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An honorable committee?

The Honor Committee is an enigma to many students. As a freshman during orientation, you walk into Dillon Gymnasium, sign your name under the Honor Code and think nothing of it until the night before your first paper is due. Then, you try to remember the right wording for this complex but highly specific phrase that affirms that you have not cheated or plagiarized on the assignment.

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Throughout your first year you diligently write that pledge at the bottom of all your papers and exams, but then, on an otherwise unmemorable Friday evening, you receive a call from someone on the Honor Committee asking you to come up to their meeting room on Nassau Street. The unidentified person on the phone doesn’t tell you whether you are being investigated or of if someone else is in question. When you tell this person that Friday at 9 p.m. isn’t exactly a great time and that you are in the middle of something, you are told that being unwilling to come to report immediately will not look good for you or anyone else involved.

So you rush up to Nassau, prepared to defend your innocence against some alleged academic crime you know nothing about. When you get there, the Honor Committee, most of them sophomores no older than you, assembles. To your relief, they inform you that you are not the person under investigation, and that they simply want to ask whether you saw anything suspicious during one of your recent midterms. Your heart is still racing but you assure them that you saw nothing and walk over to Thomas Sweet’s for some much-needed comfort food.

The Honor Committee and the investigations it carries out are an opaque process to most students. The Honor Committee is distinct from the Committee on Discipline. The Honor Committee deals with exams and in-class infractions, while the Committee on Discipline handles work done outside the classroom, such as homework, take-home tests, most COS assignments, etc. But most of us know little about either of these committees until we have already been suspended or survived by the skin of our teeth. This wouldn’t be a problem if the Honor Committee didn’t hold so much power and if the effects of their decisions weren’t so serious. As one student put it, “They have quite a bit of power and can really ruin lives with a wrongful suspension.”

The punishment scale is severe. If a student is acquitted after his or her trial, no record of the investigation is placed on the student’s transcript. If the Committee deems online casino that there are “extenuating circumstances” for the incident, the student will be placed on academic probation, which will become part of the student’s permanent Princeton record. However, if the student is found guilty of violating the Honor Code, the punishment is either a one-, two- or three-year suspension, or permanent expulsion in the case of a second offense.

Obviously, such suspensions would seriously impact any student’s experience at Princeton. But more important, perhaps is how the Honor Committee’s decisions can impact a student’s prospects after graduation. Unlike other top universities like Stanford and Harvard, Princeton’s policy is to keep a suspension on the student"s transcript forever. At Princeton, a year-long suspension isn’t enough to “pay for the offense.” The consequences aren’t contained within the Princeton bubble. The student will have that black mark on his transcript for every job or graduate school he ever applies to.

I do not argue that the suspension policies need to be changed. College students live on the edge of the real world, but are not fully in it yet. In the real world, cheating and getting caught cheating have very serious consequences. Insider trading is punishable with prison sentences, and plagiarized phrases are grounds for immediate termination of a journalist’s career. Subsequently, the consequences at college – the halfway house, in a way – should be in line with the intermediary position it occupies. Mistakes should be punished severely and students who cheat shouldn’t be coddled; but a minor academic infraction shouldn’t constitute a reason to end a student’s hopes for a successful career. I think the current system toes that line well.

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However, if we are going to have students hand out punishments with decidedly professional consequences, then the students who are endowed with this power, the students in charge of those affairs, must exude the full standard of professionalism. The Honor Committee can’t keep calling students at 9 p.m. on a Friday and scaring them into coming up to Nassau. One student under investigation for copying code in COS 126: General Computer Science complained to me that the Honor Committee was unprofessional and slow to respond to emails with information that was necessary for him to prepare for his hearing. The same student also stated that one of his appeals was entirely ignored.

This is not an indictment of any given member of the Honor Committee, or even the committee as a whole, but simply a reminder for those who wield this power to understand the significance and seriousness of their position and to ensure that they act accordingly in light of that responsibility.

The Honor Committee needs to do everything in its power to assure the student body it seeks to serve them, not just police them. We need to return to the days when we knew we wanted the Honor Committee because we value the learning that takes place at Princeton and don’t want it cheapened by academic dishonesty.

Luke Gamble is a sophomore from Eagle, Idaho. He can be reached at ljgamble@princeton.edu.

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