New English policy a step in the right direction

The Helping Hands Tutoring Club is well known around campus for providing free academic help for those struggling in their classes. Yet it is difficult to define what constitutes appropriate academic “help”; some students seeking help, according to a former volunteer, expected tutors to help them write half their essays.

This year the English department has put together a policy that outlines appropriate behavior for tutors or parents who want to help students with essays and other assignments. The guide is available on the school website on the English department’s subpage.

It is a strong step toward more ethical behavior and sets an admirable precedent for other departments.

For instance, the new policy is successful in providing constructive advice. It lists inappropriate actions, like revising a student’s essay to the point it is unrecognizable or correcting errors for a student. It also includes a list of questions students like, “What are the paper’s strengths and weaknesses?” which are aimed at helping the student individually discern areas of improvement.

These guidelines are especially important to prepare students for college, where they will not have the support of their parents or high-end tutors. In addition, consequences for breaches of academic integrity are much more severe in college. Yale College Undergraduate Regulations specifically classify “submission of an entire paper prepared by someone else” as grounds for expulsion. Even if a tutor only writes half of a student’s paper, it is still “the use of someone else’s words or ideas as if they were one’s own,” which Yale holds as plagiarism.

Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to evaluate the effects of these new guidelines. Tutoring, and other revision of take-home essays, occurs far away from school premises, and it is difficult to prove that a student received too much assistance on a particular piece.

For instance, take a hypothetical student who needs help with sentence structure and creating more interesting, varied sentences. To stay within the bounds of propriety, the tutor could walk him or her through the process of revising one or two sentences in the essay, emphasizing specific techniques like inverting the verb and subject or reviewing different transition words. Then, the student could individually practice these skills throughout the rest of the paper.

One way that other departments can incorporate the English department’s ideas about integrity is by using turnitin.com for more assignments. In AP Chemistry and AP Biology, full lab reports are due online; the same could be true for work heavy in writing like AP US History theses.

Another class that may benefit from a similar policy is AP Computer Science. Because many students in the course have parents who work in the technology sector, it is important to set clear expectations for how much help on a program is acceptable. Because programs are worth a significant part of the final grade, it would be good to state whether, for instance, copying a segment of code from an online source or having a parent help debug is within the bounds of appropriate assistance.

While new policies aren’t enough to counter cheating on their own, they could help direct students, parents and tutors who want to receive appropriate help.