
Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam - soupboy
http://bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/08/30/harvard-investigates-students-for-cheating-final-exam/RIb6915NqHQ73nQQxoZOpO/story.html
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Anechoic
One thing that I really appreciated at MIT was that when we were given take-
home tests or other take-home assignments, it was _expected_ (and often
_encouraged_ ) that we collaborate with our classmates. Writing down the exact
same answer as another classmate was fine, so long as you documented who you
worked with and who contributed what to the assignment. It provided an
important lesson since collaboration has been a huge part of my professional
career.

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.

~~~
danso
Perhaps, but isn't there the risk that a charismatic leader could get team
members to essentially do the work for him/her? Sure, you could say that's a
lesson in life, but ideally, you want a passing grade in engineering mechanics
to mean that that person has competency in engineering, not merely the
politics and management of engineering.

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

~~~
ghshephard
The mechanism to avoid having a charismatic leader unfairly being granted
credentials in courses not based on their knowledge is have a pass/fail
(heavily protctored) exam at the end of the sememster drawing on knowledge
from all the sections of the course. Fail the exam, fail the course. Pass the
exam, you get the grade you earned throughout the semester.

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.

------
rayiner
I think cheating is one of the signs of the crumbling of our civilized
society. It is a scourge that doesn't stop at final exams, but as we can see
in the financial sector one that continues on through life.

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...](http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-
blog/2012/08/21/fallout-from-emory-scandal-former-deans-resign-current-jobs-
still-unclear-why-this-mess-happened/)

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.

~~~
danielweber
About 5 years ago MIT's graduate management Sloan School had a "cheating"
incident where potential students could see if they were admitted before they
were officially told by trivially modifying the URL of their web account. It
was widely discussed on mailing lists with detailed instructions.

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?)

~~~
kd0amg
I haven't thought this through at all, but what is problematic about students
finding out their admission results before whatever magical date? At first
glance, it doesn't seem like the students are worse off (they have more time
to plan/act based on their admission result and are free to not look at the
information if they don't want it), nor does it seem like the school is better
off (I can't think of a good way for them to take advantage of students'
uncertainty right now).

~~~
danielweber
There's not a thing wrong with it. But it got the school's attention and so
they had to Do Something.

~~~
Evbn
It's a sad decline from the era where the President of MIT celebrated student
hacks.

------
gms7777
I hate to say it, but this isn't that surprising. I recently came from one of
these top universities and there's a problematic combination of factors at
play:

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.

~~~
majormajor
At a school like Harvard, with their much-touted financial aid where students
aren't supposed to have to hold down outside jobs to pay for tuition, how do
students end up with very little time to do work? Class itself should take,
what, three to five hours on a typical day? That leaves a lot of time for
homework and studying. Do people just overwhelm themselves with too many
extracurricular activities?

~~~
freyrs3
There's been a steady decline in amount of work students are willing to put in
for study over the past decade.

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.

------
calvinlough
It's funny how they think it's a problem of educating students about what
isn't considered acceptable behavior. The students knew what they were doing,
they just compared the probability of getting caught with the reward and made
a decision.

~~~
kevinw
I agree completely. I remember that cheating in college (at least on a small
scale -- e.g. copying homework in certain STEM classes with a "right" answer)
was common and not viewed as risky behavior. I doubt that any of the people
who cheated would have said that they felt they were morally in the right or
even in a gray area if confronted. Cheating is more akin to stealing a laptop
from an empty dorm room than it is to running afoul of some arcane law that
few people have ever heard of.

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.

------
Techne
Very unfortunate. Obviously cheating is a very serious issue, but in this case
I feel like something is systematically wrong with your class if half of your
students are cheating.

Putting people in the position where cheating is such an alluring option is
bad user experience. Evolve or die!

~~~
waterlesscloud
Please, let's keep the responsibility for this where it belongs- on those who
actually cheated.

~~~
jvrossb
Why can't it both be true that the students cheated and deserve to be punished
and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the course that drove
half the students to cheat?

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.

~~~
stephencanon
Oh, come on. It's not like the course held a gun to their head and made them
cheat. They didn't cheat to feed their family. It's (nearly) impossible for a
college course to actually "drive half the students to cheat". They're big
boys and girls, and they need to be responsible for their decisions.

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.

~~~
chc
> _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._

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?

~~~
stephencanon
> If you get all As but retain nothing, you are rewarded handsomely.

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.

~~~
chc
> _after graduation_

That is out of the school's control. It isn't really relevant to the
incentives set by the school.

~~~
stephencanon
What handsome rewards do you imagine are heaped upon A students while still in
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.

~~~
chc
> _What handsome rewards do you imagine are heaped upon A students while still
> in school?_

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.)

~~~
stephencanon
Harvard doesn't award scholarships based on grades and they don't have a
Dean's list. I can't speak to honors at Harvard, but at the Ivies with which I
am more familiar, departmental honors carry a lot more weight than that
magna/summa nonsense, and are awarded based on advanced work in your major,
not on your GPA.

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.

------
larrys
"Nearly half the students in a class of more than 250 are suspected of jointly
coming up with answers or copying off one another, said Jay Harris, Harvard’s
dean of undergraduate education. Independent groups of students appear to have
worked together by e-mail or other means on responses to short questions and
an essay assignment"

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.)

------
dfriedmn
We've known for a while just how widespread this is. Surveys have shown 2/3 of
undergrads cheat at some point in college. Students just don't feel they're
doing something immoral when they cheat.

[1]
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1286242...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128624207)

------
gsibble
Something really doesn't add up here. 125 students collaborating on a final
would not only be difficult to organize but would require a lot of
coordination. Not to mention getting 125 students to collectively decide to
cheat and not discuss it.

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)

~~~
Evbn
Any decent professor hands out old test answer keys himself.

------
EricDeb
Having just finished graduate school I think the cheating issue often comes
down to a misalignment between what is being taught and the skills actually
needed in the real-world.

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

------
patmcguire
About five years ago Columbia threw out the final for their Western literature
course that every freshman takes because one professor gave the thing almost
in full to her students and it spread like mad (through the football team and
friends, mostly). I didn't get it but I heard people talk about getting it
mailed to them by five different people in a day. So it may be something like
that - one massively better "study guide" that got spread around.

------
pdenya
It's incredible how high the punishments for cheating are. 1 year suspension
for collaborating on a take home test?

~~~
tptacek
You can cheat on a final at Harvard and not be expelled?

~~~
pdenya
The article mentions the blurred line between collaborating and cheating.
Seems like this is the former since it requires analysis rather than just
comparing matching answers.

~~~
draggnar
But the point is... does the line even exist? Why should a line that does not
produce optimal results exist? Wouldn't you be able to come up with a better
articulated answer to a question if you see the responses of all your peers
first? The problem is well then we can't grade you because we can't separate
you from your peers. But then why go to school in the first place? To get
affirmation or to learn?

------
BasDirks
Let's see them burn. Many would give their right arm to be given the
opportunity they had.

~~~
chc
Many would give their right arm for the opportunities you have had. Should we
all wish for your demise? That seems quite unreasonable to me.

~~~
BasDirks
No but in case I squander those opportunities, don't hesitate to fill up the
gap.

~~~
chc
You're on Hacker News expressing schadenfreude toward some college students
instead of doing something that makes the world a better place.
Congratulations — you're squandering your opportunities.

~~~
BasDirks
They need to get what's coming to them, and that is not schadenfreude. Don't
compare cheating on an exam to my condemnation of it. "Doing something that
makes the world a better place" Could you possibly be more general and
irrelevant?

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stephengillie
I know this comment will be unpopular to many who feel the injustice of
cheating trumps all else.

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.

~~~
Bill_Dimm
_I can't help but feel like this is push-back against academia. This is
illegal file sharing all over again._

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.

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ChrisArchitect
take home exam and collaboration? take home exam is just asking for that in
this day and age. I thought the idea was it would be easy, but only the
students that put the work in would learn something that they'd need to
know/use in a harder exam later.....

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megix159
Why use your hand to stick a nail into the wall when you have a hammer?

