4 ms·

Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly. I have a friend who in college had a

• Forgeties79 5mo ago
  I went to a school that actually tried to enforce it, and unfortunately it ended up being enforced wildly disproportionately along racial lines. My school had a very simple rule: if you were caught cheating, you were expelled. No strikes, no exceptions. That is a massive burden to put on an educator. Getting expelled from your university is a very serious, mandated fork in the road for anyone it happens to. So what do they do? If they relate to/empathize with the person, they try to handle it without reporting it. If they don’t, they reported and “let the system handle it.” As any reasonable person would expect, white people were not reported and marginalized groups were. Privileged groups also got exceptions (the football team had a massive cheating scandal that should have expelled about 15 players, and the professor reported it! But mumble mumble uhh they learned their lesson). After over a century they finally ended the system recently and honestly? Good. I appreciated what they were attempting to do, but it didn’t work.
  • f33d5173 5mo ago
    You could just... make punishments more proportionate? If people are regularly circumventing your punishment system because they feel it's too harsh, maybe take that as a sign.
    • Forgeties79 5mo ago
      That’s exactly what they did. Switched to a multiple strike system. Still, it was a very controversial change. The point though is these “honor codes” can become incredibly discriminatory and often, when scrutinized, prove not be effective at stopping cheating.
  • rayiner 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    • FireBeyond 5mo ago
      What, did racism end with “I have a dream…”? Public high schools in Georgia were still holding segregated proms no more than 10 years ago.
      • george916a 5mo ago
        [dead]
      • rayiner 5mo ago
        The elimination of personal racism in towns of less than 1,500 people in rural georgia isn’t a prerequisite to be skeptical of the claim that a university, which is subject to tremendous legal scrutiny and liability, is treating people differently based on race with regard to rule enforcement. Especially so when you’re invoking the specter of racially discriminatory enforcement as a reason against rules that would be highly beneficial for everyone. You can’t invoke unproven allegations of racism to argue against having rules and enforcing them. That’s just a red herring for people who don’t like rules.
        • nixon_why69 5mo ago
          OP stated that they witnessed the discrepancy firsthand. They didn't name the school, how are you so confident that they're wrong?
          • rayiner 5mo ago
            How does a student know how much cheating goes unreported in each group to form an opinion as to whether the policy is being applied fairly?
            • Forgeties79 5mo ago
  • grey-area 5mo ago
    The obvious answer would be to make the punishment more proportionate. Caught cheating in an exam? Lose half the marks for that exam (for example). Expulsion is far too harsh if cheating is widespread but there should be some penalty.
    • Forgeties79 5mo ago
      Agreed. And they finally changed it to a multi-strike system with different punishments. Which is good!
  • Jiro 5mo ago
    Could it be that cheating was enforced dispropportionately along racial lines because cheating happened disproportionately along racial lines?
• SoftTalker 5mo ago
  I've talked to instructors who've just given up. They know the students use AI. More and more of them do every year. The instructors can spot it easily, but if they brought them all into the academic dishonesty process, the department would grind to a halt. So they just let it go. They are all paying tuition, and they'll all get the credential they paid for.
  • nradov 5mo ago
    I sympathize with the instructors to an extent, but the reality is that LLMs will be a pervasive part of life going forward. Schools need to completely reinvent their curriculum around that new reality. It's going to be a painful process for instructors accustomed to the old way of teaching.
    • qotgalaxy 5mo ago
      [dead]
    • silver_silver 5mo ago
      The reality is that it’s not possible to learn if one offloads the work itself to an LLM
      • BarryMilo 5mo ago
        They learn if they have to, like we always did. In-person exams (proctored) are good for testing that.
      • novok 5mo ago
        Just like how you significantly increased the difficulty of exams in "open book" exams in the past where the only way to pass the open book exam was to know the material well, you similarly need to increase the difficulty of other work where it won't matter if you have an LLM, because you won't pass without knowing your shit either!
        • 5mo ago
• mannanj 5mo ago
  Yeah because isnt it just about money and relationships? They have relationships to those student's families and need the networks. They realize too that its more about the credentials and networks and money comes in if that support those over academic honesty.
• levocardia 5mo ago
  Not even prestigious ones. The school needs to sound like it has strong penalties against cheating, so there are really strict-sounding policies ("zero in the course"). But also, so many students cheat that actually enforcing these policies uniformly would hurt your graduation stats, make unhappy customers (students + parents), and hurt your revenue if you actually expel them. So the equilibrium is that the burden of reporting cheating is foisted upon professors, and it is understood -- though never explicitly communicated -- that academic integrity proceedings will be a huge administrative pain for you, the professor, and it is in your interest not to initiate them. The outcome is predictable: unless there is a scandal of massive proportions, the issues just..."go away" on their own. With some discretion for the professor to either just look the other way, or ding the student enough to feel vindicated, but not so much as to actually hurt the university's interests.
  • Forgeties79 5mo ago
    > So the equilibrium is that the burden of reporting cheating is foisted upon professors, and it is understood -- though never explicitly communicated -- that academic integrity proceedings will be a huge administrative pain for you, the professor, and it is in your interest not to initiate them. Not only that, but if you accuse a student of cheating and they are expelled, you have fundamentally altered their life forever. Talk about a burden.
    • ahtihn 5mo ago
      That's like saying if you accuse someone of murder and they get convicted, you've altered their life forever. That's not a burden, it's justice.
      • Forgeties79 5mo ago
        It is not reasonable to expect a calculus professor to routinely decide if they want to derail someone’s entire future because, for whatever reason (a whole other discussion), they tried to cheat on an assignment. A lot of systems don’t have multiple strikes or are otherwise deeply flawed (as well as routinely shown to be ineffective). If you cheat and are caught, you are expelled. There is no sense of proportion or nuance to those kinds of systems and to ask faculty and students to voluntarily enforce that for your school is a ridiculous expectation. If you’re asking me if there are situations where a student should be expelled because of cheating, the answer is yes. But I would say there are a lot of factors that have to be considered. It certainly can’t be one size fits all, which a number of institutions do. Otherwise it is not “justice” in the slightest. It’s taking a “tough on crime” approach to young adults in school enforced by their educators and peers, which is…well, let’s say “not effective.” At the end of the day these are institutions for learning. Plenty of people make huge mistakes, including massive breaches of trust, then learn their lesson and become better people for it. Giving a 0 on an assignment is often sufficient if we’re being honest. In a lot of cases that dig such a deep hole that your grade will never recover. If you want punitive measures, and one that hits where it hurts in a way that is relevant to the act of cheating, it doesn’t get much more appropriate than that. Not to mention the educator is going to watch them like a hawk for the rest of the semester. I’m not even going to bother elaborating on how absurd it is to compare murder and cheating on a homework assignment or whatever.
• raincom 5mo ago
  I know a guy who TA'ed at Stanford in the 1970's. He said his professor told him to give students “gentleman’s B’s” even when their work was not fully up to par, because many of them would eventually become part of the country’s future elite and power structure.
  • alfiedotwtf 5mo ago
    … which explains the current political climate in the US right now
• alfiedotwtf 5mo ago
  Money talks and bullshit walks. I’m beginning to understand why a lot of US politician seem to come from ivy leagues yet are dumb as hell.
  • vkou 5mo ago
    Many of them aren't even dumb, they just pretend that they are. They know full well that what they are doing is awful.
  • musicale 5mo ago
    Intelligence, good judgment, and ethics are not the same thing. Brilliant, charismatic people without any sense of ethics tend to do very well in school, in politics, and in most organizations.
• vjk800 5mo ago
  > Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly. Yes, because the working model is that the students are there because they want to learn. And they are paying for the professors to teach them. If they cheat in classes, they are really just cheating themselves, and this should be no concern to the staff.
  • frank_nitti 5mo ago
    I would argue they are also cheating other students in their chosen field, and any future employers who place high value on prestige of applicants’ university, no? If the only tangible, marketable value of graduating from a prestigious school was the raw knowledge and skill, I would agree with you. But it’s not. Having worked with people who clearly got preferential treatment in hiring based on their school’s prestige, over more capable applicants from lower-tier schools, I absolutely lose respect for staff at universities who turn a blind eye to cheating.
    • globalnode 5mo ago
      And people respect certifications, if the trust in those pieces of paper disappears, then like you said, the trust in people with those certs disappears too. I used to think it was just about the knowledge but its not.
  • MaxBarraclough 5mo ago
    > If they cheat in classes, they are really just cheating themselves, and this should be no concern to the staff. This is quite plainly not the case. If curve grading is used, cheating directly harms other students who aren't cheating. If curve grading isn't used, the university may end up handing out high grades like candy, and that's a problem for the university. Higher grades can translate to better career outcomes even if undeserved. If it were clear that this wasn't the case, nobody would cheat in the first place.