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Comment by cbozeman | Hacker News Reader

If they all made the same error on the test, in the same way, they're almost certainly all guilty - except apparently for two of them.

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.

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Given the sheer number of instances where the higher ups in the military have lied, especially claiming they had no involvement in a problem; letting the shit roll downhill (as the expression goes) until it finds someone so low they can't blame anyone below them.... I find it ironic that being caught lying once is considered something that proves you're not officer material. That is, of course, it's the "caught" part, because it seems rare that anyone higher up is ever actually caught for anything; that's what the scapegoats are for.

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.

> I find it ironic that being caught lying once is considered something that proves you're not officer material.

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.

> 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.

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.)

This is entirely branch and service dependent. You'll find plenty of 0-1s essentially filing paperwork in HHC, who have no subordinates reporting to them, across the Army. The overwhelming majority of 0-1s who are "line managers" will be in the Combat Arms branches (Infantry, Armor, Field Artillery, etc), and you'll still find 0-1s making slide decks for the Battalion Commander while they wait until it's their time for a Platoon.

>There seems no controversy that the middle management era of staff duty seems designed to filter out good officers and keep the worst

Can you elaborate?

Not OP but my guess is that he is referring to what happens after you finish your platoon leader time and basically wait around to go to the career course. You spend a lot of time pulling "staff duty" (think "Officer of the Watch" or something if a Naval reference is more familiar), where you're the representative of the Commander during off-duty hours. It's a time of extreme boredom, and a lot of lieutenants start experiencing FOMO for the first time since the "exciting" part of your career (being a PL in combat) is over.

Is the implication that those who have other good non-military options choose not to wait out the staff duties? Or that having the qualities that make you a good officer in combat hinder you in the staff roles?

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.

Some jargon isn't translating well here, and designed is probably the wrong word to use. "Staff Duty" (a singular "duty" as opposed to the myriad of official staff officer positions) consists of sitting at a desk and monitoring the company or battalion area for 24 hours straight. You end up dealing with things like privates coming back to the barracks drunk and getting into fights, etc. There are other semi-permanent staff roles you can get on Battalion/Brigade staff, but a lot of times lieutenants who finish platoon leader time just end up waiting for the next training assignment and you get put in the duty roster rotation. This happened to about half of my PL cohort when we re-deployed from Afghanistan. Mind you everyone has to do staff duty, but younger officers will do it more often because, well, they're younger and there's more of them.

>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.

The only lesson that will be learned is that the honor code is bullshit, and that despite swearing to neither lie, cheat nor steal, the consequences will be minimal if they do. The lesson for those who did not cheat is that the honor code is just empty words.

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.

> The last time this happened, everyone involved was dismissed or resigned.

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...

> Second chances here are what result in subpar military officers.

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.

I'd prefer to not give second chances to the servicepeople being afforded a $400k education on our dime to cheat and lie only to control the most advanced weapon systems on the planet. But that's just me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The easy reasoning, is that on the field of battle, there are no do-overs

* 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.

> > Second chances here are what result in subpar military officers.

[...]

> 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.

I'm a veteran.

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.

I'm also a veteran. I'd be more inclined to give them a second chance. There are likely more factors involved than lack of character here. I would at least try and see what the bigger picture was. If 70 were caught out in a very obvious way, there's probably a much bigger number cheating. And perhaps something about the environment that encourages the behavior.

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.

This. When so many are caught cheating, "character" is not a sufficient explanation; there is something systemic going on.

Just because there are positive incentives to participate in bad behavior, doesn't mean the people engaging in that behavior are absolved of responsibility for their actions. Just because you suffer personal costs if you do not engage in bad actions, doesn't mean you get a free pass to do them.

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.

There’s a lot of cheating in college. When I was a TA I knew of a situation where about half of a large class cheated, and I felt very bad because I gave the honest half bad grades. I expect this for any large class, so if you wish to embrace humanity broadly you may have to do more than 2nd or 20th chance.

If what you say is a character test, then one should expect almost everyone in college to be dirty somehow.

I studied and worked in academia in the UK for around 15 years, from undergrad to postdoc and then as a scientific software developer. I'm afraid to say I have little trust in current academic standards. The number of first-class honours degrees continues to rise while the academic rigour and teaching standards of courses continue to slide, and a big part of that is in tolerance of dishonesty. It's long past time that colleges and universities had a zero tolerance policy for this stuff; their reputations will suffer irreparably if they don't. If they haven't already.

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.

should the university system really just be an organized academic competition for undergraduates?

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.

I've experienced several different universities which used different teaching styles both as an undergraduate and an employee.

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.

I'm a veteran as well, and it fits perfectly that officers get a slap on the wrist, while if a junior enlisted solider did something like this, they'd get fucked up big time.

Ah, yes, I was enlisted, so I get your drift. But I wasn't suggesting anything in that space. Just that focusing on the group that happened to get caught isn't really fixing the problem.

> if a junior enlisted solider did something like this

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.

Also a Vet - I'd be fine with giving them a second chance - as enlisted men. Once they've proven they can be soldiers, they're welcome to re-attempt becoming officers.

The lack of quality officers was, and still is, one of the most egregious failings I encountered throughout my service.

>Also a Vet - I'd be fine with giving them a second chance - as enlisted men. Once they've proven they can be soldiers, they're welcome to re-attempt becoming officers.

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-...

Since there is no proof for the above conclusion I offer an counter hypothesis:

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 can see your point, but it sounds like you believe in character as of something inborn, not acquired. To give no second chances means to filter people selecting for a proper character. From the other hand second chances might nurture a character.

> 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.

> Educational environment is not a "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

> You lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do and you're not military material.

Try banking, big business, CIA/NSA. We need honest/prudent/righteous cannon fodder!

Oops: forgot politics. How could I.

> 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.

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.

As an honor code, it's implied that you not commit a willful infraction with the second chance in mind.

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.

Is honesty the biggest factor in having competent officers, or is it courage/tactical understanding/craftiness/resistance to stress etc.? (Honestly asking)

The notion of honesty and moral character seems at odds with empire building

Ah yes, the US military, famously upstanding and honourable. Not at all responsible for atrocity after atrocity after atrocity.

The really concerning bit is that the cadets tried to cheat on a core course. I mean, West Point is an engineering school, where fluency in math is an absolute requirement. Did they really think they could get away with no math in the followup courses? How stupid can you be, trying to subvert the teaching?

> The last time this happened, everyone involved was dismissed or resigned.

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.

> In 2015, Ophardt explained, the academy made changes to the honor code allowing for second chances.

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.

For whatever reason, the stance toward academic dishonesty has changed everywhere in higher education for reasons that aren't clear to me.

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.

Its completely clear to me. If you kick out a first-year student, you've deprived the university of the next three years of income from that student.

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.

That doesn't really apply in this case-- for service academies student's are all on a full-scholarship and are paid a stipend.

If anything it would be cheaper to kick them out. But that is at odds with the goal (competent service-members).

A zero tolerance policy often has unwanted outcomes. Because the punishment is so extreme even for minor problems it isn't enforced that way in practice, unwritten policies are used. It means that problems cannot be corrected, you can't learn from mistakes

>The last time this happened

It's just the last time they were caught en masse.

Otherwise, I'm pretty sure that this has happened time and again...

> > The last time this happened

> 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.

>Yeah that's what happened here, so that's exactly what “the last time this happened” means.

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...

Well, the only time you can really prove cheating, is when people get the same wrong answers....

> That would be 1976, when all 153 fourth-year cadets were expelled. I guess we're all enlightened now

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...

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