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Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

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Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#51

Post by victorhn »

danso wrote: post #30
Anechoic wrote: post #24

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 h…

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 th…

"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.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#52

Post by danielweber »

majormajor wrote: post #40
gms7777 wrote: post #11

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 ch…

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?

(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.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#53

Post by Bill_Dimm »

stephengillie wrote: post #32

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 t…

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.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#54

Post by stephencanon »

colanderman wrote: post #45
stephencanon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your reasoning is poor. 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…

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).

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#55

Post by danielweber »

rayiner wrote: post #37
akarpenko wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#56

Post by stephencanon »

chc wrote: post #49
stephencanon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 fa…

> 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.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#57

Post by chc »

stephencanon wrote: post #56
chc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fa…

> 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.

> after graduation

That is out of the school's control. It isn't really relevant to the incentives set by the school.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#58

Post by freyrs3 »

majormajor wrote: post #40
gms7777 wrote: post #11

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 ch…

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?

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.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#59

Post by chc »

BasDirks wrote: post #43
chc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many would give their right arm for the opportunities you have had. Should we all wish for your demise? That seems quite unreasonable to me.

No but in case I squander those opportunities, don't hesitate to fill up the gap.

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.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#60

Post by jj00nathan »

majormajor wrote: post #40
gms7777 wrote: post #11

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 ch…

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?

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.

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