ASG Pushes Honor Code to Fight Cheating

By Mallory Miller

Collaboration used to build integrity system
Mallory Miller
The Santa Clara

Associated Student Government is now using the Groups function of Google Apps to further develop plans for its student honor code initiative.

An email sent out last week by Campus Ethics Director David Decosse invited the student body to the group where students can view and comment on proposed changes to the plan.

In order to encourage student collaboration, prizes are being awarded to the Residential Learning Communities with the highest levels of participation. ASG plans to post ideas and revisions to the honor code each week, and then students can voice their opinions on the changes directly.

So far, in the week that the group has been available to students, the page has 79 views and comments from 10 different students.

Students have said that they would support a student initiated honor code though; in a survey sent out in spring, about 55 percent of participants said they had witnessed peers cheating in class, 10 percent admitted to cheating themselves and over 50 percent of the students said they would support a student-initiated, student-operated academic honor system.

The results received from the survey encouraged ASG's Chief Justice Aven Satre-Meloy to launch the honor code project.
"Statistically speaking, the numbers show that there are less students who cheat at universities with honor codes than at universities that do not have honor codes," said Satre-Meloy.

ASG is modeling their plan to enforce the honor code after other universities that have recently developed honor codes over the past 15 years. The proposed plan is to have students sign an honor pledge at the beginning of the year, saying they will abide by the honor code for the academic school year.

Santa Clara already has an academic integrity policy, according to DeCosse.

"But we don't have a regular, public way of re-enforcing such a policy. And that's where an honor code comes in," said DeCosse.

The implementation ideas on the current revision of the honor code are to require students to sign the honor code at their entrance to the university and at the beginning of each academic quarter. Additionally, the honor code would be posted on bulletins, syllabi and all greenbooks.

Contact Mallory Miller at memiller@scu.edu or call (408) 554-4852.