Once the guidelines have been debated in depth they must be approved by a majority of Council members in order to become a Norm.

Summary (Please see below for more detailed explanations)

Mitigating

Amount of Plagiarism

Amount of Cheating

Cooperation

Aggravating

Purposeful and demonstrated misleading of Hearing Panel

Not taken into Account

Weight of Assignment (Percent)

Long-term consequences of sanction

Premeditation

Emotional Duress

NORMS

(Related to Sanctioning)

▪ The Academic Honor Council will limit sanctions to those outlined in the Honor Code. For example, students will not be sanctioned to rewrite plagiarized papers.

EXPLANATION: This maintains consistency in sanctioning and does not afford hearing panels the opportunity to send cheated work back to a professor for grading.

▪ The Academic Honor Council mandates that all assignments on which a student is found “responsible” for violating the Honor Code will not be graded or counted.

EXPLANATION: A zero on the assignment is a mandatory sanction for all instances that a student is found “responsible” so that hearing panels cannot send cheated work back to a professor for grading.

▪ The Academic Honor Council will not consider the weight an assignment has in a course (percent-wise) when determining sanctions.

EXPLANATION: This prevents hearing panels from assigning inconsistent sanctions based on the percent weight of an assignment. For instance, if two plagiarized papers were plagiarized the same amount and in the same manner, but one counted 25% and one counted 5%, then hearing panels would be inclined to assign only a zero on the course to the first, but a zero + 2 for the second. This leads to sanctioning inconsistency and also forces panels to calculate possibilities of grades instead of any objective sanctioning method.

▪ The Academic Honor Council will consider an “F as the final course grade” its baseline sanction for all students found “responsible” for violating the Honor Code. Hearing panels can mitigate or aggravate the sanction from this point if appropriate.

EXPLANATION: Panels will not start from no sanction and work their way up… it was found that a baseline sanction with room to mitigate or aggravate, in general, fosters a more consistent system. Also, a baseline of ‘F’ serves as a greater deterrent to persons considering cheating.

▪ The Academic Honor Council will not consider the long-term consequences of its assigned sanctions (i.e. a zero on the assignment causes the student to fail the course.)

EXPLANATION: This is for the sake of consistency only. If the Honor Council considers long term consequences, a senior and a freshman in the same course could get two different sanctions for the same offense due to the fact that, for instance, the senior could be prevented from graduating with the same sanction as the freshman. The Honor Council has held up during petitions to amend sanction that external consequences of an assigned sanction are not grounds for overturning a sanction.

▪ The Academic Honor Council does not consider a faculty member’s claim that a sanction is too harsh/too light to be a sufficient argument for the Honor Council to grant a petition to amend sanction.

EXPLANATION: This would lead to inconsistency unless the professor provides substantive reasons for amending the sanction.

▪ The Academic Honor Council will continue to hear the statements of expert witnesses, even if they are unnecessary because the student plead “responsible” to violating the Honor Code.

EXPLANATION: This is to make sure the Council always gets the complete picture, even in cases where the student is responsible. Witnesses can attest to mitigating or aggravating factors as well as clarifying the severity of the offense to the Council.

▪ The Academic Honor Council will consider the amount of plagiarism as a mitigating factor during sanctioning if a student is found “responsible” for violating the Honor Code by committing plagiarism.

EXPLANATION: This distinguishes the severity of different amounts of plagiarism, i.e. one plagiarized line deserves a lesser sanction than one plagiarized paper.

▪ The Academic Honor Council will consider the volume of cheating during sanctioning.

EXPLANATION: This differentiates cheating on, for example, one math problem versus cheating on an entire problem set during sanctioning.

▪ The Academic Honor Council will add the words “Choosing to” to the definition of “plagiarism” in Section II, C of the Honor Code in order to signify that intent matters when determining responsibility. The section now reads: “Choosing to present words or ideas of another as one’s own, which is plagiarism. While it is often appropriate to use other’s work in one’s paper, it must be credited as such. Quotation marks should be used for exact quotations, and in all cases, whether paraphrasing or using another’s exact wording, footnotes or endnotes should clearly indicate the source and the extent of the borrowing of ideas.”

EXPLANATION: This establishes the right of the student to prove a lack of intent to gain an unfair advantage in the event of plagiarism. For instance, if a student argues that he/she did not cite something by accident, but has provided several other citations within a paper, it would be within the purview of the student to contend that he/she did not intend to gain the unfair advantage common to instances of plagiarism, and consequently, is not responsible.

▪ The Academic Honor Council places the burden of proof with regard to the intent to cheat on the accused student.

EXPLANATION: This is a more general form of the idea of “Choosing to” as intent. Essentially, if a student can prove that his/her instance of cheating was in no way intended to gain an unfair advantage, but rather, an accident, then it is possible for hearing panels to find “not responsible” on those grounds.

▪ The Academic Honor Council will consider acceptance of responsibility with cooperation a mitigating factor. The Honor Council will not consider “contrition” to be a mitigating factor.

EXPLANATION: This affords students the opportunity to take full responsibility for their actions with the expectation of sanction mitigation.  The student must cooperate during the hearing and admit responsibility during questioning.  A student who pleads “not responsible” may receive mitigation if s/he comes to admit and accept responsibility during the hearing.

▪ The Academic Honor Council does not draw a distinction between premeditated cheating and “spur of the moment” cheating during sanctioning.

EXPLANATION: The Council decided that because degrees of premeditation were indeterminate, and because the sanctioning structure is such that offenses would likely be punished similarly regardless of premeditation, it would not consider the difference between premeditated and “spur of the moment” cheating during sanctioning.

▪ The Academic Honor Council will not consider emotional duress as a mitigating factor.

EXPLANATION: Because it is impossible to determine the legitimacy of emotional duress, as well as inconsistent to consider the emotional conditions of every case prior to sanctions, the Council will not consider emotional duress a mitigating factor.

▪ In the event that the Academic Honor Council mitigates from the baseline sanction of an ‘F’ in a course for an offense, and must aggravate based on another separate factor, the Hearing Panel may apply the three letter grade reduction as a sanction.

▪ The Academic Honor Council considers the purposeful and demonstrated misleading of a Hearing Panel an aggravating factor during sanctioning.

▪ The Academic Honor Council will consider the existence of extenuating circumstances a mitigating factor. The existence and effects of extenuating circumstances must be supported by evidence and/or testimony.

EXPLANATION: This affords hearing panel members the opportunity to mitigate when circumstances beyond the student’s control contribute to the occurrence of a violation.  Theses circumstances include, but are not limited to, significant miscommunication between parties or the influence of a third party.