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

dailyprincetonian.com

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

#531

Post by shafyy »

onemoresoop wrote: post #363
busyant wrote: post #346

I was a grad student @ Princeton a handful of decades ago. 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 co…

That student was shameless for success. I’m sure she has navigated her way through plenty of institutions by now, confusing getting away with it for being clever.

She probably started a YC startup ("tell us about the time you hacked the system")

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

#532

Post by frgturpwd »

19skitsch wrote: post #297
ddp26 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

yeah it is interesting. when I was at Stanford I was a TA and we just had to leave the room during exams after passing them out and come back at the end to collect the exams. just as I was graduating they started doing the pilot for proctoring exams and I remember students were really upset about it, though my fellow TAs were mostly in agreement that it was a good idea. side note is that it’s kind of funny because so…

Can confirm. I had to make an effort NOT to cheat. It's so incredibly easy on exams with MCQs.

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

#533

Post by vkou »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #430
marsten wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly. I have a friend who in college had another student take his test from the "complete" pile, erase my friend's name, and put on his own instead. It was only through blind luck that my friend figured it out. He, the TA, and the professor reported it – with smoking gun proof – but nothing happened. T…

Money talks and bullshit walks. I’m beginning to understand why a lot of US politician seem to come from ivy leagues yet are dumb as hell.

Many of them aren't even dumb, they just pretend that they are.

They know full well that what they are doing is awful.

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

#534

Post by wallst07 »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #523
throwaway2037 wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you get that idea from here? https://www.persuasion.community/p/getting-to-denmark Francis Fukuyama wrote in a recent blog post: "The United States is no longer a high-trust country. We must regain what’s been lost." I object to these "wide brush" social commentaries. Normally, they are written by powerful/famous men and frequently negative. I call it "Packaged Doomerism". The US is so huge that is hard to genera…

Was it ever a high trust country? Our founding stories are various rebellions and a lawless west.

I'm interested in discussion around "high trust societies" and I look for clues because I want to live in one.

Here is just an example of one: Moving from Brooklyn to a small surbuban town:

- very few lock their bikes at the local schools, or "town center". Bikes aren't stolen and kids don't worry about it.

- "town center" has umbrellas out for public use, people use them and put them back.

- People generally don't lock front doors, or don't worry if they aren't.

- If there are problems, people call police, they show up quick [non emergency] and they sort out the problem.

- People happy to pay taxes and they know where it goes

I can go on... these are just examples I've seen.

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

#535

Post by wallst07 »

make3 wrote: post #522
DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that they didn't have any kind of exam proctor up until now shows that they actually wanted students to cheat and not get caught, and now they've changed their mind for some reason. Minimal role enforcement is not "low trust" Or maybe it is, but it's good.

no proctors is insane, seeing as I've experienced a number of people trying to cheat off of me in proctored exams (and I was not a particularly good student)

Did you go to Princeton, or similar university with a honor code?

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

#536

Post by ReptileMan »

bluegatty wrote: post #352
CSMastermind wrote: post #275

People blame AI but in reality it's more about America transitioning from a high-trust society to a low-trust one.

Maybe a bit that - but it's far more the change of elite 'class' institutions - to elite 'competitive' institutions. 'Grades Did Not Matter' 100 years ago so much. It was where 'the only educated people sent their kids to be educated'. Or maybe the nouveau riche bourgois did. Now it's a 'Giant International Competition'. You can see this where students are competitive with grades elsewhere in the world. They're compe…

>They're competing for jobs at OpenAI among a million others.

Really? Reading the comments here on HN I was left with the impression that everyone would prefer to compete for the gold in butt naked giant porcupine rodeo than to work for any company helmed by Altman, Musk, Zuckeberg or Thiel.

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

#537

Post by Maken »

novok wrote: post #461
silver_silver wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that it’s not possible to learn if one offloads the work itself to an LLM

Just like how you significantly increased the difficulty of exams in "open book" exams in the past where the only way to pass the open book exam was to know the material well, you similarly need to increase the difficulty of other work where it won't matter if you have an LLM, because you won't pass without knowing your shit either!

The problem is that only works at the advanced courses. However people need to learn the basics before they reach that level, specially when they are starting and are in many regards below the LLM's baseline.

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

#538

Post by wallst07 »

hattmall wrote: post #407
paulpauper wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously subjective, but I would argue it was higher before stores began putting the items behind glass/locks.

Sort of, but there's a difference, the rise in anti-shoplifting stuff is in contrast to a decline in things like burglar bars. Stealing from residential property is seen as mostly the domain of drug addicts. Stealing from a multi-national corporation doesn't have the same stigma.

High property rights, low crime rates are [among others] is textbook definition of high trust societies. It doesn't matter whom it's from.

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

#539

Post by weregiraffe »

silvestrov wrote: post #483
busyant wrote: post #346

I was a grad student @ Princeton a handful of decades ago. 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 co…

It's a very different world from the exams I had in Denmark, both uni and high school: * all exams were proctored * the proctoring were done by external people hired to do this. * you could not leave exam for the toilet without asking first and then being followed out by a watcher, which then would follow you back and check the toilet afterwards for notes. * you were never handed back the papers you handed in. * resp…

>you could not leave exam for the toilet without asking first and then being followed out by a watcher, which then would follow you back and check the toilet afterwards for notes.

That's not how you do it. The notes are in your pocket. You go to the toilet, read the notes, put the notes back into your pocket and go back to do the exam.

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

#540

Post by rayiner »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #520
rayiner wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The elimination of personal racism in towns of less than 1,500 people in rural georgia isn’t a prerequisite to be skeptical of the claim that a university, which is subject to tremendous legal scrutiny and liability, is treating people differently based on race with regard to rule enforcement. Especially so when you’re invoking the specter of racially discriminatory enforcement as a reason against rules that would be…

OP stated that they witnessed the discrepancy firsthand. They didn't name the school, how are you so confident that they're wrong?

How does a student know how much cheating goes unreported in each group to form an opinion as to whether the policy is being applied fairly?
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