341–350 of 662 posts
You mean currently exams aren't proctored?! I went to the University of Toronto and can't recall a single exam which wasn't.
Ivy league schools , imho, tend to operate differently--more hands-off approach. The assumption is if you're smart and determined enough to get in, that you will not cheat. The filtering to get in is intense, so this presumably filters out less honest people.
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I definitely still see honor system pay boxes in the USA. Maybe not in big cities, but outside of them. Disc golf courses, fire wood piles, that day’s chicken eggs in a wooden box on the side of the road.
I came to this country as an immigrant and one of the first memories I have was walking to the gas station to get the Sunday paper for my host father. I remember opening up the door and seeing tens of Sunday papers and was taken aback thinking how can this be, wouldn't someone just put in a quarter and take ALL of the Sunday papers home with her/him. In today's society (and especially if we are talking Princeton-like…
I've sat in classes where people at my table genuinely took pictures of the exam while the professor's back was turned (being kind to us and giving us useful information on the board) and uploaded the entire exam to the Gemini app. Cheating is all around disheartening and is now incredibly easy with all the free multi-modal models around. Real active proctoring is needed and devices need to be confiscated during exam…
I'm very interested in how this cheating is perceived by other students. There is no peer pressure not to cheat? Students aren't considered sketchy or jerky for cheating? Being seen cheating has no adverse affect on their ability to date, to join group projects, to join student startups, etc.?
There is relatively little stigma against cheating. Maybe in smaller seminars and classes with higher collaboration there is some, but much less so in large STEM lectures. Many of the incentives in classes where exams were online led to arms races and widespread cheating (without exaggeration, over 80% of the class). For instance, a certain math class I knew of had all grades based on remote and often asynchronous tests. Many people would cheat/collaborate and ace them, leading to the professor increasing difficulty (as scores were very high). This led to more cheating and so on. It got to the point where the problem sets had such difficult problems in this intro class that only a handful of people (who had taken advanced course work in high school) in the entire 100+ person seminar were distributing proofs for everyone else. Really not great dynamics all around and it's worth noting that my school does not have a reputation for being ones with an especially competitive and cutthroat culture.
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I definitely still see honor system pay boxes in the USA. Maybe not in big cities, but outside of them. Disc golf courses, fire wood piles, that day’s chicken eggs in a wooden box on the side of the road.
I came to this country as an immigrant and one of the first memories I have was walking to the gas station to get the Sunday paper for my host father. I remember opening up the door and seeing tens of Sunday papers and was taken aback thinking how can this be, wouldn't someone just put in a quarter and take ALL of the Sunday papers home with her/him. In today's society (and especially if we are talking Princeton-like…
Many people get into these positions of affluence by participating in competitions that repeatedly normalize that exact variety of deviance.
Honor-anything works when you create and maintain systems that normalize honorable behaviors and shame deviant behaviors (for any definition of honorable and deviant), and you can only measure peoples’ honor by the circumstances they’re given to prove themselves.
In bourgeois corners of the US, we’ve implicitly normalized deviance by removing the expectation for honor in competitive environments. “Win at any cost” (you don’t think the other team isn’t doing everything they can to get ahead, do you? How naïve!) has quietly replaced “be prepared” and “give it your best”.
You mean currently exams aren't proctored?! I went to the University of Toronto and can't recall a single exam which wasn't.
Ivy league schools , imho, tend to operate differently--more hands-off approach. The assumption is if you're smart and determined enough to get in, that you will not cheat. The filtering to get in is intense, so this presumably filters out less honest people.
Also: admissions at all these schools are heavily biased toward wealthy legacy hires, regardless of talent, and the "most determined" are the most likely to cheat.
What's next, claiming the wealthy don't steal?
I was a TA for a few classes and, given the honor code, we did not proctor the exams for undergrads. We just handed them out (left the room) and returned to collect them at the end.
- One of the exams in a course that I TAed had 5 free-response questions.
- There were also 5 TAs in that class, so we un-stapled the exams and each TA graded one question (for consistency).
- We re-assembled the exams and returned them to the students.
- A few days after the exam, one of "my" students (she attended my recitation) came to me with her exam and explained that I had incorrectly graded question 2.
- I told her that I didn't grade question 2, so she had to go take it up with "TA # 2"
- A few hours later, "TA #2" pays me a visit and she (TA#2) is annoyed. She tells me, "Your student is trying to pull a fast one. She answered Q2 incorrectly. She erased her answer and put in the correct answer and she wants it re-graded"
- I briefly defended the student and said something like, "Why would she do that... and how could you even know?"
- "TA#2" responded with "... because I photocopied all of the student responses after I graded them."
- Then I felt like a piece of shit for doubting my fellow TA. And felt even worse being naive enough to not be suspicious.
- "TA#2" and I brought all of this info up with the prof. who was running the course.
- We were told that the situation would be handled by an Honor Committee or something like that. We forwarded the information to the committee, but no one spoke to us and we were not allowed to participate in the deliberations.
- After about a week, all we were told was that the student was able to explain the "discrepancy" between her exam and the photocopy.
To this day, I have no idea what that student could have possibly said to explain her actions.
After that, I started photocopying every damned scrap of paper that I graded.
edits for clarity. The student did not get a zero on the exam, nor was she booted from the course. I don't remember if she was given credit for Question 2, but the TA and I were both expecting her to be tossed, which obviously didn't happen.
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.
Some schools love to pride themselves on their students' integrity. They don't proctor because they think their students don't cheat and can be trusted. I don't know about Princeton but a college my family attended had stats showing no difference between test scores in proctored vs. unproctored exams. That was before LLMs would have made it so easy to cheat. Maybe that school has changed its policy as well.
I've sat in classes where people at my table genuinely took pictures of the exam while the professor's back was turned (being kind to us and giving us useful information on the board) and uploaded the entire exam to the Gemini app. Cheating is all around disheartening and is now incredibly easy with all the free multi-modal models around. Real active proctoring is needed and devices need to be confiscated during exam…
My son is taking an AP chem class - he's doing really well, super interested in the subject. It's a difficult class, to be sure. Many of his peers are just goofing off and don't understand things. My son regularly tells me about people in his lab group that are cheating off his papers (and, I think, even his test). He tries to cover up answers, but it's not always possible to do. What is even more frustrating is that…
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[flagged]
you're just racist
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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