621–630 of 662 posts
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We have a little honor system library in our neighborhood near the playground. But I’ve never seen anything like that in Baltimore, DC, or Philadelphia.
I’ve seen them in Arlington, VA. Which is basically DC.
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> I’m an alum now, not a student, but even college students can submit a FOIA request. "Show me the reports on unreported cheating"? > Additionally, you could see the breakdown by race (and more) of people that were expelled. How do you know they were expelled for cheating? And not sexual harassment, or in some universities breaking codes of conduct around public behavior. You have heard of FERPA, right? It would be…
Over half the faculty literally admitted they don’t report/don’t feel comfortable reporting in an anonymous survey when this was being more rigorously interrogated. It’s easy to infer “therefore a lot of cheating goes unreported” from that. Second question: Because cheating is handled by a specific group and sexual misconduct/assault is a criminal offense that gets you arrested (it’s also handled at the school level…
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I've talked to instructors who've just given up. They know the students use AI. More and more of them do every year. The instructors can spot it easily, but if they brought them all into the academic dishonesty process, the department would grind to a halt. So they just let it go. They are all paying tuition, and they'll all get the credential they paid for.
I sympathize with the instructors to an extent, but the reality is that LLMs will be a pervasive part of life going forward. Schools need to completely reinvent their curriculum around that new reality. It's going to be a painful process for instructors accustomed to the old way of teaching.
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Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly. I have a friend who in college had another student take his test from the "complete" pile, erase my friend's name, and put on his own instead. It was only through blind luck that my friend figured it out. He, the TA, and the professor reported it – with smoking gun proof – but nothing happened. T…
Money talks and bullshit walks. I’m beginning to understand why a lot of US politician seem to come from ivy leagues yet are dumb as hell.
Brilliant, charismatic people without any sense of ethics tend to do very well in school, in politics, and in most organizations.
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There is an easy solution to Princeton’s problem, and it’s to have an honor system with a backbone. The way honor historically worked. At my private high school, and at my university (although they later gutted it), we had a “single sanction” honor code. That is, if you were caught lying, cheating, or stealing - in any way, and in or out of school, though usually it was in - you were immediately expelled. No mitigati…
"Zero tolerance" policies like that are much more prone to the kind of excessive leniency in application that's described, precisely because the penalty for being found to have cheated is so very high. In those cases, the academic integrity committee is much more likely to demand a very high standard of proof of cheating, and it can ironically result in more people getting away with it again and again, where, in a sy…
You either did it or you didn’t. There is no small crime, they are all the same. That is honor- you have it or you don’t.
There is no “you were accused, but it’s minor so we’ll have to be more sure than usual.”
That would be as ridiculous as saying “you were accused, and it’s major, so if there’s any suspicion at all, you’re gone.”
I know that happens in practice sometimes (like to the lacrosse players at Duke, or to Phi Psi at Virginia), but it’s not just. And it’s not representative of a functional honor system.
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Over half the faculty literally admitted they don’t report/don’t feel comfortable reporting in an anonymous survey when this was being more rigorously interrogated. It’s easy to infer “therefore a lot of cheating goes unreported” from that. Second question: Because cheating is handled by a specific group and sexual misconduct/assault is a criminal offense that gets you arrested (it’s also handled at the school level…
Weirdly to you, perhaps, I am absolutely confident that there is a high degree of probability about your story (that expulsions for cheating were enforced along racial or gender lines) is accurate. Maybe I’m just overzealously arguing about the verifiability of it.
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That's like saying if you accuse someone of murder and they get convicted, you've altered their life forever. That's not a burden, it's justice.
It is not reasonable to expect a calculus professor to routinely decide if they want to derail someone’s entire future because, for whatever reason (a whole other discussion), they tried to cheat on an assignment. A lot of systems don’t have multiple strikes or are otherwise deeply flawed (as well as routinely shown to be ineffective). If you cheat and are caught, you are expelled. There is no sense of proportion or…
The case of Katie Meyer at Stanford (not an academic integrity issue but a carelessly punitive disciplinary process nonetheless) shows that universities need to temper discipline with humanity and understanding, and to work for positive outcomes for all students.
> honor system has relied on individual accountability, with students pledging both to refrain from academic dishonesty and to report those they witness in violation
The last part is the weakness. As you note, nobody wants to potentially cause great harm to another student, even one who is guilty of cheating.
That being said, a cheating student should certainly not receive credit for the exam, as it is unearned, creates an unfair environment, undermines the assessment accuracy of course grades, and can disadvantage other students in courses with curved or grouped grade distributions. Widespread or prevalent cheating is particularly destructive because it creates bad incentives.
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Not even prestigious ones. The school needs to sound like it has strong penalties against cheating, so there are really strict-sounding policies ("zero in the course"). But also, so many students cheat that actually enforcing these policies uniformly would hurt your graduation stats, make unhappy customers (students + parents), and hurt your revenue if you actually expel them. So the equilibrium is that the burden of…
The "compromise" that my university found was that if you were caught cheating in Science & Engineering school, you were given (informally) an ultimatum: either this can be escalated to the official channels, and you may be expelled (or perhaps nothing would come of it), or you can go be someone else's problem and transfer to a different subject. Typically the business school, because they're not big on ethics anyway…
this is funny except that it also isn't
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I've talked to instructors who've just given up. They know the students use AI. More and more of them do every year. The instructors can spot it easily, but if they brought them all into the academic dishonesty process, the department would grind to a halt. So they just let it go. They are all paying tuition, and they'll all get the credential they paid for.
I sympathize with the instructors to an extent, but the reality is that LLMs will be a pervasive part of life going forward. Schools need to completely reinvent their curriculum around that new reality. It's going to be a painful process for instructors accustomed to the old way of teaching.
Going back to the old(er) way of teaching may be a very good idea.