The Honor Committee transitioned to new executive board yesterday.
"Our committee has no more roles -- we're not allowed to sit in on trials," former Honor Committee Chair David Hobbs said. "We have no official capacity."
Third-year Engineering Rep. Alison Tramba now chairs the committee.
At the final Honor Committee meeting of the 2005-2006 term, members discussed the Investigation of the Single Sanction Report that was released last week.
"We did take out the conclusions [of the report] that were too hard for people to follow," Hobbs said. "One of the purposes of this report was that it would be easy to interpret."
The report originally submitted to the Committee concluded there has been a decline in cheating rates and that the decline can be attributed to the single sanction.
Commerce Prof. Cynthia Gasman spoke to Honor about the report Sunday.
The number of cases has not changed, according to Gasman. Gasman teaches quantitative analysis in the Commerce School and reviewed the results of the study with Matt Miller, former chair of the ad-hoc Committee for the Investigation of the Single Sanction.
Gasman said there are fewer students receiving guilty verdicts, which he interprets as a sign that there are fewer students guilty of Honor offenses.
Not all committee members agreed with this assessment of the data.
David Perez, a former representative of the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, said he expressed concern about the 148 jurors who agreed to support the single sanction before being selected to serve on a panel and indicated in post-trial surveys they would have changed their vote had there been a lesser sanction.
"That could be an honor offense, and that's troubling to me," Perez said.
Former Engineering Rep. Dan Bowman said the decline in guilty students could be attributed to better education.
"I don't see how we can responsibly say it's the single sanction," Bowman said.
Curry School Rep. Sarah Outten addressed the in coming committee concerning the findings. "When I look at the data, there is a culture of honor here," Outten said. "Sometimes we get our heads wrapped around the bureaucracy. I think if we turned outward, we'd create more advocates in the committee. Whatever you do with this data, remember that."
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