Wake County has a new policy for students who cheat. See how schools will handle it.
Updated on June 18, 2019 to reflect that the new policy received final approval.
There’s a new Honor Code policy that will guide how Wake County schools handle cases of academic cheating and plagiarism by students.
The Wake County school board gave initial approval June 4 and final approval on June 18 to a new policy that would define most Honor Code violations as offenses that would typically be handled with punishments that don’t lead to out-of-school suspensions. The new policy would reserve out-of-school suspensions for serious Honor Code violations, such as stealing exam questions and taking money to do another student’s assignment.
The new policy would require students who are caught cheating to — when possible — make up the work. The Honor Code allows schools to lower a student’s grade for cheating and to decide whether to give full, partial or no credit for the makeup work.
The policy will go into effect for the 2019-20 school year.
School board members emphasized how the Honor Code is focused on setting expectations for good behavior, similar to the way the student dress code was recently revised. The Honor Code says each student, parent, family and staff member has a responsibility to promote a culture that respects and fosters integrity and honesty.
“It will be interesting to see what comes from this, and hopefully it’s positive and expectation-setting rather than punitive,” school board member Lindsay Mahaffey said before the June 4 vote.
Examples of cheating include copying from another student’s exam or assignment, taking an exam or writing a paper for another student, and sharing exam questions and answers.
Examples of plagiarism include copying materials without proper citation, intentional misrepresentation of another person’s work as your own and using a thesis or idea from another source without proper citation.
For most honor code violations, schools would use alternatives to out-of-school suspensions such as loss of interscholastic athletic participation, awards and honors.
When the student makes up the work they cheated on, the school will use grading guidelines developed by teams of teachers to determine how much credit to give. The grading guidelines would take into account the age of the student, how often they’ve violated the Honor Code and the severity of the violation.
As a related move, the board also gave initial approval Tuesday to revisions to the district’s grading policy.
The policy allows for out-of-school suspensions for intentional acts of falsification or serious deceitful misconduct. Examples of falsification or deceit include:
▪ Falsifying another person’s name on a school-related document such as a test or report;
▪ Buying or selling test questions or answers;
▪ Copying secure test materials and providing the materials to others;
▪ Paying for or receiving anything of value to complete a school assignment.
Both board members and staff stressed that the policy was developed after getting feedback from multiple groups. The school board also spent several months reviewing the policy before Tuesday’s vote.
“The development of this policy has involved a collaborative effort that included input and feedback from multiple stakeholders, including teacher representatives from the Superintendent’s Teacher Advisory Council, students on the Superintendent’s Student Leadership Council, K-12 principals and district staff across several Central Services departments,” said Drew Cook, assistant superintendent for academics.
This story was originally published June 4, 2019 at 7:39 PM.
