31–40 of 52 posts
I'm astonished that commenters are generalizing the issues in this article to U.S. in general. I never encountered anything remotely at this scale when I attended the College of William & Mary ('00). I'd guess that the culture of cheating written about in this article is simply a byproduct of amassing the kind of people who can get into Harvard in the first place: straight A, hyper competitive achievers.
From the article: "The institution and the community condones, if not promotes, academic dishonesty, emphasizing prestige over intellectual growth." This institution has employed, as professors, various characters including Henry Kissinger and Dave Winer. This assessment is in line with the impression that gives me.
As a Harvard '04-'05 grad (two numbers meaning I left early) I think The Crimson, as per usual, misses the mark. It is indeed partly the part of the faculty for not engaging with students (e.g. teaching) enough. But even if some of the faculty had engaged more with us as students when I was there, I might have run for my life even faster than I already did, because some of the faculty just weren't that great. In fact…
> because some of the faculty just weren't that great
I think this is anecdotal evidence against anecdotal evidence. In my case, a lot of the faculty were that great. A few concrete names that immediately pop to mind would be: Margo Seltzer, Mike Smith, Greg Morrisett, Matt Welsch (now at google), David Malan, Howard Georgi, ...
> admissions office [..] selects [..] "excellent sheep"--kids who do (or appear to do) what they're told extremely well
Au contraire, my anecdotal evidence is that the admissions office tends to lean a lot on the "liberal arts" side. I come from a background with a strong respect of science and academics, and would often get very surprised to see some people not focus on those areas as much. But then I'd see them play their instrument, direct a play, qualify for the Olympics, etc. Most of those people ended up in consulting or teaching (TFA and the like) actually.
But no, I am not going to argue that a lot of people don't end up on Wall Street. And quite frankly, I don't see anything wrong with that. In the tech sector, we are quite fortunate that a large fraction of funding is provided through VCs. But a lot of other sectors don't have that luxury and need to resort to other sources of liquidity, private equity firms and i-banks. In those areas, it is much harder to define an actual measure of product goodness (in CS, we can always say that app X runs Y% faster or that Z% of the large number of users prefer it), and individual performance is evaluated much more based on _soft skills_. This is the exact skill set that is developed by the non-acacdemic parts of college. As tech people, we might feel cheated in some sense by that (the same way we feel cheated by a good salesman who "doesn't contribute anything"), but as long as there are requirements for capital, I don't see any alternative.
edit: grammar
I have a few thoughts on this, but first I wanted to share an experience I had during a mandatory course I am in on "TA'ing at Harvard". The professor of one of the largest undergrad classes discussed with us how it is very, very clear that the students' #1 priorities at Harvard are _not_ academics, but rather their extracurriculars. Despite this, they will still curve the class up so that a very large percentage of students get A's (I don't have a number here, but I was told that in his class, the median grade on an exam is curved to a B+, and that is very harsh by Harvard's standards). At the very least, I think that this small tidbit falls inline with "The Fall of Academics at Harvard".
Personally, I think one thing that has to change is this perception that many overachieving highschoolers bring with them as they become undergradautes at these universities: that is, that college is a stepping stone to a prestigious, well-paying job. Furthermore, these historically high-achieving students aren't going easily let go of their stellar grade track record. Together, I think it's then easy to miss part of the point of the undergraduate experience all together, and there's an incentive to cheat.
Lastly, I wanted to include that I think this is also largely a cultural issue. I agree with others in this thread that there is this mentality of just feeding into these "prestigious" jobs (Finance, Consulting, etc.), and I think that greatly contributes towards the degradation of the school's ability to foster an academic environment.
Of course this is the Harvard Crimson writing about Harvard, but the words in the article could be applicable to damn near any institution, at least in the U.S. > The institution and the community condones, if not promotes, academic dishonesty, emphasizing prestige over intellectual growth. Academics are no longer the priority of the students or teachers at Harvard College. ~~~~~ > This prevalence of academic dishone…
Some random anecdotes: I went to Pomona College, which was a very different place than the one described in the Crimson article. While I'm sure cheating did take place, I was never witness to it, nor was there any cultural expectation that it occurred. Students tended to view cheating as just screwing yourself over in the long run (paying that much money to avoid get an education is a waste of time). Harvey Mudd Coll…
Of course this is the Harvard Crimson writing about Harvard, but the words in the article could be applicable to damn near any institution, at least in the U.S. > The institution and the community condones, if not promotes, academic dishonesty, emphasizing prestige over intellectual growth. Academics are no longer the priority of the students or teachers at Harvard College. ~~~~~ > This prevalence of academic dishone…
Some random anecdotes: I went to Pomona College, which was a very different place than the one described in the Crimson article. While I'm sure cheating did take place, I was never witness to it, nor was there any cultural expectation that it occurred. Students tended to view cheating as just screwing yourself over in the long run (paying that much money to avoid get an education is a waste of time). Harvey Mudd Coll…
Maybe because they are small and there is no incentive to publicize episodes of cheating and damage their brand no stories have come out yet. Still a quick search finds several articles indicating concerns at these schools. And sister school Claremont McKenna has had several major scandals in recent years.
I wish there were angels who we could trust to always be honest (imagine how well government would run!) but we only have humans. Many are honest much if not all of the time but how can we ever know who or when with any certainty. Sadly this is a curse we cannot escape. These and the other human weaknesses are ultimately responsible for so many of our persistent problems.
http://blogs.pomona.edu/eng87-2012f/2012/11/12/what-does-pom...
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/23/essays
http://www.claremontportside.com/print-edition/april-2011-is...
I thought that the quality of writing in the article was very poor. As a side note, I also found it funny that many are worried that the "prestige" of Harvard is besmirched, because the original meaning (now obsolete) of prestige was An illusion; a conjuring trick; a deception, an imposture. EDIT: Even the title of the article is unintentionally funny. Because academics may also be the plural of academic (better desc…
Great point...
Of course prestige is the primary product for sale at such a place of business.
It's no different at Carnegie Mellon. I spoke to a former SCS dean who revealed that cheating rates in CS courses are as high as 70%, yet most professors turn a blind eye (which as the Crimson article points out, may be attributed to apathy or inability to enforce class policy at a large scale). The fact that academic dishonesty is so prevalent these days makes me inclined to believe that cheating is symptomatic of t…
I disagree thoroughly. I've been to both Harvard and CMU, and assisted classes at the latter. CMU SCS undergrads work much harder than Harvard undergrads, and their work is more honest. Actually, CMU students are perhaps a bit too isolated. This leads to some academic stratification, because the smart kids hang out with one another. There is less support and camaraderie. Lots of promising students struggle at SCS and…
Can you elaborate on what this means? Can you pretty much just roll into the nurse's office and get some amphetamines?
I observed that cheating, especially in the first year or two was pretty common among certain groups of students. But it was treated especially harshly. Most of the students who were caught cheating were given a scare and a second chance, but by and large the systemic cheaters were kicked out or changed to an easier major by the 3rd year.
By the 4th year, the average class size was around 10% of the average 1st year.
My school was so strongly into fighting cheating, that they invested heavily into licensing cheat detection software when it was available and spending quite a bit of money researching and selling/licensing anti-cheat tools to other schools.
It turns out to be an interesting CS problem that cut across most majors and definitely made an impact on killing off endemic cheating in the school.
Academics were taken very seriously at my school.