7 ms·

Harvard Students in Cheating Scandal Say Collaboration Was Accepted

45 points by caixa 14y ago

fleitz 14y ago
Open book, open Internet and TA's that discuss exam questions sounds like the actions taken against the students are rather capricious. It seems that the environment of the exam as well as the difficulty of the questions sugguest that the exam was designed to test collaborative abilities, rather than knowledge recital.
monjaro 14y ago
For being at an elite "best-of-the-best" school, these students sure sound like a bunch of spoiled children. The reasons for cheating seem to vary from "it was a hard course so I had to cheat" to "everyone does it" to "it's an open book test, so we should be allowed to cheat".
- arjunnarayan 14y ago
  Have you not been paying attention to the entitlement and attitudes of the global financial elite in 2009-2010? This was precisely their response to the mismanagement of the banks: everybody was doing it, it was accepted, now bail us out and leave.
  - Jd 14y ago
    Not to remove blame where blame is due, but in both cases there are incentive and regulatory problems. If you give people problems whereby they feel that they cannot do well without cheating (i.e. when everyone else is cheating), then cheating becomes institutionalized. Thus, to be cheating in a class where 99% of the students are cheating is to be somewhat less culpable than to be among the students cheating when only 1% of the students are cheating. That is to say, to have a situation when cheating becomes the norm implies a much larger institutional and cultural collapse in which the larger framework (and not simply the cheating individuals) demands investigation. What are the larger trends here? Well, the first might simply be the idea that greed is okay. In this case, we can witness the following transformation in American values fairly clearly. Phase 1 (religious): Greed is bad, we do things for the sake of a heavenly kingdom only. We are only temporary stewards of the wealth we have. Phase 2 (agnostic): Greed may be a necessary part of evolution and competition for limited resources, but we need to limit it and make it a long term sort of greed. Phase 3 (hedonist): My identity is defined by how much money I have, and I don't care how I get it. In other words, there is long-term value erosion. This is not to say that one's values necessarily have to be religious-Christian in derivation, but in the American context this was overwhelmingly the case and this erosion has basically given way to live in the moment materialism. The practical consequences is that many people involved in business, and this is most clear in the financial sector which has no ostensible tie to any product whatsoever and attracts people who care only about money, not only seek money, but seek to destroy any barriers that keep them from getting as much money as possible. In the US this has meant saturation of elite universities (pulling an increasing proportion of the best and brightest into the financial sector), buying out of the major political parties, shutting out the minor political parties, and removing regulatory functions (i.e. the SEC). Additionally, there is the desire to weaken the electorate by importing cheap labor from other countries that will be liable to manipulation via mass media, decreasing the likelihood that any independent party will achieve critical mass. Because this is a long-term institutional problem there is no obvious solution, except to continue with the values that have not entirely been eroded (i.e. honesty) and to encourage others who do their function (i.e. continue working in the public sector and enforcing existing regulation). Creating new services and teams of people that are doing a good job simply for the sake of doing a good job is never a bad idea either -- although it is always easy to get sucked into the mentality of "greed is good."
    - Uchikoma 14y ago
      "Thus, to be cheating in a class where 99% of the students are cheating is to be somewhat less culpable than to be among the students cheating when only 1% of the students are cheating." No.
      - kajecounterhack 14y ago
        I'm pretty sure I agree with you but comments like these could be more verbose. It's not helpful to simply disagree without explanation. One word responses are just dogmatic.
        Jd 14y ago
        Thanks. I personally believe in right and wrong, but also in degrees of right and wrong. Doing the right thing in a situation where everyone else is doing the wrong thing is more difficult. Doing the right thing when everyone is doing the right thing is easy. Thus, you don't really know your values or the depth of your values until you are placed in a situation where it is difficult to carry them out. Here, for "culpability" I mean simply that I believe that the power to actualize the values of each individual differs, and that those who are able to actualize their values even in very difficult situations is worth more and to be praised more than those who are unable to and go with the flow. This is to say that simply saying you have certain values means nothing. You have to act on those values and, because acting on those values can be difficult, I have sympathy for those who fail to -- even as I praise those who do.
        001sky 14y ago
        Your analysis is not wrong. The UCI/The Tour DeFrance, Lance Armstrong were just as bad. You highlight lots of good issues (including - other people making money off it regardless of who wins, the act of not doping was arguably dangerous, given the exertion levels of the pack, etc). The conclusion of this section is fine I'd also agree with (It is true). But ultimately you fail to provide a framework for analysis. You conclude This is to say that simply saying you have certain values means nothing If you were a CEO of UCI and the Board asked you: 'How would you "fix" the pervasive problem' would your really come back debating "doping" and "problem"? Or would your come back with something more like: Here is my Answer X,Y,Z. While itsn't perfect, we've identified things that are clearly wrong that we can fix. First, we need to draw lines between doping and legitimate theraphy. Second, we need to have the science to fairly test between the Two. Third, while maintaining privacy and fairness, the athletes and the teams will need to co-operate with the [XYZ] league to make sure it doesn't damage the credibility of the competition and abuse our position of trust amongs the fans....etc. I'd actually be interested to hear your views on that. Your analysis pointed out the analogy to the Armstrong case (was not something I thought of before hand, but it fits perfectly). But when I see a huge, intelligent analysis thrown up then ends the way yours does, it seems like a waste of all the energy that you put into writing it. (Unless you are a lawyer -- with a point to defend =D)
  - rhizome 14y ago
    And many, many of those people, in the industry, regulatory, and political sides, learned that stuff at schools like Harvard.
    - trhtrsh 14y ago
      They didn't learn it at Harvard, so much as they didn't learn any different at Harvard.
- wisty 14y ago
  Well, they don't want to discourage teamwork.
- tlrobinson 14y ago
  Not to mention this bit: "...and some said that they will sue the university if any serious punishment is meted out."
- sp332 14y ago
  A lot of the anti-cheating campaigns are based on social norms, shame or reputation-based things. So if a student can ask themselves, "If I found out a fellow student, or future employee, had done this, would I be angry?" and honestly answer "No" then the honor systems have no effect at all. A similar change happened when calculators became common in classrooms. Teachers had to get much more specific about when they were allowed and when they weren't. It looks like teachers (and grad student tutors) haven't come to any consensus on when collaboration is OK. It's no wonder the students are confused.
- trhtrsh 14y ago
  Note that the class in question is a Government clas that had a reputation as the easiest course in school, taken by students who wanted to coast to a degree. It's a far cry from the bastions of intellectual inquiry found in other departments. But this year, the professor decided to change the course's reputation, and the students were caught by surprise.
Locke1689 14y ago
How much "cheating" was actually done here? Was it simply that people's answers looked similar? On a take-home test with open book, open Internet, you'd expect that everyone would probably Google the same sources. I'm also suspicious of people who claim that sharing notes is in violation of some cheating rule. I posted the source code to most of my school projects on GitHub. If people want to crib off my code that's not my problem -- I did the work, whether or not they want to is their problem.
- holograham 14y ago
  I did this back in H.S. comp sci class (posted my projects to my personal website). I was punished by getting a D in AP comp sci (though aced the AP exam). Definitely was not approved at my school...aided and abetted in cheating apparently.
  - Lewisham 14y ago
    Computer Science is sort of odd in that respect, and it does vary from department to department. For example, my undergrad school was very clear that everyone's home directories were set to being publicly readable, and that it was expected that there would be times that you would want to see someone else's source. This was essentially asynchronous lab work: we could always talk though problems together, but we were never able to cut and paste code (the detection system looked for things like whitespace to detect cut-and-paste vs hand-typed). When there were two matching submissions, both students would be pulled up and then the administration had to figure out who copied who. What I heard on the grapevine was that usually it was really obvious: students that had been struggling were the ones most likely to cheat, and even when they matched in ability, the guilty party would crack pretty quickly and own up. Personally, I think there are better ways of doing computer science assignments anyway: I tend to TA classes where students work on self-defined projects rather than doing the same rote exercise, so cut-and-paste is no help anyway.
- wisty 14y ago
  > I did the work, whether or not they want to is their problem. And the problem of the mediocre students who don't cheat, but get graded below the cheaters; and employers, who will tend to hire less honest and less capable graduates.
grandalf 14y ago
The worst part is that cheating indicates a strong cynicism about the course and the value of learning the material. I thought elite schools were able to recruit people with intellectual curiosity and character. Clearly the admissions formula is broken.
- ebf 14y ago
  The admissions formula is broken or the way the class was structured was broken?
  - grandalf 14y ago
    Well, it could have been a horrible, cynicism-inspiring class, but given the overall savvy of elite students (who would likely have dropped it early if that were the case) I think chances are it's just that the students being admitted are lacking in genuine intellectual curiosity and perhaps aspects of character.
- unobliged 14y ago
  Universities teach in such a way as to encourage academic pursuit of knowledge, but the majority of students will be seeking field experience post-graduation. This mismatch happens regardless of whether a school is top-tier.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > Clearly the admissions formula is broken. As someone who attended an "elite" college, I can assure you that you only need 3 things to get into them: 1. A plan to follow (you can easily find great ones online these days) telling you what to do in high school (with respect to classes, extracurricular activities, volunteering, leadership, standardized tests, recommendation letters, etc.) 2. Money (i.e., live in an relatively affluent area with a good public school or attend a good private school) 3. Determination (lots of it) Your personality doesn't matter at all for anything other than the interview, which you can also pass with flying colors as long as you have basic acting skills (which can be easily learned as well). Basically just smile a lot and don't act like a psychopath at the interview, and you're good to go. As for getting into a specific college, that's a crapshoot. The admissions process is a black box, and there's no way to guarantee admission to a certain university unless your parents are big donors. But if you apply to, say, all the Ivies + Stanford + MIT, you're guaranteed to get into at least 2 or 3 if you have the 3 things I described above.
tlrobinson 14y ago
"Some students asked whether there was a fundamental contradiction between telling students to use online resources, but not to discuss the test with each other." No.
- oob205 14y ago
  Um..yes. Study groups or websites are online resources. So is facebook. If a student posts the questions online and starts discussions with anonymous posters, or even reads relevant discussions posted online before the test, how is that different from discussing with one another. There are plenty of ways to have a test that explicitly prevents collaboration. This professor clearly did not try.
  - tlrobinson 14y ago
    If the students couldn't figure out how to use online resources without collaborating with each other they don't belong at Harvard.
  - trhtrsh 14y ago
    This is a case of the changing times leading to miscommunication. The implied intent of the rule is that READ-ONLY NON-INTERACTIVE Internet use was permitted. To today's students, the Internet is a READ-WRITE INTERACTIVE tool, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
    - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
      >The implied intent of the rule // Can you quote the rule because in the article it appears that the intent of the rule was that above all you couldn't interact with other students [on the course] to complete the work but as long as you kept to that rule then general internet resources were fine to use?
  - mbreese 14y ago
    There is a fundamental difference between using online resources to find an answer to a question and collaborating with others to find the same answer. Part of the grade is based on how well you can find the answers, not how well your collective group can. If the test is open book, open Internet, that doesn't mean you can ask your friends on Facebook for help, just because Facebook is on the Internet. I think that the class was likely poorly designed, but that doesn't mean that the students are all in the clear.
gizmo 14y ago
Most people here are saying that the students were clearly in the wrong. "Lack intellectual curiosity and character". "spoiled children". I don't agree at all. Aside from the formal rules, smart people pick up on which rules can be broken safely. In fact, knowing which rules in life you should break and which rules you should follow is probably a critical factor for success in life. Jaywalking is illegal in most (all?) US cities, but in many it's completely acceptable behavior. Jaywalking in Seattle (edit: was Manhattan), on the other hand is not done and you better not do it within eyesight of a police officer. Jaywalking in the Netherlands is completely fine (even right in front of the police), but in Germany it's not. The laws are the same, but the culture is different. There are thousands of examples of socially acceptable behavior that doesn't correspond with the law. Drinking in public. Sometimes fine, sometimes not. Forging a signature. Occasionally fine, usually not. Startups break laws all the time too. You have to get a product out first, and only when you start making money you get lawyers involved to make sure everything is going by the books. But if you aren't making real money yet the government really doesn't care whether you follow every law to the letter. And as a founder you have to decide which laws can be broken safely and which laws must be obeyed. Get it wrong and you may lose your company: either through legal trouble or because it doesn't get off the ground. The founders talk freely about the laws they broke. They brag about it! It's considered clever. Relentlessly resourceful. It's a fine line. So if the culture in Harvard was such that cooperating for take-home exams was sometimes acceptable and sometimes not, then I consider that a legitimate excuse. It's easy to test too. Just look at the exams of that course of the previous years and check if people worked together on those too. Compare with other courses. If the results show that students consistently break the "individual work only" clause for some courses and not for other courses then the students probably didn't think they were doing anything wrong. They were just acting in the socially accepted manner.
- badclient 14y ago
  Jaywalking in Manhattan, on the other hand is not done and you better not do it within eyesight of a police officer. Seriously? I have stayed in Manhattan for couple years and done my share of jaywalking occasionally in clear sight of NYPD. May be I am just lucky but this just doesn't resonate with me.
DanBC 14y ago
> One student recalled going to a teaching fellow while working on the final exam and finding a crowd of others there, asking about a test question that hinged on an unfamiliar term. The student said the fellow defined the term for them. I realise that I only have this snippet of text, but: Didn't they have a dictionary? Didn't they have search engines? Some of the attitudes displayed in that article are surprising. And disappointing.
denzil_correa 14y ago
My assessment The course instructor set the rules but the implementation was "loose" (casual). The students went one step too far in their liberties. I think it's a collective failure on part of the professor, TFs and students.
tmsh 14y ago
The thing about intellectual honesty is that when you don't feel like you know much relative to your peers and context (e.g., you're a freshman at Harvard), you don't think you have much to lose. You don't realize what you have to lose until it becomes clear about all the hidden potential that you've taken for granted and that you're risking -- how important intellectual honesty is to any type of sustainable effort. So there is a chicken and egg problem with intellectual honesty. You don't appreciate it until you've acquired experience. And you don't acquire sustainable experience until you start to appreciate it. The flip side though is that most young people just need to be told and slightly inspired about how important it is. Then they need to develop that over several years. In college can work. Learning to be confident with your own intellectual pursuits based on honesty though -- that's what college is supposed to teach. But yeah, a lot of time in all the competitiveness, it gets lost.
Mizza 14y ago
I went to school in Boston and knew lots of people of Harvard and MIT, and the amount of cheating was absolutely staggering. The "Greek"/frat network contributes to this cheating culture greatly (some houses more than others, but they're all part of it.) Personally, I think that some of these people are so used to being that #1 student that when they're surrounded by other #1'ers, they do whatever it takes to remain on top, or so their logic goes. They're not the people who ever build cool things anyway though, so who cares.
- spec_laconic 14y ago
  I can't speak to frats or Harvard, but I can speak of personal experience of MIT. When I began taking courses at MIT, I worked my proverbial ass off in a very difficult class in CS (course 6 by their parlance) and got an A. After the semester was over, I found out that students generally work together on labs, which was a major portion of the class, and would have significantly lightened my load. (Talking about spending entire weekends with hands-on-keyboard, very unreasonable amount of work for one person, even an overachieving one such as myself) This is a _cultural_ difference of MIT; people tend to work with one another, or they tend to fail. They learn it freshman year, and it's ingrained in their psyche from then on. Interestingly, the line between cooperative work and cheating is difficult to discern and mostly set up by the professor. When the professor does not say one way or another if the work is collaborative, students will generally consider it collaborative. As for the "[n]ever build cool things" troll, I'll let you google the number of neat inventions by famous MIT / Harvard alums; I won't waste my time.
  - Mizza 14y ago
    Not what I meant. I'm actually in favor of people working collaboratively on problems, I'm talking about computer-servers full of P-Set solns, essays, old tests, occasionally the sale of these for money, etc etc etc.
clarky07 14y ago
I think a case of widespread "cheating" like this is a good indication there was something wrong with the course and the professor. If the material would have been covered in class and not purposefully tricky it's likely there wouldn't have been cheating. Also, open book open Internet take home test might as well be code for group test. I always found that to be an absurd way to give a test. If you want to not have cheating give the test in class over the material covered in the course.
cwdutch 14y ago
"For being at an elite "best-of-the-best" school, these students sure sound like a bunch of spoiled children", "They're not the people who ever build cool things anyway though, so who cares." - These and similar sentiments seem a bit common on HN and, to me, seem rather myopic and, frankly, immature. The latter statement is pretty clearly false and I don't plan on listing examples to demonstrate that. Going to a "best-of-best" school is rarely not in someone's best interest. I did go to Harvard undergrad and I did not attend YC, but the draw is similar: sure the prestige matters and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, bu the real value is in the people that you live and work with, both peers and mentors. Does giving money help you get into Harvard? I'm sure it does and if that money benefits the undergraduate population more than having someone who is subjectively less deserving in that class is a detriment, then it is in all students' best interest to have the paying member accepted. Regarding the cheating: It happens and I'm sure it happens at every campus. I don't think that's what happened to half of this class. It's a large class, it's probably required for Gov concentrators, and it seems clear that the expectations were not understood by the students or the teaching fellows. What I DID do a lot of was pool notes in preparation for an exam, and I wouldn't be surprised if that is responsible for a lot of the consistencies in test answers. Why redefine a term that you have a ("the") definition for in your notes? And honestly, I think it's healthy to have varying levels of respect for different material. If I want to be a physicist, I'm going to really make sure I understand linear algebra. For the Core class on Chinese history, I'm going to pool notes, cram, and try to scrape an A, because the A means more to me than the knowledge. Sorry to address several topics; I've been reading HN for a while and this is my first comment, so I'm still learning the ropes.
- monjaro 14y ago
  Okay, I'm the one that said they sound like spoiled children, so I'll bite. Can you explain to me how that is myopic and immature? These are all quotes from the article: "He said, 'I gave out 120 A’s last year, and I’ll give out 120 more,' " "Having my degree revoked now would mean I lose my job." "some said that they will sue the university if any serious punishment is meted out" "Some students asked whether there was a fundamental contradiction between telling students to use online resources, but not to discuss the test with each other" These aren't responses of mature adults. This is immature students whining and complaining because they got caught cheating. The test explicitly said "students may not discuss the exam with others." It doesn't matter how it was done last year, or how hard the class is, or how much money they spent on the class. If the exam says not to discuss it with other students and you do, you have cheated.
tokenadult 14y ago
The Harvard Crimson reporting on this story http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/8/30/academic-dishonesty-ad-board/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/8/30/academic-dishone... plainly highlighted the relevant portion of the examination rules. If the Harvard students didn't understand what those rules meant, then the Harvard admission office must be admitting some students with some severe reading comprehension problems.

45 points by caixa 14y ago

Open book, open Internet and TA's that discuss exam questions sounds like the actions taken against the students are rather capricious. It seems that the environment of the exam as well as the difficulty of the questions sugguest that the exam was designed to test collaborative abilities, rather than knowledge recital.

monjaro 14y ago

For being at an elite "best-of-the-best" school, these students sure sound like a bunch of spoiled children. The reasons for cheating seem to vary from "it was a hard course so I had to cheat" to "everyone does it" to "it's an open book test, so we should be allowed to cheat".

arjunnarayan 14y ago
Have you not been paying attention to the entitlement and attitudes of the global financial elite in 2009-2010? This was precisely their response to the mismanagement of the banks: everybody was doing it, it was accepted, now bail us out and leave.
- Jd 14y ago
  Not to remove blame where blame is due, but in both cases there are incentive and regulatory problems. If you give people problems whereby they feel that they cannot do well without cheating (i.e. when everyone else is cheating), then cheating becomes institutionalized. Thus, to be cheating in a class where 99% of the students are cheating is to be somewhat less culpable than to be among the students cheating when only 1% of the students are cheating. That is to say, to have a situation when cheating becomes the norm implies a much larger institutional and cultural collapse in which the larger framework (and not simply the cheating individuals) demands investigation. What are the larger trends here? Well, the first might simply be the idea that greed is okay. In this case, we can witness the following transformation in American values fairly clearly. Phase 1 (religious): Greed is bad, we do things for the sake of a heavenly kingdom only. We are only temporary stewards of the wealth we have. Phase 2 (agnostic): Greed may be a necessary part of evolution and competition for limited resources, but we need to limit it and make it a long term sort of greed. Phase 3 (hedonist): My identity is defined by how much money I have, and I don't care how I get it. In other words, there is long-term value erosion. This is not to say that one's values necessarily have to be religious-Christian in derivation, but in the American context this was overwhelmingly the case and this erosion has basically given way to live in the moment materialism. The practical consequences is that many people involved in business, and this is most clear in the financial sector which has no ostensible tie to any product whatsoever and attracts people who care only about money, not only seek money, but seek to destroy any barriers that keep them from getting as much money as possible. In the US this has meant saturation of elite universities (pulling an increasing proportion of the best and brightest into the financial sector), buying out of the major political parties, shutting out the minor political parties, and removing regulatory functions (i.e. the SEC). Additionally, there is the desire to weaken the electorate by importing cheap labor from other countries that will be liable to manipulation via mass media, decreasing the likelihood that any independent party will achieve critical mass. Because this is a long-term institutional problem there is no obvious solution, except to continue with the values that have not entirely been eroded (i.e. honesty) and to encourage others who do their function (i.e. continue working in the public sector and enforcing existing regulation). Creating new services and teams of people that are doing a good job simply for the sake of doing a good job is never a bad idea either -- although it is always easy to get sucked into the mentality of "greed is good."
  - Uchikoma 14y ago
    "Thus, to be cheating in a class where 99% of the students are cheating is to be somewhat less culpable than to be among the students cheating when only 1% of the students are cheating." No.
    - kajecounterhack 14y ago
      I'm pretty sure I agree with you but comments like these could be more verbose. It's not helpful to simply disagree without explanation. One word responses are just dogmatic.
      - Jd 14y ago
        Thanks. I personally believe in right and wrong, but also in degrees of right and wrong. Doing the right thing in a situation where everyone else is doing the wrong thing is more difficult. Doing the right thing when everyone is doing the right thing is easy. Thus, you don't really know your values or the depth of your values until you are placed in a situation where it is difficult to carry them out. Here, for "culpability" I mean simply that I believe that the power to actualize the values of each individual differs, and that those who are able to actualize their values even in very difficult situations is worth more and to be praised more than those who are unable to and go with the flow. This is to say that simply saying you have certain values means nothing. You have to act on those values and, because acting on those values can be difficult, I have sympathy for those who fail to -- even as I praise those who do.
        001sky 14y ago
        Your analysis is not wrong. The UCI/The Tour DeFrance, Lance Armstrong were just as bad. You highlight lots of good issues (including - other people making money off it regardless of who wins, the act of not doping was arguably dangerous, given the exertion levels of the pack, etc). The conclusion of this section is fine I'd also agree with (It is true). But ultimately you fail to provide a framework for analysis. You conclude This is to say that simply saying you have certain values means nothing If you were a CEO of UCI and the Board asked you: 'How would you "fix" the pervasive problem' would your really come back debating "doping" and "problem"? Or would your come back with something more like: Here is my Answer X,Y,Z. While itsn't perfect, we've identified things that are clearly wrong that we can fix. First, we need to draw lines between doping and legitimate theraphy. Second, we need to have the science to fairly test between the Two. Third, while maintaining privacy and fairness, the athletes and the teams will need to co-operate with the [XYZ] league to make sure it doesn't damage the credibility of the competition and abuse our position of trust amongs the fans....etc. I'd actually be interested to hear your views on that. Your analysis pointed out the analogy to the Armstrong case (was not something I thought of before hand, but it fits perfectly). But when I see a huge, intelligent analysis thrown up then ends the way yours does, it seems like a waste of all the energy that you put into writing it. (Unless you are a lawyer -- with a point to defend =D)
- rhizome 14y ago
  And many, many of those people, in the industry, regulatory, and political sides, learned that stuff at schools like Harvard.
  - trhtrsh 14y ago
    They didn't learn it at Harvard, so much as they didn't learn any different at Harvard.
wisty 14y ago
Well, they don't want to discourage teamwork.
tlrobinson 14y ago
Not to mention this bit: "...and some said that they will sue the university if any serious punishment is meted out."
sp332 14y ago
A lot of the anti-cheating campaigns are based on social norms, shame or reputation-based things. So if a student can ask themselves, "If I found out a fellow student, or future employee, had done this, would I be angry?" and honestly answer "No" then the honor systems have no effect at all. A similar change happened when calculators became common in classrooms. Teachers had to get much more specific about when they were allowed and when they weren't. It looks like teachers (and grad student tutors) haven't come to any consensus on when collaboration is OK. It's no wonder the students are confused.
trhtrsh 14y ago
Note that the class in question is a Government clas that had a reputation as the easiest course in school, taken by students who wanted to coast to a degree. It's a far cry from the bastions of intellectual inquiry found in other departments. But this year, the professor decided to change the course's reputation, and the students were caught by surprise.

Locke1689 14y ago

How much "cheating" was actually done here? Was it simply that people's answers looked similar? On a take-home test with open book, open Internet, you'd expect that everyone would probably Google the same sources. I'm also suspicious of people who claim that sharing notes is in violation of some cheating rule. I posted the source code to most of my school projects on GitHub. If people want to crib off my code that's not my problem -- I did the work, whether or not they want to is their problem.

holograham 14y ago
I did this back in H.S. comp sci class (posted my projects to my personal website). I was punished by getting a D in AP comp sci (though aced the AP exam). Definitely was not approved at my school...aided and abetted in cheating apparently.
- Lewisham 14y ago
  Computer Science is sort of odd in that respect, and it does vary from department to department. For example, my undergrad school was very clear that everyone's home directories were set to being publicly readable, and that it was expected that there would be times that you would want to see someone else's source. This was essentially asynchronous lab work: we could always talk though problems together, but we were never able to cut and paste code (the detection system looked for things like whitespace to detect cut-and-paste vs hand-typed). When there were two matching submissions, both students would be pulled up and then the administration had to figure out who copied who. What I heard on the grapevine was that usually it was really obvious: students that had been struggling were the ones most likely to cheat, and even when they matched in ability, the guilty party would crack pretty quickly and own up. Personally, I think there are better ways of doing computer science assignments anyway: I tend to TA classes where students work on self-defined projects rather than doing the same rote exercise, so cut-and-paste is no help anyway.
wisty 14y ago
> I did the work, whether or not they want to is their problem. And the problem of the mediocre students who don't cheat, but get graded below the cheaters; and employers, who will tend to hire less honest and less capable graduates.

grandalf 14y ago

The worst part is that cheating indicates a strong cynicism about the course and the value of learning the material. I thought elite schools were able to recruit people with intellectual curiosity and character. Clearly the admissions formula is broken.

ebf 14y ago
The admissions formula is broken or the way the class was structured was broken?
- grandalf 14y ago
  Well, it could have been a horrible, cynicism-inspiring class, but given the overall savvy of elite students (who would likely have dropped it early if that were the case) I think chances are it's just that the students being admitted are lacking in genuine intellectual curiosity and perhaps aspects of character.
unobliged 14y ago
Universities teach in such a way as to encourage academic pursuit of knowledge, but the majority of students will be seeking field experience post-graduation. This mismatch happens regardless of whether a school is top-tier.
w1ntermute 14y ago
> Clearly the admissions formula is broken. As someone who attended an "elite" college, I can assure you that you only need 3 things to get into them: 1. A plan to follow (you can easily find great ones online these days) telling you what to do in high school (with respect to classes, extracurricular activities, volunteering, leadership, standardized tests, recommendation letters, etc.) 2. Money (i.e., live in an relatively affluent area with a good public school or attend a good private school) 3. Determination (lots of it) Your personality doesn't matter at all for anything other than the interview, which you can also pass with flying colors as long as you have basic acting skills (which can be easily learned as well). Basically just smile a lot and don't act like a psychopath at the interview, and you're good to go. As for getting into a specific college, that's a crapshoot. The admissions process is a black box, and there's no way to guarantee admission to a certain university unless your parents are big donors. But if you apply to, say, all the Ivies + Stanford + MIT, you're guaranteed to get into at least 2 or 3 if you have the 3 things I described above.

tlrobinson 14y ago

"Some students asked whether there was a fundamental contradiction between telling students to use online resources, but not to discuss the test with each other." No.

oob205 14y ago
Um..yes. Study groups or websites are online resources. So is facebook. If a student posts the questions online and starts discussions with anonymous posters, or even reads relevant discussions posted online before the test, how is that different from discussing with one another. There are plenty of ways to have a test that explicitly prevents collaboration. This professor clearly did not try.
- tlrobinson 14y ago
  If the students couldn't figure out how to use online resources without collaborating with each other they don't belong at Harvard.
- trhtrsh 14y ago
  This is a case of the changing times leading to miscommunication. The implied intent of the rule is that READ-ONLY NON-INTERACTIVE Internet use was permitted. To today's students, the Internet is a READ-WRITE INTERACTIVE tool, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    >The implied intent of the rule // Can you quote the rule because in the article it appears that the intent of the rule was that above all you couldn't interact with other students [on the course] to complete the work but as long as you kept to that rule then general internet resources were fine to use?
- mbreese 14y ago
  There is a fundamental difference between using online resources to find an answer to a question and collaborating with others to find the same answer. Part of the grade is based on how well you can find the answers, not how well your collective group can. If the test is open book, open Internet, that doesn't mean you can ask your friends on Facebook for help, just because Facebook is on the Internet. I think that the class was likely poorly designed, but that doesn't mean that the students are all in the clear.

gizmo 14y ago

Most people here are saying that the students were clearly in the wrong. "Lack intellectual curiosity and character". "spoiled children". I don't agree at all. Aside from the formal rules, smart people pick up on which rules can be broken safely. In fact, knowing which rules in life you should break and which rules you should follow is probably a critical factor for success in life. Jaywalking is illegal in most (all?) US cities, but in many it's completely acceptable behavior. Jaywalking in Seattle (edit: was Manhattan), on the other hand is not done and you better not do it within eyesight of a police officer. Jaywalking in the Netherlands is completely fine (even right in front of the police), but in Germany it's not. The laws are the same, but the culture is different. There are thousands of examples of socially acceptable behavior that doesn't correspond with the law. Drinking in public. Sometimes fine, sometimes not. Forging a signature. Occasionally fine, usually not. Startups break laws all the time too. You have to get a product out first, and only when you start making money you get lawyers involved to make sure everything is going by the books. But if you aren't making real money yet the government really doesn't care whether you follow every law to the letter. And as a founder you have to decide which laws can be broken safely and which laws must be obeyed. Get it wrong and you may lose your company: either through legal trouble or because it doesn't get off the ground. The founders talk freely about the laws they broke. They brag about it! It's considered clever. Relentlessly resourceful. It's a fine line. So if the culture in Harvard was such that cooperating for take-home exams was sometimes acceptable and sometimes not, then I consider that a legitimate excuse. It's easy to test too. Just look at the exams of that course of the previous years and check if people worked together on those too. Compare with other courses. If the results show that students consistently break the "individual work only" clause for some courses and not for other courses then the students probably didn't think they were doing anything wrong. They were just acting in the socially accepted manner.

badclient 14y ago
Jaywalking in Manhattan, on the other hand is not done and you better not do it within eyesight of a police officer. Seriously? I have stayed in Manhattan for couple years and done my share of jaywalking occasionally in clear sight of NYPD. May be I am just lucky but this just doesn't resonate with me.

DanBC 14y ago

> One student recalled going to a teaching fellow while working on the final exam and finding a crowd of others there, asking about a test question that hinged on an unfamiliar term. The student said the fellow defined the term for them. I realise that I only have this snippet of text, but: Didn't they have a dictionary? Didn't they have search engines? Some of the attitudes displayed in that article are surprising. And disappointing.

denzil_correa 14y ago

My assessment The course instructor set the rules but the implementation was "loose" (casual). The students went one step too far in their liberties. I think it's a collective failure on part of the professor, TFs and students.

tmsh 14y ago

The thing about intellectual honesty is that when you don't feel like you know much relative to your peers and context (e.g., you're a freshman at Harvard), you don't think you have much to lose. You don't realize what you have to lose until it becomes clear about all the hidden potential that you've taken for granted and that you're risking -- how important intellectual honesty is to any type of sustainable effort. So there is a chicken and egg problem with intellectual honesty. You don't appreciate it until you've acquired experience. And you don't acquire sustainable experience until you start to appreciate it. The flip side though is that most young people just need to be told and slightly inspired about how important it is. Then they need to develop that over several years. In college can work. Learning to be confident with your own intellectual pursuits based on honesty though -- that's what college is supposed to teach. But yeah, a lot of time in all the competitiveness, it gets lost.

Mizza 14y ago

I went to school in Boston and knew lots of people of Harvard and MIT, and the amount of cheating was absolutely staggering. The "Greek"/frat network contributes to this cheating culture greatly (some houses more than others, but they're all part of it.) Personally, I think that some of these people are so used to being that #1 student that when they're surrounded by other #1'ers, they do whatever it takes to remain on top, or so their logic goes. They're not the people who ever build cool things anyway though, so who cares.

spec_laconic 14y ago
I can't speak to frats or Harvard, but I can speak of personal experience of MIT. When I began taking courses at MIT, I worked my proverbial ass off in a very difficult class in CS (course 6 by their parlance) and got an A. After the semester was over, I found out that students generally work together on labs, which was a major portion of the class, and would have significantly lightened my load. (Talking about spending entire weekends with hands-on-keyboard, very unreasonable amount of work for one person, even an overachieving one such as myself) This is a _cultural_ difference of MIT; people tend to work with one another, or they tend to fail. They learn it freshman year, and it's ingrained in their psyche from then on. Interestingly, the line between cooperative work and cheating is difficult to discern and mostly set up by the professor. When the professor does not say one way or another if the work is collaborative, students will generally consider it collaborative. As for the "[n]ever build cool things" troll, I'll let you google the number of neat inventions by famous MIT / Harvard alums; I won't waste my time.
- Mizza 14y ago
  Not what I meant. I'm actually in favor of people working collaboratively on problems, I'm talking about computer-servers full of P-Set solns, essays, old tests, occasionally the sale of these for money, etc etc etc.

clarky07 14y ago

I think a case of widespread "cheating" like this is a good indication there was something wrong with the course and the professor. If the material would have been covered in class and not purposefully tricky it's likely there wouldn't have been cheating. Also, open book open Internet take home test might as well be code for group test. I always found that to be an absurd way to give a test. If you want to not have cheating give the test in class over the material covered in the course.

cwdutch 14y ago

"For being at an elite "best-of-the-best" school, these students sure sound like a bunch of spoiled children", "They're not the people who ever build cool things anyway though, so who cares." - These and similar sentiments seem a bit common on HN and, to me, seem rather myopic and, frankly, immature. The latter statement is pretty clearly false and I don't plan on listing examples to demonstrate that. Going to a "best-of-best" school is rarely not in someone's best interest. I did go to Harvard undergrad and I did not attend YC, but the draw is similar: sure the prestige matters and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, bu the real value is in the people that you live and work with, both peers and mentors. Does giving money help you get into Harvard? I'm sure it does and if that money benefits the undergraduate population more than having someone who is subjectively less deserving in that class is a detriment, then it is in all students' best interest to have the paying member accepted. Regarding the cheating: It happens and I'm sure it happens at every campus. I don't think that's what happened to half of this class. It's a large class, it's probably required for Gov concentrators, and it seems clear that the expectations were not understood by the students or the teaching fellows. What I DID do a lot of was pool notes in preparation for an exam, and I wouldn't be surprised if that is responsible for a lot of the consistencies in test answers. Why redefine a term that you have a ("the") definition for in your notes? And honestly, I think it's healthy to have varying levels of respect for different material. If I want to be a physicist, I'm going to really make sure I understand linear algebra. For the Core class on Chinese history, I'm going to pool notes, cram, and try to scrape an A, because the A means more to me than the knowledge. Sorry to address several topics; I've been reading HN for a while and this is my first comment, so I'm still learning the ropes.

monjaro 14y ago
Okay, I'm the one that said they sound like spoiled children, so I'll bite. Can you explain to me how that is myopic and immature? These are all quotes from the article: "He said, 'I gave out 120 A’s last year, and I’ll give out 120 more,' " "Having my degree revoked now would mean I lose my job." "some said that they will sue the university if any serious punishment is meted out" "Some students asked whether there was a fundamental contradiction between telling students to use online resources, but not to discuss the test with each other" These aren't responses of mature adults. This is immature students whining and complaining because they got caught cheating. The test explicitly said "students may not discuss the exam with others." It doesn't matter how it was done last year, or how hard the class is, or how much money they spent on the class. If the exam says not to discuss it with other students and you do, you have cheated.

tokenadult 14y ago

The Harvard Crimson reporting on this story http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/8/30/academic-dishonesty-ad-board/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/8/30/academic-dishone... plainly highlighted the relevant portion of the examination rules. If the Harvard students didn't understand what those rules meant, then the Harvard admission office must be admitting some students with some severe reading comprehension problems.