Student Government Handles Cheating
Ed Stack recalls the involvement of student leaders in the development of a student honor code in the early 1990s.
Interview on 2011-04-26 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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I remember at the time that it seems like Tom Stafford pulled together a group of student leaders to start talking about an honor code,
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and as we went through that process it was very interesting to get people's input on that.
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I think that it was very interesting, some of the dialogue that we had. People are very passionate about whether or not the work they do is theirs
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so obviously anybody within student government--. And I like to think that the people who are involved in student government are at a very minimum at least as ethical as everybody else.
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Hopefully they want to be standard bearers for being ethical students, and there again you could look at my GPA and probably tell that [Laughs] I wasn't cheating or if I was it was off the wrong people.
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But I think that where we were was really we wanted to get student sentiment, we wanted to understand what people were thinking,
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what the students were thinking, and then be good partners with the administration moving forward,
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and if we felt like we could reach an agreement on an honor code I think we felt good with that.
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We felt good with whatever it took to make sure that we were not cheating to the point where we got to an accusatory stance.
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We don't want to walk into a classroom with the professor immediately thinking, okay, all you guys are going to cheat.
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We want to walk in there, okay, none of you are going to cheat and I know that because you're ethical students, and I think that's probably where we were on that.
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