A schoolwide vote in early October showed Uni students are interested in establishing a student-run honor council. With an honor code already in place, what other changes are in store for how Uni deals with cheating?

By Alex Zhai
Gargoyle assistant editor
Posted Thursday, Nov. 16, 2006, The OG, news

Last fall, math executive teacher Craig Russell raised the idea of setting up a student-run honor council to handle a range of cheating incidents as an alternative to relying on administration-imposed punishments.

A year later, Uni seems well on the way to making that idea a reality.

Voting that took place during the week of Oct. 3-6 showed overwhelming approval for a student-run honor council. Non-seniors voted in favor of a council 149-83, with only the freshman class lacking a majority.

The Student-Faculty Advisory Committee, which sponsored the vote in order to gauge student opinion, will now develop a working model to present to the school for further consideration.

According to senior SFAC officer Michael Belmont, even though 20 non-seniors abstained from voting, SFAC's decision to draft an honor council would not have been affected if they had all voted against it.

graphic by Angelina Liang

Seniors voted 28-8 for the honor council, but their votes were not taken into as much consideration, since they will have graduated before any honor council takes effect.
Despite the support for exploring the possibilities, some students are still concerned that bias could corrupt an honor council.

“You have to question the honesty of the students, but if you can rely on the students in the honor council, it's a great idea,” says junior Joe Leigh.

In an e-mail to the junior class, junior SFAC officer Eunice How addressed some of these concerns by raising the possibility of keeping honor council members anonymous.

Another suggestion brought up at a SFAC meeting was to excuse honor council members with possible conflict of interest in particular cases. Although the honor council idea was initially prompted by cheating, it could also be applied to other infractions.

But before drafting an honor council, which would need to be approved by Student Council and the faculty before taking effect, SFAC has already instituted the University High School Honor Code, a document that SFAC composed last year in an effort to establish a better atmosphere at Uni.

The honor code lays out three “core values” — respect, honesty, and accountability — as essential components of the Uni community that students must recognize and follow. [Note: To read the complete text of the honor code, click here.]

Helping to form the basis for an honor council, it was written as a more Uni-specific replacement for the old generic pledge that was adopted from Leal Elementary School.

At first, this new document might appear to be a mere repetition of ideas already implicit in the student handbook: “Cheating, lying, and plagiarizing will not be tolerated,” the handbook states under the “honesty” section.

But social studies executive teacher Billy Vaughn, a faculty representative in SFAC, believes the new code serves a greater purpose. In light of the discipline issues in recent years, he says the honor code is meant to “help [students] take ownership of choices and actions,” something that may be lost in the detailed regulations and technicalities of the handbook.

On a similar note, senior Eleanor Unsworth says, “I think that it's a good way to deal with the fact that last year a lot of students seemed to feel like the administration was just randomly enforcing rules.”

Below the body of the honor code, students were required to sign a pledge that acknowledges consequences for violating the principles set forth. Assistant Director Sue Kovacs accepts that not all students will pay attention to the values in the honor code.

“Some will always not take it seriously, and some will take it too seriously,” Kovacs says. “That's called Uni.”

According to Vaughn, however, the honor code should get students to consider taking the rules more seriously, even if the current atmosphere does not attach a strong sense of reprehensibility to misbehavior.

At the same time, some students don't think the honor code will have much of an effect.

“People who are going to cheat have already considered what's cheating and what's not,” says senior Robert Croisant, who views cheating as the primary discipline issue at Uni.

Ultimately, Kovacs believes that one of Uni's missions is to prepare students both academically and morally for the adult world. In that respect, regardless of whether students conform their behavior to the honor code, she says that it provides a framework to rectify students' behavior before they leave Uni for environments where the consequences for misbehavior are much graver.