Honor and Spotlighting, Dimming

This post represents the thoughts and opinions of Josh Hess only.

At the end of the fall semester, the Honor Committee hosted a round table discussion with representatives of several minority groups. One topic of discussion was the disproportionate rates at which non-majority students are reported to the Honor System. From that discussion, I took away a few difficult questions. Answering these questions should receive high priority in our community.

Why are minority students more likely to be reported to the Honor Committee?

There are several possible explanations. Two in particular receive much attention. It is important to decide which is most plausible if we have any hope of tackling this problem.
The first possible explanation is “spotlighting.” That is, minority students are unduly singled out because they stand out from the crowd of students. My experience suggests that this is the conventional wisdom’s explanation for the disproportionate rate. But I am not yet convinced it tells the whole story.
A second explanation is “dimming.” The theory is that underreporting of majority students is the problem, rather than over reporting of minority students. Data available to the Honor Committee lend some credence to this explanation. A study from a few years ago indicated that, though minority students are more frequently reported to the system, the outcomes of their cases do not vary from majority students’ outcomes in a significant way. To my mind, this might indicate that reporting witnesses are not unfairly targeting minority students (at least not regularly). Instead, majority students’ cases are more often being handled informally outside the Honor System.

Why is addressing this problem important?

I can think of at least two reasons. First, the demographic distortion in the Honor Committee’s reporting rate cannot help but alienate a significant portion of those which it serves. The imbalance creates a perception of discrimination that surely illegitimates the Honor System in the eyes of many.
Additionally, the distortion could also be a sign of other problems. If dimming is, indeed, a root cause of this problem, then we should be concerned about systemic underreporting of Honor cases.

How can we address this problem in an earnest, forward leaning way?

It is easy to throw up one’s hands when confronting a problem like this. Naturally, one attributes the distortion to latent macro-cultural problems whose solutions will be found far outside grounds. While it is true that there are limits to what we can actually do, that does not mean that there is nothing worth doing. Some possible mechanisms for addressing the problem include:

1. Encourage members of the University and local community to report case of lying, cheating, and stealing to the Honor Committee rather than handling them informally.
2. Relatedly, find ways to better inform members of the community about the distortion that might be created by informal case resolution.
3. Continue to seek ways to improve recruiting for Honor support officer positions among minority groups. Doing these helps keep this problem on the agenda, counter the sense of alienation, and increases the reservoir of ideas on how to address the problem.


What do you think?

This is a sensitive and very difficult issue. Please offer your thoughts in response to any of the above mentioned questions. You can contact me directly and jch6b@virginia.edu or post below. Please observe reasonable standards of propriety when offering your thoughts. I reserve the right to remove posts that are inappropriate.