Dartmouth's student Honor Education Committee has begun publicizing students' ability to submit anonymous violations of the College's academic honor code online, as evidenced by a Nov. 9 recipient-list-suppressed e-mail that encouraged students to learn about the feature.
"The Honor Education Committee invites you to learn how it has become easier for you to uphold the Honor Principle with its new ANONYMOUS online reporting system!," the e-mail said.
These submissions cannot result in a Committee on Standards hearing, Kat Stillman '10, chair of the HEC, said. The anonymous submissions are reviewed by the committee, and if they report a serious allegation, the HEC will notify the professor of the class where the violation occurred but will not disclose the name of the accused, she said. No other action can be taken, she said.
Six violations have been anonymously submitted since last Spring term, according to Stillman.
This feature has existed for over a year, according to Nathan Miller, assistant director of Undergraduate Judicial Affairs, but students are "just becoming aware of this option."
After the committee created the feature, it went through a trial period to discover how it could most effectively be used, Stillman said. The trial period ended during Spring term, and the HEC improved the feature over the summer in order to enhance communication with professors.
"We're just figuring out how to deal with it," Stillman said.
Last week, the HEC held an informal information session in Novack Cafe to explain the feature.
In addition to the anonymous online submissions, the HEC receives attributable submissions of possible violations of the code that its members then discuss. If the committee finds that an actual violation occurred, it passes the information on to the Undergraduate Judicial Affairs office, where it is reviewed again. If the UJA finds a serious violation, the case is taken before the COS.
Although the web site that gathers these anonymous submissions "could be interpreted as a snitching web site," this is "really not what it's geared towards," Stillman said.
Instead, this option is meant to help students who want to uphold the honor code but are nervous about getting involved in a full COS hearing, she said.
"We're helping out students who are too timid," she said.
"I see this as helpful because it provides an avenue for students to uphold a charge that they've been given through the honor code," Miller said. Miller emphasized that the honor code requires students to report any violations they witness.
"It can be scary to confront a peer or faculty member," Miller added.
Another benefit of the anonymous option is that it helps people who are violating the code, Stillman said, because most people who disobey the code do not realize that they are doing so.
"A lot of people think I'm trying to scare people into following the honor code and reporting their friends," Stillman said.
But this option is intended to help people understand the honor code better, and therefore avoid violating it, she added.
The feature was created by HEC members from the Classes of 2006 and 2007 after they "brainstormed how they could relieve the pressure of reporting," Stillman said.
"I don't know that it will have a positive or negative impact," Miller said. "[It's] just providing the student population another resource to be able to do something."
