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Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

Disclosure: I graduated from Princeton in 2007

This article (which I skimmed) seems to use Princeton as a counterpoint to Harvard's supposed cheating culture and lax attitude towards academics. I have no idea whether students actually treat academics with more respect than their Crimson counterparts "on average".

However, I can definitely say that the kind of collaboration/copying/cheating that is described for Harvard's Econ10 course happens throughout Princeton. Whomever is being quoted from Princeton, casting it as this supposed utopia of higher learning, is either bubbling PR nonsense or is just completely out of touch with what goes on in the field.

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I am a current student at Dartmouth, and it's the same here as well. Especially in a class with a curve, a student is at a serious disadvantage if he/she doesn't collaborate, copy, or cheat.

Sad to hear as an alum. It wasn't that way a decade ago.

Setting a strict curve is probably the laziest way to grade a class. It doesn't tell you anything about how well you did (do you get the material? Can you solve problems on your own? Or are you the 27th "best" person in the class?) Of course, with a curve, a professor doesn't have to actually think over what a passing grade is. Which causes all kinds of negative incentive (such as cheating, or almost worse, anti-collaboration). I'll take a class where 10% of the class get an A because the standards are exceptionally high over a class where a strict 40% will get an A, as one implies I'll get a lot out of it, and the other implies I'll stress needlessly over unimportant trivia.

Cornell wasn't really any better. I commonly came across cheating rings, especially among international students.

I went to Cornell, and I never witnessed any sort of collaboration of this sort.

I did have a professor tell us an anecdote of discovering such "collaboration" in his classes and tell us he wouldn't stand for it (and yes, they were Chinese), but that's the only encounter I had.

Yep, I was Harvard '07, and I've TA'ed at Princeton as a grad student. It was pretty obvious in both places that students were collaborating pretty often; for the classes I taught, in general (though not always) students were cautious enough to hover just below the obvious threshold of phrase-for-phrase copying, so I only challenged students on it infrequently.

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