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.