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A Letter from the Honor Board: bring back the proctors

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Honor Board’s second open meeting. During that meeting, all of the students – regardless of their affiliation to the Honor Board – were in agreement that unproctored exams were no longer working as intended at Stevens. This may be the signal of a major turning point in Stevens history: one of the founding tenets of the Stevens Honor System, first suggested by Stevens Life (the Stute’s predecessor) editor in chief Frederic J. Angell (1884)[1], is now held by the students to be flawed and outdated.

To those who are not familiar with the intrinsically convoluted history of an organization like the Stevens Honor System, this may not seem particularly drastic. Let me assure you that it is. The first “trial run” of an Honor System at Stevens occurred in 1906, when graduating seniors took final exams without any faculty present. Within two years the Honor System was in full swing[2]. The structure of the Honor System, and of the Honor Board, has changed many times in the following century, but one of the few points of continuity is that faculty members have been restricted from proctoring their exams.

Along with Elena Piper and Tyler Romeo, I recently presented at the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) annual conference in Vancouver, Canada. Our presentation, The Ethics of Exam Archives, was very well received – however when we told the attending Academic Integrity officers about our current exam situation, they were overwhelmingly of the opinion prevalent across our campus: unproctored exams lead to more issues than they solve. For instance, most professors assume that students are aware that certain electronic devices (cell phones, tablets, laptops, PDAs, et cetera) are not allowed in their exams, but may never explicitly tell their students or publish a policy in their syllabus. When exams roll around and a case of a student “using” a cell phone in such an exam is reported, it becomes nigh impossible to assess the student’s claim that he was using it as a clock.

Complicating the issue even further, the Honor System’s definition of “proctoring” is woefully lacking – the Honor Board’s Constitution and Bylaws state that professors and teaching assistants may not “proctor examinations.” At least in recent years, that has been interpreted rather broadly. Professors are barred from walking between desks, peering at students’ exams, taking papers, or confiscating phones. When they suspect an infraction, they must report it after the fact and not interrupt the student mid-exam.

One thing has been consistently upheld, however: that professors may not assign students’ their seats, and that they may not insist students to turn off or surrender their phones or other electronic devices. Many of my colleagues at the ICAI heartily advocated that if we are going to continue with this model, we at least institute some reform. Require students to put their phones in sealed bags under their desks. Ensure that every exam has a standard technology policy. Define precisely what constitutes proctoring.

Alternately, and this is where the student support lay at the open meeting, abolish the policy. However, unlike the myriad of changes the Honor Board implements on a semesterly basis, the anti-proctoring sentiment is so entrenched in the Honor System it is protected constitutionally. Many of you may remember when the SGA rewrote their constitution in 2011 – just like the SGA, it requires a full third of Stevens’ undergradutes to cast a ballot for a constitutional amendment to be considered.

The Stevens Honor System is predicated on students holding one another accountable. It has always been upheld, governed, and overhauled by us, the students. Perhaps it is time for us to adapt to the times, to acknowledge that technology has fundamentally changed education, assessment, and academic dishonesty. Perhaps it is time to bring back the proctors.

 

-Shane Quinlan Arlington

Vice-Chair of the Stevens Honor Board

[1]Clark, Geoffrey W. 2000. “Honor Societies, Honor System, Student Government.” In History of Stevens Institute of Technology: A Record of Broad-Based Curricula and Technogenesis, 166.

[2] Ibid, 167-168.

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