9 ms·

Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

64 points by soupboy 14y ago

Techne 14y ago
Very unfortunate. Obviously cheating is a very serious issue, but in this case I feel like something is systematically wrong with your class if half of your students are cheating. Putting people in the position where cheating is such an alluring option is bad user experience. Evolve or die!
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  Please, let's keep the responsibility for this where it belongs- on those who actually cheated.
  - jvrossb 14y ago
    Why can't it both be true that the students cheated and deserve to be punished and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the course that drove half the students to cheat? If I had to guess it was a basic requirement students had to take whether interested or not and cheating seemed like the easiest way to pass while devoting more time to other pursuits perceived to be more intellectually stimulating. Pure conjecture though.
    - stephencanon 14y ago
      Oh, come on. It's not like the course held a gun to their head and made them cheat. They didn't cheat to feed their family. It's (nearly) impossible for a college course to actually "drive half the students to cheat". They're big boys and girls, and they need to be responsible for their decisions. The point of taking a course isn't to get an A. It's to learn something. If the students are too thick to grasp that fact, then Harvard made a mistake in admitting them and would do well to kick them out and give their places to students who get it.
      - colanderman 14y ago
        Your reasoning is poor. The point of taking a course isn't to get an A. No, but sometimes an A makes the difference between graduating or not. It's not like the course held a gun to their head and made them cheat. No, but if cheating in the class is common, then it's likely that the difficulty of the class material is artificially inflated to account for students' artificially high performance. If you know this, the professor doesn't know this, and you need an A, then it may be that the only way to get an A is to cheat.
        stephencanon 14y ago
        At no school with which I am familiar would an A make the difference between graduating or not. A C or D might, but if one needs to cheat to get a C, there is something more serious at work (especially at the institution that invented the gentleman's C).
      - chc 14y ago
        > The point of taking a course isn't to get an A. It's to learn something. If the students are too thick to grasp that fact, then Harvard made a mistake in admitting them and would do well to kick them out and give their places to students who get it. Schools generally do a bad job of communicating this if it's actually true. If you get all As but retain nothing, you are rewarded handsomely. If you learn a lot but fail all your courses in the process, you'll be punished severely. If the school is too thick to align its incentives correctly, whose fault is that?
        stephencanon 14y ago
        > If you get all As but retain nothing, you are rewarded handsomely. I certainly haven't found this to be the case. Looking at my peers 11 years after graduation, the successful ones are by and large the ones who focused on learning, not the ones who focused on their GPAs.
        chc 14y ago
        > after graduation That is out of the school's control. It isn't really relevant to the incentives set by the school.
  - chc 14y ago
    People have such weird logic. When 80% of the population is criminalized, we see that as a surefire sign of a bad government. But that completely changes when the population is "students" — then it's all their fault and the administration is just helpless against all these lazy kids. Without necessarily absolving the students of responsibility for their actions, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that rampant cheating represents a failure on the school's part.
    - danielweber 14y ago
      If anything, it means the school didn't bring the hammer down soon/hard enough on smaller incidents of cheating. The surest way to get most of your students to cheat is for the cheaters to get ahead of the class. The non-cheaters will eventually crumple just to keep up.
      - chc 14y ago
        I actually agree with this. I'm not saying it's definitely the case (never been to Harvard — the closest I've got is a friend who went to Wellesley), but rampant cheating is generally a sign of either poor communication or perverse incentives.
pdenya 14y ago
It's incredible how high the punishments for cheating are. 1 year suspension for collaborating on a take home test?
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  So don't cheat.
- tptacek 14y ago
  You can cheat on a final at Harvard and not be expelled?
  - pdenya 14y ago
    The article mentions the blurred line between collaborating and cheating. Seems like this is the former since it requires analysis rather than just comparing matching answers.
    - draggnar 14y ago
      But the point is... does the line even exist? Why should a line that does not produce optimal results exist? Wouldn't you be able to come up with a better articulated answer to a question if you see the responses of all your peers first? The problem is well then we can't grade you because we can't separate you from your peers. But then why go to school in the first place? To get affirmation or to learn?
  - brd 14y ago
    I also found this surprising. While penalties at some schools may seem extreme I think expulsion, immediate failure of the class, etc are perfectly reasonable consequences. Catching a student cheating isn't very easy, its shockingly common, and it takes a toll on the rest of the student body that doesn't cheat. I consistently notified teachers when I saw blatant occurrences of cheating. The last thing I want is for my Alma Mater to be producing an unethical alumni body that waters down the value of my degree and GPA.
- gms7777 14y ago
BasDirks 14y ago
Let's see them burn. Many would give their right arm to be given the opportunity they had.
- chc 14y ago
  Many would give their right arm for the opportunities you have had. Should we all wish for your demise? That seems quite unreasonable to me.
  - BasDirks 14y ago
    No but in case I squander those opportunities, don't hesitate to fill up the gap.
    - chc 14y ago
      You're on Hacker News expressing schadenfreude toward some college students instead of doing something that makes the world a better place. Congratulations — you're squandering your opportunities.
      - BasDirks 14y ago
        They need to get what's coming to them, and that is not schadenfreude. Don't compare cheating on an exam to my condemnation of it. "Doing something that makes the world a better place" Could you possibly be more general and irrelevant?
calvinlough 14y ago
It's funny how they think it's a problem of educating students about what isn't considered acceptable behavior. The students knew what they were doing, they just compared the probability of getting caught with the reward and made a decision.
- kevinw 14y ago
  I agree completely. I remember that cheating in college (at least on a small scale -- e.g. copying homework in certain STEM classes with a "right" answer) was common and not viewed as risky behavior. I doubt that any of the people who cheated would have said that they felt they were morally in the right or even in a gray area if confronted. Cheating is more akin to stealing a laptop from an empty dorm room than it is to running afoul of some arcane law that few people have ever heard of. Given the high value that many desirable career paths (e.g. consulting, finance, academia) place on a good GPA, and the low probability of getting caught, the risk/reward tradeoff from cheating is naturally going to tempt people to make the unscrupulous choice.
deleted 14y ago
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deleted 14y ago
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gms7777 14y ago
I hate to say it, but this isn't that surprising. I recently came from one of these top universities and there's a problematic combination of factors at play: 1. Students are under a ton of stress, have very little time to do work and have very high standards for themselves. 2. Guidelines are not clear defined or communicated as to what is and isn't cheating. There's a ton of grey area. 3. It is incredibly easy to cheat and get away with it. I doubt there is a single person that wasn't guilty of it in one shape or form. For most, it was just things like working with other people on problem sets (which for some courses is considered cheating), not "serious cheating". But still, when "cheating" is this rampant, the university needs to reconsider its policy. Personally, I liked a grad CS professor I had. On the first day, he spend 20 minutes talking about this. He very clearly defined what was and wasn't cheating, when we were and weren't able to collaborate, and the consequences (guaranteed F in the course, for even minor transgressions, and possible expulsion from the university). It was a very strict policy. He even told us that the answers for all of our labs and homeworks were available online if we looked, and even looking up the website was tantamount to cheating. If anything seemed like a grey area, we were required to get written permission from a TA or him to do. Draconian? Perhaps a bit. But I liked that it was very black and white, and frankly I don't know a single person that even considered cheating in the course.
- akarpenko 14y ago
  1. How can they have very high standards if they cheat? Stress is no excuse for cheating, spend less time getting drunk. 2. It's always mentioned that cheating is not acceptable at the beginning of every term in every class. And isn't it obvious anyway? 3. Yes it's unfortunately too easy.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    I don't get the downvotes with your post. This is absolutely correct. I went through a very rigorous engineering program and I was never unclear about what constituted cheating. You did problem sets yourself, and you did exams without copying anyone else's answers. It it's not a damned difficult concept for someone at a University where everyone has 98th %-ile SAT scores.
dfriedmn 14y ago
We've known for a while just how widespread this is. Surveys have shown 2/3 of undergrads cheat at some point in college. Students just don't feel they're doing something immoral when they cheat. [1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128624207 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1286242...
larrys 14y ago
"Nearly half the students in a class of more than 250 are suspected of jointly coming up with answers or copying off one another, said Jay Harris, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education. Independent groups of students appear to have worked together by e-mail or other means on responses to short questions and an essay assignment" Involving others in cheating with you greatly increases the "leak vectors" for the "crime" to be discovered. Loose lips sink ships. It's unclear from the story the size of the actual groups that were cheating but it seems to be that the groups were not 125/2 groups of 2 but much larger groups of students helping each other. I guess that is one life lesson that all the education in the world doesn't provide that people with street smarts might have had. No doubt that the administration was tipped off by somebody (or would have been if that's not the way this went down.)
Anechoic 14y ago
One thing that I really appreciated at MIT was that when we were given take-home tests or other take-home assignments, it was expected (and often encouraged) that we collaborate with our classmates. Writing down the exact same answer as another classmate was fine, so long as you documented who you worked with and who contributed what to the assignment. It provided an important lesson since collaboration has been a huge part of my professional career. Now if those Harvard students broke the rules, well, they broke the rules. But I can't help but think that if Harvard is restricting collaboration in take-home assignments, that they're doing it wrong.
- danso 14y ago
  Perhaps, but isn't there the risk that a charismatic leader could get team members to essentially do the work for him/her? Sure, you could say that's a lesson in life, but ideally, you want a passing grade in engineering mechanics to mean that that person has competency in engineering, not merely the politics and management of engineering. Of course, this risk is mitigated by having the final weighted much heavier than the rest of the coursework and not being take home. But that approach ends up going to the polar extreme of valuing collaboration
  - Anechoic 14y ago
    Perhaps, but isn't there the risk that a charismatic leader could get team members to essentially do the work for him/her? There were charismatic students who tried that, but it would become apparently very quickly what was happening and that point our competitiveness would kick in and we would demand contributions from that person before we would assist any further. But yes, there is always someone who will abuse the system, and you're not going to get far trying to achieve 100% compliance all the time.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    The mechanism to avoid having a charismatic leader unfairly being granted credentials in courses not based on their knowledge is have a pass/fail (heavily protctored) exam at the end of the sememster drawing on knowledge from all the sections of the course. Fail the exam, fail the course. Pass the exam, you get the grade you earned throughout the semester. We had a few of those at SFU, and they were awesome - the only ones who ever failed them were the cheaters - The ones who had actually done all the work/exams finished them in about half the time allocated.
rayiner 14y ago
I think cheating is one of the signs of the crumbling of our civilized society. It is a scourge that doesn't stop at final exams, but as we can see in the financial sector one that continues on through life. That said, we lay all the blame on students, but universities themselves are also cheating. Multiple well-known universities in recent years have been exposed as lying,[1] about their enrollment statistics to rankings organizations. Emory was exposed for its lies just a few days ago: http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/08/21/fallout-from-emory-scandal-former-deans-resign-current-jobs-still-unclear-why-this-mess-happened/ http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/08/21/fallout-fr... University of Illinois was exposed earlier this year: http://abovethelaw.com/university-of-illinois-college-of-law http://abovethelaw.com/university-of-illinois-college-of-law One of the reasons my father moved us to the U.S. from his home country of Bangladesh is that he couldn't stand to raise his children in a culture where he had to pay a bribe just to get his phone service hooked up. When I see tacit acceptance of cheating amongst students in American universities, I see the exact same elements of cultural dysfunction that my dad saw in Bangladesh. I fear without stiffer penalties for cheaters, both for students who cheat and university administrators who cheat, our culture of basic American honesty will continue to crumble. [1] Everyone uses the term "misreporting" but "misreporting" is what happens when you intend to write down 1470 and accidentally write down 1740. "Lying" is the appropriate term for what happens when you instead write down "1500" for a period of a decade.
- danielweber 14y ago
  About 5 years ago MIT's graduate management Sloan School had a "cheating" incident where potential students could see if they were admitted before they were officially told by trivially modifying the URL of their web account. It was widely discussed on mailing lists with detailed instructions. When the school found out, it delayed admittance for those students that did so by a year, saying some crap like "in this new post-ENRON age we need to teach that ethics matter." But the only ethics they taught was "don't make the guy in charge look silly." (I tend to fall on the "don't hack into things" side of arguments here, but the ease of the "hack" as well as the incredibly minor impact it had on anyone of importance just made this all seem way overblown. EDIT Plus, it was MIT. Can't you take a joke?)
ChrisArchitect 14y ago
take home exam and collaboration? take home exam is just asking for that in this day and age. I thought the idea was it would be easy, but only the students that put the work in would learn something that they'd need to know/use in a harder exam later.....
stephengillie 14y ago
I know this comment will be unpopular to many who feel the injustice of cheating trumps all else. I can't help but feel like this is push-back against academia. This is illegal file sharing all over again. This is students working together using internet resources to share knowledge to advance and succeed, to disrupt their education in a way their authority figures thoroughly disapprove of. To me, it's very similar to people working together and using internet resources to share music and movies, to disrupt their entertainment experiences. I'm not sure how to feel about this. Cheating isn't always the correct answer; usually it's not. But to say it doesn't have a place in the toolbox of life is a bold-faced lie.
- Bill_Dimm 14y ago
  I can't help but feel like this is push-back against academia. This is illegal file sharing all over again. I really don't see the parallel. If you want to justify illegal file sharing as push-back against the music industry, you would say something like "the music industry insisted on selling CDs when consumers wanted MP3s" or "the music industry was seen as charging an unfair amount for digital music when their cost of production is clearly much lower than old distribution media." What is the analog for Harvard? The students want a diploma and a high GPA, but decided that it was unreasonable to have to learn/work for it? Nobody forced them to go to Harvard. I don't see what injustice or bad treatment they are pushing back against here. They just want to obtain a grade without doing the work.
EricDeb 14y ago
Having just finished graduate school I think the cheating issue often comes down to a misalignment between what is being taught and the skills actually needed in the real-world. Most students are at college to get a "piece of paper" that makes it easier to get a job. Unfortunately, I think most of them are also intuitively aware that what they are learning will more than likely be irrelevant in any real business environment. In the realm of CS, how often does one use calculus, linear algebra, unusual algorithms, or automata theory in the standard 9-5 coding job?... Rarely - thus the incentive in students to minimize hard learning in these topics
megix159 14y ago
Why use your hand to stick a nail into the wall when you have a hammer?
gsibble 14y ago
Something really doesn't add up here. 125 students collaborating on a final would not only be difficult to organize but would require a lot of coordination. Not to mention getting 125 students to collectively decide to cheat and not discuss it. How would this even happen? My educated guess would be a complete, graded test from a previous year passed around. That would not require 125 students conspiring together, only that one test was somehow available. This problem was rampant at Vanderbilt where fraternities and sororities would keep old, graded tests for every class on campus. It was widely recognized for the reason that Greek GPAs were higher than non-Greek. I dated a sorority VP and got to see the massive file cabinets with all of the tests and watch all of her "sisters" use them constantly, without any concern for the morality of the action. (edit: To be clear, I was offered and refused access to the files)
- Evbn 14y ago
  Any decent professor hands out old test answer keys himself.
rsanchez1 14y ago
I wonder if they made the exams take-home just to see how many students they would catch cheating.
patmcguire 14y ago
About five years ago Columbia threw out the final for their Western literature course that every freshman takes because one professor gave the thing almost in full to her students and it spread like mad (through the football team and friends, mostly). I didn't get it but I heard people talk about getting it mailed to them by five different people in a day. So it may be something like that - one massively better "study guide" that got spread around.

64 points by soupboy 14y ago

Very unfortunate. Obviously cheating is a very serious issue, but in this case I feel like something is systematically wrong with your class if half of your students are cheating. Putting people in the position where cheating is such an alluring option is bad user experience. Evolve or die!

waterlesscloud 14y ago
Please, let's keep the responsibility for this where it belongs- on those who actually cheated.
- jvrossb 14y ago
  Why can't it both be true that the students cheated and deserve to be punished and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the course that drove half the students to cheat? If I had to guess it was a basic requirement students had to take whether interested or not and cheating seemed like the easiest way to pass while devoting more time to other pursuits perceived to be more intellectually stimulating. Pure conjecture though.
  - stephencanon 14y ago
    Oh, come on. It's not like the course held a gun to their head and made them cheat. They didn't cheat to feed their family. It's (nearly) impossible for a college course to actually "drive half the students to cheat". They're big boys and girls, and they need to be responsible for their decisions. The point of taking a course isn't to get an A. It's to learn something. If the students are too thick to grasp that fact, then Harvard made a mistake in admitting them and would do well to kick them out and give their places to students who get it.
    - colanderman 14y ago
      Your reasoning is poor. The point of taking a course isn't to get an A. No, but sometimes an A makes the difference between graduating or not. It's not like the course held a gun to their head and made them cheat. No, but if cheating in the class is common, then it's likely that the difficulty of the class material is artificially inflated to account for students' artificially high performance. If you know this, the professor doesn't know this, and you need an A, then it may be that the only way to get an A is to cheat.
      - stephencanon 14y ago
        At no school with which I am familiar would an A make the difference between graduating or not. A C or D might, but if one needs to cheat to get a C, there is something more serious at work (especially at the institution that invented the gentleman's C).
    - chc 14y ago
      > The point of taking a course isn't to get an A. It's to learn something. If the students are too thick to grasp that fact, then Harvard made a mistake in admitting them and would do well to kick them out and give their places to students who get it. Schools generally do a bad job of communicating this if it's actually true. If you get all As but retain nothing, you are rewarded handsomely. If you learn a lot but fail all your courses in the process, you'll be punished severely. If the school is too thick to align its incentives correctly, whose fault is that?
      - stephencanon 14y ago
        > If you get all As but retain nothing, you are rewarded handsomely. I certainly haven't found this to be the case. Looking at my peers 11 years after graduation, the successful ones are by and large the ones who focused on learning, not the ones who focused on their GPAs.
        chc 14y ago
        > after graduation That is out of the school's control. It isn't really relevant to the incentives set by the school.
- chc 14y ago
  People have such weird logic. When 80% of the population is criminalized, we see that as a surefire sign of a bad government. But that completely changes when the population is "students" — then it's all their fault and the administration is just helpless against all these lazy kids. Without necessarily absolving the students of responsibility for their actions, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that rampant cheating represents a failure on the school's part.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    If anything, it means the school didn't bring the hammer down soon/hard enough on smaller incidents of cheating. The surest way to get most of your students to cheat is for the cheaters to get ahead of the class. The non-cheaters will eventually crumple just to keep up.
    - chc 14y ago
      I actually agree with this. I'm not saying it's definitely the case (never been to Harvard — the closest I've got is a friend who went to Wellesley), but rampant cheating is generally a sign of either poor communication or perverse incentives.

pdenya 14y ago

It's incredible how high the punishments for cheating are. 1 year suspension for collaborating on a take home test?

waterlesscloud 14y ago
So don't cheat.
tptacek 14y ago
You can cheat on a final at Harvard and not be expelled?
- pdenya 14y ago
  The article mentions the blurred line between collaborating and cheating. Seems like this is the former since it requires analysis rather than just comparing matching answers.
  - draggnar 14y ago
    But the point is... does the line even exist? Why should a line that does not produce optimal results exist? Wouldn't you be able to come up with a better articulated answer to a question if you see the responses of all your peers first? The problem is well then we can't grade you because we can't separate you from your peers. But then why go to school in the first place? To get affirmation or to learn?
- brd 14y ago
  I also found this surprising. While penalties at some schools may seem extreme I think expulsion, immediate failure of the class, etc are perfectly reasonable consequences. Catching a student cheating isn't very easy, its shockingly common, and it takes a toll on the rest of the student body that doesn't cheat. I consistently notified teachers when I saw blatant occurrences of cheating. The last thing I want is for my Alma Mater to be producing an unethical alumni body that waters down the value of my degree and GPA.
gms7777 14y ago

BasDirks 14y ago

Let's see them burn. Many would give their right arm to be given the opportunity they had.

chc 14y ago
Many would give their right arm for the opportunities you have had. Should we all wish for your demise? That seems quite unreasonable to me.
- BasDirks 14y ago
  No but in case I squander those opportunities, don't hesitate to fill up the gap.
  - chc 14y ago
    You're on Hacker News expressing schadenfreude toward some college students instead of doing something that makes the world a better place. Congratulations — you're squandering your opportunities.
    - BasDirks 14y ago
      They need to get what's coming to them, and that is not schadenfreude. Don't compare cheating on an exam to my condemnation of it. "Doing something that makes the world a better place" Could you possibly be more general and irrelevant?

calvinlough 14y ago

It's funny how they think it's a problem of educating students about what isn't considered acceptable behavior. The students knew what they were doing, they just compared the probability of getting caught with the reward and made a decision.

kevinw 14y ago
I agree completely. I remember that cheating in college (at least on a small scale -- e.g. copying homework in certain STEM classes with a "right" answer) was common and not viewed as risky behavior. I doubt that any of the people who cheated would have said that they felt they were morally in the right or even in a gray area if confronted. Cheating is more akin to stealing a laptop from an empty dorm room than it is to running afoul of some arcane law that few people have ever heard of. Given the high value that many desirable career paths (e.g. consulting, finance, academia) place on a good GPA, and the low probability of getting caught, the risk/reward tradeoff from cheating is naturally going to tempt people to make the unscrupulous choice.

deleted 14y ago

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deleted 14y ago

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gms7777 14y ago

I hate to say it, but this isn't that surprising. I recently came from one of these top universities and there's a problematic combination of factors at play: 1. Students are under a ton of stress, have very little time to do work and have very high standards for themselves. 2. Guidelines are not clear defined or communicated as to what is and isn't cheating. There's a ton of grey area. 3. It is incredibly easy to cheat and get away with it. I doubt there is a single person that wasn't guilty of it in one shape or form. For most, it was just things like working with other people on problem sets (which for some courses is considered cheating), not "serious cheating". But still, when "cheating" is this rampant, the university needs to reconsider its policy. Personally, I liked a grad CS professor I had. On the first day, he spend 20 minutes talking about this. He very clearly defined what was and wasn't cheating, when we were and weren't able to collaborate, and the consequences (guaranteed F in the course, for even minor transgressions, and possible expulsion from the university). It was a very strict policy. He even told us that the answers for all of our labs and homeworks were available online if we looked, and even looking up the website was tantamount to cheating. If anything seemed like a grey area, we were required to get written permission from a TA or him to do. Draconian? Perhaps a bit. But I liked that it was very black and white, and frankly I don't know a single person that even considered cheating in the course.

akarpenko 14y ago
1. How can they have very high standards if they cheat? Stress is no excuse for cheating, spend less time getting drunk. 2. It's always mentioned that cheating is not acceptable at the beginning of every term in every class. And isn't it obvious anyway? 3. Yes it's unfortunately too easy.
- rayiner 14y ago
  I don't get the downvotes with your post. This is absolutely correct. I went through a very rigorous engineering program and I was never unclear about what constituted cheating. You did problem sets yourself, and you did exams without copying anyone else's answers. It it's not a damned difficult concept for someone at a University where everyone has 98th %-ile SAT scores.

dfriedmn 14y ago

We've known for a while just how widespread this is. Surveys have shown 2/3 of undergrads cheat at some point in college. Students just don't feel they're doing something immoral when they cheat. [1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128624207 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1286242...

larrys 14y ago

"Nearly half the students in a class of more than 250 are suspected of jointly coming up with answers or copying off one another, said Jay Harris, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education. Independent groups of students appear to have worked together by e-mail or other means on responses to short questions and an essay assignment" Involving others in cheating with you greatly increases the "leak vectors" for the "crime" to be discovered. Loose lips sink ships. It's unclear from the story the size of the actual groups that were cheating but it seems to be that the groups were not 125/2 groups of 2 but much larger groups of students helping each other. I guess that is one life lesson that all the education in the world doesn't provide that people with street smarts might have had. No doubt that the administration was tipped off by somebody (or would have been if that's not the way this went down.)

Anechoic 14y ago

One thing that I really appreciated at MIT was that when we were given take-home tests or other take-home assignments, it was expected (and often encouraged) that we collaborate with our classmates. Writing down the exact same answer as another classmate was fine, so long as you documented who you worked with and who contributed what to the assignment. It provided an important lesson since collaboration has been a huge part of my professional career. Now if those Harvard students broke the rules, well, they broke the rules. But I can't help but think that if Harvard is restricting collaboration in take-home assignments, that they're doing it wrong.

danso 14y ago
Perhaps, but isn't there the risk that a charismatic leader could get team members to essentially do the work for him/her? Sure, you could say that's a lesson in life, but ideally, you want a passing grade in engineering mechanics to mean that that person has competency in engineering, not merely the politics and management of engineering. Of course, this risk is mitigated by having the final weighted much heavier than the rest of the coursework and not being take home. But that approach ends up going to the polar extreme of valuing collaboration
- Anechoic 14y ago
  Perhaps, but isn't there the risk that a charismatic leader could get team members to essentially do the work for him/her? There were charismatic students who tried that, but it would become apparently very quickly what was happening and that point our competitiveness would kick in and we would demand contributions from that person before we would assist any further. But yes, there is always someone who will abuse the system, and you're not going to get far trying to achieve 100% compliance all the time.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  The mechanism to avoid having a charismatic leader unfairly being granted credentials in courses not based on their knowledge is have a pass/fail (heavily protctored) exam at the end of the sememster drawing on knowledge from all the sections of the course. Fail the exam, fail the course. Pass the exam, you get the grade you earned throughout the semester. We had a few of those at SFU, and they were awesome - the only ones who ever failed them were the cheaters - The ones who had actually done all the work/exams finished them in about half the time allocated.

rayiner 14y ago

I think cheating is one of the signs of the crumbling of our civilized society. It is a scourge that doesn't stop at final exams, but as we can see in the financial sector one that continues on through life. That said, we lay all the blame on students, but universities themselves are also cheating. Multiple well-known universities in recent years have been exposed as lying,[1] about their enrollment statistics to rankings organizations. Emory was exposed for its lies just a few days ago: http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/08/21/fallout-from-emory-scandal-former-deans-resign-current-jobs-still-unclear-why-this-mess-happened/ http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/08/21/fallout-fr... University of Illinois was exposed earlier this year: http://abovethelaw.com/university-of-illinois-college-of-law http://abovethelaw.com/university-of-illinois-college-of-law One of the reasons my father moved us to the U.S. from his home country of Bangladesh is that he couldn't stand to raise his children in a culture where he had to pay a bribe just to get his phone service hooked up. When I see tacit acceptance of cheating amongst students in American universities, I see the exact same elements of cultural dysfunction that my dad saw in Bangladesh. I fear without stiffer penalties for cheaters, both for students who cheat and university administrators who cheat, our culture of basic American honesty will continue to crumble. [1] Everyone uses the term "misreporting" but "misreporting" is what happens when you intend to write down 1470 and accidentally write down 1740. "Lying" is the appropriate term for what happens when you instead write down "1500" for a period of a decade.

danielweber 14y ago
About 5 years ago MIT's graduate management Sloan School had a "cheating" incident where potential students could see if they were admitted before they were officially told by trivially modifying the URL of their web account. It was widely discussed on mailing lists with detailed instructions. When the school found out, it delayed admittance for those students that did so by a year, saying some crap like "in this new post-ENRON age we need to teach that ethics matter." But the only ethics they taught was "don't make the guy in charge look silly." (I tend to fall on the "don't hack into things" side of arguments here, but the ease of the "hack" as well as the incredibly minor impact it had on anyone of importance just made this all seem way overblown. EDIT Plus, it was MIT. Can't you take a joke?)

ChrisArchitect 14y ago

take home exam and collaboration? take home exam is just asking for that in this day and age. I thought the idea was it would be easy, but only the students that put the work in would learn something that they'd need to know/use in a harder exam later.....

stephengillie 14y ago

I know this comment will be unpopular to many who feel the injustice of cheating trumps all else. I can't help but feel like this is push-back against academia. This is illegal file sharing all over again. This is students working together using internet resources to share knowledge to advance and succeed, to disrupt their education in a way their authority figures thoroughly disapprove of. To me, it's very similar to people working together and using internet resources to share music and movies, to disrupt their entertainment experiences. I'm not sure how to feel about this. Cheating isn't always the correct answer; usually it's not. But to say it doesn't have a place in the toolbox of life is a bold-faced lie.

Bill_Dimm 14y ago
I can't help but feel like this is push-back against academia. This is illegal file sharing all over again. I really don't see the parallel. If you want to justify illegal file sharing as push-back against the music industry, you would say something like "the music industry insisted on selling CDs when consumers wanted MP3s" or "the music industry was seen as charging an unfair amount for digital music when their cost of production is clearly much lower than old distribution media." What is the analog for Harvard? The students want a diploma and a high GPA, but decided that it was unreasonable to have to learn/work for it? Nobody forced them to go to Harvard. I don't see what injustice or bad treatment they are pushing back against here. They just want to obtain a grade without doing the work.

EricDeb 14y ago

Having just finished graduate school I think the cheating issue often comes down to a misalignment between what is being taught and the skills actually needed in the real-world. Most students are at college to get a "piece of paper" that makes it easier to get a job. Unfortunately, I think most of them are also intuitively aware that what they are learning will more than likely be irrelevant in any real business environment. In the realm of CS, how often does one use calculus, linear algebra, unusual algorithms, or automata theory in the standard 9-5 coding job?... Rarely - thus the incentive in students to minimize hard learning in these topics

megix159 14y ago

Why use your hand to stick a nail into the wall when you have a hammer?

gsibble 14y ago

Something really doesn't add up here. 125 students collaborating on a final would not only be difficult to organize but would require a lot of coordination. Not to mention getting 125 students to collectively decide to cheat and not discuss it. How would this even happen? My educated guess would be a complete, graded test from a previous year passed around. That would not require 125 students conspiring together, only that one test was somehow available. This problem was rampant at Vanderbilt where fraternities and sororities would keep old, graded tests for every class on campus. It was widely recognized for the reason that Greek GPAs were higher than non-Greek. I dated a sorority VP and got to see the massive file cabinets with all of the tests and watch all of her "sisters" use them constantly, without any concern for the morality of the action. (edit: To be clear, I was offered and refused access to the files)

Evbn 14y ago
Any decent professor hands out old test answer keys himself.

rsanchez1 14y ago

I wonder if they made the exams take-home just to see how many students they would catch cheating.

patmcguire 14y ago

About five years ago Columbia threw out the final for their Western literature course that every freshman takes because one professor gave the thing almost in full to her students and it spread like mad (through the football team and friends, mostly). I didn't get it but I heard people talk about getting it mailed to them by five different people in a day. So it may be something like that - one massively better "study guide" that got spread around.