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Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

dailyprincetonian.com

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Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#201

Post by hgoel »

Aurornis wrote: post #163
john_strinlai wrote: post #5

huh, 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 n…

This fits with my priors. I was in grad school during covid and had some professors I was close to (and whose class I was taking) reach out asking for feedback on their exam because students were blatantly cheating despite the allowances the professors were making (up to being open to the internet, just no direct communication). They couldn't punish them, and they were perplexed why anyone would bother cheating on even trivial exams.

Even recently when I last spoke to them, the profs described how students were refusing to think for themselves even when given open ended projects. They were just having ChatGPT come up with the project idea for them instead of taking advantage of the freedom to do something they enjoyed.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#202

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #64
kibwen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fish rots from the head. It's a sucker's game to aspire to selflessly serve the greater good when the most powerful people in the land are brazenly corrupt pedophiles. In other words: monkey see, monkey do.

> The fish rots from the head. The old adage that the people elect the governance they deserve; comes to mind. The concepts of Virtue, Honour, Duty, and Justice have been declining in the West over a very long period (this is not a US specific thing). The rotting head reflects the rotting society. > It's a sucker's game to aspire to selflessly serve the greater good when the most powerful people in the land are braze…

> The old adage that the people elect the governance they deserve; comes to

this idea has always bothered me. i think people (even ones i disagree with) deserve better.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#203

Post by pickleRick243 »

poplarsol wrote: post #168
pickleRick243 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The style of writing and the inclusion of the word "mandarin" made me assume that you were implying WASPs were not participating in the "high stakes struggles". You still have not explicitly stated your view one way or the other. As you can see from the other comments, almost everyone read an undercurrent of xenophobia in your post. I sense you're a skilled interlocutor- I concede I fell into your trap.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#204

Post by BalinKing »

throwup238 wrote: post #59
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #15

Earlier 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…

Things may have changed, but I don't recall any group exams during my time at Caltech, and conversely I do recall a strong sense of pride in the Honor Code. Also, if your professor allows collaboration, then it's definitionally not cheating: There is a vast moral difference between "the professor made the assignments difficult with the specific expectation that people will collaborate" and "the professor doesn't want collaboration but people did it anyway".

Frankly, this comment feels almost entirely foreign to my experience—I suppose things could've changed over the years (although my impression is that things have gotten much worse recently, not better), or it could be major-specific, or I just got lucky with the specific people I happened to hang out with?

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#205

Post by traderj0e »

dbvn wrote: post #4

Crazy it took them 133 years to do the obvious. Assuming your *entire* student-base is morally superior to the general population

That's not really the assumption they were making. It used to be that going to an elite university was good enough without also having top grades. Now there's more pressure, and cheating is way easier than before. In a similar vein, higher-tier schools tend to put less effort into weeding students out, because they assume everyone who got admitted there has already proven themselves enough. Wonder if that will last.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#206

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

bad_username wrote: post #138
tdb7893 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've known a lot of people who justify crimes like shoplifting by the fact that these corporations have stolen from them (and not in some abstract way, often literal wage theft) and felt like the social contract was already broken. And it's not like the leaders at the large corporations I've worked at generally seem to care about their employees or customers (I would describe most places I worked at as, at best, amor…

Justifying one's crime because other crime exists - isnot a winning position long term.

perhaps not, but cynicism in kind is understandable when you have no real power to effect change.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#207

Post by john_strinlai »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #199
jvanderbot wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI is going to steal all white collar work - why use AI to get a degree to do white collar work, paying both the AI and the college for it? Wild times.

For the legacy clout of the big college name?

more valuable, i think, is the social networking opportunities. not many places you can be chummy and party with a bunch of millionaire/billionaire heirs.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#208

Post by rosstex »

traderj0e wrote: post #198
rosstex wrote: post #119

I was a TA at Princeton ~5 years ago, and I had forgotten about the honor code until reading this. Yes it's true, we did not proctor exams, and students seemed to take pride in it. On every test, you got the names/signatures of those sitting next to you. But also, I had a student who was accused of not putting his pencil down when the test had concluded, and the bureaucratic process to fight the accusation was so cri…

Hm, this answers something I was wondering, how do accusations work with no proctors or other evidence

You end up in this wonderful place: https://rrr.princeton.edu/students-and-university/25-univers...

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#209

Post by maxglute »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #87
shadowtree wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moral code is downstream from culture and not every culture sees cheating as a moral failing. As Princeton's demo skewed hard into a more international student body, the underlying cultural assumptions have shifted. The Christian extension of the Ninth Commandment from not bearing false witness to a blanket ban on lying is unique. Islam has explicit exceptions through Taqiyya, Hinduism gets nuanced with dharma and ad…

It is rather disappointing to see a take as unsubtle as "white people are pure and honest God-fearing Christians and Asians are dirty heathens with no concept of morality" on this site.

My feeling is people in west extrapolate asian within group variations into whole. Rich international students who invest in western degrees as pay-to-win not representative / sampling bias vs whole. Reality is international students pay for degree, university accommodates, lack of language proficiency = they'll visibly "cheat" more (i.e. patch writing) to get what's theirs, but those conditions to specific subculture/cohort. Broad statistically show western institutions has like 15-50% plagiarism/cheating rates, most of which just get swept under rug because academic misconduct not elevated officially to keep misconduct stats at ~1%. For reference PRC plagiarism data (CNKI / big data audit used to sweep through tertiary thesis) was like ~10%.

I suppose one conclusion is academically inclined East Asians cheat less in aggregate... because broadly you can't cheat national examinations (yes there are very elaborate cheating rings, but this should only reinforce it's not easy / trivial). The ones who buys academic performance, i.e. dummies who can't hack PRC tertiary and has to go western tertiary (including Ivys) cheat more than baseline. But broadly west cheats more... but institutions minimize misconduct stats because incentivized to cover/underreport/juke stats to protect brand.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#210

Post by sudosteph »

poplarsol wrote: post #69

A 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.

A "WASP ethical framework" is barely a thing, if at all. The Princeton founders were motivated by moral obligations derived from a particular subset of Protestant Christianity. They were dissenters from the Anglican establishment, so it feels weird to try to bunch them in under the "WASP" umbrella. I have no idea if people who wrote the honor code were Calvinists too, but that was the seed ideology. It's not something that generic "WASP culture" gets to claim absent from the foundational theology. I'd wager that most WASPs at Princeton today do not share genuine belief in those foundations, if they don't cheat it's only because of social pressure, which tends not to hold up as well under pressure.
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