Last Friday, after several delays, the Office of Judicial Affairs (OJA) closed a survey to gauge student attitudes towards the Honor Code as part of a review initiated by Vice Provost of Student Affairs Greg Boardman. The review is the first to be conducted in 13 years.
The comprehensive survey, which has been open to students for more than a month, asks students to evaluate their own understanding of the Honor Code and the Judicial Affairs process as well as the effectiveness of the Honor Code system at Stanford.
OJA sent the online survey to approximately 2,400 undergrads and 4,000 graduate students, waited for a 40-percent response rate before closing, wrote Jamie Pontius-Hogan, assistant dean of student life, in an e-mail to The Daily. Final counts report a 24- and 26-percent response rate from undergrads and graduate students, respectively.
“A 100-percent response rate would be satisfying but also unrealistic,” Pontius-Hogan said. “It is difficult to get students to respond to a survey, but I do not think we faced any difficulties that others seeking information this way have not faced.”
In order to assess the students’ understanding of the Honor Code, the survey listed various scenarios such as “working on an assignment with others when the instructor asked for individual work” and “witnessing a case of cheating and not reporting it.” The survey asked students to label these scenarios as “not cheating,” “trivial cheating,” “moderate cheating” or “serious cheating.”
In terms of the Judicial Affairs process, the survey also asked students to evaluate what they considered to be sufficient evidence for determining whether or not a student violated the Honor Code, offering the options of “preponderance of the evidence,” “clear and convincing evidence” and “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Currently, the Judicial Affairs charter requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
The survey targeted the Judicial Affairs process as well, asking students to assess what sanctions they would find appropriate for a first-time violation of the Honor Code, with options including an oral reprimand, a failed grade and suspension.
In recent years, the number of Honor Code hearings has remained fairly consistent, with 102 cases last year, compared to 82 in 2008-09 and 124 in 2007-08. However, Richard Yuen, assistant dean of the Judicial Affairs Office, observed that the growing usage of technology in the classroom has given rise to more web-based cheating cases.
“With the development of the Internet, many more cases of plagiarism utilizing uncited sources from the Web are discovered,” Yuen wrote in an e-mail to The Daily. “Students need to understand that using the ideas or writings from other authors must be properly cited whether it appears in printed material or the Internet.”
This trend was reflected in the survey, which asked students to evaluate the severity of “paraphrasing or copying a few sentences of material from an electronic source — e.g., the Internet — without footnoting it in a paper”.
The survey also contained questions that focus on cheating related to programming, specifically copying code from a peer. These questions stem from a startling statistic: almost 30 percent of Honor Code violations last year took place in the computer science department.
According to the Office of Judicial Affairs’ yearly report, there were 29 cases in the CS Department, followed by 11 cases in the Economics Department. After that, the numbers drop sharply, with most departments having only one or two cases.
“We will use the information gathered to inform discussions of the Internal Review Panel,” Pontius-Hogan said of the survey’s findings.
He declined to provide further commentary on the results.
The Honor Code subcommittee of the Review Panel, which also participated in the student input forum earlier this month, is still in the process of gathering more feedback from the Stanford community.
Cassandra Feliciano contributed to this report.