The 2016-17 Honor Committee held their final meeting Sunday night, where they reflected on the challenges they faced and the areas in which they felt they succeeded. The incoming Committee transitions on Monday.
Joe Marchese-Schmitt, a Batten graduate student and Honor Committee member, said he hoped the incoming Committee could “repackage the Honor Committee” in terms of students’ understanding of the Honor system.
“It’s hard to get the students to understand that the Honor Committee is for them,” Marchese-Schmitt said. “The most constructive meetings or moments were the ones in which community members were present.”
Fourth-year College student Sarah Wyckoff, vice chair for investigations, gave a presentation on case statistics for the 2016-17 term. Wyckoff said an interesting statistic was that professors are the most frequent reporters of cases.
“With that being said, we really need to engage faculty better, to help them understand what our Honor system does, and then also on the front end, how to be as clear as possible with students in academic setting of the expectations,” Wyckoff said. “Whether it’s including clear instructions, providing resources for the citation, making sure they’re accessible to students for questions — What can they do on the front end to help students who get caught up in our system because of misunderstandings or mistakes?”
Wyckoff also said she believes the length of the case timeline could be shorter.
“A lot of [the long timeline] is due to the delays because of breaks,” Wyckoff said. “I think the student response interviews … take a long time, and I think they don’t necessarily need to. I think we could eliminate weeks of this uncertainty if we were to improve upon this process.”
Caroline Herre, a Committee member and Architecture graduate student, served as vice chair for education during the 2015-16 term. Herre said she felt she had grown throughout her two years on the Committee.
“I’ve had students talk to me about how they think we should have gender neutral pronouns on our newsletters, and that is just a simple thing to change,” Herre said. “Just the fact that I listened, and that we got it to happen, was cool.”
Fourth-year College student Matt West, Honor Committee chair, said he was consistently impressed by the efforts and dedication of the Honor Committee members to improve the system.
“The most valuable part of my term as Chair and of our term as Committee was having the opportunity to interact with a group of 26 other individuals who are truly passionate about the system and are passionate about improving the system,” West said. “I am consistently amazed by the level of dedication, the empathy, certainly the time that they are willing to commit to the Committee and to improving this system. We were very fortunate this year to have a group of such dedicated representatives, and it was truly an honor to work with them.”
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