<p>Yes, they were simply made to take a semester off. They always knew they would be allowed to come back.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Amen! That’s the reason I want to go to Princeton. Shake that sexy honor council position, dem money makers. Kelis ain’t got nothin’ on me.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not nerds, mostly a ■■■■■ and some careful,even attempting to be helpful and reasonable posters. If we wanted to see real nerds duking, we’d duck into a (mindnumbingly boring, lengthy-vocabulary-weilding, ridiculously rhetorical, and needlessly-long-winded) Affirmative Action debate thread, wouldn’t we? ;)</p>
<p>But who in their right minds would want to subject themselves to that? Quelle horreur.</p>
<p>Alumother, Here are the words of the Princeton Honor Committee constitution: Article III, paragraph 3, “Under normal circumstances, individuals convicted of cheating shall be subject to the following penalties: The first offense will result in a penalty of a suspension for one year…” So it’s NOT a semester. If they have another violation, they get expelled…no degree. And there are other circumstances where they are suspended for two or three years…One of them is perjury, lying to the Honor Committee…look at the beginning of this thread where I describe the initial investigation tactics where they interrogate you without the benefit of “counsel” and if you don’t tell them EVERYTHING in this interrogation and they find out something LATER, then you are NOT being forthright and can increase your penalty. So if you can’t remember in that initial interrogation, YOU MUST SAY SO, don’t speculate. Otherwise, your penalty can increase if you are found guilty.</p>
<p>Also, the decision on whether or not to advance from an accusation to a full hearing can be made without ANY testimony from the accused. They don’t need to hear the accused side of the story before deciding to go to the full hearing. In my opinion, this is prejudicial.</p>
<p>Then, the rules say “the student may exercise his or her right of up to seven days of preparation.” SEVEN DAYS!! It doesn’t say that you CAN and SHOULD ask for more time if you need it. Most accused students don’t know that they can have more time to prepare and are in a panic. These rules that set such short time limits on preparation are prejudicial because they presume obvious outcomes, not complex cases.</p>
<p>They will tell you that “good character” is assumed. However, you may be told you are permitted three character witnesses. Forgive me, but why bother, IF good character is assumed? The fact is, the rules say you have “the right to call witnesses.” It doesn’t say that their testimony is limited to character and it doesn’t say that the number of witnesses is limited.</p>
<p>The rules say that you have the right to receive the charges against you in a letter but you DON"T need to know who your accuser is. YOU DON"T NEED TO KNOW THE IDENTITY OF YOUR ACCUSER. As Dave Barry would say, “I’m not making this up.” </p>
<p>The rules say you have “the right to review in advance all documents constituting direct material evidence.” Yes, you have that right, except when they neglect to share new evidence with you until you are AT the hearing, AFTER they present it and can’t withdraw it.</p>
<p>See, there are rights and rules in black and white…and then there is flawed execution by people who are not wise…remember, the experience level of these Honor Committee students…a senior may have 10 cases per year…30 cases across how many different types of violation? A junior perhaps 20 cases? What if your Committee has a sophomore/ freshman majority and no seniors? How much experience can they possibly have in THIS TYPE OF ACCUSATION? A freshman may be only out of highschool three months earlier…No institutional wisdom but they are “thoughtful.”</p>
<p>With a $200,000 education at stake, is a lawyer worth it? Maybe so, but lawyers are not welcomed nor are parents. All of this falls on the student.</p>
<p>Students have read the Honor Code before they arrive, and sign every exam booklet. Everyone knows what they are getting into. I have never heard anyone complain before. Not when I was there, not via my kids. I suspect you are the student who was convicted, and quite frankly, if this is an actual experience, I do not believe you were not guilty of breaching the code.</p>
<p>Have you EVER heard a guilty person complain? I think it is the height of arrogance to consider the Honor Committee perfect. And for what is at stake, the standards should be VERY high…unequivocal…no doubt…an unimpeachable witness…a confession, not an opinion by minors. Adults should be involved in reviewing evidence not just procedures. Many air-tight cases involve a witness or a confession…“I was stressed out.” “He said it was OK so I went along.” “I saw her DO this.” But not all. With what’s at stake is it better to acquit someone who might be guilty or kick someone out who is innocent? I submit that the latter is the more eggregious error. These academic issues are not violent crimes or even illegal yet the punishment is FOREVER, the transcript is FOREVER. The standard should be unequivocal not “overwhelmingly convinced” by the standards of kids with little experience.</p>
<p>Anyone interested in this topic should read Lucian K. Truscott IV’s Dress Gray, a novel about West Point in the Vietnam era, in which the uses and abuses, ideals and reality, of the entirely cadet-administered West Point Honor Code are central to the plot and themes.</p>
<p>Anyway, if it’s good enough for West Point, it’s probably good enough for Princeton (and Stanford, too, although Stanford seems to wear this, like everything, more lightly). Every system of justice has its good points and its bad points, including peer-administered honor codes. If you love Princeton, you had better love its honor code, too – and most people do, even those convicted of a violation.</p>
<p>I also note that the vast majority of the world lives under various systems in which the functions of judging, prosecuting, and investigating are handled by the same people, or colleagues working together. That is not the way we have designed our public legal systems, but it would be hard to argue that the European justice system is incapable of reaching fair results.</p>
<p>Finally, a number of years ago I was teaching a course and felt I had to accuse a student of plagiarism. It was awful. The case itself was open-and-shut – it took me practically no time to find the source the student had reproduced, once it occurred to me that her research skills were probably limited, although it took hours to track down the sources she claimed to have summarized to confirm that they had nothing to do with the paragraphs in question. The student steadfastly refused to acknowledge she had done anything wrong, which was terribly upsetting, and made her teachers want to throw the book at her. I argued (successfully) that what she had done did not merit a full suspension. But she complained endlessly about being subject to any kind of discipline, or even questioning, in circumstances that were black and white.</p>
<p>I cannot argue that “legal” systems are incapable of results. But I am arguing about quasi legal systems that take short cuts with the procedures that our legal system uses to ensure justice and protect the innocent and I am arguing about the flaws of systems run by kids. I’ll bet no student signing her “Pledge” on every exam is thinking about the student who will judge her. The students think of the pledge only in terms of “I did not cheat” they don’t even think about the procedural details. Few students even know that their student government leaders are their judge and jury. I don’t think students understand every aspect of the Honor Code but forums like this will help them see it with the gravity and attention it deserves. They need to connect the dots to the $200,000 investment. This is not about “youthful indiscretion.” This is about punishment FOREVER.</p>
<p>And don’t forget Notre Dame: a relative was suspended for smoking pot there while the RA that supplied the noxious weed was not pursued by the school. Shocking!!!</p>
<p>Here are a couple quotes from the Princeton Honor Code pages posted on their website:
"2. What happens when evidence comes down to one persons word against another?
One persons word against anothers is never enough evidence for a conviction. In cases involving a single witness, the Committee requires corroborating physical evidence (i.e. examinations, notes, outside experts, etc.) in order to find an accused student guilty.
4. How many students are usually reported each year? Of those, how many are found guilty? Approximately 15-20 suspected violations are reported to the Honor Committee each year. The Committee investigates each one. From these reported incidents, three to five students are usually found guilty of violating the Honor Code.
10. What is the range of penalties assigned by the Honor Committee?
The penalties include probation, a one, two or three year suspension, and expulsion, with the most common penalty being a one year suspension.
A couple observations:
- Reported Honor Code violations are quite rare: 20 suspected violations for about 5,000 students who probably submit more than 200,000 papers, exams, etc. each year. (5,000 students times 10 courses/year times 4 papers/exams per course)
- Sanctions or penalties are extremely rare on the order of one penalty for every 50,000 student-work submissions.
- The burden of proof is quite high. Only about 20% of reported suspected violations result in penalties hardly a kangaroo court.
My son is an upper-classman at Princeton, and has known four people suspended for Honor Code violations over his time at Princeton. (No, he is mixed up with a bad crowd. He is just social and non-judgmental enough to wind up with friends from many different walks-of-life. ) He tells me that in each case: - The violation was flagrant e.g., directly copying 200 lines of computer code from another students work with no changes; downloading a Spanish paper from a web site and submitting it verbatim; collaborating with another student on a take-home exam and submitting identical wrong answers to several problems.<br>
- In each case, the students admitted that they had willfully and deliberately cheated, both to the Honor Code Committee and to my son privately.
When I asked my son whether the students got screwed, he said Not even close. They did something really stupid, and they got caught.
Is it possible that some student gets caught in an Honor Code cross-fire and winds up punished unfairly? Maybe, but the OP is this thread is hyperbolically exaggerating the risks. The evidence clearly shows that allegations of Honor Code violations are rare, investigated with a high burden of proof, and imposed only with overwhelming evidence (typically including the students admission of guilt).</p>
<p>I’d even admit that if the accused confessed, they’ve satisfied a high standard for penalty and did not get screwed. JHS admitted he/she testified at his/her school on behalf of a student who was subsequently acquitted. So in the case of conflicting faculty testimony, the vote was for acquittal. That makes sense to me in the face of ambiguous and conflicting expert testimony. Ambiguity by experts should result in acquittal. But what do you do when ambiguity isn’t viewed that way by the kids? How certain should an Honor Committe need to be? Did any faculty member testify that it was possible to have 200 lines of code match out of 2 million? or out of 10,000 lines? or out of 500 lines? How many lines of code makes the work stolen? How many sentences in an essay make it stolen? How many right answers…or even wrong ones make them stolen? How many arguments in a proof make them stolen? If experts can’t agree, how can kids be “overwhlemingly convinced.” Do experts even matter? I guess they do in JHS’ case but SHOULD they? How much unambiguous proof does it take and should it take to convict? Princeton folks can’t talk about specifics unless it comes directly from the accused because of confidentiality and I respect that.</p>
<p>It is most gracious of you to concede that students who willfully and deliberately cheated – and admitted this – should be subject to sanction.
On the other hand, I don’t understand why you feel compelled to raise bizarrely implausible scenarios and then use them to attempt to impugn a process that is both necessary to protect academic integrity and demonstrably administered with restraint and care.
Is there ANY standard of evidence that you would regard as sufficient cause to impose sanctions for violations of academic integrity, in the absence of the student’s free and un-coerced confession of guilt?</p>
<p>paysthebills, are you in fact aware of a particular case in which an innocent student was sanctioned under Princeton’s honor code? I don’t think you’ve made that clear at all. And if you are aware of such a case, what is your basis for believing that the student was innocent?</p>
<p>Ha ha, you or someone you know is out 200 grand.</p>
<p>Sorry, I just found that extremely funny for some reason.</p>
<p>pays, the point of my story was not that the student was acquitted. She wasn’t; she was disciplined, just not as harshly as the department chair first thought appropriate. The point of my story is that students caught red-handed plagiarizing sometimes have trouble understanding that they were caught red-handed. In the case I described, every adult who looked at the situation immediately identified it as plagiarism. No students were invited to weigh in, but I am pretty certain they would have been more sympathetic to the student. (On the issue of guilt or innocence, as opposed to punishment, they couldn’t possibly have been less sympathetic – there was no more room.)</p>
<p>This plagiarism, by the way, consisted of one entire paragraph, five or six sentences, lifted from another paper without attribution and presented as the student’s original work. The paper was only about 4-1/2 pages long, the paragraph in question was one of five or six in the paper, maybe 20%. It was presented as key to the paper’s structure, although one of the reasons it was so easy to identify it as plagiarism was that the rest of the paper clearly demonstrated that the student didn’t understand that paragraph. Also, the paragraph used a lot of non-standard, idiosyncratic jargon that the original author had defined for herself elsewhere. As I said, no adult questioned that lifting a whole paragraph without attribution and presenting it as your own work was plagiarism.</p>
<p>My job is done. Based on the number of folks who have viewed this forum if even 10% of them ask questions about the Honor Committee process, there will be 200 smarter people out there. They may all go to Princeton but at least they will do it with their eyes open and know that IF there is ever an Honor Committee event in their life, they must also remember that they willingly signed up to put their fate and their parent’s $200,000 investment in the hands of minors. So put your lawyer on speed dial and keep your mouth shut until your lawyer is at your side…Innocent people DO get found guilty.</p>
<p>
Oh, really? Then how come you can’t answer the question of whether you, in fact, know of one?
Why is it that Princeton has these posters who have an axe to grind? Or are they all the same poster?</p>
<p>$200,000?</p>
<ol>
<li>I thought most people get financial aid.</li>
<li>I thought you pay one year at a time.</li>
<li>I though you can go back after a year.</li>
</ol>
<p>@paysthebills: Your job is done because you have been shown to be a shill using wildly implausible fabrications to try to generate fear and anxiety where none need exist. Perhaps it is your child who is so anxious and fearful as to resort to cheating and then refusing to admit obvious guilt?
Readers: Of course you should ask about and know the rules at any institution you join. In fact, Princeton – and almost every other college – will insist on it. And DO NOT CHEAT – whatever gain you seek to secure is ephemeral and simply not worth the self-degradation or the risks. But don’t worry for a second that Princeton or any other college engages in random Honor Code witch hunts. You are being played.</p>
<p>This case has sent a ripple through the faculty. Ask ANY faculty/staff member when was the last time an appeal was granted by the Dean for procedural unfairness or harmful bias by the Honor Committee. Nobody can remember it was so long ago. Not so for the Committee on Discipline. There was a staff meeting THIS WEEK to discuss precedent set by this case. Extraordinary things do happen. Ask EVERY HC member you know if they have EVER been involved with an appeal, that’s how rare this event is. None of them can talk about specifics or violate confidentiality. There is a reason for an appeal process and it’s not because this commiittee of kids is perfect.</p>