Presenting the Honor Code to Transfers

You may have noticed on the planning sheets I gave you that we will be talking about the Honor Code in class during the week of August 31-September 1-2. I included some material from the Student Handbook as part of the reading assignment along with the Plantinga selection.

I think the Honor Code fits well here--the idea of a Christian College and the Honor Code go together in my mind. Our transfer students were not required to go to the Honor Code Session run by SGA during Launch. A few transfers did show up for that (obviously they did not come to the morning session where I specifically told them the session was not required...), and they were not turned away.

At the end of the SGA session, students signed a banner indicating their agreement with the principles of the Code at King.

We, as the transfer year seminar mentors, need to decide what we want to do about some sort of "act of agreement" for transfers. We have options:

1. We can get the banner, take it to our classes individually, and have the students sign it.
2. We can use the cards that students used to sign and have each student sign a card (Heather thinks there are enough cards left in the SGA Office for us to use).
3. We can come up with a new strategy unique to us and our situation.
   

As I already mentioned to you at our planning session, I will be asking the students to work through the plagiarism site that Fred Foy Strang pointed out in his email to all faculty a couple of weeks ago. I will post that URL on our Bb site so you can grab it easily if you want your students to do that exercise.

In addition there is an essay assignment for freshmen. I'm not advocating that we have our students write an essay; I think we have already laid out enough for them to do. However, the assignment, slightly revised might make a good discussion exercise for our classes. I will post the assignment and the rubric that accompanies it on the "Resources" section of our Blackboard site.

Do we want to all do the same things? Or do we just trust each other to present the Honor Code and get something signed from each student? We may, at the very least, want to agree either to do the banner or to do the cards.

Katie