You’ll face unfairness with DEI / diversity quotas to get in to the college, and then if you graduate you’ll face unfairness by having your job outsourced to AI or H1B, but yeah cheating in school is totally where we draw the line.
Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
251–260 of 662 posts
Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#252huh, i had no idea princeton specifically disallowed proctors, and instead relied on an honor system. seems... like a poorly thought out system, especially given: " 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report. " crazier is the people prote…
Here in Canada, a housemate of mine used ChatGPT to cheat in all his courses. He got caught on only a single one because he scored 100%. Then he did it again and got caught again in the same course. For some reason, the professor never reported him to the dean or whoever is supposed to deal with this kind of stuff. He graduated but his degree is basically a degree in cheating.
Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not obvious at all. Loyalty is a fundamental moral principle. Loyalty to a friend carries a lot of moral weight. Humans are a social animal, and loyalty to a friend can easily outweigh loyalty to some abstract institution. Like, my friend will still have my back five years from now. The university I went to won't do shit for me. Like, if you're talking about loyalty to a friend who wants you to cover up an un…
It's not a mistake if they do it routinely. I could buy the argument if the friend had a moment of weakness, regretted it, won't do it again, and please don't report it. They've learned their lesson, that's enough. But if they do it and they're fine with it and they're going to do it again and what's the big deal? Refusing to report that isn't loyalty anymore, it's not sticking with someone who made a mistake, it's p…
We can make mistakes in our ongoing behaviors. Nobody's perfect.
The question is simply how you balance loyalty to the institution vs loyalty to a friend.
A lot of people will think that cheating in a context where a lot of other people cheat too, is just not a big deal. That it's certainly not worth losing a friendship over. Like, are you going to end a friendship because someone jaywalks? Because they habitually speed 5 mph over the legal limit? Because they sometimes take illegal drugs? Because they deducted things on their tax return that you know weren't actually business expenses?
The size or importance of a moral violation matters, when weighing up conflicting moral obligations.
Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#254huh, i had no idea princeton specifically disallowed proctors, and instead relied on an honor system. seems... like a poorly thought out system, especially given: " 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report. " crazier is the people prote…
It's nothing crazy about it. Why do you study? To learn. The exams are there to benchmark your progress. If you cheat, everything falls apart for you. It is possible that when the metric becomes the target(AKA Goodhart's law) cheating can be beneficial but this is failure of the institution because it means you are no longer there to learn.
I think most are there to get a diploma, learning is a secondary benefit.
Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#255huh, i had no idea princeton specifically disallowed proctors, and instead relied on an honor system. seems... like a poorly thought out system, especially given: " 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report. " crazier is the people prote…
A couple of my friends teach university classes. Mostly undergrad. I get to hear some of their interesting stories when we game together. My impression is that there was a sharp shift around COVID. Doing classes over Zoom with a talking head broke the connection they had with their professors and other students. College felt closer to a video game operated through your screen than a community. When I was in college n…
>My impression is that there was a sharp shift around COVID. Doing classes over Zoom with a talking head broke the connection they had with their professors and other students.
I think this is part of a larger phenomenon than simply Zoom classes. COVID severely damaged the already decaying social contract of the US and we have mostly been trying to ignore that ever since. The most prevalent viewpoint of American life is now that the only thing that matters is the individual and therefore anything an individual can do to better their station in life is inherently justified. We can see this on so many levels from politics to rampant academic cheating to quiet quitting to prediction markets full of insiders. When we don't owe each other anything and the consequences are minimal, rarely applied, or completely non-existent, the only reason to not give into cheating, scamming, and corruption is your own personal morals.
Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bad argument. All countries have laws yet criminality rates varies a lot from country to country. It’s all about the culture.
"Culture" works by having a system that collectively punishes cheaters, so that people learn from their own (or others') experiences and internalize that cheating is bad and won't pay off in the long term. That's how you get a culture against cheating. You ensure that cheating doesn't pay, and eventually people learn that cheating doesn't pay. The enforcement is part of the culture.
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Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
AIUI, these schools see their mission as training the next generation of leaders and elites. They aim for people with strong abilities, and moral character. And, the way you guide youth to act in a certain way is by treating them that way. If you want them to be trustworthy, you trust them. This is not a totally fringe idea.
This has to be one of the most pretentious things I've ever read about post secondary education. I'm completely flabbergasted to learn that an Ivy League holds students to a far different and much lower standard than I what I was held to at a regular university in Canada. From now on I don't see how I can't be skeptical of the credentials of someone from Princeton knowing that their exams weren't proctored.
Ivy Leagues have always been about having money not academic rigor.
Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#258huh, i had no idea princeton specifically disallowed proctors, and instead relied on an honor system. seems... like a poorly thought out system, especially given: " 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report. " crazier is the people prote…
The honor systems is the correct system for an institution where learning is the goal as the tests are there to help you internalize the material and know how well you've absorbed it. Instead we've turned universities into vocational schools where the goal is the degree and testing is seen as a hurdle to overcome to attain it.
Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
This fits with my priors. I was in grad school during covid and had some professors I was close to (and whose class I was taking) reach out asking for feedback on their exam because students were blatantly cheating despite the allowances the professors were making (up to being open to the internet, just no direct communication). They couldn't punish them, and they were perplexed why anyone would bother cheating on ev…
Hmm, anxiety of making the wrong choice and have it on record? I’ve read that later gens are extremely aware of “the internet never forgets” and are terrified of any choice being the embarrassing and defining moment of the rest of their life
I feel like that anxiety has been a thing with regard to education for a while. Worrying about bad grades following you through life has been a thing for much longer than the internet's existence.
I think the issue is largely that in the age of AI, learning a skill requires one to be deliberate and dedicated, but the entire reason grades and exams are so prominent is because most students need the threat of near term failure to learn.
Open ended projects were always my favorite ones because I was able to utilize some of my personal projects on them. Profs also enjoy seeing students' passion for their topic. That kind of student is probably still doing well.
Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a mistake if they do it routinely. I could buy the argument if the friend had a moment of weakness, regretted it, won't do it again, and please don't report it. They've learned their lesson, that's enough. But if they do it and they're fine with it and they're going to do it again and what's the big deal? Refusing to report that isn't loyalty anymore, it's not sticking with someone who made a mistake, it's p…
We can make mistakes in our ongoing behaviors. Nobody's perfect. The question is simply how you balance loyalty to the institution vs loyalty to a friend. A lot of people will think that cheating in a context where a lot of other people cheat too, is just not a big deal. That it's certainly not worth losing a friendship over. Like, are you going to end a friendship because someone jaywalks? Because they habitually sp…
I guess this really comes down to differences in morality.
I think cheating is pretty serious. It qualifies as self-harm, and it harms your classmates by devaluing their eventual degree.
Jaywalking and minor speeding are not even immoral at all, in my view. I don't mean they're insignificant, I mean they're outright not morally wrong to me, so that comparison suggests that we have a pretty strong difference in what we consider to be morally good here.