Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent • Hacker News Board

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#261

Post by daedrdev » Wed, May 13, 2026, 11:29 PM UTC

tdb7893 wrote: post #117

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #10

Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting [1] and unprecedented corruption and criminality among our national leaders, it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/hasan-piker-jia-to...

I've known a lot of people who justify crimes like shoplifting by the fact that these corporations have stolen from them (and not in some abstract way, often literal wage theft) and felt like the social contract was already broken. And it's not like the leaders at the large corporations I've worked at generally seem to care about their employees or customers (I would describe most places I worked at as, at best, amor…

The thing is grocery stores make very little money, usually low single digit percentage profits, that surprisingly low rates of shoplifting can sink a store and force it to close. Shoplifting, especially the trend of rich people performatively shoplifting, dramatically harms the local community

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#262

Post by ericmay » Wed, May 13, 2026, 11:31 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #243

ericmay wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is bad, someone who cheats on a test or someone who rats out their friend for cheating on a test? Obviously the first. How is this even a question?

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…

You’re introducing additional details and scenarios that are part of a different conversation, one in which is certainly nuanced and well-worth discussing.

But what you are doing here is justifying behavior. That’s separate from a discussion about what’s right or wrong. You have to not only consider one’s friendship, but the negative effects across society that their actions cause. In other words, reporting the friend negatively affects (in general) only two individuals, while cheating affects many more people and cultural values and norms. I’m not a Utilitarian, but intent and effect matter.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#263

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 13, 2026, 11:33 PM UTC

palata wrote: post #58

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What on earth could be the objection to proctoring? There is a unique pride in being part of a community built around honor. You see this on the Swiss metro and in small-town vegetable stalls. Unproctored exams force every student to weigh the value of their honor against a better grade. That's a personal moral reckoning that might be worth the entire degree.

What is "Swiss metro"? Curious now.

[deleted]

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#264

Post by dweekly » Wed, May 13, 2026, 11:33 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #227

Aurornis wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Now students have ChatGPT to write their papers and they've been practicing how to use cell phones without the teacher noticing for 10 years before getting to college. Colleges will need to remodel the rooms where these tests are given to become large SCIF type rooms so that wireless communication is not possible. Let the students go back to writing on their arms, wearing eye patches, or shoving notes up their cast…

Note that this is how the FAA has been doing its written tests for years: you go to a proctor test facility and through a metal detector. The entire thing is videotaped.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#265

Post by CobrastanJorji » Wed, May 13, 2026, 11:36 PM UTC

john_strinlai wrote: post #5

huh, 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…

Even more astounding is the reporting number.

If 44.6% of students saw an honor code violation and didn't report it, and 0.4% of students saw an honor code violation and did report it, that means that 99.2% of Princeton students that pledge to report honor code violations break that pledge. And that's only counting the voluntary reporters, meaning that the actual rate is presumably even worse!

But also, how would reporting a suspected honor code violation even work? There's intentionally no staff witnessing the exam, and you aren't likely to know the names and faces of your whole class, so what would the professor even do with that information? "Professor, I saw someone take his phone out, I think maybe he was cheating, I don't know his name." Okay, thanks Captain Non-Actionable. We'll file that in the circular academic integrity investigation bin.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#266

Post by gowld » Wed, May 13, 2026, 11:37 PM UTC

impendia wrote: post #223

throwup238 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just the propaganda they sell during college visits. When I was at Caltech the honor code didn’t inspire any pride, because the only way anyone got through that course load was by “cheating”*. No one had any time for pride (GO BEAVERS!) An honor code is an admission that your curriculum is so sadistic, not even cheating will help. Princeton just isn’t prestigious enough to keep up that charade. * At Caltech th…

I went to Rice which had a similarly strong honor code, and it absolutely inspired pride. In me, and from what I could tell in many of my classmates. Is it propaganda? In some sense, yes, the only way to maintain such a culture is to repeatedly insist on its importance to prospective and current students. But if so, then it is self-fulfilling propaganda, and in my opinion the honor code made my experience richer.

It's a win-win.

It also made the experience richer for people who cheated witih impunity.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#267

Post by blast » Wed, May 13, 2026, 11:38 PM UTC

pcrh wrote: post #215

With reference to the "cultural" allusions of many posts in this thread, I can assure you that in the WASP UK universities of Oxford and Cambridge, all exams are "proctored". It is assumed that students will attempt to cheat, so exams are designed so that cheating is not a viable strategy to obtain high grades. So-called invigilators also patrol the exam room and will report any violations.

> exams are designed so that cheating is not a viable strategy to obtain high grades

That's interesting. How do they do that?

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#268

Post by traderj0e » Wed, May 13, 2026, 11:39 PM UTC

Krasnol wrote: post #220

toephu2 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a phones-free classroom. Problem solved.

I can't imagine why you would be so stupid to allow phones to exams. Is this normal in the US?

Usually the rule is you can't have a phone out of your pocket or backpack during a test. Students still have phones on them. If they disallowed that too, how would that work, an airport security style check going in?

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#269

Post by crazygringo » Wed, May 13, 2026, 11:39 PM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #260

crazygringo wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Yeah, those are exactly the differences.

It's very easy to argue speeding is immoral: it's immoral to disobey any law or regulation passed by a democratically elected government if these is no other conflicting moral principle. So you can speed to rush to a hospital, for example, but everyday speeding is immoral both because it breaks the morally legitimate democratic law and increases the chance of physical harm.

For many people, cheating on a test is little different from speeding. Calling it "self-harm" is a stretch, and there's zero direct harm to your classmates if it's not graded on a curve (which I haven't seen in a long time). And you could easily argue that the marginal difference it makes to the value of everyone's degree from that institution overall is basically as negligible as the marginal difference it makes to public safety as speeding by 5 mph does.

Also, different exams are different. Fewer people will be bothered by cheating on a freshman year calculus exam, whereas cheating on a final qualification to become any type of emergency responder is far, far more serious because somebody could directly die as a result of your lack of knowledge.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#270

Post by gowld » Wed, May 13, 2026, 11:40 PM UTC

ddp26 wrote: post #92

hcurtiss wrote: post #2

Princeton is a strange place. What on earth could be the objection to proctoring? I'd much rather have a proctor than have to narc on a classmate. And even then, the proctor just reports the matter to a student-run body? Wild.

Stanford has this policy too. Students get livid when proctoring is proposed, even though cheating is rampant (afaict)

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/04/faculty-senate-pro... April 23rd, 2026

The Faculty Senate voted to allow proctoring of in-person exams following a pilot overseen by the Academic Integrity Working Group.

The Faculty Senate unanimously voted to permit proctoring of in-person assessments following a presentation from the Academic Integrity Working Group (AIWG) on Thursday.

Formed in 2024 after updates to the Honor Code and Fundamental Standard, the AIWG was charged with studying the scope of academic dishonesty at Stanford and overseeing a multi-year proctoring pilot study, which launched the same year. Historically, proctoring was not permitted at Stanford; students were expected to report peers for academic misconduct.

“What we’re finding is that a lot of the expectations we might be putting on our students is creating an unsustainable moral burden on them,” in which students must choose to cheat to keep up or report their peers, said Jennifer Schwartz Poehlmann, AIWG co-chair and senior lecturer in chemistry.

During the pilot, instructors reported that it helped them better assess students’ learning goals, clarified academic integrity standards, and reduced student frustration, said AIWG Student co-Chair Xavier Millan, ’26, an undergraduate in computer science.

The proctoring policy was previously passed by the AIWG, the Board on Conduct Affairs, the Undergraduate Senate, and the Graduate Student Council.

Poehlmann and Millan highlighted some of the student feedback that showed support for proctoring, including one who said proctoring feels like “more of a fair level playing field.”