May
7th
2007
Today sucked.
.. and all I really did was go to an honor board meeting. The proceedings are confidential of course - but my emotional response to it needn't be. Honor Board is serious business, academic integrity: heck, integrity (full stop!) is serious
Suffice it to say that there are real consequences for people's actions - meting out those consequences is not a pain-free issue, it takes quite a toll to see these things come up time and time again, with increasing frequency.
Thankfully, I already knew that people suck - so I can shrug this off, right?
RIGHT?!
*waves* Hi! Hope you don’t mind me popping in over here. LOL. Just thought I’d stop in at your pace & check it out!
My husband works at the USAF Academy, so I know that those honor board meetings are no joke. Oh, and yes, [most]people do suck. LOL.
Ooh someone else with experience in adjudicating this. That is somewhat rare.
And of course I don’t mind if you stop in. =) Welcome to my site. It is often broken as this is where I test things *winks*
It’s really amazing what people will do and think they can get away with. In the two years I’ve been on the honor board, yesterday’s was by far the single-most disturbing incident, at least to me personally. I wish I could speak more on it, but alas. =)
But I’m sure there’s something in a shade of grey…
Something in between…
No worries; being who I am (not that I’m all that special; just the spouse of a military officer, and prior enlisted myself, LOL) I fully understand the secrecy factor that comes with all of that. LOL.
Unfortunately, at USAFA, the luxury of privacy is also a rarity; you wouldn’t believe how much they make the news. In fact, several students were recently expelled over a huge cheating scandal (nothing new, really), and I couldn’t turn on the TV or radio without seeing & hearing it.
Here’s what baffles me: there is a strenuous qualification process to get in, so you can pretty much guarantee that these kids aren’t dumb. Well, why is it that in all of their infinite wisdom, they would choose to cheat (and inevitably get caught, and forfeit a very expensive FREE education), all for the sake of what seems to me to be pure laziness?
It’s something I’ll never understand…
There was a study by some national association of librarians that showed incidents of plagiarism have risen nationwide 30% in the last 5 years. I saw that study 2 years ago.
Smith is pretty high up on the ladder, and Princeton, Harvard, Yale, right down the ladder all have these major problems. So it’s everywhere. They think they won’t get caught (I’ve heard that at least once a month if not more often, and we meet 4 times a month). Either that or they weren’t thinking rationally, meh. I’m pretty cynical about if I believe that stress can cause one’s ethics to drop that low.
That education is free - Smith’s is about 45 grand a year, all told - and plagiarism can have consequences that throw all of that away. And Smith is considered lenient in comparison to say, Princeton, who I believe have a policy of expulsion.
*shakes head*
But I’m sure there’s something in a shade of grey…
Something in between…
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