Currently, the most common outcome in a case of academic dishonesty is “required withdrawal” for two semesters, with over one-third of cases in the past five years resulting in this decision, which mandates that students leave campus and find work.

Disciplinary probation—during which the College closely monitors student behavior—ranks next, with 28 percent of students in the last five years who went before the Ad Board receiving this decision.

The remaining options, none of which carry any serious repercussions, are “admonish,” “take no action,” and “scratch.”

David J. Malan ’99, who teaches the popular introductory course Computer Science 50, says he thinks that these existing Ad Board responses do not provide enough flexibility. For some cases of academic dishonesty, Malan says he thinks that removing a student from the course might be a more “proportional” response than requiring withdrawal.

When deciding whether to send a student to the Ad Board, many professors are cognizant of the most likely outcome—required withdrawal.

“There are times when [professors] may conclude—and we don’t know this, that’s the thing—that it is plagiarism, or it is inappropriate collaboration, and they just deal with it [themselves],” Harris says. “They’re not supposed to do that.”

A TWO-TRACK SOLUTION

To address the Faculty’s concerns that the Ad Board’s disciplinary actions cannot adequately address the range of academic dishonesty cases, the Committee to Review the Ad Board recommends creating a new process that would increase the range of disciplinary responses available.

Faculty and teaching staff would be encouraged to report every case to the Ad Board, as per current policy.

For students who have already faced formal charges in the past, the case would automatically be forwarded to the Ad Board for review.

For students who have not been previously reported for academic dishonesty, two courses of action are possible. If the student denies the charges, the student would be required to appear before the Ad Board. Otherwise, the Secretary of the Ad Board—currently John “Jay” L. Ellison—would meet with the course professor, who would determine whether the case should be sent to the Ad Board or handled with punishments such as mandatory tutoring, a course warning, or a graded penalty.

The proposed two-track solution could help ease faculty apprehensions about turning students over to the board, and administrators say the solution may provide more flexibility in handling cases. Members of the Ad Board have raised concerns that it can be difficult to administer disciplinary action proportional to the degree of infraction or address the nuances of individual cases given the limited options.

“The range of cases we see only seems to be getting larger, and the kinds of responses that feel fair are very wide-ranging,” said Adams House Resident Dean Sharon L. Howell. “There’s a kind of restrictiveness at the moment.”

One junior, who was required to withdraw from the College for two semesters in January for using verbatim and near-verbatim quotations in a paper draft without proper attribution, says she believes the punishment she received was too harsh.

“The punishment I got for doing something like that on a draft of a paper was pretty extreme because that’s the same punishment someone would have gotten if they had bought a paper online and used it for their final paper,” says the junior, who asked to remain anonymous in order to avoid the stigma associated with being forced to withdraw.