Harvard Students in Cheating Scandal Say Collaboration Was Accepted

I did this back in H.S. comp sci class (posted my projects to my personal website). I was punished by getting a D in AP comp sci (though aced the AP exam). Definitely was not approved at my school...aided and abetted in cheating apparently.

Not to remove blame where blame is due, but in both cases there are incentive and regulatory problems. If you give people problems whereby they feel that they cannot do well without cheating (i.e. when everyone else is cheating), then cheating becomes institutionalized. Thus, to be cheating in a class where 99% of the students are cheating is to be somewhat less culpable than to be among the students cheating when only 1% of the students are cheating.

That is to say, to have a situation when cheating becomes the norm implies a much larger institutional and cultural collapse in which the larger framework (and not simply the cheating individuals) demands investigation.

What are the larger trends here?

Well, the first might simply be the idea that greed is okay. In this case, we can witness the following transformation in American values fairly clearly.

Phase 1 (religious): Greed is bad, we do things for the sake of a heavenly kingdom only. We are only temporary stewards of the wealth we have.

Phase 2 (agnostic): Greed may be a necessary part of evolution and competition for limited resources, but we need to limit it and make it a long term sort of greed.

Phase 3 (hedonist): My identity is defined by how much money I have, and I don't care how I get it.

In other words, there is long-term value erosion. This is not to say that one's values necessarily have to be religious-Christian in derivation, but in the American context this was overwhelmingly the case and this erosion has basically given way to live in the moment materialism.

The practical consequences is that many people involved in business, and this is most clear in the financial sector which has no ostensible tie to any product whatsoever and attracts people who care only about money, not only seek money, but seek to destroy any barriers that keep them from getting as much money as possible. In the US this has meant saturation of elite universities (pulling an increasing proportion of the best and brightest into the financial sector), buying out of the major political parties, shutting out the minor political parties, and removing regulatory functions (i.e. the SEC). Additionally, there is the desire to weaken the electorate by importing cheap labor from other countries that will be liable to manipulation via mass media, decreasing the likelihood that any independent party will achieve critical mass.

Because this is a long-term institutional problem there is no obvious solution, except to continue with the values that have not entirely been eroded (i.e. honesty) and to encourage others who do their function (i.e. continue working in the public sector and enforcing existing regulation). Creating new services and teams of people that are doing a good job simply for the sake of doing a good job is never a bad idea either -- although it is always easy to get sucked into the mentality of "greed is good."

> I did the work, whether or not they want to is their problem.

And the problem of the mediocre students who don't cheat, but get graded below the cheaters; and employers, who will tend to hire less honest and less capable graduates.

Computer Science is sort of odd in that respect, and it does vary from department to department.

For example, my undergrad school was very clear that everyone's home directories were set to being publicly readable, and that it was expected that there would be times that you would want to see someone else's source. This was essentially asynchronous lab work: we could always talk though problems together, but we were never able to cut and paste code (the detection system looked for things like whitespace to detect cut-and-paste vs hand-typed).

When there were two matching submissions, both students would be pulled up and then the administration had to figure out who copied who. What I heard on the grapevine was that usually it was really obvious: students that had been struggling were the ones most likely to cheat, and even when they matched in ability, the guilty party would crack pretty quickly and own up.

Personally, I think there are better ways of doing computer science assignments anyway: I tend to TA classes where students work on self-defined projects rather than doing the same rote exercise, so cut-and-paste is no help anyway.

> One student recalled going to a teaching fellow while working on the final exam and finding a crowd of others there, asking about a test question that hinged on an unfamiliar term. The student said the fellow defined the term for them.

I realise that I only have this snippet of text, but: Didn't they have a dictionary? Didn't they have search engines?

Some of the attitudes displayed in that article are surprising. And disappointing.