Very unfortunate. Obviously cheating is a very serious issue, but in this case I feel like something is systematically wrong with your class if half of your students are cheating.
Putting people in the position where cheating is such an alluring option is bad user experience. Evolve or die!
Why can't it both be true that the students cheated and deserve to be punished and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the course that drove half the students to cheat?
If I had to guess it was a basic requirement students had to take whether interested or not and cheating seemed like the easiest way to pass while devoting more time to other pursuits perceived to be more intellectually stimulating. Pure conjecture though.
Oh, come on. It's not like the course held a gun to their head and made them cheat. They didn't cheat to feed their family. It's (nearly) impossible for a college course to actually "drive half the students to cheat". They're big boys and girls, and they need to be responsible for their decisions.
The point of taking a course isn't to get an A. It's to learn something. If the students are too thick to grasp that fact, then Harvard made a mistake in admitting them and would do well to kick them out and give their places to students who get it.
No, but sometimes an A makes the difference between graduating or not.
It's not like the course held a gun to their head and made them cheat.
No, but if cheating in the class is common, then it's likely that the difficulty of the class material is artificially inflated to account for students' artificially high performance. If you know this, the professor doesn't know this, and you need an A, then it may be that the only way to get an A is to cheat.
At no school with which I am familiar would an A make the difference between graduating or not. A C or D might, but if one needs to cheat to get a C, there is something more serious at work (especially at the institution that invented the gentleman's C).
> The point of taking a course isn't to get an A. It's to learn something. If the students are too thick to grasp that fact, then Harvard made a mistake in admitting them and would do well to kick them out and give their places to students who get it.
Schools generally do a bad job of communicating this if it's actually true. If you get all As but retain nothing, you are rewarded handsomely. If you learn a lot but fail all your courses in the process, you'll be punished severely. If the school is too thick to align its incentives correctly, whose fault is that?
> If you get all As but retain nothing, you are rewarded handsomely.
I certainly haven't found this to be the case. Looking at my peers 11 years after graduation, the successful ones are by and large the ones who focused on learning, not the ones who focused on their GPAs.
What handsome rewards do you imagine are heaped upon A students while still in school?
If the students in question are incapable of looking ahead 1-3 years, that doesn't exactly speak well of them either.
I won't pretend that there isn't pressure on students to get As. But that doesn't mean we should condone students doing whatever it takes to get an A; it may mean that we should reduce the pressure on the students to get them.
Of the jobs at which you've worked, do you think that you got the job because you were smart/well spoken/skilled in a particular area/had some sort of connection, or because of your GPA? If you have interviewed candidates, did you look at their GPA? If so, how my weight did you give it?
Personally, I interviewed about 30 college students last year for internship and full-time positions; I didn't even look at a single GPA.
> What handsome rewards do you imagine are heaped upon A students while still in school?
Scholarships, honors, Dean's List, general praise, etc. And students who get bad grades are given the stink-eye no matter how clever they are. In general, students who get good grades are just treated better than students who fail. Is that not your experience?
This case is actually a good example of the phenomenon. The students don't appear to have been punished for not learning. According to the story, they didn't copy any answers — it just looks like they discussed the subject matter. It may well be that these students learned better from collaborating than they would have from working separately. I know I usually did in school. But because it gave them an advantage in the grading system that the school didn't want them to have, they were punished for it. Learning doesn't appear to be the primary concern here.
(I don't mean to say that I think they should cheat. I'm just pointing out that they may well have learned better than they otherwise would have, but that doesn't matter because learning is not the overriding concern here.)
Harvard doesn't award scholarships based on grades and they don't have a Dean's list. I can't speak to honors at Harvard, but at the Ivies with which I am more familiar, departmental honors carry a lot more weight than that magna/summa nonsense, and are awarded based on advanced work in your major, not on your GPA.
I'm sure that students are praised for getting 'A's, but are they men and women, or are they golden retrievers? I was mostly an 'A' student as an undergrad, but I certainly never felt that I was "given the stink-eye" on the occasions that I earned a 'C'.
To be clear, I'm not saying that 'B' and 'C' students are better off than 'A' students; I'm just observing that in my experience, they are also generally no worse off at the Ivies.
I agree that there are silly incentives to get 'A's. We should probably do something about that. But that doesn't make it unreasonable to expect the alleged "best and brightest" to be able to see past those silly incentives.
People have such weird logic. When 80% of the population is criminalized, we see that as a surefire sign of a bad government. But that completely changes when the population is "students" — then it's all their fault and the administration is just helpless against all these lazy kids.
Without necessarily absolving the students of responsibility for their actions, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that rampant cheating represents a failure on the school's part.
If anything, it means the school didn't bring the hammer down soon/hard enough on smaller incidents of cheating.
The surest way to get most of your students to cheat is for the cheaters to get ahead of the class. The non-cheaters will eventually crumple just to keep up.
I actually agree with this. I'm not saying it's definitely the case (never been to Harvard — the closest I've got is a friend who went to Wellesley), but rampant cheating is generally a sign of either poor communication or perverse incentives.
The article mentions the blurred line between collaborating and cheating. Seems like this is the former since it requires analysis rather than just comparing matching answers.
But the point is... does the line even exist? Why should a line that does not produce optimal results exist? Wouldn't you be able to come up with a better articulated answer to a question if you see the responses of all your peers first? The problem is well then we can't grade you because we can't separate you from your peers. But then why go to school in the first place? To get affirmation or to learn?
I also found this surprising. While penalties at some schools may seem extreme I think expulsion, immediate failure of the class, etc are perfectly reasonable consequences. Catching a student cheating isn't very easy, its shockingly common, and it takes a toll on the rest of the student body that doesn't cheat.
I consistently notified teachers when I saw blatant occurrences of cheating. The last thing I want is for my Alma Mater to be producing an unethical alumni body that waters down the value of my degree and GPA.
Clearly, the punishments aren't high enough if half of a course weighs their options and decides to cheat anyway. And compared to most universities a 1 year suspension for cheating on an exam seems very lenient.
I know a guy who was suspended for a year for lifting a few sentences from a previous paper he had written, and using them in a different paper for a different course, without attributing himself.
You're on Hacker News expressing schadenfreude toward some college students instead of doing something that makes the world a better place. Congratulations — you're squandering your opportunities.
They need to get what's coming to them, and that is not schadenfreude. Don't compare cheating on an exam to my condemnation of it. "Doing something that makes the world a better place" Could you possibly be more general and irrelevant?
It's funny how they think it's a problem of educating students about what isn't considered acceptable behavior. The students knew what they were doing, they just compared the probability of getting caught with the reward and made a decision.
I agree completely. I remember that cheating in college (at least on a small scale -- e.g. copying homework in certain STEM classes with a "right" answer) was common and not viewed as risky behavior. I doubt that any of the people who cheated would have said that they felt they were morally in the right or even in a gray area if confronted. Cheating is more akin to stealing a laptop from an empty dorm room than it is to running afoul of some arcane law that few people have ever heard of.
Given the high value that many desirable career paths (e.g. consulting, finance, academia) place on a good GPA, and the low probability of getting caught, the risk/reward tradeoff from cheating is naturally going to tempt people to make the unscrupulous choice.
I hate to say it, but this isn't that surprising. I recently came from one of these top universities and there's a problematic combination of factors at play:
1. Students are under a ton of stress, have very little time to do work and have very high standards for themselves.
2. Guidelines are not clear defined or communicated as to what is and isn't cheating. There's a ton of grey area.
3. It is incredibly easy to cheat and get away with it.
I doubt there is a single person that wasn't guilty of it in one shape or form. For most, it was just things like working with other people on problem sets (which for some courses is considered cheating), not "serious cheating". But still, when "cheating" is this rampant, the university needs to reconsider its policy.
Personally, I liked a grad CS professor I had. On the first day, he spend 20 minutes talking about this. He very clearly defined what was and wasn't cheating, when we were and weren't able to collaborate, and the consequences (guaranteed F in the course, for even minor transgressions, and possible expulsion from the university). It was a very strict policy. He even told us that the answers for all of our labs and homeworks were available online if we looked, and even looking up the website was tantamount to cheating. If anything seemed like a grey area, we were required to get written permission from a TA or him to do. Draconian? Perhaps a bit. But I liked that it was very black and white, and frankly I don't know a single person that even considered cheating in the course.
1. How can they have very high standards if they cheat? Stress is no excuse for cheating, spend less time getting drunk.
2. It's always mentioned that cheating is not acceptable at the beginning of every term in every class. And isn't it obvious anyway?
3. Yes it's unfortunately too easy.
I don't get the downvotes with your post. This is absolutely correct. I went through a very rigorous engineering program and I was never unclear about what constituted cheating. You did problem sets yourself, and you did exams without copying anyone else's answers. It it's not a damned difficult concept for someone at a University where everyone has 98th %-ile SAT scores.
I thought about downvoting him for his first part where he says "just don't get drunk." There is a lot of stress even for the students not getting hammered.
I didn't cheat because it repelled my moral code, and my suspicion that others were cheating added to my stress. A morally-grey friend said there wasn't any moral problem with cheating, but I don't think he did because there wasn't a point (in his view). He would later TA a class and caught some cheaters, whom he reported.
I'm not justifying those excuses. But those are the reasons students give (at least to themselves), and it would be naive for the university to overlook this and tell themselves that students just shouldn't cheat based on principle as opposed to fascillitating an environment that promotes cheating.
Perhaps "high standards" wasn't the correct choice of words on my part. I meant they all except themselves to get good grades. In particular where I went, where the school is largely populated with pre-meds where GPA is everything! If they're in a situation where the reward for cheating is high and the likelyhood for getting caught is low and they don't see any other option (not that there isn't but often they don't see it) they are likely to succumb.
One of the things I disliked most about lecturing was cheating/plagiarism. It took up a lot of time that I could use to do marking/help students. There was no incentive, nor time given, on the part of the University to deal with plagiarism (everyone just kinda wanted it to not be there). Also, being wrong about it was really serious. I could seriously hurt students who had not plagiarised (it was especially difficult to figure out who plagiarised on team projects).
I also gave a 10 minute lecture on cheating/plagiarism on the first day of class.
It is good, though, to see lecturers who are serious about cheating/plagiarism like your professor. It takes a lot of work to stay on top of that stuff. He deserves cudos.
In the end, plagiarism really hurts the student the most (and the university to some extent (but probably not Harvard)).
It looks to me also more as some form of anti-cheating theater. Expecting that there is absolutely no collaboration / idea exchange going on with a take-home exam seems naive at the very least.
At a school like Harvard, with their much-touted financial aid where students aren't supposed to have to hold down outside jobs to pay for tuition, how do students end up with very little time to do work? Class itself should take, what, three to five hours on a typical day? That leaves a lot of time for homework and studying. Do people just overwhelm themselves with too many extracurricular activities?
From my experience (Brown), students often have on-campus jobs, take more classes than the norm in order to graduate early or edify themselves, and involve themselves in a variety of extracurricular activities with often intensive time requirements (i.e. sports). All of these contribute to stress. If you are out of town for a debate tournament and then have an exam on Monday morning when you get back, you feel a bit stretched.
(Not at Harvard) I worked jobs some semesters and not others. Even when I did not have outside employment, I was still constantly busy.
A lot of this was poor time management and over-stress on my part, but that's what I was in college to learn to manage. If I went back Quantum-Leap style I would be able to chew through everything a lot easier.
There's been a steady decline in amount of work students are willing to put in for study over the past decade.
By and large undergraduates at university just refuse to put in the hours for study. If you assign any reading of more than 50 pages, maybe 5% of the class will read it. Some of them are incapable of focusing for that long, some of them simply refuse to. what they do instead differs from person to person, but what is clear is that students simply expect less work and given the rampant grade inflation professors often go along with the students expectations.
You can always take enough classes (or hard enough classes) to take up any given amount of time. Or if you're into extracurricular activities, same thing. Consider the quote in bold at the top of this Harvard prof's personal page:
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~hgeorgi/
Even if a student takes a more moderate approach, workloads can be highly unpredictable (even to the professor), which creates the same problem.
I can speak from personal experience as I actually kept strict logs my senior year of how much work I was doing. Mind you at the time I was taking some grad classes, but it really wasn't unusual work loads compared to the people around me. I spent between 15-25 hours in class per week. I worked (teaching assistant) about 10 hours a week. I spent about 50-60 hours per week on homework, labs and general studying. And I did a varsity sport, which took about 3-4 hours per day. On most days, I would wake up at 5am, go to practice, go straight to class, stay on campus and study until 10 or 11 at night and then go to bed. Weekends would be similar. If I was lucky, I would get 1 night off a week.
I don't know where some of the other commenters get the idea that students these days don't take the time to study. I can't comment a lot about Harvard, but at my school, it was difficult to come across a student who wasn't taking a full load of courses (more often than not double or triple majors), involved in several extracurricals and often doing work study.
We've known for a while just how widespread this is. Surveys have shown 2/3 of undergrads cheat at some point in college. Students just don't feel they're doing something immoral when they cheat.
"Nearly half the students in a class of more than 250 are suspected of jointly coming up with answers or copying off one another, said Jay Harris, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education. Independent groups of students appear to have worked together by e-mail or other means on responses to short questions and an essay assignment"
Involving others in cheating with you greatly increases the "leak vectors" for the "crime" to be discovered. Loose lips sink ships.
It's unclear from the story the size of the actual groups that were cheating but it seems to be that the groups were not 125/2 groups of 2 but much larger groups of students helping each other.
I guess that is one life lesson that all the education in the world doesn't provide that people with street smarts might have had.
No doubt that the administration was tipped off by somebody (or would have been if that's not the way this went down.)
One thing that I really appreciated at MIT was that when we were given take-home tests or other take-home assignments, it was expected (and often encouraged) that we collaborate with our classmates. Writing down the exact same answer as another classmate was fine, so long as you documented who you worked with and who contributed what to the assignment. It provided an important lesson since collaboration has been a huge part of my professional career.
Now if those Harvard students broke the rules, well, they broke the rules. But I can't help but think that if Harvard is restricting collaboration in take-home assignments, that they're doing it wrong.
Perhaps, but isn't there the risk that a charismatic leader could get team members to essentially do the work for him/her? Sure, you could say that's a lesson in life, but ideally, you want a passing grade in engineering mechanics to mean that that person has competency in engineering, not merely the politics and management of engineering.
Of course, this risk is mitigated by having the final weighted much heavier than the rest of the coursework and not being take home. But that approach ends up going to the polar extreme of valuing collaboration
Perhaps, but isn't there the risk that a charismatic leader could get team members to essentially do the work for him/her?
There were charismatic students who tried that, but it would become apparently very quickly what was happening and that point our competitiveness would kick in and we would demand contributions from that person before we would assist any further.
But yes, there is always someone who will abuse the system, and you're not going to get far trying to achieve 100% compliance all the time.
The mechanism to avoid having a charismatic leader unfairly being granted credentials in courses not based on their knowledge is have a pass/fail (heavily protctored) exam at the end of the sememster drawing on knowledge from all the sections of the course. Fail the exam, fail the course. Pass the exam, you get the grade you earned throughout the semester.
We had a few of those at SFU, and they were awesome - the only ones who ever failed them were the cheaters - The ones who had actually done all the work/exams finished them in about half the time allocated.
On assignments, that ends up with the charismatic leader not understanding what's going on come test time. (I am unfamiliar with collaboration on take-home tests.) The practice questions really are warm-ups for the test in most classes.
"Perhaps, but isn't there the risk that a charismatic leader could get team members to essentially do the work for him/her?"
Funny, you mention that. There was a "charismatic guy" who passed trough my whole computer engineering program just by getting a dedicated and smart girlfriend who would help him in all the assignments and even give him copy during written tests.
The guy could not program to save his life, and yet got his degree. At the end of the program he ditched her instantly and got a hot girlfriend instead, i kind of felt sorry for her girlfriend, but there is your life lesson.
I agree that giving take home exams might not be the best idea, but I place 100% of the blame on the students for this. It is completely reasonable to give academic honesty instructions to students and request that they be followed. Maybe it's not realistic to expect that the instructions will be followed, but it is certainly reasonable to punish the students for violations of academic honesty. Honestly, I think Harvard would be well within their rights to expel any student who blatantly plagiarized an exam, take-home or not.
It's a little scary (maybe not surprising) that 2% of Harvard undergrads were involved in this scandal. This incident, combined with the Stuyvesant scandal makes me lose so much faith in the national student body. I wonder what the solution to this apparently endemic problem is. Maybe the best idea is to accept that students are going to copy and collaborate, and give each student personalized assignments.
It's a little scary (maybe not surprising) that 2% of Harvard undergrads were involved in this scandal. This incident, combined with the Stuyvesant scandal makes me lose so much faith in the national student body.
You've lost faith "in the national student body" based on the actions of a tiny minority of students? Really?
Now contrast that with Virginia Tech's honor code policy in use in all CS courses where absolutely no collaboration of any kind is permitted. The only thing you can discuss with classmates is the meaning of a particular requirement.
Take-home assignments in course VI are ripe for co-work.
But the take-home test in 6.046, in my day, required us to affirm that we had worked on it alone. It was a lot of fun (I'm an algorithm dork), and I felt really bad -- like I had cheated -- when someone looked over my shoulder at what I was working on and shouted out the answer.
As a counterpoint, at Caltech during the 70s (at least) it was pretty standard to have a take home final that was (1) no collaboration, (2) closed book, and (3) timed. In fact, I very clearly remember screaming out loud on hard tests as time ticked away. Thank goodness I was in a deserted campus building in the middle of the night. You could study/cram all your notes and texts that you wanted before you put everything away for the test, but, alas, it usually didn't help. They weren't that kind of test.
For non-take home tests of any kind, the campus honor system specifically prevented the professor from staying in the room where the test was being given. They could force the students to collect in one place, but there was a strict rule against any kind of proctoring. The professor or TA with the test passed it out, hung around for a bit to answer any initial questions, and then left the room. They would typically return every fifteen minutes or so to answer any new questions, and then finally return at the time limit to collect the tests. The professor also could not prevent you from taking the test from the specified room and going, say, to the library to take the test. You missed any chance to clarify test questions, and you had to be back before time was up, but they could not force you to stay in a room packed with tense people.
It was pretty refreshing when trust and presumed integrity like that was integrated into the educational system.
The majority of classes at Caltech still have take home exams like you described. For midterms and finals, the exams were handed out at the beginning of the week and due at the end of the week. More often than not, they were open book (although the joke was that those books weren't going to help you solve the problems anyway). The honor code at Caltech was taken very seriously and in my opinion, the students reciprocated with integrity. Cheating and dishonesty was a big social stigma there.
My freshman year (1977-78) I was what was then known as a "computroll": someone who spends far too much time in the computing center, usually to the detriment of their academic performance. I managed to flame out so spectacularly first and second terms that I had to petition to be allowed to stay for third term. I was allowed, on the condition that I pass all my third term classes.
It was close. It came down to one exam where I knew that if I got this one question, I would pass, and if I did not get it, I would fail and be kicked out of school. I also knew exactly what equation I needed from the textbook to solve the problem. I could visualize what page it was on, and exactly where it was on the page--I just couldn't visualize the damned equation itself.
I was alone in my room, and the book was sitting closed on my desk just a foot or two away. It would have taken less than 10 seconds to glance at the equation I needed and pass that exam. But it was a closed book exam and peeking would violate the honor system, so peeking was out of the question.
So, I failed the exam and got kicked out.
I spend the next year at my local community college, taking courses in psychology, anthropology, and economics to show that (1) I could actually do college level academic work (2) even in subjects that weren't in my main interests. I also took a computer course, to show that I could succeed in college course even when I have access to a computer, to show I could keep my computroll tendencies in check.
Caltech let me back in, and I even was able to transfer enough credits from the community college courses to come back as a sophomore. And since I had graduated high school in three years, the year at the community college actually dropped me back to where my age matched my classmates instead of being a year younger. So it all worked out reasonably.
I have no idea if I'm this honest, because I've never been tested this way, but I will say this: I want to spend my career working with people like you. o.O
I think cheating is one of the signs of the crumbling of our civilized society. It is a scourge that doesn't stop at final exams, but as we can see in the financial sector one that continues on through life.
That said, we lay all the blame on students, but universities themselves are also cheating. Multiple well-known universities in recent years have been exposed as lying,[1] about their enrollment statistics to rankings organizations.
One of the reasons my father moved us to the U.S. from his home country of Bangladesh is that he couldn't stand to raise his children in a culture where he had to pay a bribe just to get his phone service hooked up. When I see tacit acceptance of cheating amongst students in American universities, I see the exact same elements of cultural dysfunction that my dad saw in Bangladesh. I fear without stiffer penalties for cheaters, both for students who cheat and university administrators who cheat, our culture of basic American honesty will continue to crumble.
[1] Everyone uses the term "misreporting" but "misreporting" is what happens when you intend to write down 1470 and accidentally write down 1740. "Lying" is the appropriate term for what happens when you instead write down "1500" for a period of a decade.
About 5 years ago MIT's graduate management Sloan School had a "cheating" incident where potential students could see if they were admitted before they were officially told by trivially modifying the URL of their web account. It was widely discussed on mailing lists with detailed instructions.
When the school found out, it delayed admittance for those students that did so by a year, saying some crap like "in this new post-ENRON age we need to teach that ethics matter." But the only ethics they taught was "don't make the guy in charge look silly."
(I tend to fall on the "don't hack into things" side of arguments here, but the ease of the "hack" as well as the incredibly minor impact it had on anyone of importance just made this all seem way overblown. EDIT Plus, it was MIT. Can't you take a joke?)
I haven't thought this through at all, but what is problematic about students finding out their admission results before whatever magical date? At first glance, it doesn't seem like the students are worse off (they have more time to plan/act based on their admission result and are free to not look at the information if they don't want it), nor does it seem like the school is better off (I can't think of a good way for them to take advantage of students' uncertainty right now).
Honestly, I don't think it's a failing of "Civilized Society", as much as it is a reflection of the value we place on academic scores over what a student actually knows.
South Korea has a terrible problem with cheating, and correspondingly harsh penalties for cheating - all because they have put such a high value on their student's scores; those scores determine a child's future.
If your future was on the line, and you didn't have the chops to make it on ability alone, what's to loose by cheating?
> If your future was on the line, and you didn't have the chops to make it on ability alone, what's to loose by cheating?
That's the same sort of thinking that people who take bribes to hook up phone service use to justify their actions. The small bribe is not a lot of money to the person in the nice neighborhood who is hooking up phone service, but is good money for the underpaid service worker who takes the bribe. What does he have to lose by cheating?
>> I think cheating is one of the signs of the crumbling of our civilized society.
I think cheating is a sign of an over emphasis or overly large focus on external motivators (or artificial targets) rather than on things that actually matter[1]. People are much less likely to cheat on things that they directly care about or are based in tangible reality. With all else removed, cheating is a great way of meeting the target.
A grade on a test in a boring course is a perfect example of an artificial target that creates an unhealthy imbalance in a students' mind. Since the knowledge itself (or the growth potential from the course) is perceived as irrelevant or non-existent, the only thing left to care about is the grade, and so all else becomes removed...
[1] Ie. Over industrialization or standardization.
People are bad at distinguishing between real targets and artificial targets. E.g. an exam in a "boring" course is not an artificial target. It serves important functions to the university and the student. It's an abstraction but that does not make it artificial.
The attitude that cheating is okay on "artificial targets" is the same sort of attitude that leads to ignoring things like financial regulations ("they don't really apply in _this_ case").
take home exam and collaboration? take home exam is just asking for that in this day and age. I thought the idea was it would be easy, but only the students that put the work in would learn something that they'd need to know/use in a harder exam later.....
I know this comment will be unpopular to many who feel the injustice of cheating trumps all else.
I can't help but feel like this is push-back against academia. This is illegal file sharing all over again. This is students working together using internet resources to share knowledge to advance and succeed, to disrupt their education in a way their authority figures thoroughly disapprove of. To me, it's very similar to people working together and using internet resources to share music and movies, to disrupt their entertainment experiences.
I'm not sure how to feel about this. Cheating isn't always the correct answer; usually it's not. But to say it doesn't have a place in the toolbox of life is a bold-faced lie.
I can't help but feel like this is push-back against academia. This is illegal file sharing all over again.
I really don't see the parallel. If you want to justify illegal file sharing as push-back against the music industry, you would say something like "the music industry insisted on selling CDs when consumers wanted MP3s" or "the music industry was seen as charging an unfair amount for digital music when their cost of production is clearly much lower than old distribution media." What is the analog for Harvard? The students want a diploma and a high GPA, but decided that it was unreasonable to have to learn/work for it? Nobody forced them to go to Harvard. I don't see what injustice or bad treatment they are pushing back against here. They just want to obtain a grade without doing the work.
Having just finished graduate school I think the cheating issue often comes down to a misalignment between what is being taught and the skills actually needed in the real-world.
Most students are at college to get a "piece of paper" that makes it easier to get a job. Unfortunately, I think most of them are also intuitively aware that what they are learning will more than likely be irrelevant in any real business environment. In the realm of CS, how often does one use calculus, linear algebra, unusual algorithms, or automata theory in the standard 9-5 coding job?... Rarely - thus the incentive in students to minimize hard learning in these topics
Something really doesn't add up here. 125 students collaborating on a final would not only be difficult to organize but would require a lot of coordination. Not to mention getting 125 students to collectively decide to cheat and not discuss it.
How would this even happen?
My educated guess would be a complete, graded test from a previous year passed around. That would not require 125 students conspiring together, only that one test was somehow available.
This problem was rampant at Vanderbilt where fraternities and sororities would keep old, graded tests for every class on campus. It was widely recognized for the reason that Greek GPAs were higher than non-Greek. I dated a sorority VP and got to see the massive file cabinets with all of the tests and watch all of her "sisters" use them constantly, without any concern for the morality of the action. (edit: To be clear, I was offered and refused access to the files)
About five years ago Columbia threw out the final for their Western literature course that every freshman takes because one professor gave the thing almost in full to her students and it spread like mad (through the football team and friends, mostly). I didn't get it but I heard people talk about getting it mailed to them by five different people in a day. So it may be something like that - one massively better "study guide" that got spread around.
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[ 18.9 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadPutting people in the position where cheating is such an alluring option is bad user experience. Evolve or die!
If I had to guess it was a basic requirement students had to take whether interested or not and cheating seemed like the easiest way to pass while devoting more time to other pursuits perceived to be more intellectually stimulating. Pure conjecture though.
The point of taking a course isn't to get an A. It's to learn something. If the students are too thick to grasp that fact, then Harvard made a mistake in admitting them and would do well to kick them out and give their places to students who get it.
The point of taking a course isn't to get an A.
No, but sometimes an A makes the difference between graduating or not.
It's not like the course held a gun to their head and made them cheat.
No, but if cheating in the class is common, then it's likely that the difficulty of the class material is artificially inflated to account for students' artificially high performance. If you know this, the professor doesn't know this, and you need an A, then it may be that the only way to get an A is to cheat.
Schools generally do a bad job of communicating this if it's actually true. If you get all As but retain nothing, you are rewarded handsomely. If you learn a lot but fail all your courses in the process, you'll be punished severely. If the school is too thick to align its incentives correctly, whose fault is that?
I certainly haven't found this to be the case. Looking at my peers 11 years after graduation, the successful ones are by and large the ones who focused on learning, not the ones who focused on their GPAs.
That is out of the school's control. It isn't really relevant to the incentives set by the school.
If the students in question are incapable of looking ahead 1-3 years, that doesn't exactly speak well of them either.
I won't pretend that there isn't pressure on students to get As. But that doesn't mean we should condone students doing whatever it takes to get an A; it may mean that we should reduce the pressure on the students to get them.
Personally, I interviewed about 30 college students last year for internship and full-time positions; I didn't even look at a single GPA.
Scholarships, honors, Dean's List, general praise, etc. And students who get bad grades are given the stink-eye no matter how clever they are. In general, students who get good grades are just treated better than students who fail. Is that not your experience?
This case is actually a good example of the phenomenon. The students don't appear to have been punished for not learning. According to the story, they didn't copy any answers — it just looks like they discussed the subject matter. It may well be that these students learned better from collaborating than they would have from working separately. I know I usually did in school. But because it gave them an advantage in the grading system that the school didn't want them to have, they were punished for it. Learning doesn't appear to be the primary concern here.
(I don't mean to say that I think they should cheat. I'm just pointing out that they may well have learned better than they otherwise would have, but that doesn't matter because learning is not the overriding concern here.)
I'm sure that students are praised for getting 'A's, but are they men and women, or are they golden retrievers? I was mostly an 'A' student as an undergrad, but I certainly never felt that I was "given the stink-eye" on the occasions that I earned a 'C'.
To be clear, I'm not saying that 'B' and 'C' students are better off than 'A' students; I'm just observing that in my experience, they are also generally no worse off at the Ivies.
I agree that there are silly incentives to get 'A's. We should probably do something about that. But that doesn't make it unreasonable to expect the alleged "best and brightest" to be able to see past those silly incentives.
Without necessarily absolving the students of responsibility for their actions, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that rampant cheating represents a failure on the school's part.
The surest way to get most of your students to cheat is for the cheaters to get ahead of the class. The non-cheaters will eventually crumple just to keep up.
I consistently notified teachers when I saw blatant occurrences of cheating. The last thing I want is for my Alma Mater to be producing an unethical alumni body that waters down the value of my degree and GPA.
Given the high value that many desirable career paths (e.g. consulting, finance, academia) place on a good GPA, and the low probability of getting caught, the risk/reward tradeoff from cheating is naturally going to tempt people to make the unscrupulous choice.
1. Students are under a ton of stress, have very little time to do work and have very high standards for themselves. 2. Guidelines are not clear defined or communicated as to what is and isn't cheating. There's a ton of grey area. 3. It is incredibly easy to cheat and get away with it.
I doubt there is a single person that wasn't guilty of it in one shape or form. For most, it was just things like working with other people on problem sets (which for some courses is considered cheating), not "serious cheating". But still, when "cheating" is this rampant, the university needs to reconsider its policy.
Personally, I liked a grad CS professor I had. On the first day, he spend 20 minutes talking about this. He very clearly defined what was and wasn't cheating, when we were and weren't able to collaborate, and the consequences (guaranteed F in the course, for even minor transgressions, and possible expulsion from the university). It was a very strict policy. He even told us that the answers for all of our labs and homeworks were available online if we looked, and even looking up the website was tantamount to cheating. If anything seemed like a grey area, we were required to get written permission from a TA or him to do. Draconian? Perhaps a bit. But I liked that it was very black and white, and frankly I don't know a single person that even considered cheating in the course.
I didn't cheat because it repelled my moral code, and my suspicion that others were cheating added to my stress. A morally-grey friend said there wasn't any moral problem with cheating, but I don't think he did because there wasn't a point (in his view). He would later TA a class and caught some cheaters, whom he reported.
Perhaps "high standards" wasn't the correct choice of words on my part. I meant they all except themselves to get good grades. In particular where I went, where the school is largely populated with pre-meds where GPA is everything! If they're in a situation where the reward for cheating is high and the likelyhood for getting caught is low and they don't see any other option (not that there isn't but often they don't see it) they are likely to succumb.
I also gave a 10 minute lecture on cheating/plagiarism on the first day of class.
It is good, though, to see lecturers who are serious about cheating/plagiarism like your professor. It takes a lot of work to stay on top of that stuff. He deserves cudos.
In the end, plagiarism really hurts the student the most (and the university to some extent (but probably not Harvard)).
A lot of this was poor time management and over-stress on my part, but that's what I was in college to learn to manage. If I went back Quantum-Leap style I would be able to chew through everything a lot easier.
By and large undergraduates at university just refuse to put in the hours for study. If you assign any reading of more than 50 pages, maybe 5% of the class will read it. Some of them are incapable of focusing for that long, some of them simply refuse to. what they do instead differs from person to person, but what is clear is that students simply expect less work and given the rampant grade inflation professors often go along with the students expectations.
Even if a student takes a more moderate approach, workloads can be highly unpredictable (even to the professor), which creates the same problem.
I don't know where some of the other commenters get the idea that students these days don't take the time to study. I can't comment a lot about Harvard, but at my school, it was difficult to come across a student who wasn't taking a full load of courses (more often than not double or triple majors), involved in several extracurricals and often doing work study.
[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1286242...
Involving others in cheating with you greatly increases the "leak vectors" for the "crime" to be discovered. Loose lips sink ships.
It's unclear from the story the size of the actual groups that were cheating but it seems to be that the groups were not 125/2 groups of 2 but much larger groups of students helping each other.
I guess that is one life lesson that all the education in the world doesn't provide that people with street smarts might have had.
No doubt that the administration was tipped off by somebody (or would have been if that's not the way this went down.)
Now if those Harvard students broke the rules, well, they broke the rules. But I can't help but think that if Harvard is restricting collaboration in take-home assignments, that they're doing it wrong.
Of course, this risk is mitigated by having the final weighted much heavier than the rest of the coursework and not being take home. But that approach ends up going to the polar extreme of valuing collaboration
There were charismatic students who tried that, but it would become apparently very quickly what was happening and that point our competitiveness would kick in and we would demand contributions from that person before we would assist any further.
But yes, there is always someone who will abuse the system, and you're not going to get far trying to achieve 100% compliance all the time.
We had a few of those at SFU, and they were awesome - the only ones who ever failed them were the cheaters - The ones who had actually done all the work/exams finished them in about half the time allocated.
Funny, you mention that. There was a "charismatic guy" who passed trough my whole computer engineering program just by getting a dedicated and smart girlfriend who would help him in all the assignments and even give him copy during written tests.
The guy could not program to save his life, and yet got his degree. At the end of the program he ditched her instantly and got a hot girlfriend instead, i kind of felt sorry for her girlfriend, but there is your life lesson.
It's a little scary (maybe not surprising) that 2% of Harvard undergrads were involved in this scandal. This incident, combined with the Stuyvesant scandal makes me lose so much faith in the national student body. I wonder what the solution to this apparently endemic problem is. Maybe the best idea is to accept that students are going to copy and collaborate, and give each student personalized assignments.
You've lost faith "in the national student body" based on the actions of a tiny minority of students? Really?
Sigh. Only 2 more years...
But the take-home test in 6.046, in my day, required us to affirm that we had worked on it alone. It was a lot of fun (I'm an algorithm dork), and I felt really bad -- like I had cheated -- when someone looked over my shoulder at what I was working on and shouted out the answer.
For non-take home tests of any kind, the campus honor system specifically prevented the professor from staying in the room where the test was being given. They could force the students to collect in one place, but there was a strict rule against any kind of proctoring. The professor or TA with the test passed it out, hung around for a bit to answer any initial questions, and then left the room. They would typically return every fifteen minutes or so to answer any new questions, and then finally return at the time limit to collect the tests. The professor also could not prevent you from taking the test from the specified room and going, say, to the library to take the test. You missed any chance to clarify test questions, and you had to be back before time was up, but they could not force you to stay in a room packed with tense people.
It was pretty refreshing when trust and presumed integrity like that was integrated into the educational system.
It was close. It came down to one exam where I knew that if I got this one question, I would pass, and if I did not get it, I would fail and be kicked out of school. I also knew exactly what equation I needed from the textbook to solve the problem. I could visualize what page it was on, and exactly where it was on the page--I just couldn't visualize the damned equation itself.
I was alone in my room, and the book was sitting closed on my desk just a foot or two away. It would have taken less than 10 seconds to glance at the equation I needed and pass that exam. But it was a closed book exam and peeking would violate the honor system, so peeking was out of the question.
So, I failed the exam and got kicked out.
I spend the next year at my local community college, taking courses in psychology, anthropology, and economics to show that (1) I could actually do college level academic work (2) even in subjects that weren't in my main interests. I also took a computer course, to show that I could succeed in college course even when I have access to a computer, to show I could keep my computroll tendencies in check.
Caltech let me back in, and I even was able to transfer enough credits from the community college courses to come back as a sophomore. And since I had graduated high school in three years, the year at the community college actually dropped me back to where my age matched my classmates instead of being a year younger. So it all worked out reasonably.
That said, we lay all the blame on students, but universities themselves are also cheating. Multiple well-known universities in recent years have been exposed as lying,[1] about their enrollment statistics to rankings organizations.
Emory was exposed for its lies just a few days ago: http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/08/21/fallout-fr...
University of Illinois was exposed earlier this year: http://abovethelaw.com/university-of-illinois-college-of-law
One of the reasons my father moved us to the U.S. from his home country of Bangladesh is that he couldn't stand to raise his children in a culture where he had to pay a bribe just to get his phone service hooked up. When I see tacit acceptance of cheating amongst students in American universities, I see the exact same elements of cultural dysfunction that my dad saw in Bangladesh. I fear without stiffer penalties for cheaters, both for students who cheat and university administrators who cheat, our culture of basic American honesty will continue to crumble.
[1] Everyone uses the term "misreporting" but "misreporting" is what happens when you intend to write down 1470 and accidentally write down 1740. "Lying" is the appropriate term for what happens when you instead write down "1500" for a period of a decade.
When the school found out, it delayed admittance for those students that did so by a year, saying some crap like "in this new post-ENRON age we need to teach that ethics matter." But the only ethics they taught was "don't make the guy in charge look silly."
(I tend to fall on the "don't hack into things" side of arguments here, but the ease of the "hack" as well as the incredibly minor impact it had on anyone of importance just made this all seem way overblown. EDIT Plus, it was MIT. Can't you take a joke?)
South Korea has a terrible problem with cheating, and correspondingly harsh penalties for cheating - all because they have put such a high value on their student's scores; those scores determine a child's future.
If your future was on the line, and you didn't have the chops to make it on ability alone, what's to loose by cheating?
That's the same sort of thinking that people who take bribes to hook up phone service use to justify their actions. The small bribe is not a lot of money to the person in the nice neighborhood who is hooking up phone service, but is good money for the underpaid service worker who takes the bribe. What does he have to lose by cheating?
I think cheating is a sign of an over emphasis or overly large focus on external motivators (or artificial targets) rather than on things that actually matter[1]. People are much less likely to cheat on things that they directly care about or are based in tangible reality. With all else removed, cheating is a great way of meeting the target.
A grade on a test in a boring course is a perfect example of an artificial target that creates an unhealthy imbalance in a students' mind. Since the knowledge itself (or the growth potential from the course) is perceived as irrelevant or non-existent, the only thing left to care about is the grade, and so all else becomes removed...
[1] Ie. Over industrialization or standardization.
The attitude that cheating is okay on "artificial targets" is the same sort of attitude that leads to ignoring things like financial regulations ("they don't really apply in _this_ case").
I can't help but feel like this is push-back against academia. This is illegal file sharing all over again. This is students working together using internet resources to share knowledge to advance and succeed, to disrupt their education in a way their authority figures thoroughly disapprove of. To me, it's very similar to people working together and using internet resources to share music and movies, to disrupt their entertainment experiences.
I'm not sure how to feel about this. Cheating isn't always the correct answer; usually it's not. But to say it doesn't have a place in the toolbox of life is a bold-faced lie.
I really don't see the parallel. If you want to justify illegal file sharing as push-back against the music industry, you would say something like "the music industry insisted on selling CDs when consumers wanted MP3s" or "the music industry was seen as charging an unfair amount for digital music when their cost of production is clearly much lower than old distribution media." What is the analog for Harvard? The students want a diploma and a high GPA, but decided that it was unreasonable to have to learn/work for it? Nobody forced them to go to Harvard. I don't see what injustice or bad treatment they are pushing back against here. They just want to obtain a grade without doing the work.
Most students are at college to get a "piece of paper" that makes it easier to get a job. Unfortunately, I think most of them are also intuitively aware that what they are learning will more than likely be irrelevant in any real business environment. In the realm of CS, how often does one use calculus, linear algebra, unusual algorithms, or automata theory in the standard 9-5 coding job?... Rarely - thus the incentive in students to minimize hard learning in these topics
How would this even happen?
My educated guess would be a complete, graded test from a previous year passed around. That would not require 125 students conspiring together, only that one test was somehow available.
This problem was rampant at Vanderbilt where fraternities and sororities would keep old, graded tests for every class on campus. It was widely recognized for the reason that Greek GPAs were higher than non-Greek. I dated a sorority VP and got to see the massive file cabinets with all of the tests and watch all of her "sisters" use them constantly, without any concern for the morality of the action. (edit: To be clear, I was offered and refused access to the files)