Thanks, Caltech!
My particular favorite aspects of Caltech are three-fold (in no specific order):
1) The Honor Code and collaborative nature, for the reasons you've mentioned :-)
2) The breadth of the Core and CS major requirements. e.g. I really doubt that I would have found a fascination for physics, without Caltech having required me to take two terms of special relativity and electrodynamics as a freshman.
3) The theoretical focus. Even though I'm a CS major, my classes are often proof-based. One (non-CS-specific) example was Ma 1a, the mandatory first-quarter freshman calculus class: It spent the first two weeks building up the real numbers (i.e. starting from the Peano axioms). Caltech's theoretical-ness has a particularly special place in my heart, because it's one of the big reasons I recently cared to learn about interactive theorem proving and formal verification (which I love so much that I'm working on a undergraduate research project in Coq).
[0] (among the universities that I know enough about)
[1] I'm honestly a bit hesitant to share about my burnout publicly (since mental health issues can have stigmas and I don't want to shoot myself in the foot re: grad schools or employers), but HN is sufficiently anonymous (at a casual glance) that this feels safe enough.
Feynman's requirement for an A grade in the course was "prove something original". Someone timidly asked, "Well, what if we can't?" He replied: "Then I feel sorry for you." I wish my history were slightly different.
But you must be more discreet, I think. It's not wise to give intimate medical information to strangers who might not be medical experts. All the best for your future.
Wish this weren’t the case! The more open and okay we are with it the less perceived stigma there will be. We should consider it as typical and normal as physical conditions like asthma or diabetes that many of us have experienced or live with today.
your name is in your profile
[0] with the added protection that someone non-HN-familiar might not know to click on the profile name to get more information
Hi from an '03 mole whose is mildly surprised you're hitting that wall in sophomore year -- back when I was there it was junior year. But hey, I didn't do CS :)
I can’t gloat, after 10 years I recently discovered I can favourite threads. It’s changed everything.
What does this mean in practice? Students and staff collaborate in every institution I've ever been part of.
On one take home math exam I decided to TeX up my answers. This was permitted as long as you stayed within the time limits, but I forgot the command for a specific symbol. I wouldn’t be able to print my exam until after my time had elapsed, and so I wouldn’t even be able to draw the symbol on the printed exam without violating the letter of the law. Naturally using the internet to look up the command would also be a violation of the rules. I chose to just include an apology in my proof that explained the situation and then introduced a replacement symbol that I used instead.
I got the impression that most students were similarly strict about adhering to take home exam rules.
At Caltech, I never heard anyone brag about cheating. I know of one student who willingly took an F because he accidentally went over the time limit for the take-home exam, and reported it. Nobody would have known otherwise if he hadn't reported it.
Much is made of unproctored exams, but at least 30 years ago (and I haven't heard of this changing since) students were given master keys which opened almost every part of campus, and had official 24/7 access to almost everything. Also, lockpicking was a widely known and broadly accepted student hobby, and there was apparently a fairly well-known heirarchy of which places to which students did not have official access were merely nominally off limits and would result in token punishment for the sake of form (provided no damage to persons, property, etc., was done) and which were really, seriously off-limits.
That is, the culture went beyond just unproctored exams.
When I was there (late 70s, early 80s) the best masters were actually not official masters. The best were Whitehead masters, made by a student named John Whitehead. He hand filed a master with intentional deviations from ideal designed so that when you copied it, the copying errors would make it closer to ideal. Whitehead masters were copies of that hand filed key.
Several people from campus security used Whitehead masters instead of their official masters because the Whitehead ones worked better.
I had an accidental master for a while. My room key happened to function as a master when inserted halfway. I don't remember how I discovered that. I'm assuming that they have long since changed the lock systems, but on the off chance they have not, it was room 21 of Ricketts.
How do they justify this when the keys may be locking doors that for example protect extremely sensitive personal information? Like for example financial information for support or allegations of misconduct or criminal activity? Don’t they have a legal obligation to protect these things?
The locks for rooms that had extremely sensitive information, personal or otherwise, did not use the same master as was available to students, and used a different brand of lock that was more resistant to lockpicking. And, perhaps more important in practice than the actual resistance to lockpicking, the brand was widely understood as a signal that picking the lock was not acceptable. Presumably, they also had electronic security.
Also, whatever you assume, there are legal and moral obligations to protect information in any case.
You had most older buildings on one brand of ordinary locks with a master system, and the newer buildings with better ordinary locks on a different master system, and then a few rooms with Medico high security locks.
My recollection is that that was strictly correct but that the scope of acceptable justifications (ca. 1990) was broad enough that that was all but a formality.
Indeed. Students also left their dorm rooms unlocked. I never heard of a case of one student stealing from another. A friend of mine at another university had his locked dorm room looted within his first week. Ugh.
It was a really unique and pleasant experience. So much less stressful being able to completely trust the people around you. It's a shame that the tradition has started to die out.
At Caltech, it was effortless to cheat and professors made no attempt to thwart it. (That said, if two exam papers came back with the same mistakes, the students would still have some 'splainin' to do.)
The students all knew each other (being a small university) and the A students were often asked to help out the struggling students (I got a lot of help this way), and so it was pretty obvious to spot an A student who didn't actually master the material. You knew they earned it.
Well done. Somehow I feel that this individual will do very well in life.
Students are expected to follow the exam instructions on the honor system.
It's a refreshing change of pace to take exams when and where it's convenient.
Of course I wouldn't change anything. :)
[0] I mean this humorously, not insultingly—I also don't regret choosing Caltech in the slightest.
I might change a few things. Caltech faculty were singularly unhelpful in getting me into grad school.
Some courses at Caltech had almost identical exams for at least a decade when I went through. The professors knew cheating like the above simply would not be tolerated by undergrads.
I sat on and helped run the Board of Control, which handled academic honor code violations, for several years and professors who had been at other universities would absolutely rave about how much more they could trust Caltech students. And that was while reporting a suspected cheating case to me.
However, the explicit default was that you should not look at solutions from prior years. Professors would announce at the beginning of the course that they reuse questions and looking at prior years solutions was an honor code violation. I think it's pretty clear it's cheating when the expectations are clearly outlined.
If you had inadvertently come across the problem before and independently solved it, you were expected to disclose that as part of your answer. I personally had to do this several times, and never suffered any negative consequences for it, but the expectation for honesty was there.
Yes, it means teachers have to vary tests, but then again it gives you repository of exercises to learn from and to train on. It is just win for learning.
The students were totally on their own with this and nobody would know if they chose to cheat or not. Cheating was so trivial to do there was no cred for bragging about it. If other students found out someone was cheating, that someone would be ostracized by the students, which was much worse than anything the institute could do to them.
Of course, people are people and I'm sure some cheating went on. But I bet it was at a much lower rate than at places with proctored exams.
As for me, it was the first time in my life adults trusted me and treated me like an adult rather than a child. I much prefer that to the extended childhood offered by other universities. I was motivated by simple pride to earn the degree rather than cheat and get a tainted one.
This annoyed me not only because of the lack of trust, but because law school exam questions are almost always essay questions that take a few pages to answer. No way did I want to try handwriting that much.
Fortunately, they did allow you to at least bring a typewriter to the exam (they set aside a separate room for this so it would not disturb the people who were handwriting).
There were limits, though. The typewriter could not have more than 2 lines of storage. This was around 1992, and already by then microprocessors and LCDs had become cheap enough that even most entry level typewriters exceeded the limit. It took a fair bit of effort to find one that was acceptable.
"I would like to apologize to the students who took this course last year. I always aim for a mean exam score of 50 and a standard deviation of 10. Last year's mean was 29 and I will attempt to not repeat the mistake"
AMA95 had a reputation for being a trial by fire. Doing well in it meant you were going to graduate.
Tough as he was, I liked Prof Cohen. He was a no nonsense kind of guy, and obviously enjoyed his subject. I was sorry to read he passed on recently.
For years or even decades afterwards the number 108 would show up. Call a busy tech support line and get put in queue, and you are told "The average wait time right now is 108 minutes". Check after lunch to see if it is time to go back to work...it's 1:08. That number would just show up way more often then it should have.
I know one person who fought back. She took the intro to digital electronics class and the intro digital electronics lab class in her senior year, instead of in her freshman year like most people did, which means she took them after 108.
For her electronics lab project she built herself a digital alarm clock (the traditional project). But her clock was special. It skipped 1:08, instead holding 1:07 for two minutes than going to 1:09.
Haha, love that story. Reminds me of another student who was going to build a digital clock that only displayed the time, very accurately, in 15 minute intervals. Because, he reasoned, nobody should need time more accurate than that!
I, too, built a CMOS digital clock for a freshman lab project out of about 40 chips. It did not work, it just blinked the display LEDs erratically. I still have it, it still does not work and I still don't know why.
My senior EE91 lab project (single board computer) did work, though, but I misplaced it somewhere in the last 40 years :-(
I wish that the math sequence for non-math majors had included linear algebra instead.
[0] I can't speak for the graduate experience, but I'd assume it's also non-competitive?
Can you explain why professors and students would be adversaries?
Toxic event breeding more toxicity.
Neither MIT nor Caltech are Ivy League schools.
As a native Californian living in Pasadena, I also hate the heat -- but, unlike Boston (in my experience), air conditioning is standard, and makes the outside situation matter far less. (It's also not usually that bad, and it's almost always a dry heat.)
The one time I visited Boston (for an undergraduate research program), it was frosty the first few days, and then hellishly humid every day thereafter. The dorm I was staying in didn't really have temperature control, and I got the sense that AC wasn't as common.
Your mileage may vary!