Cheating and the Honor System | Hacker News Reader

Cheating and the Honor System

ginandtacos.com

93 pointsjtbigwoo85 comments

Allow me to give the other side of such a story.

When I was 16, I took English 101 at a local college (joint enrollment, wanted to get it out of the way for my college undergraduate degree).

While there, I was, to my surprise, the top of my class. My grade average was 102 (the professor gave a maximum of 105 on each paper) and I'd had two papers read in class as exemplary.

Unfortunately, my professor was also staunchly politically-polarized, and would frequently spark political debates in class and use absurd examples for things that did not need to be politicized ("when citing a credible source, such as CBS, use this format. Non-credible sources, such as Fox News, or White House press releases [George W Bush was sitting president at the time] will not be accepted."). In one such discussion, the professor took a very difficult-to-support stance (I do not recall the substance now; this was in 2006) with which I and most of the class disagreed. However, as often happens in classroom settings, I wound up as unofficial "spokesman" for the general class consensus. The next assignment was the final paper, worth ~25% of my grade. I was given an F due to plagarism. When asked for proof, the professor highlighted a few sentence fragments here and there as "copied directly" (without stating the source from which these fragments were allegedly copied) and full paragraphs as "too far above [my] ability to be [my] original work." Her reasoning was that, on the whole, my paper "sounded more like a seasoned journalist than a mere college pre-freshman," so it was obviously plagarized despite any substantial lack of proof.

Because there was no system of appeals, the F stood, and my overall grade for the class dropped to a B. Simply because the professor disliked my political stance.

I agree completely, cheating is different than unexpected results. Additionally there is little recourse if an instructor has it in for you.

When I was 14, I had an "International trade" simulation in which each student was a "country" trying to make hamburgers. Each country was given a large amount of 2-3 ingredients, but 6 were necessary to make a burger (lettuce, cheese, patty, bread, tomato, mayo). So we had to trade and we'd be graded on how many burgers we could complete. The teacher was left wing and was trying to teach a "fixed wealth" version of trade. Some countries were specifically given less resources. Sparking cries of "unfair!". I was given less than average, and wasn't content to lose. So I immediately traded everything I had 2:1 to buy up all the patties; cornering the closed market trivially. Once I could roadblock a majority of the market, I asked for a 1:10 rate in return. I got by far the most complete hamburgers, but received an F for the exercise.

The teacher had hoped that we'd learn that wealth is pre-determined and trade more favorably with countries that had less. I wasn't participating in the "spirit" of the exercise. Thankfully she stopped short of calling it cheating.

I had a similar situation at grad school.

I turned in a proposal (what ultimately was my thesis proposal). I had created my own model and it was described as such in the text. I got accused of plagiarizing my own model because I didn't cite a source. The comment was 'it is as if you are claiming to have invented it yourself.' approximately. The next line of feedback was something to the tune of 'This is what some might consider plagiarism in a university setting.' I got 1 point above passing for the paper.

I went to the professor and told her she clearly didn't even read my proposal because it anyone who actually read it would have read that it WAS my own model. Being accused of plagiarism and not reporting it to anyone was a fun ordeal. There was no consequences because it wasn't reported but I have my dignity and fuck you for accusing me of plagiarism. I went to the head of the program who said he basically didn't care, the professor told him everything was fine. So I went to the dean of the school, who said the head of my program told him everything was fine. But nobody would actually read or listen to any feedback. Ruined my grade for that course and really made me dislike the university and their ridiculous resistance to any sort of feedback.

My school (Stanford) the teachers were required to leave the classroom during tests and we were supposed to use the honor system. I never cheated and I don't know anyone who did. Maybe his sarcastic comment at the end has more truth in it than he meant. People tend to live up to expectations.

If you prevent cheating by having a person who's job it is to catch you then you feel like if you don't get caught you have won. On the other hand if you are expected not to cheat because it is not what a honorable person does, then if you cheat it is because you have failed.

I was a TA at your school (Stanford). I like that policy, but I also witnessed cheating firsthand. Specifically, I graded a take-home midterm exam where 3 students handed in the same bizarrely wrong answer. The students received penalties on that test, but no other disciplinary action was taken. This was in the mechanical engineering department in a graduate level mechatronics course (that I suspect you've taken).

If I were making the rules, those students would be out of the university the same day. There is no shortage of smart people who would love to attend Stanford, especially the engineering school. I have no idea why enforcement is so disgracefully lax.

In the electrical engineering department, I regularly had classmates ask me if we could "compare answers" on homework problem sets. Sometimes (rarely), this was for a genuine goal of education-- if your answer is wrong, you want to know that so you can figure out the right answer. More often, it was clueless people trying to collect answers from multiple other people. Drove me up the wall.

In my experience (another school, another country), it was usually allowed to take a take-home exam together with others. The understanding was that the exams are sufficiently hard, that students smart enough to pass do not allow others to freeload and that working together with other smart students teaches important skills in addition to a better understanding of the subject.

The same goes for homework problem sets: me and two others would usually first solve them ourselves to the best of our ability and then compare answers, which was always an educational experience; the more so when no one had successfully solved the problem on their own or when it took someone a while to convince the other two their (identical) solutions were wrong.

> The understanding was that the exams are sufficiently hard, that students smart enough to pass do not allow others to freeload...

That sounds like a flawed assumption to me. There are lots of social and economic incentives that might lead someone smart to do others' work.

I tend to agree that working with others on problem sets can be quite beneficial. Many classes I took had the same policy on those. But at some point you have to prove you can do it yourself.

It would be interesting to have a web application that both people submitted the answers to and it came back with just "same" or "different". Might be one was to genuinely compare quickly. Then based on the number of sames you could discuss the differents (or decline to).

I find that comparing answers make a lot of sense when you all know each other and your level of skill. I often check answers with my roommate on math problem sets, and I know we're about at the same level, so neither of us freeloads.

My first year at Caltech, where almost all exams are take-home exams, I was in trouble. I'd spent way too much time at the computing center hacking, and at the end of second quarter I'd had to petition to be allowed to stay. I was allowed to stay on the condition that I pass everything third quarter.

I flunked the final exam for physics. I knew I was flunking it as I took it. I also knew EXACTLY where in the book the one bit of information was that I needed to pass that exam was. All I had to do was reach over a couple of feet, in my private, closed room, and spend 30 seconds in the book, and all would be well. But Caltech was on the honor system, and the instructions on the test said closed book, so I flunked and was kicked out.

(I then spent a year at a community college, acing everything, to show Caltech that I could actually do college work if I tried. They let me back in, and enough of the credits from the community college transferred so that I was able to come back as a sophomore. I still ended up spending way too much time hacking, but ended up with a B average at graduation).

I hope you are responsible for vital systems or research. You are demonstrably a person of character, head and shoulders above the rabble that is usually put in charge.

Hmm. I'm unethical then. Here's my reason why I would have read the book and passed (and saved money for that class).

Any money borrowed for purposes of education in the United States is unattachable. That debt will stick with you, NO MATTER WHAT. We have Reagan and 98' Republican Congress to thank/blame for this. The only other debts that have this status are ones granted by a judgement for crimes (for example, murder).

As I am reminded by that art student who had 160K in debt that was posted a few days ago, it is fiduciary irresponsible of you to have that kind of situation possibly happen.

> We have Reagan and 98' Republican Congress to thank/blame for this.

What's your response to the problem of folks declaring bankruptcy to get out of student loans right before they start earning real money, such as MDs?

> As I am reminded by that art student who had 160K in debt that was posted a few days ago, it is fiduciary irresponsible of you to have that kind of situation possibly happen.

Which "you" is that about? Are you saying that art students shouldn't be given such loans or they shouldn't accept them?

I think the best way to prevent cheating, at least for in class timed tests, is to make them non-trivial.

Multiple choice, simple fact recall -> easy to cheat

Real idea synthesis, non-trivial 'show your work' calculation required -> hard to cheat

It comes down to amount of data that needs to be moved surreptitiously to mimic a correct answer. When you frame it that way it almost looks like a problem in the security domain (secret keys, side-channel data leak, time bound attack)

Unfortunately it's also the case that: simple fact recall -> less need to cheat. Non-trivial calculation -> more need to cheat.

There are other reasons to not use simple fact recall type tests, of course. Like actually testing transfer.

But, in support of what you said: I went to Uppsala University in Sweden, and all exams were 6h long and happened in a giant special-purposed exam hall with 6 feet spaces between each desk. Cheating by communicating was a lost cause and even if you could, the amount of info you'd need to transfer to make a dent in a 6h-long test would be way too large. I don't recall anyone trying to cheat, but if it was to happen, it would have been done by adding notes to the bible-sized book of tables and formulae that we almost always were allowed to use.

> Real idea synthesis, non-trivial 'show your work' calculation required -> hard to cheat

And also harder to evaluate and grade; the professor or TA must be willing to invest an hour or several in reading through the longer answers to see where the students went right or wrong. That would be no problem in a hypothetical ideal educational framework, but realistically TAs (even at Stanford) aren't always that dedicated.

True, but maybe that means you just give fewer tests that matter more.

> "If you prevent cheating by having a person who's job it is to catch you then you feel like if you don't get caught you have won."

Given the time of year, when I read about cheating and the honor system, my first thought is about taxes, specifically, paying state sales tax on items bought online and shipped from out of state.

Most states don't have an easy way of catching sales tax cheaters, so it usually comes down to the honor system: When you file your state income tax return, you are supposed to add up all your "mail order" receipts for the year and pay sales tax on them.

How many HNers actually do this, I wonder? This seems like an instance where there is an honor system, but everyone cheats anyway.

The internet sales tax honor system is more of an oner system. You have to go out of your way to do all the bookkeeping yourself to reward unwarranted rent-seeking.

I went through the online H&R free tax thing because I made less than $50,000 in 2010, and the entire way through I am looking for a place to add up my receipts and pay my state tax on them, nowhere to be found. I have no way of calculating what else needs to be withheld, I don't have the money to go to a tax person to get it done there.

Tax law has become so complex that a lay person can't get the job done without either paying someone to do it, or having to use software that may not include all of the options required...

I also went to Stanford and when I took a beginning level CS course a student in my year was caught cheating. He copied a problem set from someone else and was later suspended for a quarter. Stanford has a judicial review board composed of students that make the final decision in cases like these and he was still punished. Everyone was warned by the professor at the beginning of the class that the CS department catches the most students cheating every year b/c every problem set is electronically reviewed for ways it might have been copied.

I went to a prepschool with a strong honor code culture. Cheating was nonexistent at the higher level classes I was in but it was pretty rampant among those in less intensive class distributions.

I think the deciding factor in successfully inculcating the value of fairness in academia is ensuring the students actually value academia. If the work's viewed as strictly an impediment by a student there's almost no way to change that.

I think it really depends on the students and whether or not you are finding these coasters (taken from other comments) in the classes or not. Cheating is probably the least likely in the harder degrees near the end of the program and most likely in the easier degrees near the beginning of the program.

In my engineering program I have had plenty of teachers walk out of the room for large amounts of time or do something like grade papers without looking around the room and haven't once seen an issue of cheating.

However in my freshman chemistry course which was required for a large amount of students from many disciplines they had 8 T.A.s and electronically moveable cameras (the class was recorded so the cameras were just being re-purposed) monitoring a class of about 200 and I do believe some cheaters were caught in my semester.

I was in the grad program at a top 5 stats program. Cheating was rampant. I discovered this in a 2nd semester grad level math stats course. There were 4 problems on the test, and one of them could only be solved either by being much smarter than me or by getting kind of lucky and very quickly divining the right, tricky way to factor the product of some characteristic functions. I thought it was very non obvious. When the class discussed the test there was a bimodal distn of scores on that question; 3 students, including me, got 1/2 credit and everyone else got 0 or full credit. I asked a classmate how in the hell he figured out the problem in the very tight time limit for the test. He basically told me that last year's test -- not distributed by the professor -- had almost an identical problem on it. Once you'd seen the right way to factor the characteristic function the problem was trivial. Pretty disappointing.

Forgive my statistical ignorance, but isn't this form of cheating easily remedied by substituting a different class of characteristic functions?

If a different class of functions doesn't exist, it seems like your classmates just had better study material.

(I'm thinking about a calculus test with a previously unseen e^x. Wouldn't knowing the answer from looking at a previous year's test be more akin to 'learning' than 'cheating'?)

Lots of organizations on campus (e.g. greeks) collect tests from their members and file them. This "helps" their members do better on tests. The situation you describe is basically one of the outcomes of organization resources vs personal resources in higher education.

Sometimes, it can work against the student. Particularly if the student doesn't attend class (low-level blow off class) and the teachers / method changes. I TAed an intro to programming course for non-majors. My fellow TA and myself created new tests for the class (it went from GWBasic to QBasic). A couple of students from one of the fraternities attended the 1st day of class and then the first test (missing the homework programs). I handed out the first test and got the following reaction: "This isn't the right test!". Oh well.

I can't say that I find this particular blog post that interesting. "Teacher applies firm standards, which a spineless administration then undermines" is a well-worn subject if you have spent time reading about education, and this particular post is not a strong introduction if you haven't.

The site design, on the other hand, will probably stick with me for a while: a background theme of a Soviet-style propaganda poster where the beaming People's Workers triumphantly brandish gin and tacos.

It's distracting and the text is hard to read, but I will probably never forget this site's URL. Sometimes there's value in picking something out of left field and just running with it.

> I can't say that I find this particular blog post that interesting. "Teacher applies firm standards, which a spineless administration then undermines" is a well-worn subject if you have spent time reading about education, and this particular post is not a strong introduction if you haven't.

I find this subject very interesting. Could you point me to some, in your opinion, strong introductions?

Mark Tarver's "Why I am not a Professor" hits a similar but not identical note: http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm

I'll have to go back through my reading list to see what I recommend - I've been following education issues to some extent for a long time, long enough that I remember reading better articles but not where I found them.

It's a bit much for me to write up on my coffee break, but I'll try and get back to this. Please shoot me an email (in my profile) if I forget to write it up.

There's basically three categories where this problem shows up: grade inflation, cheating, and discipline. Grade inflation is most relevant to colleges, discipline only matters for levels of schooling with mandatory attendance, and cheating cuts across all levels.

However, the same issue is in common: In theory, there are standards applied to students, and it is an important priority to distinguish between students who meet the standards and students who don't. In practice, the administration does not necessarily care about applying the standards rigorously.

I think the following two articles are a good introduction to grade inflation as a topic:

"Can Untenured Faculty Members Stop Grade Inflation?" - Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/article/Can-Untenured-Faculty-Members/4...

"In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" - The Atlantic Monthly, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-b...

It can also be useful to read up on business schools, because a business major is not an "academic" subject; more than any other major, the students are looking explicitly for a credential that boosts their income, and don't care about the subject material. The book "Ahead of the Curve" (http://www.amazon.com/Ahead-Curve-Harvard-Business-School/dp...) is a well-written appraisal of the Harvard B-School and includes chapters specifically on both grade inflation and cheating.

Going through these publications and/or following the notes and recommended reading therein can lead to more involved reading on the topic. Articles in the Atlantic Monthly are always a good starting point.

The fundamental issue: If an institution of learning punishes students for cheating, or failing classes, or behaving badly, then somebody, somewhere must have both the authority to do so and the goal of exercising said authority. But often, nobody wants to be that person, or the authority is conflicted, or the goal is given less priority than the goal of making money/quota.

'The Five-Year Party' by Craig Brandon is a decent, well-written book, by a former professor at Keene State University in New Hampshire.

I assumed the totalitarian themed background & gin referenced Orwell's 1984 and Victory Gin.

Web copy set in tiny Futura is a cute idea, but don't expect people to read it.

I'm not sure that readers are necessarily turned off by small sans-serif fonts. It might be a matter of demographics, but Daring Fireball, which currently has an article on the front page of HN, isn't exactly struggling.

Is the font use on DF somehow different? I'm genuinely curious about your thoughts because I've always wondered if it turns off a significant number of potential readers.

Small sans is fine for web copy, but Futura really isn't. The typography at DF is excellent, with headings in Gill Sans and copy in Verdana. I favor serifs for web copy, but few stand up to scrutiny. I like Erik Spiekermann's Meta Serif[1].

1. http://typekit.com/fonts/ff-meta-serif-web-pro

Verdana was explicitly designed for small pixel sizes onscreen. Why do you not differentiate between sans-serif fonts?

I do differentiate. Though he mentioned the font face specifically, I interpreted his criticism to be about the font stack and size and thought he was equating all small sans-serif copy. Verdana is listed second in the stack and is the one that was used when I viewed the page.

He has since set me and the record straight.

Most universities in America are currently structured so that the students who want to learn can learn, and the students who don't want to learn can coast along between parties for four years.

Giving low grades, failing students, assigning a lot of mandatory homework, making the minimum that's required remotely challenging, giving students more than a slap on the wrist for any infraction -- all of that drives away the coasting students, and that's bad for enrollment.

If this professor continues to fuss over this, all he's going to do is botch his chance at tenure.

A bit of an aside, but my wife spent the last 6 years teaching high school english and I was surprised to find that there's a number of interesting advancements in the anti-cheating industry. There are a number of anti-plagiarism services that she (and loads of other English teachers apparently) would submit students papers to. The papers are compared to other ones in the database and reports are popped out for ones that match. I appreciated the irony, since it's easy to argue that the internet has made it easier to cheat in the first place.

Yes, these were in use back when I was in high school (I graduated in 2005); I remember I wrote a paper in a history class about Winston Churchill, and it amusingly flagged the first sentence of it because it was just the basic biographical intro that's undoubtedly common to nearly any paper about him: "Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born XXX..." Thankfully it only marks parts of the paper, and the teacher was smart enough to realize it wasn't a real problem.

Sadly though, these provide no defense against the multitude of shady for-profit services that write papers for hire that anyone can find by Googling "term paper".

But, the paper would have to be original.. Can you really get an original paper written at a price that's at least conceivable for a high school student to pay? Nuts.

...and yeah, the results of the plagiarism service were a bit soft, but I think it would notice and annotate if things were in quotations, or likely to be common enough to not be an issue. In fact, I think her department had a general 'score' that they'd considered serious enough to consider cheating, and a sentence or two lifted from the interwebs would get you a marked down grade.

Can you really get an original paper written at a price that's at least conceivable for a high school student to pay?

It might be difficult, but that's not even the whole problem. Worse is that parents, who do have the money, will sometimes fund their students efforts to cheat (or even do it behind their backs).

I've spent a long time as a tutor (SAT, GRE, subject tests, and most of the math/science courses at high school and college level) in a relatively affluent town, and I've been approached on a few occasions by parents that wanted me to help their kids cheat in various ways (including asking me to pose as their student and take the SAT for them, write college essays, do take home tests and homework assignments, etc.).

It's by no means common; I've had hundreds of students and only a small handful of requests like this. But it does happen - never underestimate what some rich parents will do to buy their children success in spite of academic laziness!

Can you really get an original paper written at a price that's at least conceivable for a high school student to pay? Nuts.

Oh, absolutely. I see 400-level programming and engineering homework assignments crop up on vworker from time to time; they go for about $15. And copywriting is way cheaper than that.

High school english papers are what, five paragraphs? People pay about $1.50 for comparable web copy on Mechanical Turk.

It's vary easy to accidentally lift a sentence or idea if you do enough research and write something of length. Dropping a full grade for a short essay is reasonable but if you handing in 60+ pages it's rather harsh IMO.

Oh yeah, sorry I should have been more specific.. for one, the papers are much shorter than that (this is high school).. also, when I said their grade was marked down, I just meant that they were penalized.. I don't know by how much.

High school essays are generally not 60 pages.

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No reasonable person would require a citation for an easily verified, widely-known, uncontroversial fact like Churchill's birthday. You would need citations for every sentence if that was the standard.

Cheating leads to a F, what the heck is that about?

At my university, in Sweden, cheating means suspension (that includes plagiarism) for up to 10 weeks. Just last week 5 different cases got 8 weeks each..

Wouldn't suspension lead to failing as well? (assuming you're not allowed to withdraw from your courses)

I believe where I did my bachelor's, the standard punishment for willful cheating was failing the course, one semester's suspension, and a permanent note in your academic record.

Not necessarily. At my college, attendace is not required for passing. As long as you do well in all your exams and pass all practical your assignements (two or three each quarter), you are ok. So suspension would bw tough but not and automatic fail. That said, at my college cheating means you are probably expelled, and I'm not aware of suspension as a punishment for anything.

I came to this conclusion very late in the game. After working my ass off for 4+ years I realized the university honor code is basically toothless. Ohh, it will tell you a great story about all the things the university could do to you. But in the end it's not enforced or enforced so lightly that they shouldn't have bothered at all.

It used to be that cheating was just about the worst thing you could do in college and the university went through great pains to remind you of that. Robbery, murder?! that's a local police matter. Cheat, and we'll keelhaul you on the quad.

Keep in mind that when cheaters are discovered, we're required to maintain confidentiality. I've been tangentially involved in one situation where the professor went full out to give the student a failing grade and get her transcripts marked. I've also seen someone in my cohort get kicked out of the graduate school for doing it on the qualifying exam.

On the other hand, I've also been involved in two situations where the individuals received a slap on the wrist. So your results may vary.

For what it's worth, at my college it was taken pretty seriously, and professors absolutely did have the power to fail students for it.

The About page sadly doesn't say where he teaches beyond "Giant Public University in the South", which is unfortunate because, as cool as this blog may be, I would never want to send any of my hypothetical future children there.

FWIW, Google spelunking reveals this university to be the University of Georgia, whose policies I would have expected to be better than that. However, public state schools do have to deal with a lot of pressure from the state to not expel taxpayers and stuff like that, which is unfortunate and wrong.

At Caltech, we had an honor system. Proctoring of exams was not allowed. Most exams were take home, even though they had strict time limits (normally 3 hours). Once you opened the test, you had 3 hours to finish it, but since you were in your dorm room it was entirely and deliberately left up to your integrity.

Tests were typically open book and open note.

Some other characteristics:

1. Professors were not allowed to take attendance or base any part of the grade on attendance.

2. Homework was graded, but that grade had no influence on the course grade. Students were encouraged to use any resource, collaberation, etc., to understand and do the homework correctly.

3. Grades were based on exam scores. Policy was that if you could pass the exams, you got credit for the course even if you never showed up for class.

In essence, the university treated us like adults. They provided an opportunity to get a first class education, and if you didn't take full advantage of that, that was your problem.

The students liked this state of affairs immensely, and if you did cheat (and thereby threaten the honor system) you would be ostracized. Peer pressure can be extremely effective. I don't know anyone who cheated.

For example, I know one student who, 1 hour into a 3 hour exam, fell asleep. He woke up a couple hours later, and finished the exam anyway. But he told the professor what had happened, and the professor was very sorry but he had to fail the student. The student was not angry about this, he blamed himself and took responsibility.

"In essence, the university treated us like adults."

The funny thing is that most adults aren't "treated like adults" if your intention is to compare this with working conditions. There are very few jobs that don't care about attendance at all and only care if you get the project done right and on time. I'm not saying it should be this way but rather just that it is. It could be because most jobs don't employ everyone who is of the same high quality of character as you relate.

This is just an anecdote, but I've heard that even if some professors strongly suspect cheating, since the system involves so much red tape and leaves the professor with little power, it is simply not worth pursuing it and ending up losing upwards of half a day. This means, professors, whose free time is already perilously low have all the incentives in the world not to pursue students who cheat, which only makes it that much easier for them to get away with it.

Fairly useless unless you know the institution in question, how widespread the problem is, and whether or not it has been worsening.

My personal observation is that many of the structure in question is oriented specifically towards jocks who are recruited for their brawn and not brains and are expected to spend much more time building muscle than exercising their noggins. Given that my personal observation is limited to an ivy league institution, I'd imagine this would be all the more so at a large public institution in the American South, in which sports are probably considered more important than book smarts. Moreover, many of the recruits (coming from impoverished inner-city schools where they are moved from grade to grade regardless of their performance) are likely completely incapable of performing basic algebra, let alone the sort of math they would be expected to do in standard university level courses.

In other words, this sort of behavior is entirely expected given the nature of these institutions and probably is a fixture in them, likely neither worsening nor improving.

In my experience, football players usually get special incompletes. Basically, what happens is that if they are in danger of failing a class, the coach demands that they do a lot of practices during the game. They then get an incomplete and get to retake the course.

I've noticed less bureaucratic outcomes in the cases I've observed, but that might be good luck. If it's especially blatant, such as a student turning in an essay that is on the internet, the informal procedure is that the professor says, "this essay was clearly on the internet, you didn't write it, you get an F on it". The student could insist on a formal process (which is probably required), but the outcome of a formal process could result in them being suspended or expelled entirely, so if the evidence is solid, is probably not a good gamble. Admittedly a bit trickier when it isn't a piece of paper like that.

Personally it doesn't bother me that much, because the problems I'm worried about fixing in education have more to do with learning than the value of degrees. If people who want to learn aren't supported as well as they could be, or are even actively discouraged/demotivated, then that's a big problem and something teachers/lecturers/professors need to worry about. If people who never wanted to learn are getting degrees they don't deserve, meh, I guess that's bad, but we pay administrators to worry about PR things like the university's image, so let them come up with a policy to deal with it (or fix admissions to let in fewer such students). There's even a few cases of opinionated smart kids cheating because they don't find the assignments helpful, in which case I don't even really care about them doing so (and maybe even care more about whether we can fix the assignments instead), though admittedly that isn't the common case.

For better or worse, this is the same of type of action schools take on major offenses. In universities, first possession of marijuana or underage drinking is dealt with a warning and perhaps community service. In the real world, there are real consequences for these actions as well as plagiarism.

I guess college tuition is really just an insurance policy for crimes?

"Major offenses...first possession of marijuana or underage drinking..."

That's what qualifies as major? I don't give a damn if my classmates drink and blaze; I do care if they cheat and implicitly lower the value of my degree in the process.

Then again, nobody at my school cares about liquor or pot, so I guess it's hard to compare it to schools that view either as an actual issue.

I'm just saying from an objective, legal perspective. Some of these universities are public so you would think they would more strongly enforce the law. When you're really young, you get a lot of lenience based on your age. In college, I'm not really sure why you would get an excuse?

If it's about finding yourself, then it's just temporary and artificial. Whatever you thought you knew no longer applies once the "rules" change. /rant

Where I am (BC, Canada), the drinking age is 19 and nobody, police included, cares about weed. So I guess for colleges, underage drinking would only be a problem for freshmen. Even then, there are dorm parties all the time and no one on campus cares about liquor.

I've never heard of campus security hassling anyone over substances. Hell, we even have a "420 club" that meets on wednesdays at 4:20 on the field in the center of campus and smokes piles of weed. I guess attitudes towards substances are just much more relaxed here than most places in the US.

To some extent, that's an acknowledgement to the reality that colleges and universities aren't just a place/time to learn, but also be exposed to new things, and 'trying shit out'. Basically, universities are this bizarre bubble between childhood and the 'real world', where bizarre halfway rules apply. I'm pretty sure it's been seen that way for quite a while.

It's also pragmatic. If you handed out 'real' punishment to everyone, they would be so brain boggling drowned in paperwork (this is also ignoring the serious drop in enrollment). Honestly, with drinking and drugs, the universities' goal is really to a) make sure no one gets hurt on campus and b) make sure they never actually have to punish anyone. The hope is that the 'warning' scares the kids off enough so they go about their drinking and doping in a smarter way so they hopefully won't be caught again.

And for what it's worth (this completely depends on location I guess... at least here in Waterloo), if you're caught underage drinking, or smoking pot pretty much anywhere by anyone who isn't a police officer, you're likely to just have your stuff confiscated, a stern talking to, and kicked out on the threat of calling the popos. It's just way easier that way for everyone.

I was on one of these academic integrity hearing boards as a student representative at Cornell. In my experience the board was strongly in favor of failing students outright and adding a notation to their academic record. It's not as bad as expelling them from the university. But it's not like it was some softball slap on the wrist either.

And the cases we were presiding over were not simple. We had a case where a student started a test early, as the exams were being handed out, but before everyone got a copy, and we took that as a serious violation of academic integrity (this student was not completely failed out of the course.)

Our objective was not at all to "mildly scare the students until they Learn Their Lesson and then let them off the hook."

Some universities have very strict punishments for cheating - sometimes including kicking students out of the school, permanently. Having due process in place in order to ensure that those punishments are meted out fairly is a good thing.

Former TA here. It's surprising how often I've heard people use "I didn't know we weren't supposed to plagiarize" as an excuse. It seems to be the first line of defense for people who were caught copying and pasting large portions of an assignment from the internet.

Personally, I've stopped worrying about it. If people cheat themselves out of an education, that's unfortunate, but hard to avoid. Focus on doing the best job possible for the people who are there to learn; there aren't enough hours in the day to try to impose an education on unwilling people by force, and they'll hate you for trying.

Wow thats the exact opposite to the environment I'm in. The lecturers in my department are pretty much omnipotent in that regard. If one of them were determined enough he/she could kill a students career in the field (accounting & auditing) completely & permanently. Student gets blacklisted at all universities providing that qualification country-wide for ethics violation of that nature. Its only for that qualification though not a complete blacklisting & the other departments aren't nearly as strict or powerful.

As a teaching assistant I occasionally came across cheaters. Dealing with them can be a very painful process.

In one case students were plagiarizing homework assignments. The instructor invited the accused into his office and presented them with the evidence. He gave them the option of withdrawing from the course or going before a dean. They elected to withdraw. There was some ugly personal fallout from this incident.

For another point of view, as long as we are slinging ancedotes . . .

My wife teaches a large, but graduate level, seminar. Every semester, a small number of students are caught blatantly plagiarizing sources in papers. These cases are required to be handed over to a student-staffed and managed honor court.

In every case that has been handed over to them, the student-staffed and managed honor court has failed the student.

Another anecdote: my wife's teaching a class at MIT now, and they have problems with homeworks being basically copied from the MIT OpenCourseWare web site, which apparently contains the solution to pretty much any problem given in any of the previous years' classes. I'm actually genuinely troubled by what to think of this unfortunate intersection between unprecedented access to information and requiring students to do work beyond Googling...

I also went to a college with a student-adjudicated honor system. It really does work, because the students actually have the better incentive for applying discipline. They're the ones that will be competing with the scoundrels for class ranking and job hiring. But what's the incentive for the administration to cost itself a tuition payer? Of course, it is possible for the honor court to go too far and be prejudiced against peer students out of sheer competitiveness, but it would seem that happens rarely enough to make it the lesser of evils if a factor at all.

At my school, before every test and on every major assignment, each student had to write out the school's written Honor Code and then sign it, serving as a contract through which they could nail you to the wall if you got caught cheating.

What does this rant have to do with the honor system? I don't appreciate the author throwing mud at a great self-governing system used in many schools by invoking its name when it's not even relevant here.

This drawn-out diatribe irks me. You chose to teach at that school, so you should be familiar with the cheating/plagiarism policy. Should you not?

I had a professor who told the class to cheat. He justified it by saying that anyone in the real world today can go online and get help for any problem they have. Another unspoken reason is that he would not cover the material he would test us on, which was not in the book either, so allowing cheating would cut down on student complaints and let him do less work. I complained about it and nothing happened since he was tenured and close to retiring. One might say he already did.

The penalty for cheating should be: you fail the course in which you cheated and withdraw from all others. You're immediately suspended. You can't get back into the college until you've logged 12 months of gainful employment in "the real world". (Military service counts.)

Yes, the real world. Where you can do nothing wrong and get fired for looking at a powerful person the wrong way, and where people actually struggle. Ok, so get out there and have that experience. Now you know (a) that you're very privileged, as a college student, and (b) you have no right to complain about the unfairness of an 'F' for cheating; it's not unfair. Once you've learned that lesson, welcome back but don't fucking do it again.

Privileged? Ha. What a odd way of putting it. In what way is going to school a privilege? It's almost expected for everyone to go to a college/university nowadays. In what way is a college student privileged?

If you get caught cheating in a class, fail him or her in THAT CLASS. Mention it in their academic report, so that other teachers in the university are aware, and they the teachers themselves can decide whether or not they want that particular individual in their classroom.

A college student is privileged in that they have the free time to learn, all day every day. They may not realize how special this is until they decide, at thirty while supporting a family, that they want another degree -- and they do it via night classes, working eight hours a day and studying four, and it takes a decade.

I don't want to get too pedantic, and this may be beginning to get off-topic, and for that I apologize. But your example still isn't one of a privilege. What your example shows is that it is easier to concentrate on one thing instead of two or three things. Is time really free if you're choosing to just concentrate on one thing? Joke all we want that being a student is a job, but in most ways it is a job. Maybe not as strict as one, but if you're doing it properly, it should be as consuming as one.

Privileged? Ha. What a odd way of putting it. In what way is going to school a privilege? It's almost expected for everyone to go to a college/university nowadays.

You're right, but what I meant is that, in terms of recourse and tolerance of misbehavior, college students are privileged in a way they won't be in 10 years. Here's a case of clear wrongdoing by the students (if they can be called that) in which the wrongdoers hold the cards. You're simply not going to see that in any workplace. Give most people 12 months in a real-world work environment, and they'll see people getting fired for a lot less than that.

What I suggest is more forgiving. The 12-month suspension is harsh, but after the student has completed that obligation, he or she can return as a student in full status. I don't think people should have damaged "permanent records" for cheating, but I do think the punishments should be decisive and severe enough to encourage the person to think differently about the actions that created the problem.

It's not damaged 'permanent records'. Federal law states that a student's records are private, so it's not like they can be requested outside of the university. The solution you suggest would leave someone with a whole 12 month gap where, to be honest, most people would lie and say they had to work for school, instead of explaining what really happened to cause a 12 month gap. Also, I have no idea how your suggestion would work in terms of scholarships and student loans.

The solution I suggested would perhaps make it harder for a student to take a certain class if a professor doesn't allow students with 'records' into their class, but a lot easier than a 12 month expulsion.

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