Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam • Hacker News Board

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#21

Post by larrys » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 8:29 PM UTC

"Nearly half the students in a class of more than 250 are suspected of jointly coming up with answers or copying off one another, said Jay Harris, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education. Independent groups of students appear to have worked together by e-mail or other means on responses to short questions and an essay assignment"

Involving others in cheating with you greatly increases the "leak vectors" for the "crime" to be discovered. Loose lips sink ships.

It's unclear from the story the size of the actual groups that were cheating but it seems to be that the groups were not 125/2 groups of 2 but much larger groups of students helping each other.

I guess that is one life lesson that all the education in the world doesn't provide that people with street smarts might have had.

No doubt that the administration was tipped off by somebody (or would have been if that's not the way this went down.)

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#22

Post by stephencanon » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 8:29 PM UTC

jvrossb wrote: post #13

waterlesscloud wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, let's keep the responsibility for this where it belongs- on those who actually cheated.

Why can't it both be true that the students cheated and deserve to be punished and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the course that drove half the students to cheat? If I had to guess it was a basic requirement students had to take whether interested or not and cheating seemed like the easiest way to pass while devoting more time to other pursuits perceived to be more intellectually stimulating. Pure…

Oh, come on. It's not like the course held a gun to their head and made them cheat. They didn't cheat to feed their family. It's (nearly) impossible for a college course to actually "drive half the students to cheat". They're big boys and girls, and they need to be responsible for their decisions.

The point of taking a course isn't to get an A. It's to learn something. If the students are too thick to grasp that fact, then Harvard made a mistake in admitting them and would do well to kick them out and give their places to students who get it.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#23

Post by brd » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 8:30 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #10

pdenya wrote: post #4

It's incredible how high the punishments for cheating are. 1 year suspension for collaborating on a take home test?

You can cheat on a final at Harvard and not be expelled?

I also found this surprising. While penalties at some schools may seem extreme I think expulsion, immediate failure of the class, etc are perfectly reasonable consequences. Catching a student cheating isn't very easy, its shockingly common, and it takes a toll on the rest of the student body that doesn't cheat.

I consistently notified teachers when I saw blatant occurrences of cheating. The last thing I want is for my Alma Mater to be producing an unethical alumni body that waters down the value of my degree and GPA.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#24

Post by Anechoic » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 8:33 PM UTC

One thing that I really appreciated at MIT was that when we were given take-home tests or other take-home assignments, it was expected (and often encouraged) that we collaborate with our classmates. Writing down the exact same answer as another classmate was fine, so long as you documented who you worked with and who contributed what to the assignment. It provided an important lesson since collaboration has been a huge part of my professional career.

Now if those Harvard students broke the rules, well, they broke the rules. But I can't help but think that if Harvard is restricting collaboration in take-home assignments, that they're doing it wrong.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#25

Post by akarpenko » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 8:34 PM UTC

gms7777 wrote: post #11

I hate to say it, but this isn't that surprising. I recently came from one of these top universities and there's a problematic combination of factors at play: 1. Students are under a ton of stress, have very little time to do work and have very high standards for themselves. 2. Guidelines are not clear defined or communicated as to what is and isn't cheating. There's a ton of grey area. 3. It is incredibly easy to ch…

1. How can they have very high standards if they cheat? Stress is no excuse for cheating, spend less time getting drunk. 2. It's always mentioned that cheating is not acceptable at the beginning of every term in every class. And isn't it obvious anyway? 3. Yes it's unfortunately too easy.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#26

Post by rayiner » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 8:34 PM UTC

I think cheating is one of the signs of the crumbling of our civilized society. It is a scourge that doesn't stop at final exams, but as we can see in the financial sector one that continues on through life.

That said, we lay all the blame on students, but universities themselves are also cheating. Multiple well-known universities in recent years have been exposed as lying,[1] about their enrollment statistics to rankings organizations.

Emory was exposed for its lies just a few days ago: http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/08/21/fallout-fr...

University of Illinois was exposed earlier this year: http://abovethelaw.com/university-of-illinois-college-of-law

One of the reasons my father moved us to the U.S. from his home country of Bangladesh is that he couldn't stand to raise his children in a culture where he had to pay a bribe just to get his phone service hooked up. When I see tacit acceptance of cheating amongst students in American universities, I see the exact same elements of cultural dysfunction that my dad saw in Bangladesh. I fear without stiffer penalties for cheaters, both for students who cheat and university administrators who cheat, our culture of basic American honesty will continue to crumble.

[1] Everyone uses the term "misreporting" but "misreporting" is what happens when you intend to write down 1470 and accidentally write down 1740. "Lying" is the appropriate term for what happens when you instead write down "1500" for a period of a decade.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#27

Post by ChrisArchitect » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 8:36 PM UTC

take home exam and collaboration? take home exam is just asking for that in this day and age. I thought the idea was it would be easy, but only the students that put the work in would learn something that they'd need to know/use in a harder exam later.....

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#28

Post by ericHosick » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 8:37 PM UTC

gms7777 wrote: post #11

I hate to say it, but this isn't that surprising. I recently came from one of these top universities and there's a problematic combination of factors at play: 1. Students are under a ton of stress, have very little time to do work and have very high standards for themselves. 2. Guidelines are not clear defined or communicated as to what is and isn't cheating. There's a ton of grey area. 3. It is incredibly easy to ch…

One of the things I disliked most about lecturing was cheating/plagiarism. It took up a lot of time that I could use to do marking/help students. There was no incentive, nor time given, on the part of the University to deal with plagiarism (everyone just kinda wanted it to not be there). Also, being wrong about it was really serious. I could seriously hurt students who had not plagiarised (it was especially difficult to figure out who plagiarised on team projects).

I also gave a 10 minute lecture on cheating/plagiarism on the first day of class.

It is good, though, to see lecturers who are serious about cheating/plagiarism like your professor. It takes a lot of work to stay on top of that stuff. He deserves cudos.

In the end, plagiarism really hurts the student the most (and the university to some extent (but probably not Harvard)).

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#29

Post by stfu » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 8:38 PM UTC

gms7777 wrote: post #11

I hate to say it, but this isn't that surprising. I recently came from one of these top universities and there's a problematic combination of factors at play: 1. Students are under a ton of stress, have very little time to do work and have very high standards for themselves. 2. Guidelines are not clear defined or communicated as to what is and isn't cheating. There's a ton of grey area. 3. It is incredibly easy to ch…

It looks to me also more as some form of anti-cheating theater. Expecting that there is absolutely no collaboration / idea exchange going on with a take-home exam seems naive at the very least.

Re: Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam

#30

Post by danso » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 8:39 PM UTC

Anechoic wrote: post #24

One thing that I really appreciated at MIT was that when we were given take-home tests or other take-home assignments, it was expected (and often encouraged ) that we collaborate with our classmates. Writing down the exact same answer as another classmate was fine, so long as you documented who you worked with and who contributed what to the assignment. It provided an important lesson since collaboration has been a h…

Perhaps, but isn't there the risk that a charismatic leader could get team members to essentially do the work for him/her? Sure, you could say that's a lesson in life, but ideally, you want a passing grade in engineering mechanics to mean that that person has competency in engineering, not merely the politics and management of engineering.

Of course, this risk is mitigated by having the final weighted much heavier than the rest of the coursework and not being take home. But that approach ends up going to the polar extreme of valuing collaboration