained, adding that this situation may not merit the same leniency as those in which students, like Neufeld, confess much later to having plagiarized, when they no longer run any risk of getting caught.

“The committee can always consider any number of factors that it wants to about whether anything about the case should mitigate the penalty,” Herbold added. “There are a lot of nuances to these cases.”

A key question throughout the deliberation process concerns the extent to which the committee believes students should have understood the severity of their actions, Deignan said, adding that the COD considers the volume of plagiarism in this context.

“It’s not so much that it’s better to knowingly plagiarize … three sentences than a page,” Herbold said. “The act is the act … and insofar as the committee concludes the plagiarizing ought to have been understood, it would probably treat three sentences and a page in the same way.”

Deignan explained, “The smaller the infraction, the more plausible it is that it was an accident.”

Alicea noted that, in instances where the COD is convinced a student has made every effort to properly cite sources, the standard punishment may be reduced.

“If, for example, you used an idea in one paragraph of a 20-page paper but forgot to cite it, but you cited everything else perfectly throughout the rest of the paper, is that plagiarism? Technically, yes,” he explained. “But if we are convinced it was a just stupid mistake, are we going to suspend you for a year? No … that would be absurd for us to do that.”

Molecular biology professor Carlos Brody, who serves on the COD, noted that the committee’s punishments do not reflect the individual opinions of committee members but are instead meant to enforce community standards.

“Setting the rules for what different punishments go with different infractions — that is not actually something the COD is supposed to do,” he explained. “That’s something for the community as a whole to do.”

But many members of the University community said they were unfamiliar with the disciplinary guidelines and procedures governing academic integrity, though administrators stressed that they are working to raise awareness about the process.

“[During] orientation week, I remember hearing from the Honor Committee and hearing various materials encouraging integrity … and I remember just sort of disregarding it because I thought of myself as an honest person,” Neufeld said. “It never occurred to me that I would be placed in a situation that I would even be tempted to cheat.”

Deignan said the University strives to inform students about the importance of academic integrity and the ways they can avoid plagiarism from the beginning of their time at Princeton. She noted that she sends a letter to all freshmen urging them to closely inspect the academic integrity section of “Rights, Rules, Responsibilities.”

Deignan also pointed to the freshman writing seminar program as a major part of the University’s instruction on academic integrity rules.

“In the writing seminars, we spend significant class and conference time working with students on how to actively engage sources in their writing and how to properly incorporate, cite, and document them,” Princeton Writing Program Director Kerry Walk said in an e-mail.

Educating students about the University’s academic disciplinary process is a joint effort between Honor Committee and COD members, Honor Committee chair Parker Henritze ’09 explained.

“We are in a constant process of education … We speak to every freshman,” she said, noting that a new video summarizing academic integrity policies is now presented to all freshman RCA groups during orientation week.

The 13-minute video outlines several ways students can violate University rules and urges students to exercise caution when in doubt about what constitutes academic infractions, advising them that the disciplinary process is a very serious one.

“You don’t want to come before this committee — you really don’t,” classics professor Joshua Katz warns students in the film.

Neufeld, who is featured in the video, said she thinks the University did not suspend her because she self-reported her violation. “I suppose they thought that there was no need for me to be punished by being forced to take time off of school because it was evident from the circumstances — just that I had turned myself in without any prompting — that I was not going to do the same thing again [and] was repentant of my previous wrongdoing,” she said.

Still, she added, had she been suspended for her offense, she would not have considered that sentence to be overly harsh.

“I was willing to take the full punishment that was associated with my behavior,” Neufeld explained. “If they were going to make me take time off from school, I was more than happy to do that because I felt that that was what my actions had deserved.”

But Stanley Katz said he worried that excessive penalties imposed for academic violations could be very damaging for the students who received them. “I can’t believe the system is working properly if the few cases I have seen have consistently gone that far off the mark,” he said.

“I deal with these kids who did something I think was usually unintentional — was at worst not very serious — but they are made to feel as though their lives have been destroyed,” he said. “They’re probably going to be fine in the end, but it will take a number of years.”

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