Ad Hoc Committee on Academic Integrity

Every student at Williams signs the College Honor Code. This Honor Code serves as the central component of our community’s understanding of academic integrity. Professors rely on students’ honesty in completing essays, reports, and exams within the guidelines laid out in the assignments. This trust enables professors to prioritize teaching and learning over laying traps for and detecting dishonesty, and enables students to rely on one another to keep grading fair.

For over fifty years, the Williams Honor and Discipline Committee, made up of students, faculty and staff, has heard and adjudicated cases concerning academic dishonesty. The students are currently elected by their class. While all members participate in the hearings, students are the sole members who vote on findings of responsibility and sanctions. The committee depends on student leadership, responsibility, and commitment to the upholding of academic integrity. The sanctions often take the form of a grade penalty. This is the only instance across the college where students make decisions about other students’ grades.

Over recent years, and particularly since the pandemic, the process of the honor hearings as well as the “standard sanction” have shifted in significant ways. For example, for the past four years, hearings have been exclusively remote, and the standard sanction for dishonesty has lessened substantially. There haven’t always been students interested in running to serve on the committee, and the committee has also regularly struggled to have a quorum of voting members present for each hearing.

In response to these changes, a number of community members voiced concerns about the ways in which academic integrity is enforced at Williams, leading the Dean of the College in 2023-24 to convene a small group of faculty from across the three divisions to discuss the ways in which we teach and discuss academic integrity in the classroom and to gather thoughts about the honor and discipline process. The group met with student members of the Honor and Discipline Committee and hosted several events for faculty to share their experiences, strategies and challenges with academic integrity. A number of themes emerged from these conversations, as well as other conversations with TABLE, the WSU, and the Senior Associate Dean of Students. 

Students expressed concerns or questions about the following: 

• Enormous amount of work and time put into hearings by students
• Bias in the sanctioning rubric and its implementation
• Leadership structure of the Honor and Discipline Committee
• Preserving direct student elections while also ensuring experienced membership on the Committee
• System of vote counting for sanctioning (simple majority vs. three-quarters)

Faculty expressed concerns or questions about the following:

• Challenges professors face when suspecting dishonesty
• Labor put into efforts to detect and prove dishonesty and its effect on teaching
• Faculty experiences when participating in hearings
• Particular challenges facing:
  • Untenured faculty
  • Faculty teaching large classes
  • Faculty relying on take-home exams
  • Faculty dealing with diverse test-taking accommodations 

In light of this feedback and growing concerns from all constituents over how the College maintains academic integrity, the President, the Dean of the Faculty, and the Dean of the College have established the ad hoc committee to review the honor code and its workings.

Charge

Review and evaluate the College’s Honor Code and Honor and Discipline practices and procedures. Propose changes for improvement.

This evaluation should attend to: 

• The history, operations, and constitution of the Honor and Discipline Committee 
• The resolution of perceived tensions between providing appropriate accommodations for assessments and safeguarding academic integrity 
• The role of increased anxiety over grades and assessment
  
• The role of integrity beyond the classroom (in job searches, applications to graduate schools, and fellowships) 
• The perception/reality of grade inflation and how this might be putting pressure on students
  
• The conflation of non-academic disciplinary cases and academic integrity issues.
• Best practices from peer institutions 
• The traditions of student leadership of the Honor and Discipline Committee.
  
• Defining an appropriate scope of matters under the Honor Code / within the jurisdiction of the Honor Committee (cheating in academic coursework v. lying on resumes, misuse of college resources other instances of dishonesty). 
• Review of procedures to ensure fair and equitable process (e.g., clarifying that there should not be ex parte communications between complainants and decision makers) and an appropriate location for capturing written procedures (honor code v. website v. separate committee bylaws) 

As part of its work, the committee is charged with engaging with a wide range of stakeholders, including students, faculty, and staff. They should also consult actively with various faculty and student governing bodies, including the Faculty Steering Committee, the Williams Student Union, TABLE, the Honor and Discipline Committee, and MinCo.

Some matters certainly touch on issues of academic integrity and student accountability but fall beyond the charge of the committee, including the best way for faculty to manage and police the use of Artificial Intelligence or general language for faculty on syllabi and assessments. 

The committee will prepare a report for the faculty, the Honor and Discipline Committee, and the Dean of the College. The report should include a set of recommendations for addressing the challenges laid out in the charge.

Members