More Than 70 West Point Cadets Accused of Cheating in Academic Scandal
npr.org
npr.org
It does take a little time to adjust to the honor code, but among all the things learned at WP, this one stuck with me the most. I (and many of my friends) came to literally hate lying/cheating, and to disdain those who do. But there’s another route that is taken too — the opposite, where some cadets become very good at lying/cheating. What starts out as a trivial lie must be covered up with larger more intricate lies, moving from something accidental or thoughtless to something intentional and deliberate. The cover-up and defense, often bringing friends into the mix, turns toxic really quickly. This is what happens when a perceived innocuous lie is seen a a life-ruiner.
My father also went to a service academy, and often after catching me in a lie would say, “I’m mad at you about lying, but I’m ever madder you were dumb enough to get caught!” My dad is one of the most moral men I’ve ever met, and I only just now connected the dots here with regard to a zero-toleration honor code.
I suspect the 2015 change was a practical rather than principled change: to make it easier to catch and correct violations instead of letting them fester and spread.
In some ways the service academies are a giant experiment in human character. Humans naturally lie, cheat, and steal in order to survive and protect their own tribe (i.e., go to war). Can you change that? Not really. But you can create a culture like that. The change, as ironic as it may seem, may do a better job of creating that kind of culture by attacking the tendency to dig deeper holes.
Depending on which degree you were working on, there was often just way too much to do with the time given. The "academic wing" wouldn't coordinate with the "military wing" and we'd end up having a slew of inspections alongside midterms. I remember getting caught skipping out on military training on a Saturday (which was just a day of lectures, easy to slip out after attendance) to catch up on homework. At the same time, an officer went through the dorms to ensure nobody was skipping. I was caught in my room and spent the next two weeks having to wear an uncomfortable uniform all day and reporting to do drill every morning.
Obviously, choosing to cheat academically is way worse than skipping a Saturday of lectures, but if the system is designed to break you, it shouldn't be impossible to recover from.
1. There was absolutely way too much to do. Classes within a major did not coordinate large projects/tests and students tried to find a way to cope.
2. The teacher was so terrible that they felt vastly underprepared for an upcoming test.
I didn't attend a military academy, but did go to an academically demanding college (with an honor code). Some of my fellow students were ridiculous in that they didn't know when to quit and tried to do all assignments perfectly even at the expense of having a social life or getting some exercise.
Exercise shouldn’t be skipped, though.
Additionally, there was a hard lights off policy at midnight to ensure cadets got enough sleep, yet people invariably would be up with a flashlight underneath their covers trying to get work done until 2am.
Plebes in particular got less time as well, as they'd be subject to additional tasks/hazing until a given time when they couldn't be disturbed (I believe 7pm).
The idea of zero tolerance is a little crazy. Have you ever violated a software license, or streamed something with someone else's account? Those should technically be honor violations, but they aren't prosecuting those. It isn't 100% clear to me where to draw the line.
When laws are BS, ZT is not a little crazy: it's inhumane.
> It isn't 100% clear to me where to draw the line.
I feel that's the idea with BS laws: everyone is a criminal, so you can just dig for dirt on anyone and make them go away as law enforcement.
What BS laws? Well all victimless crime for one. I dont mind some victimless behaviours are offenses (punishable with a fine), but a crime (punishable with jail time)?! That's IMHO a big part of why the law system is broken. We need the constitutional right not to be punished for victimless crime.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
Reckless driving and child pornography comes to mind. It is crimes against the state atleast where I live.
Because teenagers getting air off the train track berm in their shitbox cars and sending nudes to each other definitely needs to be prosecuted like criminals <rolls eyes>.
It's easy to call for zero tolerance in the abstract.
They make a HUGE deal about this in lifestyle polygraphs. It's completely asinine and drives significant attrition of strong candidates for selective jobs in the IC/SOF world.
We need a complete overhaul of the puritanical mindset with which the powers-that-be judge prior behavior. Downloading porn from Limewire when you were a 19-year-old college sophomore should not be stopping people from advancing in selective processes; nor should a history of having used hard drugs, hallucinogens, or marijuana >10x (on the latter I gather they're evolving given current state laws).
Doing hard drugs doesn't stop you in advancing with the selection process, or even prevent you from getting a clearance.
LYING about it, hiding it, or attempting to cover it up or show ANY KIND of dishonesty is what prevents you from continuing in the process.
Nobody has ever been denied a clearance because they downloaded porn on limewire, or pirated movies or videos, assuming they admit to such, and do not indicate a desire or intent to continue in the behavior.
This is factually incorrect. I personally know two people who, already holding a TS/SCI, were denied further career opportunities due to the volume and duration of their downloading of pirated material while in college (which they were honest about due to thinking, as you erroneously assert, that it wasn't a big deal).
The "digital piracy" was specifically cited as the reason for not advancing in the process. Two different former colleagues, both proven performers.
Also, prior drug use ABSOLUTELY does disqualify you if there's enough of it, even if you've never been addicted to anything or if it's years in the past. They're especially tough on hallucinogens for some reason which is hilariously ironic because LSD...I mean....
Same with drug use. It explicitly says under Guideline H that if it was not recent, not ongoing, if you seeked treatment, etc. that it is a mitigation to the security concern raised by use of illicit drugs.
If your contacts were denied based on those reasons, they either didn't tell you the whole story (other, unmitigated risks that compounded the total risk of their position), or they had substantive grounds for an appeal of the decision. You can see the evidence yourself of the appeals process, as every appeal record is public, and the govt has no problem with former drug addicts, etc. getting clearances.
[1]https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/do...
[2] https://ogc.osd.mil/doha/industrial/2020.html for this years decisions, an example: "Applicant mitigated Guideline H (drug involvement and substance misuse) security concerns because his most recent marijuana use was in 2014".
This isn't the right setting to discuss the details of individuals' past clearance adjudication processes but at a high level I can tell you that curating and trading a massive library of illegally downloaded music over a period of multiple years was sufficient to get two separate SAP clearances denied.
Without getting hung up on the technical details, would you agree that the national security community is far too puritanical in how it evaluates details of one's past personal life?
Merry Christmas.
And I mean, no, I wouldn't. I think standards have gotten way too relaxed as they've pushed to over classify a ton of shit that wouldn't have been so crazily classified 40 years ago. When you relax standards, as has been done over the past few years, you end up with Reality Winner, Edward Snowden, Harold Martin, etc.
Your friends, and I'm not joking. Polygraphs themselves are poor indicators, but that's just one of many tools adjudicators use when judging people for clearances. The primary tool is documentation (you'd be amazed how many people lie about criminal offenses when it's a quick search away), and second is friends (2nd order ones especially), acquaintances, and neighbors.
I suppose I’m just reinforcing the “don’t get caught” mantra, but that’s really not a trait I like to see in people who are supposed to be cracking down on fraud.
No one cares if you like porn or had a DUI when you were younger, unless you're lying about it.
This is false. Polygraph tests do not detect lies.
The polygraph is pseudoscientific snake oil, used to perpetuate fear.
Being told by the IC it will be reviewed by a judge is not reassuring.
They cannot effectively prohibit something they cannot detect. The polygraph being inaccurate pseudoscience means that they can't exercise the control that they pretend and purport to, as they simply cannot reliably determine if someone is being truthful or not.
Additionally, due to its inaccuracy, it makes the whole process wickedly unfair.
Who would want to work for an employer that gates your success as a team member on pseudoscientific nonsense?
What they do is use it as a tool against you to try to force a confession. It's absolutely a bluff on the part of the interviewer, and they know it.
What they'll do is sit you down after the "results" come in and say: "hey, we both know you weren't 100% truthful during the test, the results clearly indicate you lied during key parts of the interview. Is there anything you'd like to tell us?"
I cannot stress enough that the actual results of what the polygraph say are not factored in whatsoever.
This can't be asserted a priori.
Is it thought up by people who have just "decided to be honest" in their life and think that should be the way to do things?
And then later, these policies cove more ground, so you get something like one kid picking on another and both get in trouble for fighting, or "a leatherman tool is a weapon, so you're out".
Basically - anything that could lead to some sort of conflict, they can lie about, just to avoid.
Which is kind of ironic - as people often cite or view strict upbringing as something which will build character and "mature" kids for adult life. But then you see a lot of these kids end up becoming master liars.
Honest question: Don't you think that is systemic within the Military itself and is one of the trademarks of its so called culture? Which is why the State will go the lengths it will when things are leaked and given how Assange and Snowden are treated when they prove Intelligence agencies lied (supposedly crimes punishable with long term sentences) to Congress and the US Citizens?
I come from a military family and the hypocrisy is suffocating, any time you even suggest what it really is (Empire) its like the scars from the kool-aid levels of indoctrination re-open and they leap to extremes about fictional forms of 'terrorism' to rationalize their existence with even more lies.
I stopped talking about illegal interventionism by Imperial decree that violates the US Constitution (and their supposed sacred oath) long ago, as every conflict since WWII has not been declared by Congress. And most are Intelleence Agency led conflicts, that now last decades with no end in sigh based on lies to make private contractors incredibly wealthy. Let alone that that their is no (intentionally so) provision in the US Constitution for a standing Army (and defined limitations of conflicts) but only a domestic Navy to protect trade routes from pirates and states nothing about protecting 'freedom' abroad all while the US systematically becomes more an more of a surveillance-police State with ever more eroded Civil Rights and Liberties that are only rivaled in scope by the CCP, which is now he US' supposed Enemy #1 after all the pro-China rhetoric from the Obama/Biden administration years prior to now?
You say you hate lies, and talk about principals but how do you contend with this very blatant contradiction that is clear to anyone who cares enough to pay attention within it and not want to hurl yourself out of a building? In my lifetime alone, the US went from a place where people took massive risks just to have a chance to be to a place where its own Citizen's will pay an exhorbarnt amount of money if they have it to leave because of this Imperial interventionism and the degrading quality of Life due to an over-inflated currency to finance these Corporate-led headlong excursions that lead no where but death and misery have made it not worth it.
What penalty is there to breaking the honor code that it ruins one's life?
In either case, can you explain further why getting expelled from West Point ruins one's life?
Is it this?
> A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.
I'd hope we're not admitting cadets who make a habit of cheating and stealing before joining.
Every single one of these people should be dismissed or resign. They are simply not officer material. The Honor Code is very clear. You lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do and you're not military material.
There simply cannot be second chances. Second chances here are what result in subpar military officers. The last time this happened, everyone involved was dismissed or resigned.
To be very clear, I appreciate the military and all those men and women that serve in it. I just think it's ridiculous to think that they are of a higher moral caliber than the rest of the population. They're people, just like you and me. And learning from your mistakes is part of being human. You can't learn from a mistake if there's never second chances.
Their second chance is the rest of their lives. They were given a privilege and they abused it and it should rightfully be taken away.
There seems no controversy that the middle management era of staff duty seems designed to filter out good officers and keep the worst or at least keep the folks unable to escape. Their point of view is if you start with a better pool of O-1 then as the good officers are eliminated on the march upward in rank, forcing the worst O-1 to none the less be better officers at the start will result in better O-4 range officers which eventually, in theory, will someday result in better O-9 officers.
Remember unlike corporations, the military promotes from within, so todays 2nd Lts will literally be the commanding generals in about 25 years. Most corporations do not promote from within, or rarely do, and life long careers are dead in corporate world, so there's no ethical or moral argument in trying to make superior paper filing clerks today so as to get a better CEO in forty years.
Its also worth considering that there's a peculiar form of hazing or abuse of junior military personnel where "caught" is really a combo of intelligence testing and social skills testing where at least one is required to pass. The reason for a baroquely complex process to take leave is to select for personnel who are some mixture of extremely smart able to outthink the opposition or good at social skills to schmooze successfully (which is a military intel or military police or green beret skill...). There's a power law distribution of importance where almost all decisions are not "newsworthy". Technically its an honor violation to fill out the wrong leave form and obtain the wrong signature in the wrong box and put it in the wrong mailbox, its an IQ and/or social skills test or hazing for juniors to avoid situations like that. In theory the kids are supposed to be selected via that process to be smart enough and observant enough to avoid making dumb mistakes when it actually counts. In practice once in a long while psychopaths get thru the process and bend the hazing to more self serving purposes, LOL, and THEN that stuff makes the news, not unlike a lot of corporate internal politics.
Or more explicitly, you're supposed to not "get caught" technically AWOL because you're supposed to be smart enough to read the policy book and/or friendly enough with the "old timer" O-2 who's been there an entire year before you, such that you file your paperwork properly and avoid being technically AWOL. With the hope that someday if you make it to O-9 rank, or perhaps earlier, you'll have absorbed via osmosis enough written regs and adopted a hopefully moral culture that when you have to make an important decision you won't screw up.
O-1s aren't paper filing clerks, either, those are, like, E-2s.
O-1s are line managers (with, generally, a couple levels of supervisors and lead staff underneath.)
Can you elaborate?
If everyone has to rotate through, I’m trying to make the connection on why it’s “designed” to filter out the good officers while the less-good stick around.
>Or that having the qualities that make you a good officer in combat hinder you in the staff roles?
Some people claim this and I've definitely seen it as a phenomenon, but I don't think it's necessarily a truism. Plenty of folks can do both. I think a lot of good officers just don't want to do staff officer time is all. It's not really sexy, it can be really boring, and you spend a lot of time getting exposed to the bureaucracy and politics of the military (yes the army still has politics). A lot of younger officers (so lieutenants and captains) see that for the first time and balk and get out (I was one of them). So the folks who end up staying are a) fully committed to the military as a career, b) don't think they have any better options so they just deal with it and stay in, or c) are the kind of officer who isn't smart enough to place themselves in category (a) or (b). You can imagine the filter effect this has, but it's not unique to the military imo.
If you're referring to the 1976 scandal that's not completely true. Yes they were dismissed, but a large number of them were given a second chance.
The 1976 scandal involved 150 cadets but 92 cadets were readmitted after completing year of useful service as stipulated by the Pentagon. [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/21/nyregion/west-point-cheat...
How did you come to this conclusion?
I believe in consequences, but I am neither a professional educator nor a veteran of any armed forces. I would defer to the head of this institution to arrive at an appropriate decision.
In my opinion this should probably result in dismissal (depending on exact circumstance which I'm not privy to).
The main issue here is demonstration of a lack of character. You give in to temptation to take the easy way out. That might be not doing the proper maintenance on a vehicle, or maybe not going exactly through the checklist before you take off for a flight, or maybe you take a shortcut and think "you got it" before that recon mission, or maybe you don't quite make sure someone's gear is up to standard and it fails on them and kills them.
Once you start taking shortcuts, you tend to keep taking them until it results in a colossal screw-up.
When I got out of the army it actually took me a few years to get away from the "triple-checking" anxiety. Do I have my car keys? Ok. Wait do I have my keys? Ok good.
"walking to my car"
Do I have my keys? Ok hand is on the keys and I can feel them.
Etc.
Cheating means you'll eventually screw that up and forget your keys. Then you or someone else dies.
For example, watching yourself slip down the class ranking while knowing those ahead of you are cheating can be discouraging. Especially if you think it's being ignored. A few months of that might test your character pretty hard.
The lack of quality officers was, and still is, one of the most egregious failings I encountered throughout my service.
The Army tried this, a cadet was killed, and the program ended (as far as I'm aware) [1].
>The lack of quality officers was, and still is, one of the most egregious failings I encountered throughout my service.
Speaking as a (former) officer, I can't disagree, it was the reason I left. My personal opinion is that USMA/USNA/USAFA spend way, way too much time trying to pretend that they're "just another University", and not an institution that explicitly exists to do one thing: produce leaders for war.
[1] https://www.stwnewspress.com/news/faith-honor-and-sacrifice-...
Exactly like this, I donno.
But in spirit isn't the academy kind of officers basic training? And anyone who went thru basic knows that the recruits do the dumbest imaginable things and the drill sgts slowly and laboriously socialize them into being competent military personnel.
Fresh off the bus recruits at basic can get away with the dumbest things imaginable, things that would instantly chapter a MOSQ soldier out of a line unit. Think of the stupidest thing you ever saw a recruit do with a rifle WRT common sense safety or maintenance requirements. Dumb lapses of discipline, incredible lack of foresight, etc.
Frankly not much is expected of new 2nd LTs other than shut up, stay out of the way, and listen carefully to your platoon Sgt. Officers have a VERY slow and long maturation period compared to enlisted. Enlisted experience is here's a couple months to get MOSQ and then sink or swim.
Not that basic trainees get away with being dumb, that's kinda the point. The officer cadets have just earned the most epic extra duty imaginable for a long time.
If what you say is a character test, then one should expect almost everyone in college to be dirty somehow.
As someone who worked their ass off, graduated with first class honours and never cheated, rewarding cheating devalues the grades of honest students. It's absolutely unfair, and it needs properly policing. Good academics don't need to cheat.
There is huge pressure not to fail people, and it is incredibly difficult to actually fail--I know only of a small handful of instances. In one case, they basically didn't show up for six months on a 1 year masters and did zero work, and even then it took months of handwringing to actually kick them out. But it shouldn't require months of agonising if the rules are clear and consistently and fairly enforced. The problem is that they are in a thrall to rich overseas students' cash, and they don't want to rock the boat. They even have special dumbed down Masters courses which are strictly for overseas students only. An academic friend of mine who was a fellow PhD student teaches on one, and he wasn't happy at the standard of the course or the academic conduct of the students. If they were on a regular course they should mostly have failed. And there's also the issue of league tables--being lax in grading and punishing cheating gets you a higher ranking in the league tables, so there's a strong disincentive to have high standards.
At this point, I do think that universities need some sort of external intervention. If standards are to be upheld, academic misconduct must result in real consequences, i.e. being kicked out. Most universities have a session on academic misconduct for all new students, and they have to sign a statement saying they understand what academic misconduct is and that they understand that it is not permitted. That needs enforcing properly, no second chances. As for cheating on coursework, there's a simple answer to that: go back to closed examinations for all courses, and make the coursework component a minor part or remove it entirely. And structure the coursework to minimise cheating. For example, make every student's work unique so there is no possibility of using anyone else's work. As a scientist, lab work and written work were usually your own experiments and essays, so little chance for cheating.
The real test for the cheaters is when they later have to perform in the real world. There is usually a clear difference between motivated and competent people who are independent thinkers and doers and lazy chancers who struggle, and it's quickly apparent which category people fall into despite their paper qualifications and CVs. Whether you're in a university or a company, there are people you can rely on who know their stuff and can deliver, and the people who can't.
I think the solution is as you say -- make assignments that are hard to cheat on -- but also reduce the incentive to cheat. Just make it less important. High-stakes closed exams and emphasis on ranking students will certainly make cheating worse.
In one university, absolutely everything was assessed, every bit of lab work, every tutorial, the lot. Unfortunately, this means you're being assessed on lab work which might fail due to your inexperience, and it makes it unnecessarily stressful.
In another, the lab work and tutorials were almost never assessed. They were learning exercises, which you could try and fail at without any consequences. I found that you learned a lot more here, because you could try stuff out and fail without it affecting anything, and it was much less stressful.
In the latter university, you did three modules per term (~10 weeks) and you had a closed exam for each every term. New paper set every year. No coursework. No chance for cheating.
The exams were also not "high-stakes". Each one made up a small percentage of the course total, which increased through the three years of the course, so there was no problem with doing badly on one or more. It meant the term time was pretty much all about learning, with assessment right at the end. I'm very much in favour of this simplicity, and it makes academic misconduct almost impossible.
The fact that the cheating isn't literally universal does suggest that specific people are knowingly making bad choices while others decide to rise above temptation and make the right choices. That is on them, and they should accept the consequences. Full stop.
> Once you start taking shortcuts, you tend to keep taking them until it results in a colossal screw-up.
So maybe for educational purposes academy needs to provoke cadets to take shortcuts and to make them into a colossal screw-ups?
Educational environment is not a "real life". Their goal was to pass exam on calculus. They did everything they were able to do, including the cheating. It is the cheating in educational environment, in real life it would not be the cheating, it would be a healthy cooperation. Or maybe not so healthy, because they screwed it up, by sharing not right answers, but mistakes. It is hard to judge, because there is such thing as a psychological narrative, there is a psychological context for all this. Each cheated cadet had his own context, his own story that came to a cheating.
In a high school I was ready to share my homework with my friends, and sometimes I got unacceptable marks because a teacher was able to see cheating and marked all with low grades. I got low marks not because I cheated, because I helped others to cheat. Was I demonstrating a lack of character, or a high morale character, who was ready to take additional risks to help his friends? It depends on my own narrative. From the one hand, it might be a lack of character, due to inability to say "no" to my friends. From the other hand, my friends might be more important for me than my grades. (Really I don't know what it was, because I know that I have troubles with saying "no", and at the same time I never bothered with grades, I knew that I would manage something acceptable, especially in math, I was good at it).
This anecdote here is an attempt to demonstrate that it is hard sometimes to judge character by assessing behavior only. It is even more hard on artificial educational environment where rules could arbitrarily diverge from real life.
I very much agree with this point. I think the messaging that is being handed to students is very different than what happens in professional settings. Students are often given the message that they are on their own and if something is not achievable it is their own fault, with consequences being their own. There are very little outlets for students to ask for help, or changes in school workload. I have seen the cause of too much work to do and too little time with no feedback from professors as causing this kind of widespread cheating.
Once you reach a professional environment with high risk (note, I have not been in the military but have worked on national defense aerospace programs) the messaging becomes if you are unsure of something or feel pressured to let something give you MUST ask for help or changes because the consequences are not your own and can be very widespread.
Edit: grammar
There are people in the academy that did not get caught and will, in your conclusion, take even bigger shortcuts.
However, these cadets have possibly learned a painful lesson that they can always use a reminder to do the right thing.
Let them be significantly punished, and know this was an excellent bootcamp following the Honor Code.
[...]
> I would defer to the head of this institution to arrive at an appropriate decision.
Blind faith in institutions here (and anywhere) is what enables mass institutional failure. Whether it's producing subpart military officers and the all the negative consequences that has, or the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, or a slide toward tyranny in representative political institutions.
* You don't know the math and people die
* You cheat and you create an international incident. You either go to jail or people die because of the decisions you make.
Try banking, big business, CIA/NSA. We need honest/prudent/righteous cannon fodder!
Yeah but since 2015 the rules have stated you can get a second chance. So it would not be fair or ethical to retroactively change the punishment now.
Intent to follow the spirit of an honor code is as important as following it. Abusing the system because you know you get one free pass is an invitation to cheat until caught, which is unfair to everyone else.
In reality, needing to use your second chance is already failure. If you can't internalize that, admit to it, and volunteer to step down, then you aren't the type of person who deserved a second chance.
The notion of honesty and moral character seems at odds with empire building
That would be 1976, when all 153 fourth-year cadets were expelled. I guess we're all enlightened now. From the article: "Nearly all of those who admitted guilt have been allowed to remain at the academy on the condition that they complete a rehabilitation program that includes meeting with a mentor and after-hours classes about the honor system and the importance of being a better leader..."
A "rehabilitation program". Not only should these cadets be expelled, but so should the clowns running this program.
Actually, the majority if the 1976 participants were allowed to return to West Point:
> Ninety-two of those involved in the scandal were later readmitted as cadets and allowed to graduate after accepting a Pentagon amnesty that required them to complete a year of “useful service” away from the academy.
See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/21/nyregion/west-point-cheat...
Why did they change this? Did the other US military academies (USAFA, USNA, USCGA) change their codes/concepts, as well?
The Honor Code is (was?) straightforward and if you broke it, you were gone.
The two other institutions I taught at used to have very strict policies about it and then at some point they became laxer in a similar way. It used to be a no warnings policy, and then became more wishy washy.
I always assumed it was to be more realistic, in that many students were being granted exceptions of sorts. There also can be a lot of grey area with cheating. Overall my impression was that some lawyers recommended the change to avoid liability. But I really don't know.
We've allowed money to become the guiding principle of higher education, rather than ability.
The sad truth no one wants to admit to, is that most people don't need to go to college, and frankly, if we were go to back just 60 years to the rigor of those curriculums, most people couldn't hack it, either.
If anything it would be cheaper to kick them out. But that is at odds with the goal (competent service-members).
It's just the last time they were caught en masse.
Otherwise, I'm pretty sure that this has happened time and again...
> It's just the last time they were caught en masse.
Yeah that's what happened here, so that's exactly what “the last time this happened” means.
When you develop a system that can successfully impose consequences for behavior without detecting it, let us know.
Well, hardly "exactly", as it also implies the cheating last happened at that time, which is, I'm willing to bet, not true...
>When you develop a system that can successfully impose consequences for behavior without detecting it, let us know
That's trivial and doesn't need inventing. You just impose consequences without detection. Not fair, but trivial to implement.
But how about better detection? If the "last time" they were caught was 1975, then something is surely amiss...
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2018 2019 2020
It's important to remember that almost every cadet here was a plebe (1st year student). Plebes are under enormous pressure, and they are only just beginning the inculcation of the honor code (they've all only been there about 6 months now).
Traditionally, they are given by far the most leeway. The expectation is that going through this process will only hasten and harden their understanding of the importance of the honor code.
I recall reading stories in the news about happenings when I was cadet, and there's always invariably some nuances and details that are either incorrect, missing, or misunderstood by people not familiar with West Point.
Some cadets are also still going to go before an honor board, which may very well lead to their separation.
Without knowing more details, I trust the administration (including cadet-led) to take actions in the best interest of our country, the institution, and the Corps.
Ironically, that knowledge leads to a crisis of trust in military institutions among enlisteds.
The trust problem is critical and far ranging, but also multifaceted. It permeates not only the military but all of US society at this point. I'm honestly unsure as to the best solutions? We may only be able to restore trust with glacial change rather than sea change.
As someone who has never been in a military, I'm going to throw out a wild idea:
I can't imagine that restoring this trust will be easy as long as officers aren't drawn from the pool of enlisted men.
This was an arrogant waste of time, but my priorities at that time were to simultaneously max(grades) and min(effort), with the end goal being a job, and my strategy optimally satisfied those goals. In hindsight I wish that things had been designed differently to prevent gaming the system in such a way, to save me from myself, but alas they were not (and still aren't).
I'm not saying you're wrong but some supporting evidence would be good as this wasn't my experience in undergrad and isn't my experience now.
Picking different professors will also result in better grades independent of effort or knowledge. One of my math teachers literally gave everyone that showed up to an upper level class an A, and said he wanted to cover more material rather than have a final.
The most clear cut example of grades independent of learning is someone that knows the subject and is unable to test out of the class. In such cases they can get top scores without learning anything.
If you’re arguing that they reflect having learned the material at some time. I knew people with significant time pressure like a full time job that knew the material very well, but simply aimed for a lower grade on assignments as a means of managing their time. Grading on a curve means you need to find something that separates A’s from B’s when everyone learns the material and that’s often just effort.
What should devastate people's trust in educational institutions is the relationship between Harvard and Epstein. We get to watch this university, whom I'm told is full of the world's smartest people, claim it was ignorant of what was really going on.
Harvard gave a sex trafficker a security card and his own office while he paid them millions. Harvard faculty was even joining him at his parties, I find it hard to believe what he was doing was really a secret.
I'm not saying that grading is perfect -- measuring what has been learned is hard, and there can be pressure not to be too harsh overall. But this sort of corruption is, in my observation, not widespread.
If the administration tried to hatch some conspiracy to inflate the grades of athletes or legacy students or whoever, ... then a quarter of the faculty would rebel, and the other three-quarters wouldn't even notice. Senior administrators send out lots of emails concerning this or that, and when they say to jump, nobody is scrambling to ask how high.
(2) AFAICT, when it does happen, it happens through known channels. e.g. there might be a few classes or majors which have a reputation as going easy on athletes, and instructors there might be asked to stay in line.
I'm not saying it never happens, but it's certainly uncommon enough that "grades are meaningless" isn't really true.
If so, there's at least a little bit of pressure towards passing those students. I wouldn't even call it "corruption", just normal human bias that everyone is guilty of.
I think there are typically a handful of classes that are known to be "athlete friendly" and I can imagine pressure existing there. Indeed, here is one example I have read about:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/131523/teaching...
The question is how pervasive it is and how it is handled. For the most part the corruption is overstated because it is newsworthy.
As an aside, you should look into the specific facts on Harvard and Epstein [1].
https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2020/report-regarding...
Everybody loved Epstein right up until he got caught, and nobody had a clue what he was doing. This is the position of everybody involved with Epstein, not just Harvard. Call me dumb but I'm not buying it.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/esper-pompeo-west...
We want them to be really really good at following orders and not to think too much about the moral aspect of bombing civilians. The reason cheating is banned in West Point is not because it is wrong, but because it displays that people prioritise their own individuality over that of the institution, and that they do not blindly believe in its ideals
I know this is common trope but tends to be more widely held by those with limited military experience.
For example, U.S. Marines are often considered highly disciplined (sometimes conflated with being very good at blindly following orders). From boot camp onward, they are encouraged (sometimes mandated) to read from the Commandant’s reading list. A perennial favorite to assign junior enlisted is A Message to Garcia. However, after nearly 40 years, it was removed from the list explicitly because the message was often misinterpreted as advocating strict obedience and went against the intent to promote independent thought.
Particularly in counter insurgency, the military wants/needs critical thinking, not blind obedience.
[0]: MCTP 206-10B, Appendix B: https://www.marines.mil/portals/1/Publications/MCTP%206-10B%...
[1]: ADRP 6-22: https://www.benning.army.mil/mssp/pdf/adrp6_22_new.pdf
Actually, I believe the Marines have the lowest intellectual bar of entry and the highest physical one for any branch. To your point, they do push small unit leadership to a lower level, which may be why they try to advocate a leadership mindset at low levels.
You could sweep a lot under the carpet before, thus improving your image in face of the world.
This is not to imply that George Washington is no better than the corrupt politicians, judges and police we have today. George Washington was, by all accounts, a very good man.
My only point was that it was far easier to actually be a good man in the time of George Washington than it is to be a good man or woman today. Not even a tenth of the opportunities to get yourself in trouble back then.
My impression is that e.g. British elite at the time of American war of independence was fabulously corrupt.
Please cite sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandahar_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagram_torture_and_prisoner_ab...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maywand_District_murders
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/21/afghanistan-tr...
https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/collateral_damage_f...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/terrorism.afgh...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
"But within a year, Operation Iron Tempest had fizzled out. Many of the suspected labs turned out to be empty, mud-walled compounds. After more than 200 airstrikes, the U.S. military concluded it was a waste of resources to keep blowing up primitive targets with advanced aircraft and laser-guided munitions."
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/9/20/afghanistan-us-conf...
When did you go to university? As I went a couple years ago and cheating was universal to the point that you could ask random classmates for the answers to quizzes you had not done yet and the frosh leaders collaborated to give the year below them all the answers. We had a massive drive of answers maintained by the student society.
Academic integrity was an absurd pretense. Except for a few niche programs like political science and history, it just did not exist.
Not arguing that this is a good thing, just that higher education in general is not all that reliable.
I was working at a well-funded ($86M Series B) fiberoptic startup in Fremont in 2000. We were trying to develop a polarization-maintaining fused fiber coupler, which we knew little about except for reading some papers. We were led by a young Chinese guy who kept everything he knew pretty much to himself. We all went out for pizza. I asked him, how did you solve so-and-so problem? Remarkably, without hesitation he said, I called up my friend at so-and-so COMPETING STARTUP, and asked him how they did it. (And he didn’t share with me any details of the solution, either). Then, I knew Silicon Valley was immersed in a sea of electrons…
If you want to publish a blog post on something, it's really involved. You have to make your vendors look good, your engineering team look good, and then there'll be this army of people on HN and Reddit who will nitpick everything so that you lose any of the good will you generate.
Wayyy better to just use private channels to exchange that information. So, if I'm considering data pipeline stuff I'll just hop on Discord with my friends and ask them how it went at their company and they'll just tell me.
Obviously none of us will tell the rest of the world, but we'll tell each other. Heck, strangers will do that in SF and Silicon Valley in general. Most people easily understand what parts are MNPI and what is company-private IP and what isn't. Until Xiaomi or Huawei or whatever stole that bloody robotic arm off T-Mobile even big companies would routinely officially sanction this information sharing.
For lots of software too it's just the real mechanism of stuff. I've definitely straight copied infrastructure code from friends at other companies. Not hardware process stuff certainly but it's straight plagiarism.
And honestly, I don't understand what the significance of "Then I realized Silicon Valley is immersed in a sea of electrons..." Is. I thought it was just colour but clearly you intend some significance to it.
"How did you cook the soufflé?"
"I asked my friend and he gave me some pointers"
Not clear to me how your story differs. Was it something specifically mentioned in an NDA or contract?
Why are exams that contribute to the final grade being reused? Why are they such trivial questions that you can reuse answers from previous exams?
My CS/Maths/Physics exams all consisted of longform written or worked answers. Maybe 10% max were trivial, no multiple choice, no question re-use within 10 years or so.
Sure, if you went and memorised every question ever asked for every subject in the 12 hours of final exams you might get lucky and have a very similar question.
But, uh, that's just learning.
This sort-of feels like cheating on the side of the professors. Making your life easier by recycling the same stuff.
There are some general issues with leadership training in the military.
You're randomly and arbitrarily in charge until you're not. You're randomly and arbitrarily practicing your group cooperation skills until you're not. In theory you'll get a lesson about paying attention, hopefully not in a career ending manner.
There is a strong push to demonize the kids who do dumb things. But its worth considering they're not evil, just a bit slow on the uptake.
Surely if a kid at training methodically organized the process of unloading a truck that would be valid leadership training. If the same kid organized the chemistry lab so operations run smoother, that's good too. If the same kid organizes group study sessions against an outline of the syllabus that is good leadership. If the kid goes a bit far and study session photocopies change from similar questions to the test, to actual questions from the test... The kid's not necessarily evil incarnate but a bit slow on the uptake about the precise definitions of expectations and an attention getting reaction from the actual leaders is appropriate, whereas blaming the kid retroactively for Iraq not having WMD is just a bit overboard.
Despite these test banks, the only widespread cheating when I was in school was on homework, which usually screwed the students when it came time for the exams because they had no practice. They weeded themselves out this way.
But there's no excuse for lazy professors/instructors and each new test should be distinct. Re-using an old test or old test questions is questionable behavior by a professor.
I agree with what Veen posted earlier: the cheating students should be expelled.
-- From "Tom Brown's School Days"
I'm sorry amigo, it seems you're a bit confused.
A large drop occurred in the 60s, again in the 90s, and since 2000 to today it is at an all-time low.
These cadets were likely not raised to respect this country in its current form.
Compassion and vulnerability are also important parts of leadership: leaders that can admit they made a mistake, perhaps even acted selfishly, and reflect on that behavior and avoid it in the future are better than those who cannot. This is the "new" way of leadership now, and personally, I am all for it, compared to the "old" style of pure hierarchy, repressed emotion, violence + fear as motivators, etc.
I got in trouble a few times in the Army and there was a lot of effort to "rehab" me. When I got in trouble as an NCO, the whole point of my punishment was to make me a better NCO. That's what they said and it seemed that's what they were trying to do.
The Spartan boy, learned only the basics, according to Plutarch, such as music and mathematics. Their principal training is a military one, often even crossing moral boundaries, such as learning how to steal without getting caught. The philosophy was that, in case of a war, a soldier might have to steal food in order to survive. The main key point here is that, when a boy was caught, he was not punished for his act of stealing, but for being caught! The Spartan youth had their favorite "game" of stealing food or other possessions from servants (Greek: είλωτες, helotes).
A well-known story that proves the Spartan training and loyalty is this: Once, a 13 year old Spartan boy stole a fox from a village near his camp. Alas, a trainer found him and asked him what he was doing off campus. The boy had seen the trainer and had hidden the fox beneath his cloth. As the boy said nothing, the trainer insisted. The fox, still alive, beneath the boy's cloth, started scratching him, in order to escape. While doing that, the boy continued to deny the stealing until the wounds suffered by the fox killed him.
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
As Devereaux puts it on Spartan child-rearing:
"To sum up: far from being some ideal system of child-rearing, as Xenophon might have it, the Spartan agoge appears functionally identical to modern systems which use trauma to condition child soldiers."
The whole series is a great and very deep dive into Sparta and the summation is clear: If Sparta still existed, we'd all invade to stop the horror.
"Sparta, the new Angola!"
> The committee began with the creation of an emblem that consisted of a sword, a universal symbol of war, and the helmet of Pallas Athena. Athena, a fully armed mythological goddess, is associated with the arts of war, and her helmet signifies wisdom and learning.
http://usheraldicregistry.com/index.php?n=Registrations.2008...
Years ago I worked very closely with the current Commandant of West Point BG Buzzard. I know him to be a man of honor. Based on my experience working with him and other quality officers during my enlistment, I can assure you that they are experienced, highly educated (BG Buzzard has a masters from Harvard), and have a good sense of the broader impacts of their decisions.
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/08/archives/more-than-90-cad...
This is obviously made with (some) jest, but it is fascinating we pride ourselves on being societies where "the military answers to the civilian authorities", but we have nowhere near the same standards for civilian leaders as we apparently expect for military folk.
Cheat on a calculus exam?
It would be funnier as "Westpoint Ain't Cal Tech".
Personally I thought army basic training was OK other than not having a full nights sleep for two months. Certainly I could never pass a calculus exam on a couple hours of sleep over the past weeks. It really is amazing how unproductive humans are after a couple hours of hard work or even just ten hours sitting in a chair.
Also your job assignment for officers is given based on your GPA and your GPA will be based on a curved test. So its not that cadets are accepted in a grueling process and then it smooth sailing, its more like the grueling process just begins and whomever high scores the calc test gets branched Aviation in three years whereas the guy at the bottom of the calc test gets Chemical corps or ADA (supposedly the work-life balance of ADA is the worst in the entire Army...)
This form of cheating just seems lazy.
In the US, particularly until the late 19th Century, I'm not sure that was so. The congressman on the recent frontier had an appointment in his gift, just as did the congressman whose district took in the Boston Latin School. Combining the military and educational instruction gave a chance to bring everyone up to at least a known level.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/kg8cbx/aita_...
The top voted comment, with around 20K upvotes, rips into the father: "Instead of berating your son, you should be proud of what he did and support him by explaining that doing right is not always easy but necessary. You should be talking to administrators at his school about the culture they have inculcated."
In contrast, the top voted comment which defends the son has only around 2,400 upvotes.
Can't speak to "99% of people on twitter", but looks like only 10-15% of people on Reddit.
Note this applies to anything controversial on reddit especially politics. Only one extreme position will be allowed in all discussions in the presence of karma farming.
Twitter is somewhat more conversational.
Link to study itself: https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/lying-to-ourselves-dishonesty...
Top level point: Lying in the Army has been normalized due to required attestations that are likely impossible to accomplish, leading to 'pencil whipping'.
I don't think that this is at all unique to the Army and I see this kind of thing where I work as well.
Maybe because the subjects were quantitative, there was less scope for plagiarism detection? Or maybe they just didn't really care, or they didn't want the administrative trouble. I'm not sure.
the cadets — all but one of whom are first-years...
Academic ethics aside, cheating at this level is just plain bad judgment. No one who has to cheat in Calc I is going to get through Calc II without having to do the same thing, over and over.
Honor systems can work. A well known example is Caltech, where almost all exams are take home exams which students typically take alone in their room or in some other isolated place.
Caltech may have an advantage in this because the classes are hard and it gets harder for you each year. If you need to and successfully do cheat, at least in a class that is at all relevant to your field, you are quite likely to flounder in subsequent years.
So it may not be that Caltech students follow the Honor system because they are actually more honorable than most--it may be because they are smart enough to realize that cheating isn't really going to help them.
Add to that, if they can't be trusted in an academic setting where the consequences are a bad grade, how can you trust them in a situation where there are lives at stake?
So in Turkey there is this islamic cleric, a charismatic figure who was a "Youtuber" before the internet. His organisation was spreading his message through VHS tapes and he gained substential following. Innocent enough, right?
Well, the problem is that the guy was preaching about infiltrating institutions, "the capillaries" in his own words, to create a "golden generation" and to achieve that cheating, killing, destruction of lives was acceptable for greater good.
The Turkish military was the primary target of the organisation and the military at one point began expelling people for being associated with this organisation.
How they were getting in? First it was through legit ways: study for the exams. Later, those who get it keep their alliance with this organisation and did whatever they can to get more people in. At some point, they reached dominance in the admission process and some of the branches were recruiting from this organisation - exclusively. They were passing the exam questions to the organisation and the organisation got all their people in. They created an unofficial ranking scheme inside the military where officially highly ranking personel could be below the cafeteria guy.
At some point they were everywhere that matters and were the unofficial partner of Erdogan up until they decided that they want it all and clashed with Erdogan. Erdogan won, then they attempted a coup. Erdogan won again.
Crazy stuff, right? I wouldn't believe it up until the coup night when people dragged civilians associated with these people out of the tanks on live TV and CCTV footage of the airbase that bombed the parliament. On the CCTV, businessman known to be associated with this organisation was running around the base, checking the screens, talking to solders - he was clearly directing the air attacks that nigh.
So yes, corruption in these institutions is a big deal.
[0] : some CCTV footage from the airbase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLEOKnCcRNM
[1] : an article about the guy being sentenced for life in prison: https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/15-temmuz-darbe-girisimi/akinci-dav...
For better or worse, the US is assumed to have the most powerful military in present day.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_level_of_...
Do you think allowing more people who break clear explicit rules of conduct for immediate personal advantage into the military (and visibly doing so, so that you send the message that it is acceptable) will make those bigger problems better or worse?
> Also US military is not the largest military in the world.
By manpower? No. By virtually any capacity measure? Yes.
Maybe by manpower to, once you account for the large degree to which military functions are contracted out (including armed combat roles in war zones) and add in all the contractors performing those functions.
People in Russia and China really don’t think the US military is the most powerful military.
I'm not sure what bearing this has on anything even if it is true, besides being a weirdly selective argumentum ad populum fallacy.
And yes not the largest by headcount but widely considered the most powerful military in the world.
When I was serving, I once came across a unit who didn't respect their commander. And the unit was pretty fucked up as a result. They weren't effective, there were whispered jokes about him, and people were showing up late & leaving early. If we had gone to war, there was a good chance that many unit members would have found ways to avoid serving under him.
His boss at the Wing/Group level should have pulled his ticket and replaced him. The phrase commonly used for this is "Loss of trust and confidence in their ability to lead".