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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

#541

Post by wallst07 »

pdonis wrote: post #189
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…

> 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…

Same, but before AI.

The thought being that the Engineering exams were so difficult that even with the text book, you had little chance of getting it right unless you knew the material.

Often, final exams were just one question, but you were graded on the multiple pages of work you had to show.

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

#542

Post by rayiner »

nerdsniper wrote: post #499
rayiner wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In major cities? LKY was talking about an unmanned newspaper stand and cash box in Trafalgar Square. Would that work in Times Square today?

We do have "little libraries" where anyone can take or leave books in many people's yards. But I haven't seen the honor system produce stands in urban areas for the past 10+ years.

We have a little honor system library in our neighborhood near the playground. But I’ve never seen anything like that in Baltimore, DC, or Philadelphia.

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

#543

Post by wallst07 »

throwup238 wrote: post #175
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #131

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…

Reposting what I said earlier, because I'm interested in this topic.

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

#545

Post by varjag »

riknos314 wrote: post #470
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

A more accurate phrasing is: It's significantly less likely that one learns the portion of the work they offload to an LLM. A random anecdote is that most of the people I know who went very far in theoretical math are relatively poor at basic mental arithmetic, because they always think in the abstract and offload addition and multiplication to the calculator. It doesn't mean they can't do it, they just aren't as pra…

That's just a poor analogy. A better one would be with lobotimized people doing math.

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

#546

Post by jvanderbot »

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…

Because colleges are paid by the student, and students who are expelled don't pay. Incentives explain outcomes, to quote a controversial public figure.

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

#547

Post by vintermann »

culi wrote: post #464
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…

I wish I as a student had this power. I took an exam once for a class I had taken before (transfer student woes). I went into the hall, took the easy exam, turned it in, and left. They lost my test. I had no idea until 3 weeks later when exam scores were finally uploaded and mine was missing. The quarter was over and what the hell could I possibly do at that point? I had no possible evidence to give to show that I no…

Similar story: I had taken a college level programming course before starting college. I reported this, and was told that it would either excempt me from an intro to programming class (if it was similar enough) or get credit for it towards my degree. Fair enough. After a while I was told it was different enough, and in the school software, it said I had a half-semester's worth of study point "in reserve" through all the years I studied there. In the final year, there was a small elective topic (something about engineering leadership) which seemed really uninteresting, so I thought, "it's time I finally make use of those banked points" and so didn't sign up for it.

Then after the semester was over, after a while I realized I'd only gotten a grades transcript, not a degree. Apparently I was lacking those 5 points from the elective course for that - the 40 points from my pre-college college course were mysteriously gone. Oh, and the mail I had gotten where they confirmed it counted? On the mail server, which we were mandated to use, and which they wiped the day we were done with our last semester.

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

#548

Post by cucumber3732842 »

dlcarrier wrote: post #458
rayiner wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want rage bait, read the proceedings of honor code committees at your school. At least at Northwestern they were public record (sometimes with redaction of identities). The number of people who got off with obviously bullshit excuses was maddening even to read about.

When I was in high school, mad dad was subscribed to the California Bar Journal, and the discipline section was one of my favorite reads. The outrageous rational lawyers had for failing their clients or downright stealing from them was hilarious, and the rate they won their appeals was appalling. Someone wrote a book about how organizations like state bars protect their members from clients, not the clients from thei…

>Someone wrote a book about how organizations like state bars protect their members from clients, not the clients from their members as is the stated goal: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674295421

Every licensing organization does this to the extent it can get away with because it needs to provide value to its members otherwise it's members wouldn't constantly beg the state to do the licensing organization's bidding.

I should read that book. Sounds good.

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

#549

Post by Forgeties79 »

f33d5173 wrote: post #390
Forgeties79 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to a school that actually tried to enforce it, and unfortunately it ended up being enforced wildly disproportionately along racial lines. My school had a very simple rule: if you were caught cheating, you were expelled. No strikes, no exceptions. That is a massive burden to put on an educator. Getting expelled from your university is a very serious, mandated fork in the road for anyone it happens to. So what d…

You could just... make punishments more proportionate? If people are regularly circumventing your punishment system because they feel it's too harsh, maybe take that as a sign.

That’s exactly what they did. Switched to a multiple strike system. Still, it was a very controversial change.

The point though is these “honor codes” can become incredibly discriminatory and often, when scrutinized, prove not be effective at stopping cheating.

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

#550

Post by Forgeties79 »

rayiner wrote: post #540
nixon_why69 wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m an alum now, not a student, but even college students can submit a FOIA request. Additionally, the school can look in to it if it wants. The possibilities are near-endless for getting this kind of info. There’s also the simple fact that it’s not like it’s a secret when someone is expelled.

I don’t understand why you think it’s so impossible for people to prove this problem exists. For starters, they could simply survey the faculty and ask them how they handle cheating at the school to better understand how it’s reported. Which they did, and it was very revealing. Most did not feel comfortable reporting. They literally told the school. So out the gate you had less than half the faculty even participating, which immediately changes who is impacted (I.e. incredibly unfair enforcement). Before we’re even getting into race and other factors students are basically subject to a near-coin flip over whether or not their professors even report it. Then you have to take the professor’s own potential biases into account, since it’s basically all on them (and peers to a lesser degree. Do I need to explain 18-21 year olds can exercise poor social judgment and/or may not want to ruin someone’s life? Or worse, want to?) voluntarily report this.

Additionally, you could see the breakdown by race (and more) of people that were expelled. The numbers made no sense if you wanted to assert the system was fair - less than 20% of those reported or expelled were white at a school over 80% white. For emphasis: This was the case both for reporting them and verdict. It was common knowledge and over the years there had been several attempts by students to shut the one strike/expulsion only system down. There were also big gender discrepancies, with men being accused and expelled way more than women. Do you believe that claim?

The real issue here is why you immediately come from a place of “that’s impossible,” when it’s something that’s not actually very difficult to prove. That’s literally why it was removed. It was demonstrably discriminatory. Either way, this isn’t complicated and the data isn’t and wasn’t exactly hard to come by. So now it’s gone and the school is better for it.

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