The Fall of Academics at Harvard

Setting a strict curve is probably the laziest way to grade a class. It doesn't tell you anything about how well you did (do you get the material? Can you solve problems on your own? Or are you the 27th "best" person in the class?) Of course, with a curve, a professor doesn't have to actually think over what a passing grade is. Which causes all kinds of negative incentive (such as cheating, or almost worse, anti-collaboration). I'll take a class where 10% of the class get an A because the standards are exceptionally high over a class where a strict 40% will get an A, as one implies I'll get a lot out of it, and the other implies I'll stress needlessly over unimportant trivia.

CMU undergrad and 15-122 (intro to CS) TA here.

As far as I can tell, there's a lot of awareness against cheating here. Most, if not all, of my professors have gone out of their way to stress how cheating is a terrible thing, devalues the degree, etc.

As a TA, I've seen some cheating on homework, but not nearly as much as described in the article. Our professor certainly does NOT turn a blind eye to it, assuming it's caught via software or we're able to catch it on the written part.

One of the worst parts of CMU is this weird aversion to seeking help. We try our best to hold a lot of office hours, especially in the lower level courses, but a fair number of students don't take advantage of them, or of the other helpful opportunities (e.g. one-on-one tutoring), because they fear some stigma against them. The worst part of CMU academic culture is that attitude: that it's not okay to seek help if you're struggling.

Shivak (another responder to your post) put it pretty well: academic stratification is what happens here, as well as some social stratification. If you're part of that group of people who fits well at the Gates 3K cluster, then you can get basically all the help you need from the myriad of upper level TAs who hang out there (hay geohot how do i kernel???). Also, CMU can be pretty fucked up socially in general, but that's for another post.

The comments on the Crimson site are insane. These are some jaded people.

On the point of Harvard professors being more concerned about research than teaching, Sean Carroll has a blog post from a few years ago that is relevant: The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/...).

To quote: "the purpose of Harvard is not to educate students. If anything, its primary purpose is to produce research and scholarly work."

I graduated from HMC last year.

>Do you really think nobody was cheating at Pomona & Harvey Mudd? Perhaps those schools follow educational philosophies that deemphasize relative performance like Brown's gradeless system or emphasizing "cooperation" over individual ability. If your performance did not matter then perhaps there would be no incentive to cheat (or study). However these students are still humans and humans are lazy, greedy and proud - thus prone to cheating.

I can't speak for Pomona, but many HMC classes have timed, closed book take home exams. It would be trivially easy to cheat on these. On homework, collaboration was usually encouraged, with the caveat that problems sets should ultimately be written up individually -- what policy to take was the choice of the professor.

We certainly had grades.

>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'm appending data collected in a survey last year. The data was shared with students, but not AFAIK published outside. My personal perception is that cheating is uncommon, and I did not know of anybody I knew doing so. I believe very few people I knew would be open to cheating if approached by a friend. I agree that the administration has no incentive to publicize issues, but I do honestly believe that the issues were few.

With all due respect to Claremont McKenna, their culture is very different. I would not extrapolate from them.

...

There was a survey of student and faculty perceptions of cheating on campus. Unfortunately I don't have details of how this was conducted. Presumably it was anonymous.

In response to : "I believe nearly all HMC Students respect the Honor Code"

Students: Agree: 84% Neutral: 8% Disagree: 8%

Faculty: Agree: 88% Neutral: 5% Disagree: 7%

"Most HMC Students adhere to the Honor Code in their academic work.":

Students: Agree: 92% Neutral: 4% Disagree: 4%

Faculty: Agree: 90% Neutral: 10% Disagree: 0%

"Most HMC Students adhere to the Honor Code in matters unrelated to their academic work.":

Students: Agree: 66% Neutral: 22% Disagree: 12%

Faculty: Agree: 53% Neutral: 33% Disagree: 14%

(For this question, I do not know the number of respondents): Faculty: In the past 3 years, have any of the following Honor Code violations occurred in the classes you teach:

Plagiarism: 18 Cheating: 10 Collaboration: 10 Other: 3

Faculty: On average, how frequently have Honor Code violations come to your attention?":

1/yr: 77% 2-3/yr: 23%

Faculty: Do you currently give take home exams in any of your Core classes"? [Core classes are required for all students].

Yes: 32% No: 42% N/A: 26%

Faculty: Do you currently give take home exams in any of your non-Core classes"?

Yes: 86% No: 14%

Students: "Have you ever violated the honor code?"

No: 80% 1x: 15% 2x: 1% >2x: 4%

Students: "Did you self report?

Yes: 17% No: 83%