It must have been hard and taken some courage to quote your own past ideas about handling academic misconduct, and then admit how they were wrong. I was inspired by Dr. Bagley's post as well at the time.
One thing that's helpful to push for in our institutions is to make policy changes on how academic misconduct matters are handled by the college so that the ultimate goal is to help students grow like mentioned here, but also in other ways. The goal of reporting to the office of academic code of conduct (or whatever it's called) should not be to punish (or take "corrective action"), but rather determine the underlying causes of the incident and provide additional support and guidance to the student so they can grow from this experience in different ways than what Robert or instructors in general can offer. The academic code of conduct officer has information about the student's past record that instructors do not have access to, and they are hopefully trained to spot issues that students are facing relating to family members, emotionally, psychologically, disability-wise, etc. They can help provide additional appropriate support for the student and instructor (often times instructors get really upset and discouraged by cheating, so they need help too!). For instance, it could be that the student you worked with has cheated before in other classes trying to avoid harsh punishments by parents, or they're suffering from depression, so in this case it may be helpful to take "corrective action" by requiring a certain number of hours meetings with a school counselor/psychologist or something to this extent. In my ideal world, the instructor and the academic conduct office should trust each other and work together, so the instructor should always be reporting academic misconduct and collaborate with this office to help the student grow, and also feel supported in this difficult process.
It must have been hard and taken some courage to quote your own past ideas about handling academic misconduct, and then admit how they were wrong. I was inspired by Dr. Bagley's post as well at the time.
One thing that's helpful to push for in our institutions is to make policy changes on how academic misconduct matters are handled by the college so that the ultimate goal is to help students grow like mentioned here, but also in other ways. The goal of reporting to the office of academic code of conduct (or whatever it's called) should not be to punish (or take "corrective action"), but rather determine the underlying causes of the incident and provide additional support and guidance to the student so they can grow from this experience in different ways than what Robert or instructors in general can offer. The academic code of conduct officer has information about the student's past record that instructors do not have access to, and they are hopefully trained to spot issues that students are facing relating to family members, emotionally, psychologically, disability-wise, etc. They can help provide additional appropriate support for the student and instructor (often times instructors get really upset and discouraged by cheating, so they need help too!). For instance, it could be that the student you worked with has cheated before in other classes trying to avoid harsh punishments by parents, or they're suffering from depression, so in this case it may be helpful to take "corrective action" by requiring a certain number of hours meetings with a school counselor/psychologist or something to this extent. In my ideal world, the instructor and the academic conduct office should trust each other and work together, so the instructor should always be reporting academic misconduct and collaborate with this office to help the student grow, and also feel supported in this difficult process.
This made me uncomfortable in that way of forcing me to think about past actions and beliefs and reconsider my thinking.
And ... Don't Leave Me Hanging with footnote 3! I want the rest of that story.
This is a great post. Thanks for sharing. The whole series has been excellent.