11 ms·
Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
- hcurtiss 6mo agoPrinceton is a strange place. What on earth could be the objection to proctoring? I'd much rather have a proctor than have to narc on a classmate. And even then, the proctor just reports the matter to a student-run body? Wild.
- alephnerd 6mo agoAs someone who has attended this kind of program, it's because some students will cheat and view proctoring as an annoyance. Imo it's both on the students (plenty of students are optimizing just to get a class out of the way to do more interesting stuff) and the programs (some classes just aren't up-to-date or are rightfully viewed as busywork). Personally, I found courses that were output heavy and regurgitation light tended to be the most successful from an honor code perspective - you can't cheat your way out of "learning by doing" when you are held accountable for the output (eg. A research grade paper or implementing a fully functional Linux kernel). Sadly, even at Ivies most lower div classes are just rote memorization because class sizes would be massive for plenty of core classes (100-500 students for some classes).
- gnerd00 6mo agoI dont know what it means, but you missed an important category that was mentioned elsewhere ... brutal, even sadistic levels of work to filter students. I was in these kind of classes in my undergrad.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> What on earth could be the objection to proctoring? There is a unique pride in being part of a community built around honor. You see this on the Swiss metro and in small-town vegetable stalls. Unproctored exams force every student to weigh the value of their honor against a better grade. That's a personal moral reckoning that might be worth the entire degree.
- alephnerd 6mo agoYou'd hope, but humans are humans - even if they attend an Ivy. Some individuals have heady thoughts and morals like you mentioned. Others are using it as a checkbox.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> humans are humans - even if they attend an Ivy I specifically called out two non-Ivy examples. Humans are humans. And one of those capacities is for behaving with honor. The enemy of honor, it turns out, isn't dishonor, but cynicism. (It isn't surprising that the dominant emotion on a Silicon Valley board towards an honor system is scorn.)
- alephnerd 6mo agoNo argument there. Tbf given my professional and personal background, I automatically assume the worst in all people so even though I never abused honor codes (and honestly never had the need to anyhow because I liked the classes I took with one as they tend to be the kinds of classes where professors and teacher staff are the most engaged) I think it is almost impossible to enforce one in classes beyond 30 students, because anonymity does beget some amount of bad behavior.
- traderj0e 6mo agoI agree about the cynicism thing, I like the idea of an honor code if/when it actually works, but the bad reaction here is because 1/3 of students admitted to cheating.
- TitaRusell 6mo agoAs I understand it Americans pay tens of thousands of dollars for university. In my country if you can't hack it you just transfer to something else. Much less pressure. And let's face it if you can't even pass the exams maybe it is not your career? Don't live in a lie and go do something you'll enjoy.
- 6mo ago
- lll-o-lll 6mo agoRight, but there’s really only two directions you can go. 1. Install a culture of honour/virtue/accountability. Rely on duty and moral justice to keep the majority in-line. 2. An arms race to prevent ever more sophisticated methods of cheating, and the reduction in human dignity this implies. (E.g. the proctor must follow you into the toilet). We all want the systems to be fair and just; but we also all want to be treated with dignity. No easy answers.
- ddp26 6mo agoStanford has this policy too. Students get livid when proctoring is proposed, even though cheating is rampant (afaict)
- gowld 6mo agohttps://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/04/faculty-senate-proctoring-open-access-policy https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/04/faculty-senate-pro... April 23rd, 2026 The Faculty Senate voted to allow proctoring of in-person exams following a pilot overseen by the Academic Integrity Working Group. The Faculty Senate unanimously voted to permit proctoring of in-person assessments following a presentation from the Academic Integrity Working Group (AIWG) on Thursday. Formed in 2024 after updates to the Honor Code and Fundamental Standard, the AIWG was charged with studying the scope of academic dishonesty at Stanford and overseeing a multi-year proctoring pilot study, which launched the same year. Historically, proctoring was not permitted at Stanford; students were expected to report peers for academic misconduct. “What we’re finding is that a lot of the expectations we might be putting on our students is creating an unsustainable moral burden on them,” in which students must choose to cheat to keep up or report their peers, said Jennifer Schwartz Poehlmann, AIWG co-chair and senior lecturer in chemistry. During the pilot, instructors reported that it helped them better assess students’ learning goals, clarified academic integrity standards, and reduced student frustration, said AIWG Student co-Chair Xavier Millan, ’26, an undergraduate in computer science. The proctoring policy was previously passed by the AIWG, the Board on Conduct Affairs, the Undergraduate Senate, and the Graduate Student Council. Poehlmann and Millan highlighted some of the student feedback that showed support for proctoring, including one who said proctoring feels like “more of a fair level playing field.”
- 19skitsch 6mo agoyeah it is interesting. when I was at Stanford I was a TA and we just had to leave the room during exams after passing them out and come back at the end to collect the exams. just as I was graduating they started doing the pilot for proctoring exams and I remember students were really upset about it, though my fellow TAs were mostly in agreement that it was a good idea. side note is that it’s kind of funny because sometimes the seating would be auditorium style so you could easily see papers in front of you if you were higher up… probably difficult to avoid accidentally glancing at someone else’s paper while taking a break, lol.
- teaearlgraycold 6mo agoSome schools love to pride themselves on their students' integrity. They don't proctor because they think their students don't cheat and can be trusted. I don't know about Princeton but a college my family attended had stats showing no difference between test scores in proctored vs. unproctored exams. That was before LLMs would have made it so easy to cheat. Maybe that school has changed its policy as well.
- asdff 6mo agoAs a former TA the cheaters were never acing the test. They were like a turd circling the drain desperate for anything to grab on to. Often they'd cheat off eachother, sitting next to eachother, turning in identically incorrect exams. That being said if they were smart enough to cheat off the smart kids instead, maybe they wouldn't be so dumb to cheat and get caught. Oftentimes they had their head fully turned staring at another students exam without even hiding it. Very blatant cheating a lot of cases.
- expedition32 6mo agoI would never NARC on someone shoplifting or dealing drugs but cheating on exams? Yeah no fuck you we're not India here. That's your future cardiologist.
- s5300 6mo ago[dead]
- Schlagbohrer 6mo agoWhy did the other comment by s5300 get downvoted literally to death? Many people who have suffered first hand at the depravity of the american medical system are right to be furious about it. Is this forum full of cardiologists and medical staff?
- huflungdung 6mo ago[dead]
- dbvn 6mo agoCrazy it took them 133 years to do the obvious. Assuming your *entire* student-base is morally superior to the general population
- mystraline 6mo agoThe elite have ALWAYS had special rules. Whereas the rest of us were always assumed to be cheaters until absolutely cleared otherwise. Just look at how people are treated by the dalits who run Proctorio. We were teated as less than human.
- dbvn 6mo agoYeah but they're lying to themselves. They cheated the whole time - guaranteed.
- traderj0e 6mo agoThat's not really the assumption they were making. It used to be that going to an elite university was good enough without also having top grades. Now there's more pressure, and cheating is way easier than before. In a similar vein, higher-tier schools tend to put less effort into weeding students out, because they assume everyone who got admitted there has already proven themselves enough. Wonder if that will last.
- john_strinlai 6mo agohuh, i had no idea princeton specifically disallowed proctors, and instead relied on an honor system. seems... like a poorly thought out system, especially given: "29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report." crazier is the people protesting by saying: “students should behave honorably, and that faculty and students should trust each other given the 1893 Honor Code compact.”. obviously that isnt happening if 1/3rd of the student body has admitted to cheating (meaning that the real percent of cheating is even higher).
- doctorpangloss 6mo agoare feelings more strongly felt more valid? the same things are happening at caltech - that is, just as much cheating - and they have an honor code. but they feel much stronger about their honor code, so it is more valid.
- lokar 6mo agoAIUI, these schools see their mission as training the next generation of leaders and elites. They aim for people with strong abilities, and moral character. And, the way you guide youth to act in a certain way is by treating them that way. If you want them to be trustworthy, you trust them. This is not a totally fringe idea.
- john_strinlai 6mo ago>If you want them to be trustworthy, you trust them. sure, but it seems exceptionally silly to continue to blindly trust them when a sizeable portion of them admit to not being trustworthy
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- matthewdgreen 6mo agoMost of us have done something stupid once in our lives. That does not mean we do stupid things all the time, nor does it mean that we didn't learn from the experience. The goal of school is to help immature young adults grow into mature ones.
- analogpixel 6mo ago> If a suspected Honor Code violation occurs, proctors will document their observations and submit a report to the student-run Honor Committee, where they may later testify under the same standards used for other witnesses. is this so the rich kids that have parents who pay for parts of the school can still get a pass?
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> so the rich kids that have parents who pay for parts of the school can still get a pass? It's Princeton. They're given due process, not administrative fiat. Also, on what planet does having "parents who pay for parts of the school" swing a student (versus administrator) run process?
- 9x39 6mo agoSeems unlikely the student-run honor committee decision would be immune to being 'reviewed' or 'considered' by faculty. Why would they cede that power?
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> Why would they cede that power? That's just the culture at Princeton. (And in a lot of high-trust settings.) Nobody is ceding real power, they're devolving unrewarding work.
- redsocksfan45 6mo ago[dead]
- defen 6mo agoPrinceton has so much money that they could make it free for all undergrads and literally never run out of money.
- badlibrarian 6mo ago> Financial aid covers the full cost of attendance -- including tuition, housing, food, books and personal expenses -- for most families with incomes up to $150,000 a year. Most undergraduate families with incomes up to $250,000 will pay no tuition. https://www.princeton.edu/admission-aid/affordable-all https://www.princeton.edu/admission-aid/affordable-all
- JumpCrisscross 6mo agoCombined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting [1] and unprecedented corruption and criminality among our national leaders, it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/hasan-piker-jia-tolentino-microlooting/686919/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/hasan-piker-jia-to...
- kibwen 6mo agoThe fish rots from the head. It's a sucker's game to aspire to selflessly serve the greater good when the most powerful people in the land are brazenly corrupt pedophiles. In other words: monkey see, monkey do.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> fish rots from the head Does it? Did it? We elected the "brazenly corrupt pedophiles." This question seems complex and important enough to not be resolved with a truism.
- afavour 6mo agoThe brazenly corrupt also own the vast media ecosystem that can help swing elections. Should we all know better? Probably. But they control the education system too, so…
- kibwen 6mo agoTrump was not the beginning of the decline, only the terminal symptom.
- kfse 6mo agoTerminal? We don't know if worse is yet to come.
- marginalia_nu 6mo agoYeah I think Reagan's reforms of the antitrust laws, and the subsequent fall of the Soviet union are probably some of the first dominoes toward the new gilded age. The lack of competition from the Soviets is probably one of the bigger systemic causes. The cold war in no small part a war for hearts and minds in the democratic world. It was existentially important that the west believed in America, both the US itself and its allies. As long as the Soviets were around as existence proof for an alternate world order, the US needed at least visibly have its shit in order. If today's clown fiesta had unfolded 50 years ago, well comrade, сегодня мы все говорили бы по-русски.
- ngruhn 6mo agoSo after 133 they learned to not leave dogs alone with sausages.
- mmooss 6mo agoComments express surprise that this honor code has been in place. Many schools have similar honor codes. Despite HN trendiness, SV and business world advocacy of 'animal instincts', and current cultural trends, humans are generally honest and honorable - obviously people in many places have thought that. It's good news, though many will resist it because, I think, it violates the anarcho-libertarian norms that are fundamental to these cultural trends (i.e., arguing that corruption is inevitable, human nature, etc.).
- traderj0e 6mo agoNah, it's just that I went to college and saw cheating. When an assignment was take-home, people were forming cheating rings, but because they wanted an upper hand but because they were afraid others were doing the same. I saw even some top-notch students cheat a little bit, cause they wanted 4.00 not 3.95. As a non-cheater, I didn't want draconian measures to catch cheating, just wanted there to be real consequences when someone was caught. I didn't need 4.00, but what if I did?
- the_jeremy 6mo agoChegg was a $15B company before AI came out. I promise that wasn't because it was the best platform to learn the material. I agree that humans are generally honorable for things with low stakes. Consider our cultural view of politicians for a non-SV example of where we fully expect high stakes to lead to selfish and dishonorable actions.
- traderj0e 6mo agolol Chegg. Even the name suggests what it's for.
- whyenot 6mo ago> Despite HN trendiness, SV and business world advocacy of 'animal instincts', and current cultural trends, humans are generally honest and honorable I personally believe this (that people are generally honest and good). BUT, the numbers don't lie: 30% of Princeton students admit to having cheated on an exam. This is a "your house is on fire" moment. An honor code has has to be enforced, and that is apparently not happening at Princeton. Frankly, as someone working at a school that also has an honor code (most do, in my experience), that is where the problem lies: if you turn a blind eye to violators, it sends the message to everyone that the honor code is just words, it doesn't mean anything.
- wps 6mo agoI've sat in classes where people at my table genuinely took pictures of the exam while the professor's back was turned (being kind to us and giving us useful information on the board) and uploaded the entire exam to the Gemini app. Cheating is all around disheartening and is now incredibly easy with all the free multi-modal models around. Real active proctoring is needed and devices need to be confiscated during exams. This is common practice in many other countries.
- gizajob 6mo agoThat’s pretty sad. Even sadder is that those people will hardly even feel it to be cheating because they’re now using AI for absolutely everything and so suddenly contented with a situation where it can’t be used they still can’t help but use it. Not a good sign.
- toephu2 6mo agoHave a phones-free classroom. Problem solved.
- Krasnol 6mo agoI can't imagine why you would be so stupid to allow phones to exams. Is this normal in the US?
- traderj0e 6mo agoUsually the rule is you can't have a phone out of your pocket or backpack during a test. Students still have phones on them. If they disallowed that too, how would that work, an airport security style check going in?
- bombcar 6mo agoYes, that kind of thing can and is done, if the stakes are high enough.
- 6mo ago
- redsocksfan45 6mo ago[dead]
- i_am_proteus 6mo agoThe technical ability for the student to cheat in the present day is unprecedented. For exams in most subjects, the cellular phone is held in the lap. The student needs only briefly expose the exam page to the camera of the phone: immediate photograph of the page, ingestion of the page by an artificial intelligence, and then: the student flips the page to view the side exposed to the camera, and glances down to see the answer on the telephone.
- matthewdgreen 6mo agoYes, this is really depressing. I don't want to have to ban devices from exams, but it is something I might have to think about.
- girvo 6mo agoI’m sort of surprised that they’re not banned already; dating myself but when I was at Uni in the late 2000s they were banned then. Despite probably not being very useful for cheating on nascent 3G!
- dinkumthinkum 6mo agoThis can easily be stopped. I don’t see how you would copy whole paragraphs or the working of a physics this way without easily being caught but this can mitigated against.
- typs 6mo agoI mean, so many graded assignments are online now that very little technology is needed to cheat. I would guess that is the largest driver in increased cheating at universities.
- fegu 6mo agoCould it be non-proctoring has served Princeton by inflating grades due to some cheating, but only now have cheating become rampant enough that it must be curtailed to destroy the reputation entirely?
- traderj0e 6mo agoI honestly think it's that. I've seen it before at other private schools, where someone is caught cheating and let off with very minor consequences. Private high schools were hiding it from colleges too.
- poplarsol 6mo agoA WASP ethical framework cannot survive either the extirpation of WASPs from the student body or the transformation of the education system into a high stakes mandarin style death struggle.
- shimman 6mo agoThis class form of racism always gets a chuckle out of me. Want to trade skull calipers?
- traderj0e 6mo agoHe's wrong, but it's not because he's being racist
- Analemma_ 6mo agoSorry, can you state your hypothesis clearly here? You are saying Princeton would not need to make this change if it admitted only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants?
- regnull 6mo agoWhat?
- pickleRick243 6mo agoWASPs in this day and age are no more immune to "high stakes mandarin style death struggles".
- poplarsol 6mo agoThe word "or" grammatically indicates such a combination of conditions.
- pickleRick243 6mo agoThe style of writing and the inclusion of the word "mandarin" made me assume that you were implying WASPs were not participating in the "high stakes struggles". You still have not explicitly stated your view one way or the other. As you can see from the other comments, almost everyone read an undercurrent of xenophobia in your post. I sense you're a skilled interlocutor- I concede I fell into your trap.
- ronburgandy28 6mo agoI would argue that the student behavior - ~30% admitting to cheating on academic work - reflects the value system shown by those holding positions/stature the students aspire to. It is a combination of FOMO (everyone else is doing it, I must also to not fall behind) similar to that which drives hype adoption, combined with a perception that moral behavior grows optional in proportion with wealth or power. The latter is empirically evident in how American society has addressed moral failures of wealthy/powerful leaders (i.e. crimes without punishment)
- bawolff 6mo agoI wonder to what extent this is due to the changing roles of university. I would guess 133 years ago university was mostly upper class folks trying to better their minds, and less people wanting a degree to open up a job. Much more incentive to cheat if you just care about the piece of paper at the end.
- dinkumthinkum 6mo agoYou might be interested in the history. That was definitely not the case 133 years ago. Since at least the Middle Ages education has had a big impact on profession and station wasn’t just like a pastime for curiosity.
- jackie293746 6mo ago[dead]
- nashashmi 6mo agoDifficult to imagine that people were not using phones to search for stuff while taking an exam. I can understand this being the case 18 years ago. But since the iPhone, how was honor still a thing?
- rosstex 6mo agoI was a TA at Princeton ~5 years ago, and I had forgotten about the honor code until reading this. Yes it's true, we did not proctor exams, and students seemed to take pride in it. On every test, you got the names/signatures of those sitting next to you. But also, I had a student who was accused of not putting his pencil down when the test had concluded, and the bureaucratic process to fight the accusation was so crippling that they had to take a semester of leave anyway. So I don't see harm in tearing it down.
- traderj0e 6mo agoHm, this answers something I was wondering, how do accusations work with no proctors or other evidence
- rosstex 6mo agoYou end up in this wonderful place: https://rrr.princeton.edu/students-and-university/25-university-discipline https://rrr.princeton.edu/students-and-university/25-univers...
- nerdsniper 6mo agoWouldn’t you end up in front of the Undergraduate Honor Committee rather than the Faculty-Student Committee on Discipline? The Faculty-Student Committee on Discipline “adjudicates all potential violations of academic integrity regulations by undergraduate students other than those violations involving in-class exams (which fall under the jurisdiction of the Honor Committee)” [0] 0: https://odus.princeton.edu/student-support-and-community-standards/community-standards/committee-discipline https://odus.princeton.edu/student-support-and-community-sta...
- Al-Khwarizmi 6mo agoSo now I finally understand why Americans use the expression "proctored exams". Because not all exams are proctored. Here in Spain, we don't have an equivalent expression because there is no such thing as an unproctored exam. The idea of being proctored is already included in the word "exam".
- Ekaros 6mo agoSimilar in Finland. If it is not proctored it is either "homework" or "project". Not an exam.
- moralestapia 6mo agoVery curious to see if/how the admissions distribution changes after this.
- godsinhisheaven 6mo agoMaybe I haven't scrolled down far enough, but gut feeling is telling me that a lot of the rise in cheating is coming from international (read: chinese) students. Plenty of stories and personal experience of cheating rings. I tried to get into one just to see what was going on, but even though I looked the part I couldn't talk the talk.
- pickleRick243 6mo agoThe numbers don't play out because international chinese students only make up 5-7% (maybe less) of the undergraduate student body. Self-reported cheating frequencies are much higher.
- godsinhisheaven 6mo agoVery fair.
- traderj0e 6mo agoThat's kind of a large number. Honor system is a solidarity thing. There can be 0% cheating cause nobody wants to be that person, but if 5% come in and egregiously cheat anyway, it can poison more. Most people don't want to cheat, but they may feel disadvantaged not to.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- pcrh 6mo agoWith reference to the "cultural" allusions of many posts in this thread, I can assure you that in the WASP UK universities of Oxford and Cambridge, all exams are "proctored". It is assumed that students will attempt to cheat, so exams are designed so that cheating is not a viable strategy to obtain high grades. So-called invigilators also patrol the exam room and will report any violations.
- blast 6mo ago> exams are designed so that cheating is not a viable strategy to obtain high grades That's interesting. How do they do that?
- pcrh 6mo agoMostly by requiring analysis and synthesis rather than memorization. It's been some years for me so things might have changed, but no tech was allowed into the exam rooms, except for calculators in some subjects. Everything was done by pen and paper.
- travelalberta 6mo agoI’ve never heard of a non-proctored exam. Every exam I took in university was proctored. If you got caught (happened every once in a while and made everything very awkward) you failed the exam immediately, got kicked out, and had a department hearing. I have a vivid memory of two girls almost killing each other as a result of one such failed scheme during a CS Logic exam of all things. I had the Naruto Chunnin Exam episodes where they write the written test on dvd as a kid and watched it all the time so it might have altered my philosophy but I’ve always viewed proctored tests as a mini game. The ability to gather information under stress, maintain composure, and evaluate the likelihood the person you were borrowing answers from knew what they were doing was always fun to me. Even on tests where I was going to get 90% guaranteed I liked seeing how much information I could parse from other people. I remember one exam I could make out another girls scantron and knew she was going to fail. She was the first person to hand in her answers and the proctor joked “wow that was quick, we’ll have to make the next one harder”. When I was a proctor I loved trying to catch people cheating. Lots of wandering eyes but never a phone. I’d have thrown someone out so quick if the pulled out a phone and that’s before ChatGPT. I can’t imagine not having proctors. Honour systems sound great and all but not in an evaluation. Tribe mentality prevents most people from ratting on others (except for those with limited social status to lose from the jump), especially when you are 19. I saw someone mention that having proctors “punished” students who followed the honour code which is insane. If you know what you are doing in an exam you’ll forget all about the proctors being there. The only people who will notice them are those trying to cheat…
- jwilber 6mo agoWell, the average grade at Princeton is an A. Not sure how much this will change anything.
- regintelapi 6mo agoIts a clear shift back to traditional assessment. It’ll be interesting to see how students adapt and whether this improves exam integrity or just adds new pressure.
- Revisional_Sin 6mo agoWhy would it add pressure?
- dzonga 6mo agomy wish maybe some liberal colleges already do this. eliminate exams all together - have in person discussions. if you gonna write something - to answer questions - let it be done in person then marked on the spot by your peers. better yet to test understanding - answer questions with better questions i.e critical thinking. since easily machines can do calculations, fact finding faster than us. but machines can't ask better questions
- symlinkk 6mo agoYou’ll face unfairness with DEI / diversity quotas to get in to the college, and then if you graduate you’ll face unfairness by having your job outsourced to AI or H1B, but yeah cheating in school is totally where we draw the line.
- traderj0e 6mo agoHonestly the DEI in private universities was a huge loss of credibility. But they've changed that.
- CSMastermind 6mo agoPeople blame AI but in reality it's more about America transitioning from a high-trust society to a low-trust one.
- throwaway198846 6mo agoWhen was the USA a high trust society?
- losteric 6mo agoRight after WW2, trust was way higher. There was a belief in common good and progress and all that.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- shimman 6mo agoSomething tells me this trust evaporated once the Vietnam War was in full swing and the USA started murdering labor activists in South America.
- platevoltage 6mo agoBack during the Red Scare obviously \s
- dmd 6mo agoIn the General Social Survey, the share of adults saying “most people can be trusted” fell from 46% in 1972 to 34% in 2018, and Pew found the same 34% in a 2023 to 2024 poll. - https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-one-another/ https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on...
- ComplexSystems 6mo agoYou know, back when it was a noble democracy where all men were free, or something.
- recroad 6mo agoYou mean currently exams aren't proctored?! I went to the University of Toronto and can't recall a single exam which wasn't.
- burnt-resistor 6mo agoStanford is also unproctored by charter.
- bookofjoe 6mo ago>Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/40-percent-stanford-undergraduates-claim-disabled-sw99r3k8c https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/40-percent-st... https://archive.ph/RPegw https://archive.ph/RPegw
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- paulpauper 6mo agoIvy league schools , imho, tend to operate differently--more hands-off approach. The assumption is if you're smart and determined enough to get in, that you will not cheat. The filtering to get in is intense, so this presumably filters out less honest people.
- asdff 6mo ago"Presumably" doing a lot of heavy lifting.
- KennyBlanken 6mo agoThe only possible reason for a school like Princeton that is drowning in cash to not proctor exams is to allow students to cheat. Also: admissions at all these schools are heavily biased toward wealthy legacy hires, regardless of talent, and the "most determined" are the most likely to cheat. What's next, claiming the wealthy don't steal?
- avazhi 6mo ago[flagged]
- nerdsniper 6mo agoThis is just racist. At Princeton, 56 undergrads are Chinese [0]. That's about 1%. Not "half the student body". 0: https://davisic.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf2371/files/documents/2022-2023_international_students_summary.pdf https://davisic.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf2371/files...
- avazhi 6mo agoI don't think you know what racist means. Either way, international students make up a huge percentage of the student population, as evidenced by your documentation. And in fact, it's too funny to me that you specify undergrad - keeps you from mentioning that there were 533 Chinese grad students, nearly 5x more than the the country with the 2nd most grad students, India.
- nerdsniper 6mo agoWhat does racist mean? I don’t know why specifying undergraduate is “too funny to you”…I specified undergrad because TFA was about undergrads. At no point did TFA mention any graduate student body - but it took care to explicitly reference decisions and feedback from multiple specific undergraduate bodies: - (Undergraduate) Honor Committee [0] - Senior Survey - Undergraduate Student Government - Dean of Undergraduate Students - Faculty-Student Committee on Discipline [1] > In The Daily Princetonian’s 2025 Senior Survey of over 500 seniors, 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report. Only 0.4 percent of seniors responded saying that they had reported a peer for an Honor Code violation. An Undergraduate Student Government survey of students cited in the proposal reportedly found that “a majority would favor proctoring or are indifferent to any change,” though a “sizeable minority opposes it on the grounds that students should behave honorably, and that faculty and students should trust each other given the 1893 Honor Code compact.” The proposal states that Gordin met with and received endorsements on the policy from “current and former student chairs of the Honor Committee; colleagues from the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students and the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning; the Faculty-Student Committee on Discipline; and the Academics Chair of the Undergraduate Student Government.” “Undergraduates and faculty are realistic in understanding that having an instructor supervising examinations will not eradicate cheating,” the proposal notes. “However, they believe that there will be a significant deterrent effect, and that having an additional witness in the room will reduce pressure on students to notice and report concerns while they are themselves completing exams.” 0: https://honor.princeton.edu/front https://honor.princeton.edu/front : Note that the “Honor Committee” is an undergraduate body, there is no graduate Honor Committee at Princeton. 1: https://odus.princeton.edu/student-support-and-community-standards/community-standards/committee-discipline https://odus.princeton.edu/student-support-and-community-sta... “ composed of faculty members, undergraduate students, and administrators, adjudicates all potential violations of academic integrity regulations by undergraduate students” (has nothing at all to do with graduate students)
- busyant 6mo agoI was a grad student @ Princeton a handful of decades ago. I was a TA for a few classes and, given the honor code, we did not proctor the exams for undergrads. We just handed them out (left the room) and returned to collect them at the end. - One of the exams in a course that I TAed had 5 free-response questions. - There were also 5 TAs in that class, so we un-stapled the exams and each TA graded one question (for consistency). - We re-assembled the exams and returned them to the students. - A few days after the exam, one of "my" students (she attended my recitation) came to me with her exam and explained that I had incorrectly graded question 2. - I told her that I didn't grade question 2, so she had to go take it up with "TA # 2" - A few hours later, "TA #2" pays me a visit and she (TA#2) is annoyed. She tells me, "Your student is trying to pull a fast one. She answered Q2 incorrectly. She erased her answer and put in the correct answer and she wants it re-graded" - I briefly defended the student and said something like, "Why would she do that... and how could you even know?" - "TA#2" responded with "... because I photocopied all of the student responses after I graded them." - Then I felt like a piece of shit for doubting my fellow TA. And felt even worse being naive enough to not be suspicious. - "TA#2" and I brought all of this info up with the prof. who was running the course. - We were told that the situation would be handled by an Honor Committee or something like that. We forwarded the information to the committee, but no one spoke to us and we were not allowed to participate in the deliberations. - After about a week, all we were told was that the student was able to explain the "discrepancy" between her exam and the photocopy. To this day, I have no idea what that student could have possibly said to explain her actions. After that, I started photocopying every damned scrap of paper that I graded. edits for clarity. The student did not get a zero on the exam, nor was she booted from the course. I don't remember if she was given credit for Question 2, but the TA and I were both expecting her to be tossed, which obviously didn't happen.
- zerocrates 6mo agoSo, they didn't face any consequences. Did they at least keep the original grade or was this so well explained they also got the re-grade?
- busyant 6mo ago
- 8bitsrule 6mo agoI guess the days of advising that 'You're only cheating yourself' have come to fall on deaf ears.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- andai 6mo agoOff topic but but why does Princeton need to sell my data to 1326 of their "partners"?
- londons_explore 6mo ago> 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton Wow
- SoftTalker 6mo agoYeah seems low to me.
- energy123 6mo agoThis is good. Everyone is a cheater if they think they can get away with it. I don't mean 50% I mean more like 95-100%. Based on personal experience being in one of those classes where the opportunity existed and it was observable.
- dataflow 6mo ago> Everyone is a cheater if they think they can get away with it. I don't mean 50% I mean more like 95-100%. Not convinced of this. I would imagine the majority of people are more likely to cheat if they see the a lot of people getting away with it, not merely if they think they themselves can get away with it.
- isaisabella 6mo agoWait, Princeton NEVER have faculty proctoring exams??? Really shocks me but is reasonable for the ivy league. Nowadays, academic integrity is indeed a problem. Almost all students are using AI in their assignments, though it violates the honor code.
- contubernio 6mo agoAs professor I see little evidence of an increase in cheating. Microscopic earpieces and remote assistance we're problems already ten-fifteen years ago and copying has always been an issue (I teach mostly engineers who tend to be ahead of the curve at cheating). What has perhaps changed is that now it is easier to detect cheating because AI assisted cheating is much higher quality. As such it stands out as obvious. The mere fact that a student writes a coherent sentence and a well structured argument normally puts one on alert. That Princeton has never proctored exams strikes me as farcical. Those honor codes don't work except to support the myth that we are above all that.
- te_chris 6mo agoLet me get this straight, they just didn’t supervise exams? For over 100 years. Lol.
- anonpolls 6mo ago[flagged]
- nottorp 6mo ago> with students pledging both to refrain from academic dishonesty and to report those they witness in violation Sounds more like an 1893 cost reduction to me... have the students supervise themselves for free.
- steveBK123 6mo agoWeren’t the grades already fake at most ivys, giving out As like candy? https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2025/12/princeton-news-adpol-dean-michael-gordin-continued-grade-inflation-overuse-of-a-plus-faculty-meeting https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2025/12/princeton-...
- hfnews 6mo ago[dead]
- sleepyams 6mo agoI wonder if a solution for higher education is to enforce access to technology both inside and outside of the classroom? I've been teaching math at various institutions for the past 8 years after getting my PhD, and the conversation among my friends and peers has become increasingly bleak over the years. At first LLMs were not great at math, but at this point they can reliably solve the majority of problems one might see in an undergraduate math course. Recently I interviewed for a position at a university and spoke to the Dean of Arts and Sciences who admitted to me candidly that the university didn't really know how to handle AI. Teachers increasingly must assume that students will not learn on their own outside of the time spent in class. This is difficult because we only see students for a handful of contact hours every week, and there is not enough time to both lecture AND ensure that a student has attained thorough understanding of the material. Teachers have adapted to this in various ways, but another stressor is that students are coming into college much less prepared. When I teach precalc I essentially have to assume that I will need to teach students how fractions work. The current system is not built to support this kind of learning. In order to make sure students are really learning, I now have to cut out major portions of the curriculum to make sure I have time to do active learning during class. It's obvious through students' performance that their understanding of things we work on in class is much more internalized and sophisticated than things I lecture about but assume they will learn on homework problems. A novel I really love is Anathem by Neal Stephenson. While Anathem is an admittedly goofy work of fiction, I do think Stephenson's vision of the future is compelling: the purity of mathematics education and research must be protected from the hyper-technological outside world. In reality I'm not anti-technology of course, I feel like access to a non-internet-connected computer is fine. But, I wonder if such a model would work for an educational institution?
- musicale 6mo agoSo they're going back to the approach they used for their first 147 years? Fair enough.
- silexia 6mo agoHigh trust society transitioning to a low trust society.
- bob_theslob646 6mo agoThe real question, is how many colleges in the United States actually proctor their in person exams?
- bunzee 6mo ago[dead]