Our Mission and Philosophy

The mission of the Office of Student Conduct is to educate students about their rights and responsibilities as community members, help students understand the balance between individual and community rights, and help maintain a community atmosphere conducive to academic success.

The philosophy of the Office of Student Conduct staff is a simple one: ensure that each individual student, through counseling and disciplinary intervention:

  • has pertinent information regarding outcomes and consequences to make positive, informed choices around behavior and
  • has the opportunity to seek out those support services at campus to become positively re-invested in their community

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Collaborating with OSC

 

The Office of Student Conduct (OSC) can be very useful because there are clear, specific procedures:

  1. OSC informs the student of the alleged academic misconduct.
  2. OSC provides an opportunity for the student to respond to the academic misconduct claim and present information as to the incident.
  3. OSC allows for a determination of responsibility by an impartial hearing officer or committee.
  4. OSC provides for an outcome or sanction intended to correct the misconduct and ensure responsibility.

(For full details, refer to Disciplinary Procedures in the Code of Student Community Standards.)

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There are many advantages for students and faculty when the Office of Student Conduct is used for processing academic misconduct including the following:

  • OSC has and uses an established system for due process that ensures the student’s rights are being protected.
  • OSC is an established third-party process for determining responsibility, which provides neutrality for the incident.
  • OSC has established benchmarks for providing an administrative response such as referring the student anonymously to the Educational and Career Counseling Center for corrective measures (or in certain circumstances, sanctions such as disciplinary probation, suspension, or dismissal).
  • OSC affords a transference of the time and resource commitment required to process an academic misconduct matter.
  • OSC is a centralized system for tracking academic misconduct and preventing recidivism as faculty in one department may not know that a student is behaving poorly in another department.

 

Faculty must remember that the Office of Student Conduct cannot provide an academic outcome for academic misconduct.