301–310 of 662 posts
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You'd hope, but humans are humans - even if they attend an Ivy. Some individuals have heady thoughts and morals like you mentioned. Others are using it as a checkbox.
As I understand it Americans pay tens of thousands of dollars for university. In my country if you can't hack it you just transfer to something else. Much less pressure. And let's face it if you can't even pass the exams maybe it is not your career? Don't live in a lie and go do something you'll enjoy.
Most target career paths in the US (eg. Investment Banking, VC, Tech, Consulting, Entrepreneurship) now require a STEM or Engineering background, so a large subset of students do have an incentive to study a major they have no interest in.
As you are Dutch, think about it the same way certain numerus fixus programs at TU Delft, UvA, or UL open career paths unavailable to most other Dutch graduates (eg. Optiver, MBB, DeepMind, EU think tanks).
This is basically Princeton's equivalent of setting up a numerus fixus because of the deluge of students enrolling in target degree programs without the interest or background.
In all honesty cheating is common in all universities - the incentive structures for students are the same as a large portion of students do want to end up in a high prestige career.
The American higher ed system is similar to the French, British, and Italian system with regards to prestige and target programs.
> As I understand it Americans pay tens of thousands of dollars for university
Not at Ivies and Ivy-tier programs. Plenty of us got really competitive scholarships and I attended back when Obama was still in office.
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The advantage(?) of take-home exams à la Caltech is that they can be open everything and 3–5 hours long :-P (For what it's worth, being able to listen to music during an exam, ctrl+F a digital textbook, etc. was super awesome; it would deeply sadden me if that becomes infeasible in the future once enough students stop caring about the Honor Code....)
I had in-class exams at MIT that were up to 3 hours long. Take home would definitely have been nicer.
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It is rather disappointing to see a take as unsubtle as "white people are pure and honest God-fearing Christians and Asians are dirty heathens with no concept of morality" on this site.
No, it is culture, not race. A friend of mine (half asian, half white) and by happenstance devot christian got his graduate degree at a top 3 school in the US, and he was shocked the international student brazenness in cheating. He reported it and it was brushed under the rug, and this severely disillusioned my friend. Every professor I know reports this cultural difference. And obviously we see it with SDE interivew…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is rather disappointing to see a take as unsubtle as "white people are pure and honest God-fearing Christians and Asians are dirty heathens with no concept of morality" on this site.
No, it is culture, not race. A friend of mine (half asian, half white) and by happenstance devot christian got his graduate degree at a top 3 school in the US, and he was shocked the international student brazenness in cheating. He reported it and it was brushed under the rug, and this severely disillusioned my friend. Every professor I know reports this cultural difference. And obviously we see it with SDE interivew…
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It is true that more than half of respondees reported that they never saw a violation. However, the 44.6% was the category of "respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report," and the 0.4% was the category of "had reported a peer for an Honor Code violation." Everybody who saw a violation was in one of those two categories (did report or didn't report), so we can compare them to…
Those two categories don't include everyone. 44.6% saw a violation and didn't report. 0.4% saw a violation and did report. That doesn't include people who didn't see a violation. Did I misread something?
The 44.6% appears to refer to the proportion of respondents who saw a violation and did not report it.
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Those two categories don't include everyone. 44.6% saw a violation and didn't report. 0.4% saw a violation and did report. That doesn't include people who didn't see a violation. Did I misread something?
> ” In The Daily Princetonian’s 2025 Senior Survey of over 500 seniors, 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. Only 0.4 percent of seniors responded saying that they had reported a peer for an Honor Code violation.” The 44.6% appears…
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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.
You mean currently exams aren't proctored?! I went to the University of Toronto and can't recall a single exam which wasn't.