Walking the delicate line between a welcoming and a warning, administrators in charge of planning and presenting this year's international student orientation introduced the University's Honor Code to a group of about 60 first-year international students last week.
The program was designed to familiarize international students to their new school's policy on academic integrity early on.
"We didn't want to come down too hard," said Robert Thompson, dean of Trinity College, who helped plan and present the event. "We didn't want to appear insensitive and unwelcoming, but at the same time we needed to convey that in college it's a different ball game."
As part of the presentation, senior Matthew Baugh, chair of the Undergraduate Judicial Board, and sophomore Melissa Walker, president of the Honor Council, conducted an interactive presentation where students identified whether they thought various hypothetical examples were instances of serious cheating, trivial cheating or not cheating at all.
International students make up about 6 percent of Duke's undergraduate population. But of the 27 students who were brought before UJB last year for academic dishonesty, five of them-almost 19 percent-were international.
Administrators say the numbers themselves are not alarming. Instead, they are more disturbed by the fact that those international students didn't seem to have a clear understanding of the Honor Code.
Carlisle Harvard, director of the International House, said she has met many international students who say they have difficulty adjusting to the United States classroom environment. For example, several Asian students have told Harvard that they were taught not to ask questions of teachers; a German student expressed surprise that his peers brought food and drink to class.
The bottom line, Harvard said, is that expectations in American classrooms are not necessarily in line with classroom practices in other countries.
But some international students hesitated to attribute the number of honor code violations to cultural nuances.
Freshman Jennie Chen said her Beijing high school published a pamphlet about proper citation practices, which made an honor system familiar to her.
Still, she said, many high schools around the world do not emphasize honor codes.
She added that the transition from high school to college was probably more profound than her move overseas.
"I thought [the honor code presentation] definitely helped me distinguish between the severity of different violations," she said.
Cultural differences and transitions to college are just the tip of the iceberg, Thompson said. Once at Duke, he said, students encounter variations among the expectations of individual teachers. In recognition of that, Thompson wrote a letter to the faculty of Trinity College in mid-August: "I ask that you take a few moments during one of your classes early in the semester to be explicit about your expectations for the course," Thompson wrote.
He noted the results from a survey taken last year indicated that many students found their teacher's standards ambiguous when it came to questions about collaboration and citation, as well as whether tests and exams from previous years could be used as study tools.
Thompson hoped the letter would get faculty thinking about discussing the honor code with their students.
Although this year's honor code orientation session was geared toward international students, Baugh said the program may eventually be extended to other groups, including freshmen.
"We don't want to send the wrong message," Baugh said. "We are not making a point that international students are the most prone to cheating, because that is not the case. What we are saying is that everyone should know the basic standards."
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