Comment by michael_miller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michael_miller | Hacker News Reader

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I find it a little disingenuous that students who are subject to "forced withdrawal" are allowed to re-enter after 2-4 semesters. This sends a horrible message to students - that you can cheat, and the worst case scenario is taking a couple semesters off. No mar on their transcript of starting a degree at Harvard, and suddenly transferring to another, probably academically inferior, school. No explaining to employers why they suddenly decided to pack up and leave during a large cheating scandal. Just a forced vacation.

I'm also pretty appalled that students supplied the same answer down to typological errors. When the scandal first broke out, it sounded much more mundane - that there was little guidance, and that students asked their TAs for help. At least then, it's possible to rationalize the situation by saying that students genuinely did not believe they were doing something wrong. I don't think there's any way to justify multiple students submitting the same typos. This indicates blatant cheating, which any Harvard student should readily recognize as being morally wrong, and clearly violating any reasonable academic honesty standard.

If so many kids, proportionally, are cheating, the reasonable conclusion is not that there's an abundance of 'bad seeds' but perhaps that Harvard isn't very good at getting students to take ethics seriously.

At your typical university, cheating on take-home exams is common, pressure is high, and ethics are underemphasized--is it your place to say a student reacting in the obvious and ordinary way deserves expulsion? Are kids trying to sink or swim in such an environment really deserving expulsion? Besides, more effective cheaters are less likely to be caught. The moral Harvard sends its students is not "don't cheat on a take-home exam" but "don't be caught by copy-pasting answers". The people who work together and tweak their answers to look different get A's.

Honestly, I think it's an overreaction; an institution that has been so poor at imparting academic ethics to its students is now harming the same in order to save face.

More generally, it is an anti-pattern to paint large groups of people as wrong and deserving of punishment, even if you feel the underlying ethics are correct.

perhaps that Harvard isn't very good at getting students to take ethics seriously

The current financial crisis would support that hypothesis.

Harvard is not going to bake ethics or morals into students during their time there, try or not.

Additionally, your blithe assertion that "but everyone was doing it!" is a valid defense is... unsettling.

I've also wondered if the incentives with regards to cheating have changed. It's certainly easier to cheat. And if grades are perceived as having a greater effect on standing, the rewards have increased as well.

My understanding is that forced withdrawals at Harvard work like this:

1. If you want to come back you have to leave Cambridge and get a job for something like 6 months, and it has to be a real job, not a job at your Dad's company or something.

2. Any letter of recommendation that Harvard issues will note that you've been required to withdraw.

I don't see this as a forced vacation. The intent is that you have to have some understanding and appreciation of the real world before you are allowed to come back. Compared to many other schools, Harvard's penalties for cheating are actually very harsh.

I was under the impression that the de-facto penalty for cheating was expulsion. Without coming back. Without ANY "recommendation letters." You cheated, fuck you, get out.

Then again, I went to a school which is struggling to raise itself up in the ranks ( or into the ranks at all ), so maybe Harvard doesn't have to take cheating seriously for people to take their graduates seriously.

Actually, when I talk to people who teach or TA at other universities, they tell me that Harvard's policies are comparably harsh. If you plagiarize a paper at many universities, you are likely to get a zero for the assignment. That means that you might lose a letter grade in one class. At Harvard, professors were until recently required to report students to the Ad Board which generally led to being forced to withdraw.

On the flip side, most US universities simply turn a blind eye to blatant cheating, and actively punish professors for even reporting it. I don't know if Harvard is better or this case was simply too egregious.

I'm not sure how cheating is handled outside my university, but they take it very seriously in my CS major. If we're caught cheating on any assignment we generally fail the course and have a note placed in our academic file, and are potentially removed from the major.

I have seen it even worse in medical and dental school. And because there is little ability to replace the lost revenue from expelling a student the schools are typically lenient.

This is because Harvard prides itself on its graduation rate; any decline in that rate would cause it to fall in the popular rankings of colleges.

This is a silly remark. Harvard doesn't care at all about the popular rankings of colleges, because no one picks Harvard just because they read it got a good rating in US News. And Harvard isn't proud of itself because it has a high graduation rate; Harvard is proud of itself because, whatever anyone else may think, Harvard thinks it's the best university in the world.

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