For being at an elite "best-of-the-best" school, these students sure sound like a bunch of spoiled children. The reasons for cheating seem to vary from "it was a hard course so I had to cheat" to "everyone does it" to "it's an open book test, so we should be allowed to cheat".
Have you not been paying attention to the entitlement and attitudes of the global financial elite in 2009-2010? This was precisely their response to the mismanagement of the banks: everybody was doing it, it was accepted, now bail us out and leave.
Not to remove blame where blame is due, but in both cases there are incentive and regulatory problems. If you give people problems whereby they feel that they cannot do well without cheating (i.e. when everyone else is cheating), then cheating becomes institutionalized. Thus, to be cheating in a class where 99% of the students are cheating is to be somewhat less culpable than to be among the students cheating when only 1% of the students are cheating.
That is to say, to have a situation when cheating becomes the norm implies a much larger institutional and cultural collapse in which the larger framework (and not simply the cheating individuals) demands investigation.
What are the larger trends here?
Well, the first might simply be the idea that greed is okay. In this case, we can witness the following transformation in American values fairly clearly.
Phase 1 (religious): Greed is bad, we do things for the sake of a heavenly kingdom only. We are only temporary stewards of the wealth we have.
Phase 2 (agnostic): Greed may be a necessary part of evolution and competition for limited resources, but we need to limit it and make it a long term sort of greed.
Phase 3 (hedonist): My identity is defined by how much money I have, and I don't care how I get it.
In other words, there is long-term value erosion. This is not to say that one's values necessarily have to be religious-Christian in derivation, but in the American context this was overwhelmingly the case and this erosion has basically given way to live in the moment materialism.
The practical consequences is that many people involved in business, and this is most clear in the financial sector which has no ostensible tie to any product whatsoever and attracts people who care only about money, not only seek money, but seek to destroy any barriers that keep them from getting as much money as possible. In the US this has meant saturation of elite universities (pulling an increasing proportion of the best and brightest into the financial sector), buying out of the major political parties, shutting out the minor political parties, and removing regulatory functions (i.e. the SEC). Additionally, there is the desire to weaken the electorate by importing cheap labor from other countries that will be liable to manipulation via mass media, decreasing the likelihood that any independent party will achieve critical mass.
Because this is a long-term institutional problem there is no obvious solution, except to continue with the values that have not entirely been eroded (i.e. honesty) and to encourage others who do their function (i.e. continue working in the public sector and enforcing existing regulation). Creating new services and teams of people that are doing a good job simply for the sake of doing a good job is never a bad idea either -- although it is always easy to get sucked into the mentality of "greed is good."
"Thus, to be cheating in a class where 99% of the students are cheating is to be somewhat less culpable than to be among the students cheating when only 1% of the students are cheating."
I'm pretty sure I agree with you but comments like these could be more verbose. It's not helpful to simply disagree without explanation. One word responses are just dogmatic.
Thanks. I personally believe in right and wrong, but also in degrees of right and wrong. Doing the right thing in a situation where everyone else is doing the wrong thing is more difficult. Doing the right thing when everyone is doing the right thing is easy. Thus, you don't really know your values or the depth of your values until you are placed in a situation where it is difficult to carry them out.
Here, for "culpability" I mean simply that I believe that the power to actualize the values of each individual differs, and that those who are able to actualize their values even in very difficult situations is worth more and to be praised more than those who are unable to and go with the flow.
This is to say that simply saying you have certain values means nothing. You have to act on those values and, because acting on those values can be difficult, I have sympathy for those who fail to -- even as I praise those who do.
Your analysis is not wrong. The UCI/The Tour DeFrance, Lance Armstrong were just as bad. You highlight lots of good issues (including - other people making money off it regardless of who wins, the act of not doping was arguably dangerous, given the exertion levels of the pack, etc). The conclusion of this section is fine I'd also agree with (It is true). But ultimately you fail to provide a framework for analysis. You conclude This is to say that simply saying you have certain values means nothing
If you were a CEO of UCI and the Board asked you: 'How would you "fix" the pervasive problem' would your really come back debating "doping" and "problem"? Or would your come back with something more like: Here is my Answer X,Y,Z. While itsn't perfect, we've identified things that are clearly wrong that we can fix. First, we need to draw lines between doping and legitimate theraphy. Second, we need to have the science to fairly test between the Two. Third, while maintaining privacy and fairness, the athletes and the teams will need to co-operate with the [XYZ] league to make sure it doesn't damage the credibility of the competition and abuse our position of trust amongs the fans....etc.
I'd actually be interested to hear your views on that. Your analysis pointed out the analogy to the Armstrong case (was not something I thought of before hand, but it fits perfectly). But when I see a huge, intelligent analysis thrown up then ends the way yours does, it seems like a waste of all the energy that you put into writing it. (Unless you are a lawyer -- with a point to defend =D)
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with contemporary doping scandals to offer programmatic advice on what can be done about them, except to say that in my view here too we are probably at the cusp of major shift in a massive historical trend. This trend I suspect will end with 'doping' being considered the norm not only among athletes but among the general population, and the chemicals used will be seen as an generally accepted life enhancement rather than an aberration -- much like vitamin supplements already are. What to do about it today, when doping is illegal, at least within the context of professional sports competitions? I don't know, especially since in this context it seems that the trend is a scientific one, perhaps mixed with a degradation in values (here I'm simply not informed enough to comment).
You want to "fix" the problem? It probably depends on the gravity of the specific offense and the pervasiveness of the offense. Pushing a few people harshly and publicly can send a statement that certain things are not acceptable, and curb abuses by others who are watching them. This is not a particularly bad tactic, but again it is context specific.
My own approach is always to fit the solution to the problem in such a way that the optimal outcome (i.e. reduction of abuses in the short and long-term) is achieved.
This is pretty common failure avoidance technique.
But it lacks ambition.
Imagine a father or a mother with a newborn infant, "Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with...changing nappies" so I just won't bother. The kid cries "You want to "fix" the problem?..." The kid cries. "My own approach is always to fit the solution to the problem in such a way that the optimal outcome (i.e. reduction of abuses in the short and long-term) is achieved." The kid cries.
Is that being a responsible Adult? The kid might ask. I dunno. Not my kid. Anyway, who gives a shit about the kid? The kid is kind of fucking annoying.
Maybe that's just the world we live in.
But the difference between an Adult and a Child, is that the Adult doesn't have the luxury of being the Child.
Somebody has to clean up the Shit.
Maybe the kid has a point?
Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing.
Fine, but I think you generally have be familiar with the problem domain to devise the optimal solution. I am in a good position to change the diapers or punish my own child. Not quite so for someone else's, particularly if they are not in my own geographic vicinity.
A lot of the anti-cheating campaigns are based on social norms, shame or reputation-based things. So if a student can ask themselves, "If I found out a fellow student, or future employee, had done this, would I be angry?" and honestly answer "No" then the honor systems have no effect at all.
A similar change happened when calculators became common in classrooms. Teachers had to get much more specific about when they were allowed and when they weren't. It looks like teachers (and grad student tutors) haven't come to any consensus on when collaboration is OK. It's no wonder the students are confused.
Note that the class in question is a Government clas that had a reputation as the easiest course in school, taken by students who wanted to coast to a degree. It's a far cry from the bastions of intellectual inquiry found in other departments. But this year, the professor decided to change the course's reputation, and the students were caught by surprise.
How much "cheating" was actually done here? Was it simply that people's answers looked similar? On a take-home test with open book, open Internet, you'd expect that everyone would probably Google the same sources.
I'm also suspicious of people who claim that sharing notes is in violation of some cheating rule. I posted the source code to most of my school projects on GitHub. If people want to crib off my code that's not my problem -- I did the work, whether or not they want to is their problem.
I did this back in H.S. comp sci class (posted my projects to my personal website). I was punished by getting a D in AP comp sci (though aced the AP exam). Definitely was not approved at my school...aided and abetted in cheating apparently.
Computer Science is sort of odd in that respect, and it does vary from department to department.
For example, my undergrad school was very clear that everyone's home directories were set to being publicly readable, and that it was expected that there would be times that you would want to see someone else's source. This was essentially asynchronous lab work: we could always talk though problems together, but we were never able to cut and paste code (the detection system looked for things like whitespace to detect cut-and-paste vs hand-typed).
When there were two matching submissions, both students would be pulled up and then the administration had to figure out who copied who. What I heard on the grapevine was that usually it was really obvious: students that had been struggling were the ones most likely to cheat, and even when they matched in ability, the guilty party would crack pretty quickly and own up.
Personally, I think there are better ways of doing computer science assignments anyway: I tend to TA classes where students work on self-defined projects rather than doing the same rote exercise, so cut-and-paste is no help anyway.
> I did the work, whether or not they want to is their problem.
And the problem of the mediocre students who don't cheat, but get graded below the cheaters; and employers, who will tend to hire less honest and less capable graduates.
Well, maybe, but I was never one to care too much about grades. More often than not copying off me was a bad idea for most of the students because the professors knew that the level of work was too high for the cheater.
> I posted the source code to most of my school projects on GitHub. If people want to crib off my code that's not my problem -- I did the work, whether or not they want to is their problem.
This is not true at all post-secondary institutions. For example, the University of Waterloo's Policy 71 - Student Discipline[0] explicitly puts the burden on you to prevent others from cribbing your work:
"Students are responsible for demonstrating behaviour that is honest and ethical in their academic work. Such behaviour includes:
<snip>
* Preventing their work from being used by others, e.g. not lending assignments to others, protecting access to computer files."
It appears ludicrous on its face. If I leave my house unlocked and someone steals all my things, what ethical boundary have I violated? No criminal is an agent of my will. Not locking my doors does not make me complicit in my own robbery.
The worst part is that cheating indicates a strong cynicism about the course and the value of learning the material. I thought elite schools were able to recruit people with intellectual curiosity and character. Clearly the admissions formula is broken.
Well, it could have been a horrible, cynicism-inspiring class, but given the overall savvy of elite students (who would likely have dropped it early if that were the case) I think chances are it's just that the students being admitted are lacking in genuine intellectual curiosity and perhaps aspects of character.
Universities teach in such a way as to encourage academic pursuit of knowledge, but the majority of students will be seeking field experience post-graduation. This mismatch happens regardless of whether a school is top-tier.
As someone who attended an "elite" college, I can assure you that you only need 3 things to get into them:
1. A plan to follow (you can easily find great ones online these days) telling you what to do in high school (with respect to classes, extracurricular activities, volunteering, leadership, standardized tests, recommendation letters, etc.)
2. Money (i.e., live in an relatively affluent area with a good public school or attend a good private school)
3. Determination (lots of it)
Your personality doesn't matter at all for anything other than the interview, which you can also pass with flying colors as long as you have basic acting skills (which can be easily learned as well). Basically just smile a lot and don't act like a psychopath at the interview, and you're good to go.
As for getting into a specific college, that's a crapshoot. The admissions process is a black box, and there's no way to guarantee admission to a certain university unless your parents are big donors. But if you apply to, say, all the Ivies + Stanford + MIT, you're guaranteed to get into at least 2 or 3 if you have the 3 things I described above.
The quality of teaching and of the coursework is highly variable, even at an elite institution. A lot depends on the teacher's interest in the topic, their ability to teach, and the composition of the students taking the course (whether it's a required class for graduation, or an elective class).
I think it is important for students to be cynical about their schools and recognize that there is a huge difference between academia and real life.
Most of schooling is complete crap that you'll never use, or in the case of computer sciences especially it is outdated and/or barely practical by the time you graduate and get a job.
What schooling is important for is teaching how to collaborate and how to learn. Most of the learning you'll actually use on the job is stuff you'll learn on your own or after you are hired by working with other people.
In my opinion from what I read in this article these students working together to figure out a tough test and collaborating are using their brains and learning how to accomplish things. That is vastly more important than an arbitrary, contrived, academia model of learning.
80% of kids at elite schools come through the same kind of feeder system of either good local public schools or private schools.
In that system there's a series of successively narrower hoops you have to jump through - if there's only one junior high that teaches math beyond a certain point and not everyone can go there, those kids are going to be better prepared for the high school that teaches more advanced things, so they'll make up a disproportionate amount. Since it's really hard to on the track once you're not on it, at every level of evaluation and selection you keep selecting out of smaller and smaller sections of the initial pool.
The people who come out of that system tend to be supremely competent, but in a limited way. If you take a stand in high school approaching a topic from a different angle and a teacher doesn't like it and gives you a C (the horror), when it comes time to apply for Harvard there are an essentially limitless number of competitors who didn't and who got the A. So people who naturally play it safe and cynical tend to move on, and people who don't tend to adapt or get cut.
It's the best description I've seen. That's how I remember everyone when I started school, but everyone got a lot more cynical after the 2008 crisis. People still do the same things, though - the attitude is that even if the ladder might not be there when you get to the top, it's still the only one around.
"Some students asked whether there was a fundamental contradiction between telling students to use online resources, but not to discuss the test with each other."
Um..yes. Study groups or websites are online resources. So is facebook. If a student posts the questions online and starts discussions with anonymous posters, or even reads relevant discussions posted online before the test, how is that different from discussing with one another. There are plenty of ways to have a test that explicitly prevents collaboration. This professor clearly did not try.
This is a case of the changing times leading to miscommunication.
The implied intent of the rule is that READ-ONLY NON-INTERACTIVE Internet use was permitted. To today's students, the Internet is a READ-WRITE INTERACTIVE tool, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Can you quote the rule because in the article it appears that the intent of the rule was that above all you couldn't interact with other students [on the course] to complete the work but as long as you kept to that rule then general internet resources were fine to use?
There is a fundamental difference between using online resources to find an answer to a question and collaborating with others to find the same answer. Part of the grade is based on how well you can find the answers, not how well your collective group can.
If the test is open book, open Internet, that doesn't mean you can ask your friends on Facebook for help, just because Facebook is on the Internet.
I think that the class was likely poorly designed, but that doesn't mean that the students are all in the clear.
It's not even really about how well you can find the answers, it's more about what you'll learn while you're searching for and thinking about the answers.
That process is completely cut short if you just copy someone else's answer.
I dont think students are all in the clear in the least bit. I just happen to believe that permitting online resources implies permitting collaboration, as the internet is a tool for collaboration as much as it is a tool for pure research. As far as I'm concerned, it a test is open internet, then it's de facto collaboration permitted.
Maybe in the past there was more of a distinction between online resources and peers, but today I think the line is quite blurred. Would a thoughtful online discussion of the students enrolled in the class be considered an online resource, or would it be classified as discussing the test with others?
Personally, I think some of the most valuable learning happens when discussing course content with my peers. Sometimes, I take the role of the learner, other times I'm forced to test my own understanding when explaining things to others. It's a win-win. Because I engage with others, it's likely that many of the same ideas I put down on paper would be similar to other people's work. But I don't consider that cheating. However, I would never take an answer that somebody else had written, change the words around, and submit it. Not being directly involved in this case at Harvard, it's hard to tell exactly what the students did.
Most people here are saying that the students were clearly in the wrong. "Lack intellectual curiosity and character". "spoiled children". I don't agree at all. Aside from the formal rules, smart people pick up on which rules can be broken safely. In fact, knowing which rules in life you should break and which rules you should follow is probably a critical factor for success in life.
Jaywalking is illegal in most (all?) US cities, but in many it's completely acceptable behavior. Jaywalking in Seattle (edit: was Manhattan), on the other hand is not done and you better not do it within eyesight of a police officer. Jaywalking in the Netherlands is completely fine (even right in front of the police), but in Germany it's not. The laws are the same, but the culture is different.
There are thousands of examples of socially acceptable behavior that doesn't correspond with the law. Drinking in public. Sometimes fine, sometimes not. Forging a signature. Occasionally fine, usually not.
Startups break laws all the time too. You have to get a product out first, and only when you start making money you get lawyers involved to make sure everything is going by the books. But if you aren't making real money yet the government really doesn't care whether you follow every law to the letter. And as a founder you have to decide which laws can be broken safely and which laws must be obeyed. Get it wrong and you may lose your company: either through legal trouble or because it doesn't get off the ground. The founders talk freely about the laws they broke. They brag about it! It's considered clever. Relentlessly resourceful. It's a fine line.
So if the culture in Harvard was such that cooperating for take-home exams was sometimes acceptable and sometimes not, then I consider that a legitimate excuse. It's easy to test too. Just look at the exams of that course of the previous years and check if people worked together on those too. Compare with other courses. If the results show that students consistently break the "individual work only" clause for some courses and not for other courses then the students probably didn't think they were doing anything wrong. They were just acting in the socially accepted manner.
Jaywalking in Manhattan, on the other hand is not done and you better not do it within eyesight of a police officer.
Seriously? I have stayed in Manhattan for couple years and done my share of jaywalking occasionally in clear sight of NYPD. May be I am just lucky but this just doesn't resonate with me.
"In fact, knowing which rules in life you should break and which rules you should follow is probably a critical factor for success in life."
I completely agree. Especially for entrepreneurs, it's a super important skill that is not easily learned but often creates incredible advantages and opportunities.
Seems like an arbitrary distinction. Job, school, marriage, et al are all social constructs with certain principles and rules to try keep things operating smoothly and beneficially to all participants. You can break the rules in any of them to the detriment of your counter-parties.
In this case, they cheapen the brand of a Harvard degree and potentially screw the non-cheaters if there's a grading curve.
I think there is a distinction, since cheating completely defeats the purpose of school (learning) or games (fun), while breaking some rules may create more value than it destroys in the case of entrepreneurs (like Airbnb and Uber do).
> They were just acting in the socially accepted manner.
Yes, I'm guessing that this sort of thing is very common at Harvard (and, to be fair, in all colleges). They reasoned that the risk of getting caught was low enough to justify the cheating.
And they got caught. They lost their bet. So now they should pay the price.
Yes, there are things which are culturally acceptable, but technically against the rules. Just because you get away with murder, and don't get caught, that doesn't mean murder is OK.
It's quite clear that plagiarism was badly enforced, but anyone who admitted to it would have been severely punished. Most of your examples are completely different - they are things that nobody cares about, even if you get caught.
Arguably, it's a terrible system if severe crimes are routinely left unpunished. Either the penalty should be lowered, or they should enforce it better.
So while I don't just blame the students, I think it's a sign that the system is fucked. The students are part of it, as are the lectures, and universities (do they fire lecturers who don't try to catch cheats, the same way they fire unpopular lecturers?), employers (perhaps they should test graduates to see if they are actually competent?), and society in general.
> One student recalled going to a teaching fellow while working on the final exam and finding a crowd of others there, asking about a test question that hinged on an unfamiliar term. The student said the fellow defined the term for them.
I realise that I only have this snippet of text, but: Didn't they have a dictionary? Didn't they have search engines?
Some of the attitudes displayed in that article are surprising. And disappointing.
The course instructor set the rules but the implementation was "loose" (casual). The students went one step too far in their liberties. I think it's a collective failure on part of the professor, TFs and students.
The thing about intellectual honesty is that when you don't feel like you know much relative to your peers and context (e.g., you're a freshman at Harvard), you don't think you have much to lose. You don't realize what you have to lose until it becomes clear about all the hidden potential that you've taken for granted and that you're risking -- how important intellectual honesty is to any type of sustainable effort.
So there is a chicken and egg problem with intellectual honesty. You don't appreciate it until you've acquired experience. And you don't acquire sustainable experience until you start to appreciate it.
The flip side though is that most young people just need to be told and slightly inspired about how important it is. Then they need to develop that over several years. In college can work. Learning to be confident with your own intellectual pursuits based on honesty though -- that's what college is supposed to teach. But yeah, a lot of time in all the competitiveness, it gets lost.
I went to school in Boston and knew lots of people of Harvard and MIT, and the amount of cheating was absolutely staggering. The "Greek"/frat network contributes to this cheating culture greatly (some houses more than others, but they're all part of it.)
Personally, I think that some of these people are so used to being that #1 student that when they're surrounded by other #1'ers, they do whatever it takes to remain on top, or so their logic goes.
They're not the people who ever build cool things anyway though, so who cares.
I can't speak to frats or Harvard, but I can speak of personal experience of MIT. When I began taking courses at MIT, I worked my proverbial ass off in a very difficult class in CS (course 6 by their parlance) and got an A. After the semester was over, I found out that students generally work together on labs, which was a major portion of the class, and would have significantly lightened my load. (Talking about spending entire weekends with hands-on-keyboard, very unreasonable amount of work for one person, even an overachieving one such as myself)
This is a _cultural_ difference of MIT; people tend to work with one another, or they tend to fail. They learn it freshman year, and it's ingrained in their psyche from then on.
Interestingly, the line between cooperative work and cheating is difficult to discern and mostly set up by the professor. When the professor does not say one way or another if the work is collaborative, students will generally consider it collaborative.
As for the "[n]ever build cool things" troll, I'll let you google the number of neat inventions by famous MIT / Harvard alums; I won't waste my time.
Not what I meant. I'm actually in favor of people working collaboratively on problems, I'm talking about computer-servers full of P-Set solns, essays, old tests, occasionally the sale of these for money, etc etc etc.
I think a case of widespread "cheating" like this is a good indication there was something wrong with the course and the professor. If the material would have been covered in class and not purposefully tricky it's likely there wouldn't have been cheating.
Also, open book open Internet take home test might as well be code for group test. I always found that to be an absurd way to give a test. If you want to not have cheating give the test in class over the material covered in the course.
"For being at an elite "best-of-the-best" school, these students sure sound like a bunch of spoiled children", "They're not the people who ever build cool things anyway though, so who cares." - These and similar sentiments seem a bit common on HN and, to me, seem rather myopic and, frankly, immature. The latter statement is pretty clearly false and I don't plan on listing examples to demonstrate that.
Going to a "best-of-best" school is rarely not in someone's best interest. I did go to Harvard undergrad and I did not attend YC, but the draw is similar: sure the prestige matters and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, bu the real value is in the people that you live and work with, both peers and mentors.
Does giving money help you get into Harvard? I'm sure it does and if that money benefits the undergraduate population more than having someone who is subjectively less deserving in that class is a detriment, then it is in all students' best interest to have the paying member accepted.
Regarding the cheating: It happens and I'm sure it happens at every campus. I don't think that's what happened to half of this class. It's a large class, it's probably required for Gov concentrators, and it seems clear that the expectations were not understood by the students or the teaching fellows. What I DID do a lot of was pool notes in preparation for an exam, and I wouldn't be surprised if that is responsible for a lot of the consistencies in test answers. Why redefine a term that you have a ("the") definition for in your notes? And honestly, I think it's healthy to have varying levels of respect for different material. If I want to be a physicist, I'm going to really make sure I understand linear algebra. For the Core class on Chinese history, I'm going to pool notes, cram, and try to scrape an A, because the A means more to me than the knowledge.
Sorry to address several topics; I've been reading HN for a while and this is my first comment, so I'm still learning the ropes.
Okay, I'm the one that said they sound like spoiled children, so I'll bite. Can you explain to me how that is myopic and immature? These are all quotes from the article:
"He said, 'I gave out 120 A’s last year, and I’ll give out 120 more,' "
"Having my degree revoked now would mean I lose my job."
"some said that they will sue the university if any serious punishment is meted out"
"Some students asked whether there was a fundamental contradiction between telling students to use online resources, but not to discuss the test with each other"
These aren't responses of mature adults. This is immature students whining and complaining because they got caught cheating. The test explicitly said "students may not discuss the exam with others." It doesn't matter how it was done last year, or how hard the class is, or how much money they spent on the class. If the exam says not to discuss it with other students and you do, you have cheated.
I totally agree. And it sounds like the students knew perfectly well that they were cheating... "[one of the students] said that he also discussed test questions with other students, which he acknowledged was prohibited, but he maintained that the practice was widespread and accepted." Now they are just whining that they got caught ("I'm a Harvard grad, god dammit!").
I went to a small science/engineering school with a very serious honor code, and can assure you there is nothing contradictory about saying "you may use online resources, but do not discuss this test with anyone." It's sad that some Harvard students think their privilege entitles them to ignore the rules.
plainly highlighted the relevant portion of the examination rules. If the Harvard students didn't understand what those rules meant, then the Harvard admission office must be admitting some students with some severe reading comprehension problems.
Open book, open Internet and TA's that discuss exam questions sounds like the actions taken against the students are rather capricious.
It seems that the environment of the exam as well as the difficulty of the questions sugguest that the exam was designed to test collaborative abilities, rather than knowledge recital.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadThat is to say, to have a situation when cheating becomes the norm implies a much larger institutional and cultural collapse in which the larger framework (and not simply the cheating individuals) demands investigation.
What are the larger trends here?
Well, the first might simply be the idea that greed is okay. In this case, we can witness the following transformation in American values fairly clearly.
Phase 1 (religious): Greed is bad, we do things for the sake of a heavenly kingdom only. We are only temporary stewards of the wealth we have.
Phase 2 (agnostic): Greed may be a necessary part of evolution and competition for limited resources, but we need to limit it and make it a long term sort of greed.
Phase 3 (hedonist): My identity is defined by how much money I have, and I don't care how I get it.
In other words, there is long-term value erosion. This is not to say that one's values necessarily have to be religious-Christian in derivation, but in the American context this was overwhelmingly the case and this erosion has basically given way to live in the moment materialism.
The practical consequences is that many people involved in business, and this is most clear in the financial sector which has no ostensible tie to any product whatsoever and attracts people who care only about money, not only seek money, but seek to destroy any barriers that keep them from getting as much money as possible. In the US this has meant saturation of elite universities (pulling an increasing proportion of the best and brightest into the financial sector), buying out of the major political parties, shutting out the minor political parties, and removing regulatory functions (i.e. the SEC). Additionally, there is the desire to weaken the electorate by importing cheap labor from other countries that will be liable to manipulation via mass media, decreasing the likelihood that any independent party will achieve critical mass.
Because this is a long-term institutional problem there is no obvious solution, except to continue with the values that have not entirely been eroded (i.e. honesty) and to encourage others who do their function (i.e. continue working in the public sector and enforcing existing regulation). Creating new services and teams of people that are doing a good job simply for the sake of doing a good job is never a bad idea either -- although it is always easy to get sucked into the mentality of "greed is good."
No.
Here, for "culpability" I mean simply that I believe that the power to actualize the values of each individual differs, and that those who are able to actualize their values even in very difficult situations is worth more and to be praised more than those who are unable to and go with the flow.
This is to say that simply saying you have certain values means nothing. You have to act on those values and, because acting on those values can be difficult, I have sympathy for those who fail to -- even as I praise those who do.
If you were a CEO of UCI and the Board asked you: 'How would you "fix" the pervasive problem' would your really come back debating "doping" and "problem"? Or would your come back with something more like: Here is my Answer X,Y,Z. While itsn't perfect, we've identified things that are clearly wrong that we can fix. First, we need to draw lines between doping and legitimate theraphy. Second, we need to have the science to fairly test between the Two. Third, while maintaining privacy and fairness, the athletes and the teams will need to co-operate with the [XYZ] league to make sure it doesn't damage the credibility of the competition and abuse our position of trust amongs the fans....etc.
I'd actually be interested to hear your views on that. Your analysis pointed out the analogy to the Armstrong case (was not something I thought of before hand, but it fits perfectly). But when I see a huge, intelligent analysis thrown up then ends the way yours does, it seems like a waste of all the energy that you put into writing it. (Unless you are a lawyer -- with a point to defend =D)
You want to "fix" the problem? It probably depends on the gravity of the specific offense and the pervasiveness of the offense. Pushing a few people harshly and publicly can send a statement that certain things are not acceptable, and curb abuses by others who are watching them. This is not a particularly bad tactic, but again it is context specific.
My own approach is always to fit the solution to the problem in such a way that the optimal outcome (i.e. reduction of abuses in the short and long-term) is achieved.
You want to "fix" the problem?...
My own approach is always...
This is pretty common failure avoidance technique.
But it lacks ambition.
Imagine a father or a mother with a newborn infant, "Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with...changing nappies" so I just won't bother. The kid cries "You want to "fix" the problem?..." The kid cries. "My own approach is always to fit the solution to the problem in such a way that the optimal outcome (i.e. reduction of abuses in the short and long-term) is achieved." The kid cries.
Is that being a responsible Adult? The kid might ask. I dunno. Not my kid. Anyway, who gives a shit about the kid? The kid is kind of fucking annoying.
Maybe that's just the world we live in.
But the difference between an Adult and a Child, is that the Adult doesn't have the luxury of being the Child.
Somebody has to clean up the Shit.
Maybe the kid has a point?
Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing.
http://paulgraham.com/essay.html
In other words, the point of thinking is to solve, not to display thought.
Same as for the Harvard students.
1 - Wall of words
2 - Lance Armstrong
Question is: how do you clean it up?
A similar change happened when calculators became common in classrooms. Teachers had to get much more specific about when they were allowed and when they weren't. It looks like teachers (and grad student tutors) haven't come to any consensus on when collaboration is OK. It's no wonder the students are confused.
I'm also suspicious of people who claim that sharing notes is in violation of some cheating rule. I posted the source code to most of my school projects on GitHub. If people want to crib off my code that's not my problem -- I did the work, whether or not they want to is their problem.
For example, my undergrad school was very clear that everyone's home directories were set to being publicly readable, and that it was expected that there would be times that you would want to see someone else's source. This was essentially asynchronous lab work: we could always talk though problems together, but we were never able to cut and paste code (the detection system looked for things like whitespace to detect cut-and-paste vs hand-typed).
When there were two matching submissions, both students would be pulled up and then the administration had to figure out who copied who. What I heard on the grapevine was that usually it was really obvious: students that had been struggling were the ones most likely to cheat, and even when they matched in ability, the guilty party would crack pretty quickly and own up.
Personally, I think there are better ways of doing computer science assignments anyway: I tend to TA classes where students work on self-defined projects rather than doing the same rote exercise, so cut-and-paste is no help anyway.
And the problem of the mediocre students who don't cheat, but get graded below the cheaters; and employers, who will tend to hire less honest and less capable graduates.
This is not true at all post-secondary institutions. For example, the University of Waterloo's Policy 71 - Student Discipline[0] explicitly puts the burden on you to prevent others from cribbing your work:
"Students are responsible for demonstrating behaviour that is honest and ethical in their academic work. Such behaviour includes:
<snip>
* Preventing their work from being used by others, e.g. not lending assignments to others, protecting access to computer files."
[0] https://uwaterloo.ca/secretariat/policies-procedures-guideli...
It appears ludicrous on its face. If I leave my house unlocked and someone steals all my things, what ethical boundary have I violated? No criminal is an agent of my will. Not locking my doors does not make me complicit in my own robbery.
As someone who attended an "elite" college, I can assure you that you only need 3 things to get into them:
1. A plan to follow (you can easily find great ones online these days) telling you what to do in high school (with respect to classes, extracurricular activities, volunteering, leadership, standardized tests, recommendation letters, etc.)
2. Money (i.e., live in an relatively affluent area with a good public school or attend a good private school)
3. Determination (lots of it)
Your personality doesn't matter at all for anything other than the interview, which you can also pass with flying colors as long as you have basic acting skills (which can be easily learned as well). Basically just smile a lot and don't act like a psychopath at the interview, and you're good to go.
As for getting into a specific college, that's a crapshoot. The admissions process is a black box, and there's no way to guarantee admission to a certain university unless your parents are big donors. But if you apply to, say, all the Ivies + Stanford + MIT, you're guaranteed to get into at least 2 or 3 if you have the 3 things I described above.
http://www.quora.com/College-and-University-Admissions/What-...
Most of schooling is complete crap that you'll never use, or in the case of computer sciences especially it is outdated and/or barely practical by the time you graduate and get a job.
What schooling is important for is teaching how to collaborate and how to learn. Most of the learning you'll actually use on the job is stuff you'll learn on your own or after you are hired by working with other people.
In my opinion from what I read in this article these students working together to figure out a tough test and collaborating are using their brains and learning how to accomplish things. That is vastly more important than an arbitrary, contrived, academia model of learning.
In that system there's a series of successively narrower hoops you have to jump through - if there's only one junior high that teaches math beyond a certain point and not everyone can go there, those kids are going to be better prepared for the high school that teaches more advanced things, so they'll make up a disproportionate amount. Since it's really hard to on the track once you're not on it, at every level of evaluation and selection you keep selecting out of smaller and smaller sections of the initial pool.
The people who come out of that system tend to be supremely competent, but in a limited way. If you take a stand in high school approaching a topic from a different angle and a teacher doesn't like it and gives you a C (the horror), when it comes time to apply for Harvard there are an essentially limitless number of competitors who didn't and who got the A. So people who naturally play it safe and cynical tend to move on, and people who don't tend to adapt or get cut.
Fair disclaimer, the article is over a decade old.
No.
The implied intent of the rule is that READ-ONLY NON-INTERACTIVE Internet use was permitted. To today's students, the Internet is a READ-WRITE INTERACTIVE tool, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Can you quote the rule because in the article it appears that the intent of the rule was that above all you couldn't interact with other students [on the course] to complete the work but as long as you kept to that rule then general internet resources were fine to use?
If the test is open book, open Internet, that doesn't mean you can ask your friends on Facebook for help, just because Facebook is on the Internet.
I think that the class was likely poorly designed, but that doesn't mean that the students are all in the clear.
That process is completely cut short if you just copy someone else's answer.
Personally, I think some of the most valuable learning happens when discussing course content with my peers. Sometimes, I take the role of the learner, other times I'm forced to test my own understanding when explaining things to others. It's a win-win. Because I engage with others, it's likely that many of the same ideas I put down on paper would be similar to other people's work. But I don't consider that cheating. However, I would never take an answer that somebody else had written, change the words around, and submit it. Not being directly involved in this case at Harvard, it's hard to tell exactly what the students did.
Jaywalking is illegal in most (all?) US cities, but in many it's completely acceptable behavior. Jaywalking in Seattle (edit: was Manhattan), on the other hand is not done and you better not do it within eyesight of a police officer. Jaywalking in the Netherlands is completely fine (even right in front of the police), but in Germany it's not. The laws are the same, but the culture is different.
There are thousands of examples of socially acceptable behavior that doesn't correspond with the law. Drinking in public. Sometimes fine, sometimes not. Forging a signature. Occasionally fine, usually not.
Startups break laws all the time too. You have to get a product out first, and only when you start making money you get lawyers involved to make sure everything is going by the books. But if you aren't making real money yet the government really doesn't care whether you follow every law to the letter. And as a founder you have to decide which laws can be broken safely and which laws must be obeyed. Get it wrong and you may lose your company: either through legal trouble or because it doesn't get off the ground. The founders talk freely about the laws they broke. They brag about it! It's considered clever. Relentlessly resourceful. It's a fine line.
So if the culture in Harvard was such that cooperating for take-home exams was sometimes acceptable and sometimes not, then I consider that a legitimate excuse. It's easy to test too. Just look at the exams of that course of the previous years and check if people worked together on those too. Compare with other courses. If the results show that students consistently break the "individual work only" clause for some courses and not for other courses then the students probably didn't think they were doing anything wrong. They were just acting in the socially accepted manner.
Seriously? I have stayed in Manhattan for couple years and done my share of jaywalking occasionally in clear sight of NYPD. May be I am just lucky but this just doesn't resonate with me.
I completely agree. Especially for entrepreneurs, it's a super important skill that is not easily learned but often creates incredible advantages and opportunities.
Yes, I'm guessing that this sort of thing is very common at Harvard (and, to be fair, in all colleges). They reasoned that the risk of getting caught was low enough to justify the cheating.
And they got caught. They lost their bet. So now they should pay the price.
Yes, there are things which are culturally acceptable, but technically against the rules. Just because you get away with murder, and don't get caught, that doesn't mean murder is OK.
It's quite clear that plagiarism was badly enforced, but anyone who admitted to it would have been severely punished. Most of your examples are completely different - they are things that nobody cares about, even if you get caught.
Arguably, it's a terrible system if severe crimes are routinely left unpunished. Either the penalty should be lowered, or they should enforce it better.
So while I don't just blame the students, I think it's a sign that the system is fucked. The students are part of it, as are the lectures, and universities (do they fire lecturers who don't try to catch cheats, the same way they fire unpopular lecturers?), employers (perhaps they should test graduates to see if they are actually competent?), and society in general.
I realise that I only have this snippet of text, but: Didn't they have a dictionary? Didn't they have search engines?
Some of the attitudes displayed in that article are surprising. And disappointing.
The course instructor set the rules but the implementation was "loose" (casual). The students went one step too far in their liberties. I think it's a collective failure on part of the professor, TFs and students.
So there is a chicken and egg problem with intellectual honesty. You don't appreciate it until you've acquired experience. And you don't acquire sustainable experience until you start to appreciate it.
The flip side though is that most young people just need to be told and slightly inspired about how important it is. Then they need to develop that over several years. In college can work. Learning to be confident with your own intellectual pursuits based on honesty though -- that's what college is supposed to teach. But yeah, a lot of time in all the competitiveness, it gets lost.
Personally, I think that some of these people are so used to being that #1 student that when they're surrounded by other #1'ers, they do whatever it takes to remain on top, or so their logic goes.
They're not the people who ever build cool things anyway though, so who cares.
This is a _cultural_ difference of MIT; people tend to work with one another, or they tend to fail. They learn it freshman year, and it's ingrained in their psyche from then on.
Interestingly, the line between cooperative work and cheating is difficult to discern and mostly set up by the professor. When the professor does not say one way or another if the work is collaborative, students will generally consider it collaborative.
As for the "[n]ever build cool things" troll, I'll let you google the number of neat inventions by famous MIT / Harvard alums; I won't waste my time.
Also, open book open Internet take home test might as well be code for group test. I always found that to be an absurd way to give a test. If you want to not have cheating give the test in class over the material covered in the course.
Going to a "best-of-best" school is rarely not in someone's best interest. I did go to Harvard undergrad and I did not attend YC, but the draw is similar: sure the prestige matters and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, bu the real value is in the people that you live and work with, both peers and mentors.
Does giving money help you get into Harvard? I'm sure it does and if that money benefits the undergraduate population more than having someone who is subjectively less deserving in that class is a detriment, then it is in all students' best interest to have the paying member accepted.
Regarding the cheating: It happens and I'm sure it happens at every campus. I don't think that's what happened to half of this class. It's a large class, it's probably required for Gov concentrators, and it seems clear that the expectations were not understood by the students or the teaching fellows. What I DID do a lot of was pool notes in preparation for an exam, and I wouldn't be surprised if that is responsible for a lot of the consistencies in test answers. Why redefine a term that you have a ("the") definition for in your notes? And honestly, I think it's healthy to have varying levels of respect for different material. If I want to be a physicist, I'm going to really make sure I understand linear algebra. For the Core class on Chinese history, I'm going to pool notes, cram, and try to scrape an A, because the A means more to me than the knowledge.
Sorry to address several topics; I've been reading HN for a while and this is my first comment, so I'm still learning the ropes.
"He said, 'I gave out 120 A’s last year, and I’ll give out 120 more,' "
"Having my degree revoked now would mean I lose my job."
"some said that they will sue the university if any serious punishment is meted out"
"Some students asked whether there was a fundamental contradiction between telling students to use online resources, but not to discuss the test with each other"
These aren't responses of mature adults. This is immature students whining and complaining because they got caught cheating. The test explicitly said "students may not discuss the exam with others." It doesn't matter how it was done last year, or how hard the class is, or how much money they spent on the class. If the exam says not to discuss it with other students and you do, you have cheated.
I went to a small science/engineering school with a very serious honor code, and can assure you there is nothing contradictory about saying "you may use online resources, but do not discuss this test with anyone." It's sad that some Harvard students think their privilege entitles them to ignore the rules.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/8/30/academic-dishone...
plainly highlighted the relevant portion of the examination rules. If the Harvard students didn't understand what those rules meant, then the Harvard admission office must be admitting some students with some severe reading comprehension problems.
It seems that the environment of the exam as well as the difficulty of the questions sugguest that the exam was designed to test collaborative abilities, rather than knowledge recital.