Maybe I haven't scrolled down far enough, but gut feeling is telling me that a lot of the rise in cheating is coming from international (read: chinese) students. Plenty of stories and personal experience of cheating rings. I tried to get into one just to see what was going on, but even though I looked the part I couldn't talk the talk.
Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
161–170 of 662 posts
Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#162A WASP ethical framework cannot survive either the extirpation of WASPs from the student body or the transformation of the education system into a high stakes mandarin style death struggle.
WASPs in this day and age are no more immune to "high stakes mandarin style death struggles".
Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#163huh, i had no idea princeton specifically disallowed proctors, and instead relied on an honor system. seems... like a poorly thought out system, especially given: " 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report. " crazier is the people prote…
A couple of my friends teach university classes. Mostly undergrad. I get to hear some of their interesting stories when we game together.
My impression is that there was a sharp shift around COVID. Doing classes over Zoom with a talking head broke the connection they had with their professors and other students. College felt closer to a video game operated through your screen than a community.
When I was in college not all that long ago, cheating was a scandalous thing. I knew a friend of a friend who cheated on an exam with some tricks and it resulted in suspension for a semester. There were rumors of someone hiring a service to write their papers for them and it was a wild story.
Now students have ChatGPT to write their papers and they've been practicing how to use cell phones without the teacher noticing for 10 years before getting to college. Combine that with social media grumblings about how college is "just a piece of paper" and doomerism about how they're never going to get a job or buy a house and cheating starts to look the only rational option to some.
The pattern is not contained to college. Every time the topic of cheating comes up on Hacker News there are more comments defending cheating than I would expect from this crowd. The usual justification is that the system is broken in a hand-wavey way and therefore nobody can be blamed for cheating.
Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#164Earlier 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.
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…
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Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who went there (albeit many decades ago) I can tell you FWIW when I was there folks took it seriously. I literally knew of no one who ever cheated on an exam. And I'm pretty sure that anyone I knew who observed cheating would have taken it seriously enough to bring it to the process. It was pretty much a fixture of how students thought about things. So it worked (near as I could tell) back then. But instit…
I wasn't at Princeton, but I remember blatant cheating going on and 'study groups' in CS classes that were mere passing around of completed code. (1997-2001) I'd asked them what they expected would happen when they tried to get jobs or landed one. Like how do you fake work? They just said all jobs are group-based like their study group. (Keep in mind they were soliciting my code as their group was struggling to find…
Maybe he's happier managing a bagel store rather than dealing with Kubernetes.
Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#166I've sat in classes where people at my table genuinely took pictures of the exam while the professor's back was turned (being kind to us and giving us useful information on the board) and uploaded the entire exam to the Gemini app. Cheating is all around disheartening and is now incredibly easy with all the free multi-modal models around. Real active proctoring is needed and devices need to be confiscated during exam…
I'm very interested in how this cheating is perceived by other students.
There is no peer pressure not to cheat?
Students aren't considered sketchy or jerky for cheating?
Being seen cheating has no adverse affect on their ability to date, to join group projects, to join student startups, etc.?
Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#167huh, i had no idea princeton specifically disallowed proctors, and instead relied on an honor system. seems... like a poorly thought out system, especially given: " 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report. " crazier is the people prote…
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Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#168A WASP ethical framework cannot survive either the extirpation of WASPs from the student body or the transformation of the education system into a high stakes mandarin style death struggle.
WASPs in this day and age are no more immune to "high stakes mandarin style death struggles".
The word "or" grammatically indicates such a combination of conditions.
Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#169Maybe I haven't scrolled down far enough, but gut feeling is telling me that a lot of the rise in cheating is coming from international (read: chinese) students. Plenty of stories and personal experience of cheating rings. I tried to get into one just to see what was going on, but even though I looked the part I couldn't talk the talk.
The numbers don't play out because international chinese students only make up 5-7% (maybe less) of the undergraduate student body. Self-reported cheating frequencies are much higher.
Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is bad, someone who cheats on a test or someone who rats out their friend for cheating on a test? It really is a cultural thing, and that sort of culture is primarily passed down from upperclassmen to underclassmen. I went to a different college with an honor code (Harvey Mudd) and when I graduated in 2019 it was still doing relatively well, but from what I've heard COVID really killed students caring about / a…
> Which is bad, someone who cheats on a test or someone who rats out their friend for cheating on a test? Obviously the first. How is this even a question?
> Obviously the first.
The more usual perspective would be that they're both bad.