The Honor Committee held its first meeting of the semester Sunday night, in which committee members listened to presentations from several Honor Summer Fellows who worked on Honor-related research projects over the last few months.
Third-year College student Eric Xu, second-year College student Derrick Wang and second-year Engineering student Em Flynn participated in the fellowship and introduced their research findings to the Committee.
Xu studied over-representation of international students in Honor cases with a focus on faculty reporting. He analyzed available data including anecdotes from Honor as well as professors.
“[The research] basically entailed making a list of problematic classes that international students were most likely to take and planning with [the] Honor Faculty Advisory Committee Outreach Chair to take a series of things to bring up to faculty, like the topics to go through with the Faculty Senate,” Xu said.
Xu said he will meet one-on-one with the professors of classes international students were likely to take, including introductory economics, English writing and computer science classes.
Wang, an Honor support officer and education coordinator for international students, also researched over-representation of international students in Honor, with a focus on the characteristics of international students that made them more likely to be reported than domestic students.
“I primarily looked at … What kind of things amongst international students causes that over-reporting and what are some ways that we can address that,” Wang said.
Wang said one challenge in studying over-reporting is that there is not much hard data on international students reported to Honor — rather, the evidence is anecdotal.
“It’s difficult to compare … Sometimes we don’t keep data, sometimes things get dropped,” Wang said.
In his presentation, Wang listed five possible causes of over-reporting — lack of knowledge, spotlighting by faculty, different academic backgrounds, different cultural backgrounds and additional pressure.
“That standard of what constitutes collaboration versus cheating, that line of what is and what isn’t acceptable behavior in academia — it’s very, very different depending on what academic system they’re coming out of,” Wang said.
Jeffrey Warren, fourth-year College student and Honor vice chair for hearings, echoed the sentiment.
“Regardless of what the numbers actually are … The questions they have, their understanding of Honor is different than what American students have,” Warren said.
Flynn’s project studied student-professor communication, focusing on students who have accommodations. She presented several overarching trends she found in the research, including that professors find email to be unuseful for communicating with students.
“One of the questions I asked was ‘How do you communicate your expectations for class and assignments to your students?’” Flynn said. “Some of the professors I talked to knew exactly what I was talking about … They’ve adapted their communication to fit their students or to fit their classes.”
Flynn said large classes — 100 people or more — tended to be communication focused.
“In small classes … Those professors greatly preferred one on one communication with students,” Flynn said. “Medium classes … They used existing systems like Collab [and] email. A lot of the miscommunications that professors told me about could have been fixed and were fixed by clarifying written instructions or just having the written instructions available to their students.”
Flynn suggested a handbook for new professors containing information about how to implement classroom accommodations and said she hoped there would be further research on communication between students and professors.
“I feel like I have a better understanding of the Honor system as to how it applies to some very specific classes and some very specific people,” Flynn said.
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