The Honor Committee last night heard a proposal for an Honor representatives system which would assign each department at least one Representative to act as a contact point for students' honor concerns.
Under the current proposal put forth by Josh Hess of the Student Initiations Ad-Hoc Committee, the faculty would be asked to put the names of their departments' honor representatives on class syllabi and to mention the representatives on the first day of class.
The faculty would be provided with a standard statement about the honor representatives and would have the option of putting the approved statement, a statement of their own choosing or no statement on their syllabi.
"We think that part of the problem [in the low initiation rate] is a skewed perception of who is the appropriate authority to report honor violations to," Hess said.
Under the current system, students need to research the contact information of the Honor Committee themselves before they can initiate a case.
According to Hess, the representatives system would provide a number of benefits with regard to student participation in honor.
"Outside of increasing student initiations, the Honor Committee will be much easier to contact and professors will be talking about honor more in the classroom," Hess said.
The program would also serve the larger benefit of increasing awareness of honor at the University.
"It would essentially make the Honor Committee a little more pervasive in the University," Hess said.
Hess said the Honor Representatives could also play an expanded role as a link between the various departments in an educational function.
The Honor Representatives would be chosen from among the current Committee members, advisors, and possibly educators.
There was some concern from the Student Initiations Committee about using educators as Honor Representatives because they might need to be re-trained. Yet Hess said the educators he spoke to were very eager to take part in the Representatives system.
The Honor Committee briefly discussed the execution of this program, including the time it would take to establish the system.
"We will need a timeline for implementation, obviously it cannot be implemented immediately," Vice-chair for Trials Stewart Ackerly said.
Representative Matt Miller suggested that they begin with a smaller pilot program of representatives in a specific department or area.
The proposal will be discussed further at next week's meeting at which time it will be put to a vote.
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