Good luck (and good decisions) during finals!

Most schools are winding down with finals either this week or next which means *stress.* We all do silly things to make ourselves more anxious during high stress times, but for most of us that anxiety will not translate to any real problems. There are times, however, when our bad habits cause us to respond to manageable situations as if they were hopeless. It is then that we do things that we would not do otherwise like plagiarize, cheat, or take other shortcuts that can get you suspended or expelled from school. Most students I deal with that get caught cheating are not habitual cheaters. They are good people and good students who were overwhelmed and acted without thinking things through. By taking a deep breath and asking yourself the following questions you can save yourself a lot of trouble down the road:

1. What will happen if you get caught? For most academic misconduct you should assume that you will, at a minimum, fail the class. In addition, faculty and TAs are actively looking for academic misconduct during the last couple of weeks of school and during finals. Because of this, you will probably also be referred to the judicial office and if you are found responsible you will be suspended. Even if you would fail the final or the last paper without cheating, there is a HUGE difference between an earned F and an assigned 0.
2. How much will cheating help you even if you get away with it? Going back to the above example, let’s assume that the final is half your grade. If you have a D going into the final that means you have at least 30 points (60% of 50 points=30). If you cheat and get an A, that would add 45 points to your grade which would give you a C. So if you cheat and succeed you’re getting a C, if you don’t and you get a D you’re getting a D, and if you get caught you’re getting an F and likely getting suspended. The potential reward is not worth it. You’d be better off not studying and spending that time on other classes. (Note: the math works if you have a B going into the final as well.)
3. How easy is it to catch plagiarism? The answer to this is “easy.” Professors and TAs know to Google phrases that sound “off” to them and they will likely find the source you used and didn’t credit, or the book you pretended to use and cited. If you don’t have time to finish a paper without plagiarizing, talk to your professor ASAP. Even if she will not give you extra time, you will likely only lose a set amount of points by handing it in late, and that’s much better than a zero.
   

   Most people get away with this part and are caught during grading.

4. Why would someone I care about ask me to risk everything so they can cheat? Many academic misconduct cases are when one student cheats of another student who is doing well in the class. In most systems, especially those with an honor code, both students are accountable for that even if one student receives no benefit from the misconduct. I understand that if your friend, that girl you like, or your boyfriend asks that it is really hard to say no because you want to help them. However, this is the academic misconduct equivalent of them asking you to smuggle their drugs through the airport and I bet all of you would be too smart to do that.
5. Have I tried everything else? Your school has academic support resources, policies for getting an “Incomplete,” and other options to get help with academic situations that seem hopeless. Even more importantly, most of your faculty want you to succeed and if you approach them they may have options for you. If none of these actually help you then at least you tried to do everything you could and you can feel better about your actual grade.

Of course, if you decided to cheat anyway and get caught, we’re here to help.

What other strategies do you have to get out of trouble without cheating? If you’re faculty at a school what have you done to help students in crisis? Any tips?

Getting Better Advisors–Why Administrators Are Wrong About Us, And Why That Mistake May Hurt You

At College Judicial Consultants we have tremendous respect for judicial officers, Greek advisors, and other administrators, but believe they should be less mistrustful of outside help during the campus judicial process. When that help is an attorney for the non-legal judicial process, that help can indeed hurt a student and cost the student thousands of dollars. While we understand that mistrust, we believe that when you look at the support offered on campus, we are not truly outside.

Fact 1: Every student discipline system allows a student or organization (“respondent”) to have an advisor, with most limiting that advisor to a non-attorney from the campus community.

Fact 2: Only a handful of schools have an organized advisor program where they train a few faculty and staff in how the system works and make those people available for students going through the process. These advisors are well intended and may help a few students each year. However, their job is to make sure the student understands the process and is connected to campus resources; not to “help” the student minimize the consequence or negate false accusations. In other words, they are there for emotional and psychological support only. That support is REALLY important (in fact we encourage every client to take advantage of it) but that type of advising is less than a respondent needs when they are innocent or the stakes are high.

When a respondent goes through the disciplinary process there are two essential parts of that process the respondent needs to understand—the procedure and the content. Judicial officers often say that their system is “different” and thus requires someone with specific training to understand it. While this is technically correct, ask your judicial officer if he or she can understand other systems and I’ll bet you $5 they won’t have a problem doing so. Judicial systems have slight differences, but they are similar enough that there are best practices, model codes, community assessment models, and uniform standards. More importantly, any system they have must be explainable AND in writing in a way to make it understandable. When you meet with the judicial officer he or she will explain it to you and that explanation is essentially the same “training” the advisors from the school receive.

The much more important part is developing the content where the respondent gets the chance to tell their side of the story and present evidence to show how their version is correct and the accusations are inaccurate. It is during this part of the process where respondents make mistakes that can get them found responsible when they are not, and make their sanction worse than it needed to be. It is in this arena that our consultants are miles ahead of any other “advisor” you will get from the school for two very important reasons:

1. The least experienced of our consultants has seen at least 10 times the number of cases as the most experienced advisor from your school (with that number closer to 50 times more.) This means that your consultant has seen literally hundreds more responses than anyone you will find on campus, and are much more likely to have seen a case with similar facts to yours.
2. Our consultants’ only goal is to make sure you are not found responsible for something you did not do and have the smallest consequence possible for what you did. We are not faculty who have opinions about plagiarism at your school. We are not administrators who have had to deal with “problem” students. In other words, we do not have any reason to protect the school, the community, or the system.

In other words, we are like the best advisor you might find on campus but with vastly more experience, and without any agenda other than giving a respondent the best chance for the best result. Why would anyone on your campus not want you to take advantage of that?

 Contact us for a free and completely confidential consultation to go over your case and see what we can do for you.

We Are the 5% Solution

We recently were featured in an article in The Dartmouth. The journalist, Ms. Amanda Young, discussed what we do and then spoke with their Director of Undergraduate Affairs, Mr. Nathan Miller, and Ms. Jessica Womack, a junior on Dartmouth’s “Committee on Standards (COS),” to get a sense of whether or not we are a resource that Dartmouth students should use.  It was a fair article with both Mr. Miller and Ms. Womack saying what you would expect from people in their positions.  Neither of them thinks that a student needs to use our services to get through the process; although they both seem to acknowledge that a student should use anything he or she can to maximize their readiness for the process.  While that position is inherently contradictory, since we essentially agree with them I thought I’d explain it.

To make the math easy, let’s say that, on average, 5% of college students get into some kind of trouble each year.  This trouble can be anything from the silly (violating copyright through “illegal” downloads) to the horrible (sexual assault.)  To make it even simpler, let’s pretend that Dartmouth has 2000 students so each year 100 of them get in some sort of trouble.  Ms. Womack and Mr. Miller both think that the process works well and that the support offered is sufficient for the students involved.  Let’s say they’re right, and give them an A on their process and the support offered.  That means that there is a 95% rate of what I call “sufficient fairness” where the resources and the process are enough to ensure that a student is prepared to obtain the best result possible. That would be an amazing system, and something that the people on the COS (like Ms. Womack) and the person responsible for the process (Mr. Miller) should be understandably proud.  In fact, at College Judicial Consultants we assume that every system is at or near 95% with the people involved in the process acting beyond reproach and really doing the best they can for students.

That still leaves 5% of the time where some additional help is needed or would help a student be more prepared.  Using the numbers above that means that at Dartmouth every year, 5 students could benefit from competent outside help.  In other words, it is completely consistent for the world to have judicial systems with an efficiency and customer satisfaction rate higher than almost anything offered anywhere by anyone, and also that the students subjected to that system could on occasion, use help and support beyond that system. We are here for that 1%, 3%, 5% or higher percent of the cases where the resources either are not sufficient or the student/student organization cannot use them fully so they are, in practice, not sufficient.  We are not trying to suggest that systems are out to get students or are happy when a student organization gets screwed over. We believe that systems of accountability are good things, managed by good people who work hard, and adjudicated by good people with the best intentions.  The problem is that sometimes that isn’t enough.

I can hear the defensiveness of some of our critics now “you’re just making up numbers!” Correct. I did. I have no way of knowing how many students that have gone through a process believe that they understood it all, did everything they should have, and would change nothing about how it went.   I do know, however, that if systems were perfect there would be no need for an appeal process.  If everything worked out as it should AND the students subjected to it were always satisfied with the result, they wouldn’t want to appeal because there would be no need. However, the appeals process is there for when a student believes that something very wrong has happened, and that the result is unfair. (I talk about appeals in an earlier blog so I won’t go into it more, but if you don’t see this point let me know and I’ll explain more.)

We love to assign blame in this country. If something isn’t working, or if there is a breakdown in something that does work, we love to point to someone and say “this is why it doesn’t work.”  If a student thinks the system is unfair, then it is that student or that fraternity that is “broken,” not the system. ($5 to the first person who can send me an article where the upper administration of a school, before any legal action began, said When we say that systems with underprepared participants are inherently unfair, we are not criticizing the people involved in that system (usually.)  We believe that most systems are inherently fair and that almost administrators and board members are trying to get the right result.  In fact, we count on it.  Our fundamental belief is that no matter how fair a system is the outcome will not be fair if the person subjected to it is not able to use it fully.  We are not challenging the fairness of a system when we say that.

Schools do have varying levels of support–some have advisors they train on the process, student advocates who help they prepare their responses, and other resources to help a student be prepared.  As I’ve said, in most cases they are probably fine and will be enough help.  However, when something is really serious, when a student or student group feels that they want someone who’s goal is to help them minimize the sanction against them or make sure they are not held accountable for something they didn’t do, when they want judgment free help, or when they just don’t trust the resources, we are here.  We have seen thousands of cases in different kinds of systems.  We have seen administrative hearings (run them in some cases,) all student boards (advised/created them in some cases,) boards made up of faculty, staff and students (trained them in some cases,) and “special” boards made up of more highly trained people to hear more serious cases (and served on them in some cases.)  We study the judicial system of every client’s school, and by the time the hearing happens understand it better than almost anyone. More than that, when we help a student or student group, our only obligation is to them.  We have no obligation to disclose and will never tell anyone what our client tells us, a promise that administrators simply cannot make. We also do not care about any political pressure on an office to deal with hazing, the anger of a faculty member about allegations of academic misconduct, the ego of a dean who believes that he should be able to control student behavior, or any of the other things that consciously or subconsciously shape a system. It is also worth noting that we encourage our clients to ALSO take advantage of the resources on campus.  Go to the counseling center, the academic resource center, your RA, and get yourself a hearing advisor so you don’t have to sit there alone!  Just don’t think that any of them have the combine expertise, experience, and knowledge that we do about Greek life, judicial systems, and case preparation.

If you have any questions about what we do and why we do it, email me.  We try to be as transparent as possible, so if we are doing something and you want to understand why, just ask. You can email me at DaveK@collegejudicialconsultants.com, or the office in general at Info@collegejudicialconsultants.com, or you can call us at (617) 287-8782.

Sexual Assault and the Judicial System (INTRO) 1 of 4

I first became aware of rape as a “real thing” after my freshman year when a good friend of mine was attacked over the summer.  It was a different time and we didn’t really talk about “date rape,” so rape to me was the stereotypical “guy in an ally” thing. So despite how horrible my friend’s rape was (and it was the stuff of nightmares) there was a randomness to it that somehow made it both more terrible and also something unlikely to happen to anyone else I knew.

It wasn’t until years later that “acquaintance rape” became a larger part of the popular dialogue.  I remember talking to women I either knew or was dating, and being stunned by the number of them that had stories-either about themselves or about a close friend.  It seemed like I actually knew more people who were assaulted than weren’t, and I was stunned. 

When I started in student affairs I didn’t really know anything about the profession.  I wasn’t even an RA; heck, not only wasn’t I an RA, but I had some disciplinary issues at both Tulane and UCONN. I had no idea what RAs or Hall Directors did, except that one wrote me up for being stupid, and I had to see the other.  What I knew, however, was that I was going to work on sexual assault because when you have a hall of 210 women the “1 in 4” number becomes too real to ignore.  By the time I started I knew that approximately 1 in 4 college women would be sexually assaulted during their 4 years.  I knew most of them would never tell anyone.  I knew most of the perpetrators would never even face disciplinary charges, much less civil or criminal cases.  I also knew that if I spoke to every male student I could find that none of them would consider themselves predators.   At the time I believed that a lot of the reasons assaults were so prevalent was because guys were naïve, inexperienced, or just dumb so I dedicated myself to educating them about not being an “unintentional rapist.”  (Program nutshell:  If you can have sex with someone at a party, but could not the day after then you’re committing sexual assault.)

Even that turned out to be wrong.  As I did programming and advocacy work I learned just how big of a problem this was.  I read a lot on masculine identity issues, sexual identity formation, and feminist theory about the consequences of the objectification in popular culture.  Most recently was  Dr. David Lisak’s work on “the undetected rapist” showing just how intentional a lot of these sexual assaults actually are.  At MIT I had a chance to help shape the disciplinary response to sexual assaults and work with our advocacy office in an attempt to lower the barrier to the judicial process for survivors/victims.    I’m proud of what we did, but over 90% of the survivors who actually sought help never came forward.  Of those who did only about 1/3 went all the way to a hearing.  So, if you assume that 60-85% of all assaults go undisclosed to anyone then the actual percentage of victims who used our system was depressingly low.  (e.g. if there were 100 actual assaults and (assuming high reporting) 40 sought help from the advocate, 4 spoke to me and 2 actually had hearings.)  The worst part about it is that we had a good system. 

When I left student affairs and started College Judicial Consultants I was really worried that I was not going to be able to remain an advocate on these issues so I have really tried to focus on reaching out to advocacy groups and offices to offer our services at a fraction of our per-incident costs to help as many people as possible.  The idea is simple—if an advocate has a student thinking about going through their system we can help them understand what the process will be, anticipate some questions, practice the actual hearing, and do all of that remotely so they can maintain as much of their anonymity as they would like.  That way the advocate would know who they are, but we could help them get the most out of their system and, hopefully, greatly reduce the revictimization of bringing a case forward. 

While we are still doing that, I thought it was worth addressing some issues for victims, accused perpetrators, and some prevention strategies.  Since I’ve been criticized for making these blogs too long I am going to break it up into 4 blogs so you can read all of them or just the ones you think apply to you.  Right now the intention is to do the next one for victims, the one after for accused students, and the last one having some individual and group risk management suggestions.  However, before I go I want to make sure I leave you with a few essential points:

1. If you are a victim, no matter how good your school is, you should be aware of perhaps the greatest resource in the country—The Victim Rights Law Center.  They are attorneys and advocates who are experts in these issues.  If you have any questions at all about your legal rights, you should give them a call. There are offices in Portland, OR and Boston, MA with the main office in Boston.  That number is 617-399-6720.  Put their number in your phone in case you or one of your friends ever needs it.  NOTE:  They do not assist accused perpetrators of sexual assault and will likely not help you find assistance.  This is a service for victims only. While I am confident in our ability to help you in your disciplinary system, if you think there is even a remote possibility that you will want to proceed civilly or criminally, you should contact them immediately.  It’s worth contacting them even if you think you’re going to use us to have as much support as possible. Have I mentioned they are amazing?
2. If you are the victim of sexual assault or other interpersonal violence it is not your fault.  Nothing you did or did not do gave someone permission to do anything to you without your consent.
3. There are a lot of resources for you.  Your school likely has dedicated people who can assist you, your local community may have some advocacy centers, and most courts should have a victim’s advocate or at least be able to point you to one.
4. The Department of Education recently came out with a “Dear Colleague” letter that “suggests” a wide range of support resources and services that your college should offer.  This includes moving the perpetrator from your residence hall, getting an escort to class, obtaining delays in academic deadlines, and a host of other resources.  While schools are at different places with the services they offer, there should be more of them than there were a year ago.
5. I do not want to discourage anyone from seeking help, but some college personnel may believe they have a reporting requirement.  In other words, while they should keep your identifying information out of any report, they may be mandated to report that a crime of this type has happened (or at least incorrectly believe they are.)  There are ways around this, but the best advice I can give is to ask someone what their confidentiality policy is, and what they are required to report before you say something to them.  A lot of colleges are erring on the side of legal caution and WAY overstepping this requirement, IMHO.) If it will help, you can contact us and we can make some calls for you.
6. I am in no way giving legal advice here or in the subsequent blogs.  I am going to focus ONLY on how to approach these issues using your college’s disciplinary systems.  Keep in mind that whether or not the police get involved or it goes to court, sexual assault is a crime.  If it happened to you or someone you know there are things you should do in case you decide you want to pursue those options in the future, but I am not talking about that.  If you are accused you should get an attorney ASAP to protect yourself, but I am not talking about that.  I am going to talk as if the ONLY venue to deal with this is your college’s judicial system, and anything that seems like legal advice isn’t. 

If you have any thoughts you would like me to consider while I’m writing this email me at davek@collegejudicialconsultants.com.

Next:  Advice for the complainant-survivor.