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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 st

• 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.
            • stephencanon 14y ago
              What handsome rewards do you imagine are heaped upon A students while still in school? If the students in question are incapable of looking ahead 1-3 years, that doesn't exactly speak well of them either. I won't pretend that there isn't pressure on students to get As. But that doesn't mean we should condone students doing whatever it takes to get an A; it may mean that we should reduce the pressure on the students to get them.
              • bcbrown 14y ago
                Better job prospects?
                • 14y ago
  • 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.