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Comment by nneonneo | Hacker News Reader

We use honor pledges not to reduce cheating directly - but rather, to create incontrovertible evidence that the student was aware of the course policies. This supports those rare cases where a student chooses to fight a plagiarism case and claims ignorance of the policy, especially in cases where it may not be University-wide policy - e.g. a policy against AI usage. Students can argue they didn’t read the syllabus, missed the first day of class, etc. but have a harder time arguing they signed a pledge without reading it.

We regularly catch cheaters in our classes; I do so every term and report all the cases I see up to the dean. In my experience these have not resulted in catastrophic declines in teaching evaluations; the few unhappy with getting caught cheating are drowned out by the 80-90% who don’t cheat.

It is actually critically important that institutions take cheating seriously. Rampant, well-known cheating can tank the reputation of a program or institution, or at the very least serve to cheapen the value of the degree.

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I think cheating is increasing over time. There are a number of reports about this I have read from individual universities. The problem is that if cheating becomes widespread enough, the schools don't have the power to do much about it when they rely on the tuition revenue. For example, this article https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/8/honor-council-w... makes the point that academic integrity violations are increasing while enforcement is decreasing. If you read the punishments given, they are basically along the lines of strongly worded letters.

A lot of the tier-3 schools are getting desperate due to declining enrollment. Demographic changes are killing them. Tolerating cheating might help them keep enrollment up for a few more years by attracting the laziest students but eventually this will wreck their reputation with employers and lead to a death spiral. If those schools want to survive then some will need to pivot to other business models, like become a trade school or corporate training center.

You don't think prominent students from the ultra rich don't get kid gloves?

Trump went to Wharton.

Interested, not skeptical: do you have sources or analysis you like which discuss the declining enrollment you mentioned?

United States culture celebrates and often elects grifters, whose core precept can be summarized as “either you’re running the con, or you’re the mark”. Cheating at academics is treated no differently, through a social lens, from attempting to scam a widow out of her insurance payout: simply attempting to run the con places you in a higher social caste than those marks who do not attempt any con, even if you fail. That the cheaters often get caught is much less relevant to them than the shame and shunning and demotion to the lesser caste that their peers would respond with if they did not try to grift their grades — even if they could graduate with a 4.3 without cheating at all! (I don’t personally subscribe to these beliefs, but it’s important to understand why ‘cheating is wrong’ is so contentious in U.S. culture, if only to be able to evaluate whether academic policies are designed effectively to decrease the rate of cheating per student capita.)

I don't think "cheating is wrong" is contentious in US culture. Why do you think this?

I guess it depends on what you mean by contentious and by whom. The current US administration is a love letter to grifters, con artists, liars, and cheaters. And is staffed with many of the same kind of people.

It's a fairly long way from those people elected to the actions of individuals.

Given a few minutes of thought, it's not hard to imagine one side calling the other cheaters, while holding themselves to higher standards (even holding up those "others" as reasons why its important to be honest). That's just how politics seems to go.

I was thinking more of our cultural appreciation for con men, Robin Hood types, and so on. Many movies come to mind over the past several decades; Ocean’s Eleven, whatever that grass seed salesman movie was, etc. Also, I’d been considering the endless cheating in multiplayer games, whether video or IRL, for as long as humans have played games; and the tendency of United States drivers to cut in line in congested traffic, which is a less-considered form of cheating but still hits all the right points to count as such. Olympians and their endless doping scandals demonstrate that some authorities might think cheating is wrong, but athletes clearly aren’t so uniformly concerned about it. Still, you make a good point about politics demonstrating both the controversy and popularity with voters of cheating and grifting!

Those movies, stories, and games are popular _because_ we have an aversion to rule breaking, IMHO. The average person could never muster up the courage to steal a candy bar, let alone a treasure from a kingdom. It's a fun fantasy to live out precisely because we cannot bring ourselves to do it in the real world, and precisely because it wouldn't go well in the real world.

Being asocial myself, the aversion described comes across as an outcome of societal pressures, rather than any sort of innate characteristic. I still voluntarily adhere to the principles intended by it, but without ever feeling the aversion that typical vulnerability to social pressures confers. So, yes, I do agree that aversion holds true in some social environments — but not all. If one constructs a theoretical culture where lying to, conning, and stealing from outsiders is ethically neutral, then the opposite becomes true: courage is only required to steal a candy bar from an insider, else it’s ethically neutral and courage is not required. This isn’t a thought experiment; such cultures do exist within the United States and have numerous adherents both in U.S. politics and at home. One of the controversies around cheating on homework is whether it’s cheating or not; if a degree ultimately earned fraudulently is only used to exploit outsiders — e.g. including faceless corporate and government non-person entities — then it is not necessarily cheating under an “insiders-only” ethical framework at all. The threats of such frameworks are many and various, but right at the top of the list is “ethical concerns are only applicable to in-group members”, which neatly sidesteps the courage otherwise required to take advantage of a professor, college, etc. Thus the controversy: to say that “cheating is wrong” assumes not only that cheating is “wrong”, but that the ethical concerns implied by the label “cheating” are even applicable at all. Unfortunately, colleges tend not to engage at that level with students (other than those that self-select into philosophy!), and so punitive-only efforts are ineffective at shifting the underlying cultural issues.

1) capitalism and the money is all you need has gradually worn down all other moral and ethical institutions over the decades. Without something like WWII to reset a popular ethos in a uniform manner, it's a gradual slide downward

2) maybe the universality of team sports in the United States, where again winning is all that matters and if you aren't bending the rules and burdening the referees, you aren't trying.

3) this all gets cranked up based on socioeconomic stress, which also is being steadily ratcheted up each decade.

It may be pre-conceptions, but after a while you know where to look. Its "imperial"-entitled cultures that produce the most hefty cheaters. "I belong to the cultural, god-chosen center of the universe therefore i excel" as an attitude.

And then there is face-culture, which assumes that everyone puts up a show anyway and the grades are created by a bribe competition of the families heads in some backroom.

There is a reason, why academia refuses to read a ton of papers from certain countries unless they get propelled by other trusted sources to the top of the heap. A mediocre, honest student is worth 20 fake doctors with accolades.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1296860.pdf

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10805-021-09391-8

US and California culture have lots of problems around arrogance and refusal to see or hear the rest of the world, but refusing to read research from American universities seems harsh. Because the most powerful state that has ever existed is the imperial, entitled culture you meant right?

Why are you projecting so hard? Afraid of something?

Instead of having a (useless in this context) knee-jerk reaction, you can read the links and find that the reported countries with the highest cheating in each link were France and UAE.

US and California are in the opposite side of that spectrum, with less cheating.

The actual Hacker News comment which I was responding to mentioned "imperial-entitled cultures ... the cultural, god-chosen center of the universe ... face culture" which sounds like he means China. The comment linked two papers, but not for specific facts, and they discuss five countries only one of which is a hotbed of fake research (the USA - psychology, enough said). There are only a million Bahrainis so I don't think anyone would need to have a policy of ignoring research by Bahrainis, but a lot of people talk smack about Indian and Chinese research.

As an undergrad student, I can tell you that cheating is rampant. It kind of sucks for those who don't and are genuinely curious because it's frustrating to see someone else easily passing with less effort spent.

What I think teachers could do is to come up with truly novel and strange assignments that require real curiosity and creativity (and some do, which is great). I can only assume this to get harder and harder with modern AI readily available to everyone but perhaps the key is to assign something that would take a long time even with these tools. It should be as hard as necessary which is only all the more fulfilling to a curious student.

Agree that time spent preventing cheating is preferable to time spent detecting or punishing cheating, and that all are terrible distractions from time spent actually teaching. In response to OP saying that honor pledges are unhelpful, GP only mentions that they can make the punishment part less painful and time-consuming, but I can personally confirm GP exhausts the prevention route (including putting out "novel and strange" assignments :) ) before trying to detect and punish cheating, at least in my experience.

I've heard many a story about professors treating it like a trap door, paying no attention to prevention and much more to detection/punishment to the point you'd think they're sadistic pleasure out of it. (I doubt they are, but you'd have to numb yourself to it in that position.) In certain ways, I guess this is better than pushing people through to the next class—giving them no option but to catch up quickly or cheat more—but it isn't great...

OP mostly talks about detection/punishment, but I think it's also the job of course staff to make cheating as impossible as possible before it happens. Engaging and novel assignments are great; putting more weight on exams is low-cost and acceptable.

I don’t know how this would work for CS, but in law school I had one professor that did final oral examinations as follows: there were about 15-20 cornerstone topics from the class that were possible exam questions and were announced a few weeks before finals. Then, during finals week(s), each student had a 30 minute block during which they would randomly select 3 of the 10 topics by pulling note cards and engaging in a conversation about the topic with the professor. If you knew the basics of the topic you were almost guaranteed a B or B+; if you demonstrated novel or expansive knowledge you got a higher grade… and you really had to not study to get a C+ or lower.

There are flaws in every method of measuring competency but I thought this was one of the better ones, and it is very difficult to cheat on. His exams were by far the least grumbled about and I don’t recall a single student that thought the method was unfair. And even though this required more upfront work from the professor he said it was ultimately less time consuming than grading written exams, and far more enjoyable.

I think the cost here is that conducting this examination for a small cohort of law students is much easier than a huge CS class. 300-person class sizes would mean you optimistically would spend 150 hours examining every student, notwithstanding scheduling conflicts.

I do like the idea, though. My parents from the former Soviet Union had oral examinations for their entire schooling.

There's this myth that cracking down on cheating tanks your ratings, but in reality, most students want a fair playing field and respect instructors who maintain standards

I read through the honor board reports at my law school once and they were disgusting. People blatantly cheated, then would make up some sort of excuse and the honor board would do nothing. The punishments for cheating should be certain and severe.

It’s not just about the reputation of the schools, it’s about society as a whole. A chronic problem in the third world is widespread cheating and low level corruption. The last straw that convinced my dad to leave our home country was a phone line installer asking for a bribe when he came to install a second line. If we don’t police our culture we will degenerate into that sort of behavior over time.

I don't condone cheating but it's a bit less of a concern in law school. Ultimately they still have to pass the bar exam. In the USA at least it's quite difficult to cheat on that, although I don't know whether the same applies in your home country.

It’s a much bigger concern in law school because the entire legal system is built on trust. (It’s a very specific, narrowly defined form of trust, but trust nonetheless.)

>Students can argue they didn’t read the syllabus, missed the first day of class, etc. but have a harder time arguing they signed a pledge without reading it.

I am confused as to why anyone would need to sign a pledge to provide proof that they are aware cheating is bad. If you don’t know that by the time you are in university, then tough luck. One would hope a defense of “I didn’t know cheating was frowned upon” would get you laughed out.

It is because many people hide behind "legal" when they want to dodge accusation of "unethical". And since the process of expulsion or other punishment is sort of legalistic, the institution needs legalistic defense.

Surely, cheating and fraud is already illegal? If you cheat on your taxes or cook the books or otherwise defraud others, the government doesn’t need a signed pledge to punish you.

Cheating in school generally wouldn't meet the definition of criminal fraud, depending on the facts of the particular case. Normally it's only an administrative issue.

Cheating on exam is fully legal. Likewise, cheating om your wife. Or, cheating in a card game.

As is expelling someone from a school (at least a college). It is not a legal right to be able to attend a school.

Also, cheating in a personal card game might not result in consequences, but in a casino it could result in prosecution:

https://www.8newsnow.com/investigators/group-accused-in-225k...

Same with cheating in a spouse, you won’t go to jail, but it will adversely affect you in divorce proceedings. Point being that society has some expectations of people knowing what the rules are without people signing a pledge.

I would refer back to my own "since the process of expulsion or other punishment is sort of legalistic, the institution needs legalistic defense". Universities do not allow their faculties and workers to expel students randomly and on whim. There is process about it, to prevent abuse of power.

Consent forms are normal in whole range of areas, because society does not expect people to know all the rules that exist.

The IRS wont accept your tax filings if they are not signed.

> but have a harder time arguing they signed a pledge without reading it.

This is easy to argue, people do it all the time (hello, TOS). So there is nothing incontrovertible about it.

It also contradicts the goal for pledges expressed by those setting this policy, they want to "strengthen the dedication to academic integrity" etc

If you’re arguing that then the answer is: too bad. These sorts of pledges are not 30 pages of legalese that you’re asked to agree to in the middle of a purchase. It’s usually a single page of plain language. If someone signs it without reading it they lose all rights to argue they weren’t aware. Choosing to remain unaware is not a defense.

Syllabus isn't legalese either, and not reading its first page that cheating is bad is exactly the same choice with the same "rights" attached. There is no magical difference here

You don’t countersign a syllabus.

Then add a signing requirement???

You are arguing for the sake of arguing.

Or you could just add it to the honor code, once, instead of multiple times each semester on what is typically a purely informational document.

Focus. The only goal here is creating a paper trail, and signing the honor code once does that and exactly that.

Sure, having a clear honor code is helpful. But individual instructors and courses have different policies on which tools are allowed and how students can collaborate.

If you sign something that says “I won’t do X”, and then you do X and argue you didn’t actually read what you signed, no one is going to take you seriously.

How does it contradict, exactly?

To me it seems completely congruent with your quotation.

Two things can be true at once. You can take your pledge seriously, which is the happy path. And in the event that you choose the unhappy path, it can also be used as evidence that you understood the requirements. The overwhelming majority of my students choose the happy path.

Do you think that the pledge reduced the incidence of cheating, as students may have treated it as a warning that this class would enforce rules on cheating?

That would be surprising to me. I wouldn't take seriously anything the university says, as opposed to does. Prospective cheaters probably take their cues about likely enforcement levels from fellow students who have seen [lack of] actual consequences.

I took it seriously as a student. I remember during a no-book take home exam having forgotten some stupid little fact, and thinking “damn it would be such a little thing to look it up in the textbook” and feeling so much shame about even considering it, specifically because I had to handwrite an honor pledge on my work. (I didn’t cheat, by the way.)

The institutions you refer to are rotten to the core obsessed with rankings, endowments, research funding, and keeping as many high paying students enrolled as possible.

What is the incentive to censure/eject a sucker, uh, student that is paying 50-100k per year for a social class badge?

These institutions are professional sports programs, have satellite universities in Saudi Arabian for oil money grift, use minimum wage labor for their putative core mission of education, have suspicious numbers of overseas and legacy but not legacy admissions.

Lost in the Harvard trump battle is the 50 billion endowment Harvard has, and how expensive it still is to go there, and how Harvard basically refuses to expand its enrollment.

I think this misses just one important nuance - cheating is often done out of desperation and it might bee important to try to understand that desperation before deciding on the degree of punishment. For instance, if the student is dealing with a recent diagnosis of e.g. depression or adhd. You really can't know the extent of anguish some might go through before deciding they "have to" cheat in order to hopefully have some semblance of normalcy in their future career.

Obviously cheating is unacceptable, but empathy can really help the student in this situation.

A person's true character comes out in hard times.

A disciplined character will handle hard times well. An undisciplined character will not.

Compassion exists, sure. But morality doesn't disappear just because something bad happens. Compassion should be sought after before resorting to cheating, not after.

A person's true character is not set in stone, nor can it be generally measured by a single incident.

It's very much like climate. And like climate, you can use it to certainly predict typical weather, such as a desert not gaining much rain.

If you are disciplined in morality and have a well-trained conscience, that will tend to follow you as long as you keep up the discpline.

Awful take.

Everyone is capable of murder in the right circumstances.

That doesn’t make everyone a murderer.

> Everyone is capable of murder in the right circumstances.

Citation needed. I don't think this is true, and if it was it wouldn't change anything. Notably, the individual level of circumstances required matters a lot, pragmatically even if you don't care in principle.

And there is some significant evidence that it is not true.

Think about training soldiers and the concept of “non-firers”. I’m not an expert on those things but the fact that training soldiers to kill is hard, and no one has a great solution even after a lot of effort, and passive combat personnel concepts even exist at all, I think gives evidence to the idea that not everyone can be a murderer, even under extreme circumstances.

“ Gen. S.L.A. Marshall once described war as “the business of killing”. And yet many war-fighters throughout history have gone out of their way to avoid it. Marshall himself estimated (though some say he exaggerated, or even fabricated) that only 15-25 per cent of infantry soldiers in the Second World War fired their weapons in any given battle. The rest were so-called “non-firers”; they had the opportunity to shoot at enemy soldiers but failed to do so. Marshall added that even those who did shoot often deliberately missed their target — they were so-called “mis-firers”. These “passive combat personnel”, as they are sometimes called, have long been a thorn in the side of military institutions. War is a “competition in death and destruction”, in the words of Henry Shue, and these individuals deliberately forego opportunities to score points for their own team.”

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/ned-dobos-military-training-...

To be fair, on the grand scale of possible circumstances that might drive someone to murder, being a soldier is relatively common but not that high. The more interesting cases involve intense personal hate, possibly for revenge for extreme injury, or reasons that blur the line with self-defense or defense of a loved one. But I think a lot of people would still require unfeasibly extreme circumstances, if they could do it at all.

Everyone is a monster, that is true. And I agree that anyone can _kill_ in the right circumstance (e.g. self defense, etc), but I strongly disagree that any disciplined moral character will easily become a murderer overnight.

However, the part you miss is the keyword discipline. To be discipline in morality means that you are aware you can be a monster and you actively choose not to be, even if it means what appears to be a negative outcome for you, relatively speaking.

Morality isn't free. It's not easy, and it requires diligent practice, aka it's a discipline.

By the time your in college, you should have enough discipline to not cheat. If you don't, you have a very untrained conscience.

I don't think anyone's advocating for death penalty for cheating.

I was referring to the whole "referral to the dean" thing which is again, totally fair in certain circumstances but also basically guaranteed to ruin that person's life.

Cheating is done by ppl who don't put in the effort and take the easy way out. Someone who is depressed wouldn't care enough to cheat. Too much empathy where it is not required has become the bane of society.

Well spoiler alert - I cheated in college! I have acute bipolar depression (undiagnosed back then) and fortunately my only punishment was to fail that class rather than expulsion. I'm now a successful software engineer with 12 years of career coding under my belt. I do good work and I don't cheat.

Sorry it wasn't harder to counter your response. I would really implore you to change your perspective and attitude. Other people generally aren't psychopaths trying to take shortcuts. they are as i said, often just very desperate.

No. The ones who make excuses instead of owning up to it should receive double the punishment.

Im fine with the other comments here but the insinuation that mental health issues and a desire to live a normal life are "making excuses" (as in making up excuses when the real cause is something like laziness) - well let me just say it's not a very polite way to approach the issue and would probably come across as gaslighting to anyone dealing with this.

Like i said, others have similar criticism to yours but don't include this dismissive bit.

Mental health issues aren’t an excuse to cheat. If you can’t do the work, tell the professor about your situation instead of breaking the rules. Everyone has shit to deal with—some single mom was up all night with the baby and still did her work on her own and followed the rules.

And that’s literally the reason to understand people and help them rather than punish. I hope you’ll never experience how shitty life circumstances can be, and how fragile your own mind can be.

That's still an argument for being graceful with failures, not for excusing dishonesty. It's really, truly, not that complicated. Civilization cannot function properly when dishonesty is accepted. (ed: To be clear, this is not a hypothetical problem. We're already in trouble due to erosion of trust.)

Understanding dishonesty and forgiving in it in some cases is ok. Note it’s very different from the world where dishonesty is accepted. There are a lot of cases and a lot of circumstances, not all of them should be treated equally. Seeing it black and white especially in environment where, for example, the president do corruption all the time, only will increase sense of unjust, and dishonesty itself.

If the rules aren’t applied equally the similarly situated people, they will break down entirely. And pointing to supposed corruption elsewhere in society is how third worlders justify their own low level corruption in those countries.

> in some cases is ok. Note it’s very different from the world where dishonesty is accepted.

"In some cases", maybe. In a world where the majority of cases are effectively punished, we could start talking about that. Today, we live in the world where it's accepted, even when the offender is just an entitled college brat. We should change that.

Oh, and "but my boss/my friends/the president does it" remains exactly as valid excuse as it always has.

You can understand people when they’re honest and ask for help up front, not when they make excuses after they get caught breaking the rules. The latter warrants only swift and sure punishment, to reinforce the social norms.

What is the point of your last sentence? It reads like the Jehovah witnesses arguments.

So how would we expect the same student to handle a situation later in their academic career faced with the perceived choice between fudging a study or losing funding for their lab?

Properly aligned incentives need to be enforced from day 0.

I would argue that nothing is more destructive for academic and intellectual activities than what you propose.

It immediately replaces the ideal result, which is a true assessment, with a feelings-based assessment, and it undermines academic honesty for all students.

What must be done is to teach the students that failing an exam is OK, and help them recover the learning mindset. Evaluations are intended to measure the things learned and the things that need to improve. Evaluations are not a punishment.

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