Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

bostonglobe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–87 of 87 posts

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#81

Post by danielweber »

kd0amg wrote: post #72
danielweber wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 fo…

There's not a thing wrong with it. But it got the school's attention and so they had to Do Something.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#82

Post by Evbn »

danielweber wrote: post #81
kd0amg wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

There's not a thing wrong with it. But it got the school's attention and so they had to Do Something.

It's a sad decline from the era where the President of MIT celebrated student hacks.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#83

Post by Evbn »

gsibble wrote: post #79

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, onl…

Any decent professor hands out old test answer keys himself.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#85

Post by patmcguire »

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.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#86

Post by gms7777 »

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?

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.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#87

Post by gms7777 »

akarpenko wrote: post #25
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…

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'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.

Post reply on HN