To the Editor:

Re: “Cheated by the Code of Academic Integrity,” Opinion, Nov. 10

We served on the Academic Integrity Hearing Board of the College of Arts and Sciences for a combined four years. During that time, it was only a rare student, found guilty of cheating, who was “shaking uncontrollably “ or “sobbing hysterically,” as the author has characterized them.

Indeed, by the time a student was brought before the AIHB, he or she had had countless opportunities to set the record straight and apologize. For the most part, the students whose appeals we heard were conniving, impenitent and tenacious in their own defense.

Academic integrity is an issue prevalent at campuses across the country, and over the past semester it has come under increasing scrutiny at Cornell. Leading the initiative to reexamine Cornell’s current rules against cheating is the University Assembly’s Committee to Consider Academic Integrity, which hosted an open student forum yesterday afternoon to discuss Cornell’s current honor code and ways to model it after the honor systems at the University of Virginia and the University of Colorado.