Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent • Hacker News Board

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

#591

Post by nerdsniper » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

avazhi wrote: post #572

nerdsniper wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does racist mean? I don’t know why specifying undergraduate is “too funny to you”…I specified undergrad because TFA was about undergrads. At no point did TFA mention any graduate student body - but it took care to explicitly reference decisions and feedback from multiple specific undergraduate bodies: - (Undergraduate) Honor Committee [0] - Senior Survey - Undergraduate Student Government - Dean of Undergraduate…

Huh? I was referring to the 2nd page of the link you submitted earlier. You acted like there are only a few Chinese students at Princeton when they are the overwhelming majority of the graduate international student body. Did you not look at your own evidence? And brother, I don't give a shit what Princeton students have to say about the invigilation situation. That's an inmates running the asylum kind of thing. It's…

N.B.: TFA stands for “The Fucking Article”, as in RTFA: Read The Fucking Article.

1) In a root level response to The Fucking Article, which is about changes that only apply to the undergrad proctoring system, you argued: “(Self-proctored exams) may have worked back in the 1800s … but these days when half the student body is Chinese expats who need the degree to get high paying jobs back in Shanghai…why wouldn’t they cheat?”

2) I pointed out the fallacy of your argument, in that the Chinese proportion of the affected population from The Fucking Article is not, in fact, half (it is 1%).

3) Then you argued that the Chinese proportion of the graduate students is significant.

4) I pointed out that the graduate students have nothing to do with The Fucking Article.

5) Now you are doubling down on the graduate students, who are not affected by the changes we’re talking about today.

I don't know what you’re talking about, but it sure as shit isn't The Fucking Article. Read The Fucking Article.

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

#592

Post by gregw2 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

ndiddy wrote: post #73

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What on earth could be the objection to proctoring? There is a unique pride in being part of a community built around honor. You see this on the Swiss metro and in small-town vegetable stalls. Unproctored exams force every student to weigh the value of their honor against a better grade. That's a personal moral reckoning that might be worth the entire degree.

The article says that according to a survey of Princeton seniors from 2025, 29.9% admitted to cheating on an assignment and 44.6% admitted to knowing of cheating that they chose not to report. I guess they could continue acting as if they were a community built around honor, but when they have been empirically proven to not be honorable I think acknowledging this reality is the more practical solution.

It would also be interesting to understand how much "imposter syndrome" seen at Ivy institutions stems from just the inevitable "little fish big pond" dynamic and how much stems from cheating.

(And how much that "imposter syndrome", from either source, then drives later hard-work/success and how much doesn't.)

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

#593

Post by srean » Thu, May 14, 2026, 5:10 PM UTC

btrettel wrote: post #356

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 had a similar experience when I was a TA at UT Austin that I wrote about on HN years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23163472

Such a bizarre story and a "lecturer".

Can you say more now, like what subject was he/she was teaching.

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

#594

Post by traderj0e » Thu, May 14, 2026, 5:13 PM UTC

spuz wrote: post #471

traderj0e wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually the rule is you can't have a phone out of your pocket or backpack during a test. Students still have phones on them. If they disallowed that too, how would that work, an airport security style check going in?

When I had exams in the 90s we'd have to hand phones in at the start. If the phone was seen during the exam, your test would be forfeited. If the rules were that strict then, I can't imagine how they could be less strict now given how much more powerful phones are today.

Most colleges today will consider phone use during a test cheating, then it depends on the school but at least a 0 on the test is likely. I've had some professors say upfront that they'll go further and wreck cheaters as much as they possibly can.

They probably don't ask for phones upfront, but I don't see how that'd do anything. The only way to make this stricter would be to search students like they do for big standardized tests.

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

#595

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 14, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

eclipticplane wrote: post #387

traderj0e wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually the rule is you can't have a phone out of your pocket or backpack during a test. Students still have phones on them. If they disallowed that too, how would that work, an airport security style check going in?

If NYC schools can do it at scale (1,600 schools this year banned cell phones), Princeton could certainly do it. Students either leave phones at home, or the school provides pouches/mini lockers for each student.

[deleted]

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

#596

Post by ok_dad » Thu, May 14, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

runsWphotons wrote: post #361

ok_dad wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to Hawaii. Your whole argument is destroyed by Hawaii’s culture. America (the continent) is broken socially because American whites cannot get along with others and they’ve gone mask off, destroying the cohesion we once had when they were trying to seem less hateful.

Hawaii is rife with ethnic tensions, not some exception.

Nah everyone gets along except the haoles

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

#597

Post by impendia » Thu, May 14, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

throwaway2037 wrote: post #503

impendia wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a great personal experience to share on HN. It makes me wonder: What makes an honor code work (or not)? In your example (Rice), what did the university do to promote the honor code? And why was it so culturally impactful upon you? 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…

These are very good questions, but it was a long time ago and I'm afraid I don't remember well enough to answer.

I'm not even sure I could have answered you at the time. In my memory, it was mostly students promoting the honor code. But I have to imagine that the university was quietly doing things to keep this going.

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

#598

Post by Aurornis » Thu, May 14, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

tdeck wrote: post #567

hgoel wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This fits with my priors. I was in grad school during covid and had some professors I was close to (and whose class I was taking) reach out asking for feedback on their exam because students were blatantly cheating despite the allowances the professors were making (up to being open to the internet, just no direct communication). They couldn't punish them, and they were perplexed why anyone would bother cheating on ev…

> students were refusing to think for themselves even when given open ended projects. They were just having ChatGPT come up with the project idea for them instead of taking advantage of the freedom to do something they enjoyed. Those kinds of projects are a big trap for certain kinds of people. If I had used ChatGPT in college, maybe I wouldn't have come up with overly-ambitious projects that seemed doable at the tim…

Sounds like a very valuable learning experience.

LLM over-reliance has an analogous problem: People start using LLMs to start projects that get in over their heads, then when the LLM has gone through all of the easy and medium problems they're left with only the hardest problems to solve on top of a project where they didn't learn much doing the easy and medium parts first.

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

#599

Post by OkayPhysicist » Thu, May 14, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

levocardia wrote: post #416

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…

Not even prestigious ones. The school needs to sound like it has strong penalties against cheating, so there are really strict-sounding policies ("zero in the course"). But also, so many students cheat that actually enforcing these policies uniformly would hurt your graduation stats, make unhappy customers (students + parents), and hurt your revenue if you actually expel them. So the equilibrium is that the burden of…

The "compromise" that my university found was that if you were caught cheating in Science & Engineering school, you were given (informally) an ultimatum: either this can be escalated to the official channels, and you may be expelled (or perhaps nothing would come of it), or you can go be someone else's problem and transfer to a different subject. Typically the business school, because they're not big on ethics anyway.

As a TA, I once stumbled upon a bunch of students who had been copying each other's labs, because one student was brazen enough to turn in a printout with a the gmail header information across the top, indicating it had been received from another student. So I looked at that student's page, and noticed that they had somehow completely screwed up their rounding, and used way too many significant figures, which I recognized from another student's assignment. Digging through the pile, I found others that had rearranged stuff enough that I probably would have missed them if not for their exceptionally dull friend.

All told, 9 students had turned in the same exact assignment. 8 took up the offer to drop the course and switch majors, 1 faced the music, took their zero in the course, but did stick with the program.

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

#600

Post by Forgeties79 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #587

Forgeties79 wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I’m an alum now, not a student, but even college students can submit a FOIA request. "Show me the reports on unreported cheating"? > Additionally, you could see the breakdown by race (and more) of people that were expelled. How do you know they were expelled for cheating? And not sexual harassment, or in some universities breaking codes of conduct around public behavior. You have heard of FERPA, right? It would be…

Over half the faculty literally admitted they don’t report/don’t feel comfortable reporting in an anonymous survey when this was being more rigorously interrogated. It’s easy to infer “therefore a lot of cheating goes unreported” from that.

Second question: Because cheating is handled by a specific group and sexual misconduct/assault is a criminal offense that gets you arrested (it’s also handled at the school level by a specific group). They aren’t the same thing and they aren’t combined in reporting. I can’t imagine any school combines those two but maybe there are outliers.

The number of students expelled for cheating at my school was a concrete, annual number that was public knowledge.

So many of you keep asking all these random questions trying to poke holes. If you don’t believe me, just move on. I am giving you all the specificity I’m going to give you. You either believe me or you don’t. I have nothing to gain by lying on HN about a school I attended decades ago. I am relaying something I have a lot of firsthand knowledge of. You can find value in it or not.

There was a clear, demonstrable problem with the way cheating was handled. They've altered it because of this. That’s the story.