501–510 of 662 posts
So now I finally understand why Americans use the expression "proctored exams". Because not all exams are proctored. Here in Spain, we don't have an equivalent expression because there is no such thing as an unproctored exam. The idea of being proctored is already included in the word "exam".
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.
I will never forget being in high school and seeing so many classmates cheat on homework and take-home exams, yet raised their hands with ease to give the honor code pledge. It was a farce. Please don't read my personal anecdote as doubt that honor codes can work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Im surprised to hear that. I went to Caltech for my postgrad and never collaborated on an test, and it would have never ocurre me to do so (and no, the professor didn’t have to explicitly say they collaboration was not allowed. It was just the standard honor code). We all suspected of people that didn’t adhere to the honor code and it was frowned upon, and they could have faced repercussions if anyone had reported th…
He or she is telling on himself. Cheaters always project. I looked at materials hidden in my desk for one question during a quiz in fifth grade and it still gnaws at me. Cheaters suck.
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…
> every exam was take home When I was at MIT, most exams were in-class, but open book, open notes, open whatever you wanted to bring with you. And of course that just meant the exams were much harder, because they could assume you had all the necessary reference materials at hand and didn't have to conjure things up from memory. "Cheating" was pointless, because everyone else in the room was struggling just as hard a…
[flagged]
0: https://davisic.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf2371/files...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly. Yes, because the working model is that the students are there because they want to learn. And they are paying for the professors to teach them. If they cheat in classes, they are really just cheating themselves, and this should be no concern to the staff.
I would argue they are also cheating other students in their chosen field, and any future employers who place high value on prestige of applicants’ university, no? If the only tangible, marketable value of graduating from a prestigious school was the raw knowledge and skill, I would agree with you. But it’s not. Having worked with people who clearly got preferential treatment in hiring based on their school’s prestig…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That’s just the propaganda they sell during college visits I'm speaking generally, not just about colleges. If you've never been in a high-trust commuity, I strongly recommend travelling to find one. It's about as mind blowing as transiting from one such community to a low-trust, high-cynicism one.
Can you give examples of what you consider to be high trust communities? Without specifics it’s hard to calibrate and figure out whether we‘re talking past each other. I spent two seasons working with the SPCC Icefall Doctors who put up the infrastructure to cross the Khumbu Icefall each year for Everest climbers so I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what a high trust community looks like (the Nepalese guiding…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is "Swiss metro"? Curious now.
In Vienna, where there is not a single automated check for public transport tickets (annual passes are analog plastic cards, one-way tickets are paper), there is consistently a less than ~2% fraud rate. So over 98% of users have a valid ticket at any time. The City of Vienna has concluded that the cost of building such checkpoints combined with the reduced quality of service and the destruction of the city image coul…
> the destruction of the city image could never be worth it