Previously, the offending student's professor alone determined the degree of the penalty, without any precedent set by a recommended course of action.
"[The penalty] has always been at the discretion of the instructor of a course," said Dean of Students Ben Lieber, a member of the Council. "One of the things the College Council did last year in studying this issue was a survey of students and faculty, and what it found was that less than 50 percent of the time, the faculty member actually failed the student in the course. The alternative is generally failure of the assignment."
Lieber said that the amendment aims to mitigate the recent spike in cheating and plagiarism. "The Council's hope was to encourage faculty to choose the more serious penalty, precisely because there has been a real increase in cases of academic dishonesty," he said. "We felt that more deterrence was needed."
Association of Amherst Students President Ryan Park '05, a Council member, stressed that the amendment does not reflect a change in the administration's views on cheating. "It's important to note that the College Council made this recommendation last spring as part of a series of measures intended to respond to increased levels of reported cheating," he said. "There were delays in holding a faculty vote on the matter until the end of last semester, but ratcheting up the official penalties for cheating was part of the original Honor Code proposal."
To date, the Council and College administrators have not yet informed the student body of the amendment, which will go into effect in the 2005-06 academic year.
Park predicts that the recommendation of failure will deter potential cheaters. "I think that the passage of this measure is a very clear signal that Amherst College, as an institution, takes cheating and plagiarism very seriously and is willing to take substantive measures to combat them," he said. "We can't have an Honor Code that makes any sort of sense if we do not have penalties for those who break the trust that this community freely gives them upon admission. So, this measure is about two things: Justice-people who cheat should be punished-and changing the culture of Amherst to one that is more respectful of and committed to academic integrity."
Erika Sams '08 agrees that the new recommendation will benefit the College community. "I think if our school is going to have a policy of academic honesty, then people need to be held accountable," she said. "If you are going to go to a school like Amherst, you should be expected to do your own work."
The faculty passed two other motions in conjunction with the recommendation of failure. One of the students elected to the Disciplinary Committee, the adjudicating body which reviews cases of academic dishonesty, will be replaced on the hearing panel by a randomly chosen member of the sophomore, junior or senior classes. "It is the College Council's hope to create a bit more investment in the Honor Code by having random students know they could be selected to adjudicate cases, not just students who ran for positions on the Committee on Discipline," said Lieber.
The faculty also established that when a professor suspects that a student has cheated, either the professor or a hearing officer, appointed within the Dean of Students Office, can bring the case before the Committee on Discipline.
In the 2002 calender year, the College found 35 students guilty of academic dishonesty, compared to an annual average of just three to six cases in the 1980s and 1990s. In response to this jump, the College Council launched a study of academic dishonesty at the College in 2003, and the Council subsequently resolved last spring to update and strengthen the Code of Conduct as a result of the study.
The Council's first move was to highlight the three "governing principles of student life" established in the Code of Conduct and to require that each incoming first-year class sign the governing principles in the form of an Honor Code. The class of 2008 was the first class to sign the Honor Code, which students and faculty must reapprove every four years.