Honor commitee’s frequently asked questions

In the past I only wrote the honor code on quizzes and exams. Why do I have to write and sign it on every assignment now?
The Honor Code has always applied to all academic work at Oberlin College. When the Code was revised last year, the General Faculty mandated that it should be written and signed on every piece of work to make this broad application explicit. This change was important for two reasons. First, the process of learning at Oberlin (and in college generally) has changed a great deal in the last thirty years. Now, in addition to traditional exams, labs and research papers, faculty may require journals, collaborative work, response papers, or a variety of other projects to which the Honor Code still applies. Additionally, it should be noted that the Honor Code applies to academic conduct in a still broader sense. In addition to forbidding cheating, plagiarism, and fabrication of data, the Honor Code governs the submission of academic information (like transfer-of-credit forms or other academic documents) and prohibits denying others access to library materials by destroying or concealing them.

What are the faculty responsibilities to the Honor Code?
To function effectively the Honor Code requires the active support of all members of the College’s academic community: students, faculty and administrators. The Honor Code spells out how each of these groups is responsible. Most importantly, faculty are required to explain how the Honor Code applies to all the work done in their class. Since student work is governed by the Honor Code, faculty may not proctor exams or quizzes. Faculty members are also obliged to contact the Student Honor Committee (ohonor@oberlin.edu) if they suspect an infraction to the Honor Code. If a student in a class reports an infraction to a professor, the professor is required to communicate this report to the Student Honor Committee. The Honor Code also states that “a student or faculty member observing or having evidence of a faculty member not fulfilling his or her obligation under the Honor System is responsible for reporting this to the General Faculty Honor Committee. The complainant is encouraged to contact the respondent first.”

Why is it important that faculty support and adhere to the Honor Code?
I know an Oberlin graduate who taught English in Poland for a year. When she explained Oberlin’s honor system to her students there, some were horrified by it. Raised in the East Block, to these students the honor system looked like a divisive means of forcing students to inform on each other to a governing authority. And, if the honor code were a system of regulations devised to control student activity to the faculty’s benefit, this point of view would be understandable. But this is not the case. Students and faculty alike need the Honor Code, for it embodies and upholds the principles necessary to the productive academic inquiry that is the College’s fundamental mission. As the Honor Code and System states: “It provides the foundation for the intellectual freedom that is encouraged and shared by all members of the academic community....[T]rue academic freedom can only exist within a framework of honesty, integrity and responsibility, values essential to the life of an engaged citizenry.”

How does the faculty benefit from the Honor Code?
In a word, trust. At schools without an honor code, relationships between faculty and students can be at least implicitly adversarial. At Oberlin, on the other hand, the wide adherence to the Honor Code helps prevent this adversarial relationship because faculty members do not approach each piece of student work with suspicion, anxious to sniff out cheating, plagiarism, or fabrication. Free of this temporal and intellectual distraction, professors can focus on the work itself. This focus improves the quality of teaching, while also making it less complicated and more enjoyable.

—Erik Inglis
General Faculty Honor Committee Chair