4 ms·
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:
by 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 ago1. 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 agoI 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.
- danielweber 14y agoI thought about downvoting him for his first part where he says "just don't get drunk." There is a lot of stress even for the students not getting hammered. I didn't cheat because it repelled my moral code, and my suspicion that others were cheating added to my stress. A morally-grey friend said there wasn't any moral problem with cheating, but I don't think he did because there wasn't a point (in his view). He would later TA a class and caught some cheaters, whom he reported.
- gms7777 14y agoI'm not justifying those excuses. But those are the reasons students give (at least to themselves), and it would be naive for the university to overlook this and tell themselves that students just shouldn't cheat based on principle as opposed to fascillitating an environment that promotes cheating. Perhaps "high standards" wasn't the correct choice of words on my part. I meant they all except themselves to get good grades. In particular where I went, where the school is largely populated with pre-meds where GPA is everything! If they're in a situation where the reward for cheating is high and the likelyhood for getting caught is low and they don't see any other option (not that there isn't but often they don't see it) they are likely to succumb.
- ericHosick 14y agoOne of the things I disliked most about lecturing was cheating/plagiarism. It took up a lot of time that I could use to do marking/help students. There was no incentive, nor time given, on the part of the University to deal with plagiarism (everyone just kinda wanted it to not be there). Also, being wrong about it was really serious. I could seriously hurt students who had not plagiarised (it was especially difficult to figure out who plagiarised on team projects). I also gave a 10 minute lecture on cheating/plagiarism on the first day of class. It is good, though, to see lecturers who are serious about cheating/plagiarism like your professor. It takes a lot of work to stay on top of that stuff. He deserves cudos. In the end, plagiarism really hurts the student the most (and the university to some extent (but probably not Harvard)).
- stfu 14y agoIt looks to me also more as some form of anti-cheating theater. Expecting that there is absolutely no collaboration / idea exchange going on with a take-home exam seems naive at the very least.
- majormajor 14y agoAt a school like Harvard, with their much-touted financial aid where students aren't supposed to have to hold down outside jobs to pay for tuition, how do students end up with very little time to do work? Class itself should take, what, three to five hours on a typical day? That leaves a lot of time for homework and studying. Do people just overwhelm themselves with too many extracurricular activities?
- Jd 14y agoFrom my experience (Brown), students often have on-campus jobs, take more classes than the norm in order to graduate early or edify themselves, and involve themselves in a variety of extracurricular activities with often intensive time requirements (i.e. sports). All of these contribute to stress. If you are out of town for a debate tournament and then have an exam on Monday morning when you get back, you feel a bit stretched.
- danielweber 14y ago(Not at Harvard) I worked jobs some semesters and not others. Even when I did not have outside employment, I was still constantly busy. A lot of this was poor time management and over-stress on my part, but that's what I was in college to learn to manage. If I went back Quantum-Leap style I would be able to chew through everything a lot easier.
- freyrs3 14y agoThere's been a steady decline in amount of work students are willing to put in for study over the past decade. By and large undergraduates at university just refuse to put in the hours for study. If you assign any reading of more than 50 pages, maybe 5% of the class will read it. Some of them are incapable of focusing for that long, some of them simply refuse to. what they do instead differs from person to person, but what is clear is that students simply expect less work and given the rampant grade inflation professors often go along with the students expectations.
- jj00nathan 14y agoYou can always take enough classes (or hard enough classes) to take up any given amount of time. Or if you're into extracurricular activities, same thing. Consider the quote in bold at the top of this Harvard prof's personal page: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~hgeorgi/ http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~hgeorgi/ Even if a student takes a more moderate approach, workloads can be highly unpredictable (even to the professor), which creates the same problem.