Community Standards

The Office of Community Standards promotes the mutual responsibility of members of the Stanford community to uphold the Honor Code and the Fundamental Standard. The office coordinates the student conduct system, including administering the formal disciplinary processes and the informal resolution of concerns. The office strives to resolve cases of alleged misconduct in a fair, responsible, and timely manner that emphasizes Stanford’s core values of respect, trust, and integrity.

Honor Code

The text of the Honor Code is as follows:

  1. The Honor Code is an undertaking of the students, individually and collectively:

    1. that they will not give or receive aid in examinations; that they will not give or receive unpermitted aid in class work, in the preparation of reports, or in any other work that is to be used by the instructor as the basis of grading;

    2. that they will do their share and take an active part in seeing to it that others as well as themselves uphold the spirit and letter of the Honor Code.

  2. The faculty on its part manifests its confidence in the honor of its students by refraining from proctoring examinations and from taking unusual and unreasonable precautions to prevent the forms of dishonesty mentioned above. The faculty will also avoid, as far as practicable, academic procedures that create temptations to violate the Honor Code.

  3. While the faculty alone has the right and obligation to set academic requirements, the students and faculty will work together to establish optimal conditions for honorable academic work.

Violations of the Honor Code are taken very seriously. The standard sanction for a first violation of the Honor Code is a one-quarter suspension from the University and 40 hours of community service. In addition, most faculty members issue a “no pass” for the class in which the violation occurred. The standard penalty for a second violation of the Honor Code is a three-quarter suspension and 80 hours of community service. Additional sanctions include other penalties up to and including expulsion. The full text of the Honor Code, the Interpretations and Applications of the Honor Code, the full text of the Student Judicial Charter—which applies to both the Fundamental Standard and the Honor Code—as well as the text of other student conduct policies are available on the Office of Community Standards website.

The Fundamental Standard

The Fundamental Standard has set the standard of conduct for students at Stanford since it was articulated in 1896 by David Starr Jordan, Stanford's first president. It states:

Students at Stanford are expected to show both within and without the university such respect for order, morality, personal honor and the rights of others as is demanded of good citizens. Failure to do this will be sufficient cause for removal from the university.

There is no standard penalty that applies to violations of the Fundamental Standard. Infractions have led to penalties ranging from formal warning and community service to expulsion. In each case, the nature and seriousness of the offense, the motivation underlying the offense and precedent in similar cases are considered.

 

For more information about these policies and the Office of Community Standards