THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 21, 1994 TAG: 9410210065
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E13 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
OLD DOMINION University officials say it's time to get tough on cheating. So they're proposing an overhaul of the campus honor system, giving more power to administrators and professors - and less to students - to handle cheating cases.
The plan would require all complaints on cheating or plagiarism to go through faculty members. Currently, either a student or a professor can bring a case directly to the Honor Council. Furthermore, under the revisions, the university's ``hearing officer'' - an administrator - would determine a student's guilt or innocence. The all-student Honor Council now has that role.
If a student appealed a decision under the new plan, a committee of three professors and three students would hear the case.
The student Honor Council would be transformed into an educational group, spreading the word across campus on the dangers of cheating.
``The most important role they can play is to champion the concepts of honesty and integrity,'' said Vice President Dana D. Burnett, who is pushing the proposal. ``I can say that, but they (students) won't listen to me. Peers can be much more effective doing that.''
ODU is the second Virginia university at which student governance of the honor system has been called into question recently. At the University of Virginia, students have accused administrators of pressuring the honor council to hold a retrial over the summer for a student threatening to sue the school. The student's conviction was overturned.
Most Virginia schools with longstanding honor systems - such as U.Va., Washington and Lee University and the College of William and Mary - allow students near-total authority to decide their peers' fate. But Burnett said the system hasn't been working at ODU or other campuses.
ODU's Honor Council heard only one cheating case in the spring semester and no more than nine last fall, he said.
``Whether it's one, eight or nine - even 20 - that hardly represents the total number of cheating cases on campus,'' he said.
Nathan Harris, an education major who is a senior from Richmond, thinks that more publicity from the Honor Council would help cut down on cheating. ``By printing more newsletters and fliers, people would know, `They're watching you.' They'll be more reluctant'' to cheat, he said.
But Honor Council members vigorously oppose the proposal.
``Students should be in charge of all of this,'' said Alison Martz, a senior from Pittsburgh who is chairwoman of the council. ``This is about students, this is for students; it should be run by students.''
Ted Arminio, a graduate student in history who is a vice chairman, also questioned letting the hearing officer decide cases. He said the administrator ``is going to be affected by the policies and procedures of the university. A student body which hears cases - we're not answerable to anybody other than students. This allows us to be objective.''
Council members last week issued a counterproposal maintaining their right to hear cases but agreeing to grant faculty full power to bring up complaints and to make the council's primary role the education of students about the system.
Donald McCabe, a Rutgers University management professor who has studied honor codes, said there is no single formula for success. But ``I'm personally for more student involvement,'' he said. ``If it were for me, that (the ODU plan) would concern me. . . . I see the value of honor codes where students govern themselves. I've seen schools where if it's the administration's process, the students tend to respect it less than if it's their own process.''
The Student Senate and the Faculty Senate plan to vote on the proposal within the next few weeks, and Burnett hopes to bring it before ODU's Board of Visitors in December. A similar plan was voted down in the spring by both senates, but students and faculty members say it could pass this time because the administration is making a stronger effort to promote it.
Despite some reservations, student president Angela East supports the plan. ``The bottom line is, we're dealing with dishonest people, and they're receiving the same degrees that honest people are getting,'' she said.
If nothing else, the debate on campus has revealed widespread discontent with some parts of the system, whether it's students' lack of awareness of the process or the faculty's lack of involvement.
``A lot of professors don't say much about it (cheating), unless it's a class where you have to do a lot of writing,'' said Toshica Hill, a senior from Norfolk majoring in communications. ``Maybe if the faculty is more involved, they'll pay more attention to it in the classroom.''
Robert Ake, chairman of the Faculty Senate, said some professors have grown reluctant to get involved because student Honor Council members sometimes haven't done their homework and cases have dragged on for months. ``The students,'' he said, ``haven't done all they needed to do to make it work well. The system probably needs some changes.'' But he said he's still not sure the administration's proposal is the answer. by CNB