Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam
bostonglobe.com
bostonglobe.com
Now if those Harvard students broke the rules, well, they broke the rules. But I can't help but think that if Harvard is restricting collaboration in take-home assignments, that they're doing it wrong.
Of course, this risk is mitigated by having the final weighted much heavier than the rest of the coursework and not being take home. But that approach ends up going to the polar extreme of valuing collaboration
There were charismatic students who tried that, but it would become apparently very quickly what was happening and that point our competitiveness would kick in and we would demand contributions from that person before we would assist any further.
But yes, there is always someone who will abuse the system, and you're not going to get far trying to achieve 100% compliance all the time.
We had a few of those at SFU, and they were awesome - the only ones who ever failed them were the cheaters - The ones who had actually done all the work/exams finished them in about half the time allocated.
Funny, you mention that. There was a "charismatic guy" who passed trough my whole computer engineering program just by getting a dedicated and smart girlfriend who would help him in all the assignments and even give him copy during written tests.
The guy could not program to save his life, and yet got his degree. At the end of the program he ditched her instantly and got a hot girlfriend instead, i kind of felt sorry for her girlfriend, but there is your life lesson.
It's a little scary (maybe not surprising) that 2% of Harvard undergrads were involved in this scandal. This incident, combined with the Stuyvesant scandal makes me lose so much faith in the national student body. I wonder what the solution to this apparently endemic problem is. Maybe the best idea is to accept that students are going to copy and collaborate, and give each student personalized assignments.
You've lost faith "in the national student body" based on the actions of a tiny minority of students? Really?
Sigh. Only 2 more years...
But the take-home test in 6.046, in my day, required us to affirm that we had worked on it alone. It was a lot of fun (I'm an algorithm dork), and I felt really bad -- like I had cheated -- when someone looked over my shoulder at what I was working on and shouted out the answer.
For non-take home tests of any kind, the campus honor system specifically prevented the professor from staying in the room where the test was being given. They could force the students to collect in one place, but there was a strict rule against any kind of proctoring. The professor or TA with the test passed it out, hung around for a bit to answer any initial questions, and then left the room. They would typically return every fifteen minutes or so to answer any new questions, and then finally return at the time limit to collect the tests. The professor also could not prevent you from taking the test from the specified room and going, say, to the library to take the test. You missed any chance to clarify test questions, and you had to be back before time was up, but they could not force you to stay in a room packed with tense people.
It was pretty refreshing when trust and presumed integrity like that was integrated into the educational system.
It was close. It came down to one exam where I knew that if I got this one question, I would pass, and if I did not get it, I would fail and be kicked out of school. I also knew exactly what equation I needed from the textbook to solve the problem. I could visualize what page it was on, and exactly where it was on the page--I just couldn't visualize the damned equation itself.
I was alone in my room, and the book was sitting closed on my desk just a foot or two away. It would have taken less than 10 seconds to glance at the equation I needed and pass that exam. But it was a closed book exam and peeking would violate the honor system, so peeking was out of the question.
So, I failed the exam and got kicked out.
I spend the next year at my local community college, taking courses in psychology, anthropology, and economics to show that (1) I could actually do college level academic work (2) even in subjects that weren't in my main interests. I also took a computer course, to show that I could succeed in college course even when I have access to a computer, to show I could keep my computroll tendencies in check.
Caltech let me back in, and I even was able to transfer enough credits from the community college courses to come back as a sophomore. And since I had graduated high school in three years, the year at the community college actually dropped me back to where my age matched my classmates instead of being a year younger. So it all worked out reasonably.
That said, we lay all the blame on students, but universities themselves are also cheating. Multiple well-known universities in recent years have been exposed as lying,[1] about their enrollment statistics to rankings organizations.
Emory was exposed for its lies just a few days ago: http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/08/21/fallout-fr...
University of Illinois was exposed earlier this year: http://abovethelaw.com/university-of-illinois-college-of-law
One of the reasons my father moved us to the U.S. from his home country of Bangladesh is that he couldn't stand to raise his children in a culture where he had to pay a bribe just to get his phone service hooked up. When I see tacit acceptance of cheating amongst students in American universities, I see the exact same elements of cultural dysfunction that my dad saw in Bangladesh. I fear without stiffer penalties for cheaters, both for students who cheat and university administrators who cheat, our culture of basic American honesty will continue to crumble.
[1] Everyone uses the term "misreporting" but "misreporting" is what happens when you intend to write down 1470 and accidentally write down 1740. "Lying" is the appropriate term for what happens when you instead write down "1500" for a period of a decade.
When the school found out, it delayed admittance for those students that did so by a year, saying some crap like "in this new post-ENRON age we need to teach that ethics matter." But the only ethics they taught was "don't make the guy in charge look silly."
(I tend to fall on the "don't hack into things" side of arguments here, but the ease of the "hack" as well as the incredibly minor impact it had on anyone of importance just made this all seem way overblown. EDIT Plus, it was MIT. Can't you take a joke?)
South Korea has a terrible problem with cheating, and correspondingly harsh penalties for cheating - all because they have put such a high value on their student's scores; those scores determine a child's future.
If your future was on the line, and you didn't have the chops to make it on ability alone, what's to loose by cheating?
That's the same sort of thinking that people who take bribes to hook up phone service use to justify their actions. The small bribe is not a lot of money to the person in the nice neighborhood who is hooking up phone service, but is good money for the underpaid service worker who takes the bribe. What does he have to lose by cheating?
I think cheating is a sign of an over emphasis or overly large focus on external motivators (or artificial targets) rather than on things that actually matter[1]. People are much less likely to cheat on things that they directly care about or are based in tangible reality. With all else removed, cheating is a great way of meeting the target.
A grade on a test in a boring course is a perfect example of an artificial target that creates an unhealthy imbalance in a students' mind. Since the knowledge itself (or the growth potential from the course) is perceived as irrelevant or non-existent, the only thing left to care about is the grade, and so all else becomes removed...
[1] Ie. Over industrialization or standardization.
The attitude that cheating is okay on "artificial targets" is the same sort of attitude that leads to ignoring things like financial regulations ("they don't really apply in _this_ case").
1. Students are under a ton of stress, have very little time to do work and have very high standards for themselves. 2. Guidelines are not clear defined or communicated as to what is and isn't cheating. There's a ton of grey area. 3. It is incredibly easy to cheat and get away with it.
I doubt there is a single person that wasn't guilty of it in one shape or form. For most, it was just things like working with other people on problem sets (which for some courses is considered cheating), not "serious cheating". But still, when "cheating" is this rampant, the university needs to reconsider its policy.
Personally, I liked a grad CS professor I had. On the first day, he spend 20 minutes talking about this. He very clearly defined what was and wasn't cheating, when we were and weren't able to collaborate, and the consequences (guaranteed F in the course, for even minor transgressions, and possible expulsion from the university). It was a very strict policy. He even told us that the answers for all of our labs and homeworks were available online if we looked, and even looking up the website was tantamount to cheating. If anything seemed like a grey area, we were required to get written permission from a TA or him to do. Draconian? Perhaps a bit. But I liked that it was very black and white, and frankly I don't know a single person that even considered cheating in the course.
I didn't cheat because it repelled my moral code, and my suspicion that others were cheating added to my stress. A morally-grey friend said there wasn't any moral problem with cheating, but I don't think he did because there wasn't a point (in his view). He would later TA a class and caught some cheaters, whom he reported.
Perhaps "high standards" wasn't the correct choice of words on my part. I meant they all except themselves to get good grades. In particular where I went, where the school is largely populated with pre-meds where GPA is everything! If they're in a situation where the reward for cheating is high and the likelyhood for getting caught is low and they don't see any other option (not that there isn't but often they don't see it) they are likely to succumb.
I also gave a 10 minute lecture on cheating/plagiarism on the first day of class.
It is good, though, to see lecturers who are serious about cheating/plagiarism like your professor. It takes a lot of work to stay on top of that stuff. He deserves cudos.
In the end, plagiarism really hurts the student the most (and the university to some extent (but probably not Harvard)).
A lot of this was poor time management and over-stress on my part, but that's what I was in college to learn to manage. If I went back Quantum-Leap style I would be able to chew through everything a lot easier.
By and large undergraduates at university just refuse to put in the hours for study. If you assign any reading of more than 50 pages, maybe 5% of the class will read it. Some of them are incapable of focusing for that long, some of them simply refuse to. what they do instead differs from person to person, but what is clear is that students simply expect less work and given the rampant grade inflation professors often go along with the students expectations.
Even if a student takes a more moderate approach, workloads can be highly unpredictable (even to the professor), which creates the same problem.
I don't know where some of the other commenters get the idea that students these days don't take the time to study. I can't comment a lot about Harvard, but at my school, it was difficult to come across a student who wasn't taking a full load of courses (more often than not double or triple majors), involved in several extracurricals and often doing work study.
Given the high value that many desirable career paths (e.g. consulting, finance, academia) place on a good GPA, and the low probability of getting caught, the risk/reward tradeoff from cheating is naturally going to tempt people to make the unscrupulous choice.
Putting people in the position where cheating is such an alluring option is bad user experience. Evolve or die!
If I had to guess it was a basic requirement students had to take whether interested or not and cheating seemed like the easiest way to pass while devoting more time to other pursuits perceived to be more intellectually stimulating. Pure conjecture though.
The point of taking a course isn't to get an A. It's to learn something. If the students are too thick to grasp that fact, then Harvard made a mistake in admitting them and would do well to kick them out and give their places to students who get it.
The point of taking a course isn't to get an A.
No, but sometimes an A makes the difference between graduating or not.
It's not like the course held a gun to their head and made them cheat.
No, but if cheating in the class is common, then it's likely that the difficulty of the class material is artificially inflated to account for students' artificially high performance. If you know this, the professor doesn't know this, and you need an A, then it may be that the only way to get an A is to cheat.
Schools generally do a bad job of communicating this if it's actually true. If you get all As but retain nothing, you are rewarded handsomely. If you learn a lot but fail all your courses in the process, you'll be punished severely. If the school is too thick to align its incentives correctly, whose fault is that?
I certainly haven't found this to be the case. Looking at my peers 11 years after graduation, the successful ones are by and large the ones who focused on learning, not the ones who focused on their GPAs.
That is out of the school's control. It isn't really relevant to the incentives set by the school.
If the students in question are incapable of looking ahead 1-3 years, that doesn't exactly speak well of them either.
I won't pretend that there isn't pressure on students to get As. But that doesn't mean we should condone students doing whatever it takes to get an A; it may mean that we should reduce the pressure on the students to get them.
Personally, I interviewed about 30 college students last year for internship and full-time positions; I didn't even look at a single GPA.
Scholarships, honors, Dean's List, general praise, etc. And students who get bad grades are given the stink-eye no matter how clever they are. In general, students who get good grades are just treated better than students who fail. Is that not your experience?
This case is actually a good example of the phenomenon. The students don't appear to have been punished for not learning. According to the story, they didn't copy any answers — it just looks like they discussed the subject matter. It may well be that these students learned better from collaborating than they would have from working separately. I know I usually did in school. But because it gave them an advantage in the grading system that the school didn't want them to have, they were punished for it. Learning doesn't appear to be the primary concern here.
(I don't mean to say that I think they should cheat. I'm just pointing out that they may well have learned better than they otherwise would have, but that doesn't matter because learning is not the overriding concern here.)
I'm sure that students are praised for getting 'A's, but are they men and women, or are they golden retrievers? I was mostly an 'A' student as an undergrad, but I certainly never felt that I was "given the stink-eye" on the occasions that I earned a 'C'.
To be clear, I'm not saying that 'B' and 'C' students are better off than 'A' students; I'm just observing that in my experience, they are also generally no worse off at the Ivies.
I agree that there are silly incentives to get 'A's. We should probably do something about that. But that doesn't make it unreasonable to expect the alleged "best and brightest" to be able to see past those silly incentives.
Without necessarily absolving the students of responsibility for their actions, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that rampant cheating represents a failure on the school's part.
The surest way to get most of your students to cheat is for the cheaters to get ahead of the class. The non-cheaters will eventually crumple just to keep up.
Involving others in cheating with you greatly increases the "leak vectors" for the "crime" to be discovered. Loose lips sink ships.
It's unclear from the story the size of the actual groups that were cheating but it seems to be that the groups were not 125/2 groups of 2 but much larger groups of students helping each other.
I guess that is one life lesson that all the education in the world doesn't provide that people with street smarts might have had.
No doubt that the administration was tipped off by somebody (or would have been if that's not the way this went down.)
[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1286242...
How would this even happen?
My educated guess would be a complete, graded test from a previous year passed around. That would not require 125 students conspiring together, only that one test was somehow available.
This problem was rampant at Vanderbilt where fraternities and sororities would keep old, graded tests for every class on campus. It was widely recognized for the reason that Greek GPAs were higher than non-Greek. I dated a sorority VP and got to see the massive file cabinets with all of the tests and watch all of her "sisters" use them constantly, without any concern for the morality of the action. (edit: To be clear, I was offered and refused access to the files)
Most students are at college to get a "piece of paper" that makes it easier to get a job. Unfortunately, I think most of them are also intuitively aware that what they are learning will more than likely be irrelevant in any real business environment. In the realm of CS, how often does one use calculus, linear algebra, unusual algorithms, or automata theory in the standard 9-5 coding job?... Rarely - thus the incentive in students to minimize hard learning in these topics
I consistently notified teachers when I saw blatant occurrences of cheating. The last thing I want is for my Alma Mater to be producing an unethical alumni body that waters down the value of my degree and GPA.
I can't help but feel like this is push-back against academia. This is illegal file sharing all over again. This is students working together using internet resources to share knowledge to advance and succeed, to disrupt their education in a way their authority figures thoroughly disapprove of. To me, it's very similar to people working together and using internet resources to share music and movies, to disrupt their entertainment experiences.
I'm not sure how to feel about this. Cheating isn't always the correct answer; usually it's not. But to say it doesn't have a place in the toolbox of life is a bold-faced lie.
I really don't see the parallel. If you want to justify illegal file sharing as push-back against the music industry, you would say something like "the music industry insisted on selling CDs when consumers wanted MP3s" or "the music industry was seen as charging an unfair amount for digital music when their cost of production is clearly much lower than old distribution media." What is the analog for Harvard? The students want a diploma and a high GPA, but decided that it was unreasonable to have to learn/work for it? Nobody forced them to go to Harvard. I don't see what injustice or bad treatment they are pushing back against here. They just want to obtain a grade without doing the work.