Student Code of Conduct undergoes changes

By Shakira Bates

The Student Code of Conduct has gotten clearer thanks to changes made in August.

This will allow students to be more knowledgeable and interactive if they have an incident report made about them.

The Office of Community Standards and Student Conduct made the changes to specifically spell out new guidelines and renew old procedures.

Brian Glick, assistant director of the Office of Community Standards & Student Conduct, said most of the conduct violations are the same, but the changes have made the policies clearer and articulately defined.

“The changes in terms of adding community standards, we have redefined and reworked many of the codes of conduct violations,” Glick said. “We have updated and further defined the student conduct process as well.”

The changes have been a result of an 18-month review from both internal and external recommendations, he said. The advice led to the name change from Judicial Affairs to the Office of Community Standards and Student Conduct.

The student conduct process now allows students and organizations to know the steps after an incident is reported.

“For organizations, the old code policy was in the back of the book, now it is fully integrated in the code [violations section],” Glick said.

Thamngu Nguyen, junior industrial management technology major, said he was unaware of the changes.

“They should make the changes more obvious, like in classrooms.” Nguyen said. “If they do that, people will actually see what has changed.”

Sophomore journalism major Patrick Pawlowski said he shares the same sentiment.

“They [professors] have told me about the code of conduct as far as plagiarism,” Pawlowski said. “University 101 did cover the changes but not as in-depth as you would think.”

With the department taking a much more technical approach with submissions of incident reports online and notifying students via their Z-ID e-mails, Glick said the whole approach to student conduct has changed.

“Our focus is being very efficient and educational with students,” he said. “We want to help them understand where we as an institution come from.”