03.01.02 Faculty Responsibilities
Faculty at the Eastman School of Music are expected to maintain and uphold standards of professional conduct in all of their research and education endeavors. In order to preserve an educational environment that is fair and equitable, the following practices are expected:
- Objective evaluation of student performance. The instructor will take no action which favors one student over another or gives one or more students advantages not available to others in his or her class. The instructor will judge student performance objectively, without attention to extraneous matters such as personality, age, race, creed, ethnic background, sexual identity, or political conviction. In general the instructor will do nothing which deprives his or her students of learning opportunities normally available to others throughout the School, and will avoid exploiting in any way the inherent inequality of the student-faculty relationship.
- Clear definitions of course requirements. The instructor is expected to tell his or her students, during the first or second class meeting, the number and character of the major assignments and examinations in the course and the approximate weights of each in determining the course grade. The instructor should also specify his or her policies regarding such matters as incompletes, attendance, and late work, indicating any penalties that might be involved.
- Active advocacy of academic integrity. The instructor is expected to discuss the application of Eastman standards of academic integrity to his or her particular course, indicating what resources may be used, and specifying how much student discussion or collaboration is permissible in preparing assignments outside class.
The instructor should take all reasonable measures to remove the possibility of cheating from examination situations. Individual departments must establish guidelines for how to deal with suspicious student behavior during in-class exams, and all instructors should consult these guidelines before giving tests of any kind. Any instructor who sees one or more students cheating singly or together while taking an exam should confront the student or students in question, stop their exams, secure and retain all of their examination materials for use as evidence in subsequent stages of the case, and dismiss the student or students from the examination room. After the examination is over, the instructor should follow up on the case using the guidelines below.
The instructor is expected to confront students suspected of violations and to take the appropriate steps for dealing with such cases, as detailed below. Although it obviously can be inconvenient and unpleasant to initiate such action, to do so is essential for fairness to other students (including those violators who are penalized) and for overall integrity of the academic process at Eastman. In cases in which the student wishes to contest either the instructor’s accusation or the proposed penalty, both parties are expected to follow the procedures outlined in the following sections.
