This post reflects the opinions of Josh Hess only.
Critics of the Honor System frequently insist that the inflexibility of its sanction creates perverse incentives for guilty students to lie once accused. At the heart of this contention is the realization that the system actually rewards those who decide to contest their guilt by allowing them to continue to accrue course credit until the date of their dismissal at trial.
In recognition of this state of affairs, critics of the system propose replacing the single sanction with an “informed retraction.” Under this new regime, students who admit their guilt within a certain period of time after accusation would be permitted to return to the University at some point in the future. Students who contest their guilt and request a trial would still face only permanent dismissal.
One problem with this approach is that it creates perverse incentives of its own. The potential disparity in outcomes for students deciding whether to “leave admitting guilt” or contest their guilt at trial is substantial. Students who are genuinely unsure as to whether they have committed an Honor offense confront a choice between admitting their “guilt” and facing mere suspension and contesting it and facing permanent dismissal. There is a very real risk here that not guilty students would subject themselves to suspension because it is the “safer” option.
But the realization that the informed retraction is undesirable (as students did in 2002) leaves the problems it sought to address untouched.
This past Sunday, the Honor Committee reviewed three proposals to address the “moral hazard” without stirring up new complications. These ideas represent a moderate, creative alternative to the informed retraction and my hope is that the Committee will adopt them.
The first proposal offers to change the transcript notation for students who LAG (“leave admitting guilt”) rather than request a trial from “enrollment discontinued” to “withdrawn.” “Enrollment Discontinued” is already meant to offer dismissed students a certain measure of confidentiality post-dismissal. The switch to “withdrawn” would simply offer one more degree of anonymity.
The differentiating degree is not large enough, though, to create the perverse incentives that one finds with the informed retraction. The shift simply makes the decision by knowingly guilty students to more clearly rational. The shift in transcript notation, unlike the informed retraction, does not present a stand-alone incentive to LAG for not-guilty students.
The other two proposals seek to place reasonable limits on accused students’ capacity to “game” the trial scheduling process to obtain more credit. One proposes giving accused students who request a trial a pre-determined set of trial dates in the near future from which to choose, shifting the burden on them to make a showing as to why none of the dates work and delay is justified. The other attempts to mitigate the incentive to delay in dishonest pursuit of credit accrual by giving the Honor Committee’s Executive Committee the ability to, with a unanimous finding of system-gaming, request that the Faculty Senate deprive delaying students of the credit they acquired post-accusation.
Animating these two proposals is an impulse to minimize the breadth of the moral hazard by making the “reward” of continued dishonesty post-accusation less certain.
My firm belief is that these proposals individually will not have a material capacity to address the moral hazard complications. But, passed together, I do think they would represent a substantial contribution.
7 comments:
Josh, this is a thoughtful post. Since you have not yet provoked a response from anyone else, I'll throw in a few cents worth (hopefully denominated in Euros) of my own:
In an ideal world, the definition of an Honor offense is perfectly clear. No student is confused about whether or not given conduct falls inside or outside the definition. In such a world, the preferred outcome is the LAG. This should be self-evident; since there can be no legitimate confusion with respect to guilt, the guilty student acts most honorably when he admits his dishonorable conduct in spite of the consequences.
If you accept this premise, than the best possible Honor System will provide incentives for guilty students to LAG rather than go to trial. Accordingly, the only students who would go to trial are those who are truly innocent and those who continue to lie.
Such a system benefits the student, who is encouraged to take responsibility for his actions and be honest with himself and others. This system also benefits the rest of the community in its reaffirmation of the importance of honesty and integrity. Confessions are rewarded, liars are punished, and the innocent are exhonerated.
Our Honor System is not like this. As you note, in the case of a guilty student, the incentive structure currently in place occasionally rewards delay, self-denial, and dishonesty. It hurts the Community in the ways that you mention. But it also hurts the accused student who is trying to decide what to do. It places him in a "moral hazard" in which the Honor System itself is encouraging him to continue to lie. The Committee has seen this play out, and it can be disheartening.
Such a result seems perverse. But critics of your proposals argue that our ideal system cannot exist in the real world. The primary reason given for this seems to be that it is very difficult to define an Honor Offense in practice. They have the impression that there is a large swath of gray between clearly honorable and clearly dishonorable conduct. It is this uncertainty that makes trials useful and even morally preferable. After all, they say, don't we define an Honor Offense according to some changing "community standard"? Two arguments follow from this view. First, we cannot predict what juries will do. Second, students do not know whether their own conduct constitutes an Honor Offense.
What are your thoughts in response?
I would say a few things in response.
First, in practice I do not think that the truly ambiguous cases represent a large "swathe" of cases. But I would concede the possibility that they represent a not-insignificant percentage.
Given that possibility, I think the Cavalier Daily's position is fair criticism. The proposal isn't perfect. But this defect is small and the benefits of the proposal outweigh it.
The defect is that students who genuinely, but ultimately wrongly, believe that they are not-guilty do not enjoy the advantage of the new transcript notation. The significance of this downside is undermined by the facts that 1. the advantage to having "withdrawn" rather than "enrollment discontinued" is not substantial and 2. the student was, after all, guilty despite his belief to the contrary.
The benefits that I have outlined in the post, however, are comparatively substantial.
Instead of "swathe" I should have said "swath."
Please give us an example of this moral hazard problem. How many credit hours might be gained by delaying tactics? How long is the process from beginning to end?
At my university, the most lengthy case I can recall lasted one month. Granted, our system is not as involved or evolved as UVa's, but I have trouble imagining more than a few credit hours being at stake.
If your process takes more than a semester, something's amiss.
I believe that the concern is for those cases with timing that falls at the end of the semester. Students then may attempt to delay their trial as long as possible in order to finish the semester and receive those credits.
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