

The typo at the root of Harvard's cheating scandal - ilamont
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/9/12/platt-letter-reveals-scandal/

======
scott_meade
"some students said that they will sue the university if any serious
punishment is meted out" [1]

These are our future business and political leaders ensuring unabated
corruption continues for generations to come.

It's world-views like these students' which explains why articles like this
Onion spoof are sadly funny: [http://www.theonion.com/articles/wealthy-teen-
nearly-experie...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/wealthy-teen-nearly-
experiences-consequence,2551/)

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/education/students-of-
harv...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/education/students-of-harvard-
cheating-scandal-say-group-work-was-accepted.html?_r=1)

~~~
genwin
I can kinda see the students' point. If the exam was unreasonable as they
claim (they claim it was completely unrelated to the lectures), it may be
grounds for cheating rather than go through a lengthy costly path to
correcting the exam or ousting the professor, perhaps unsuccessfully. Software
developers (or their employers) do this all the time when they ignore
frivolous patents.

~~~
pdonis
Um, you're kidding, right? Of _course_ the students are going to claim the
exam wasn't fair; why would you believe them? (On reading the article linked
to, the few specific exam questions that were described didn't seem to me to
be unrelated to the course.)

Also, even if the exam was "unrelated to the lectures", tough luck; they are
paying a lot for a degree, on the understanding that the school makes the
rules. If the school is being unfair, the correct response is not to cheat;
it's to stop placing so much weight on a degree that really doesn't mean much.

Finally, your suggested analogy between frivolous patents and a supposedely
unfair exam is nonsense. The correct analogy would be between a business that
ignores a patent because it is convinced the patent is unfounded and would not
stand up to a court challenge, and an employer that ignores a C in Government
from Harvard (for a job applicant who took the hit on an unfair exam rather
than cheat) because it knows Harvard's grades are no longer an accurate
reflection of a person's job potential.

~~~
genwin
If they accept "tough luck" they're not going to go much beyond minimum wage.
It's a dog-eat-dog world.

> business that ignores a patent because it is convinced the patent is
> unfounded and would not stand up to a court challenge

Same thing here. The students may be convinced the cheating charge would not
stand up to a court challenge, hence they threaten to sue.

> an employer that ignores a C in Government from Harvard (for a job applicant
> who took the hit on an unfair exam rather than cheat)

The applicant wouldn't get that far. The resume would be filtered out by
software before the interview. The applicant would lose the job to the
cheater. It's a dog-eat-dog world.

~~~
pdonis
So your argument is basically, it's a dog-eat-dog world, so it's OK to cheat
to get ahead? I see. I don't agree, but I see.

(Also, it's laughable to suggest that Harvard students are stuck with minimum
wage if they don't cheat on exams. We're talking about _Harvard_ ; most
employers won't even care what the applicant's GPA was.)

~~~
genwin
It's okay to sometimes cheat on an exam in the same way it's okay for software
developers to ignore the dozens of patents they infringe on, instead of paying
the holders. In the same way it's okay to sometimes exceed the speed limit
without asking the police for a ticket. In the same way it's okay to buy stuff
online tax-free and not pay use taxes on it in your own state. Everyone
cheats.

I said they won't get much past minimum wage if they take the attitude "tough
luck". Successful people get used to knocking down the hurdles others
endlessly throw at them, often unfairly.

~~~
pdonis
> Everyone cheats.

Well, yes, if you lump all the things you named together and call them all
"cheating" without differentiating between them, yes, everyone "cheats". But I
don't think everyone would agree that all the things you named should be
lumped together. That's a subjective judgment, which means we probably won't
get anywhere arguing about it--but see further comment below.

> Successful people get used to knocking down the hurdles others endlessly
> throw at them, often unfairly.

But the way you are putting it, anything I don't like or anything I don't want
to comply with is just a "hurdle" that I'm justified in knocking down. By your
logic, if I want my boss's job, it would be OK for me to murder him and then
fill the vacant position; after all, he's just a "hurdle", right? Or if you
don't think that would be OK, where do you draw the line? What principle lets
me differentiate between things that are just "hurdles" that I'm allowed to
knock down to be successful, and things that I'm not?

~~~
genwin
> What principle lets me differentiate between things that are just "hurdles"
> that I'm allowed to knock down to be successful, and things that I'm not?

Easy: employ your own ethics system built around the Golden Rule, rather than
blindly follow a system designed largely to make rich people richer.

~~~
pdonis
> employ your own ethics system built around the Golden Rule

Wouldn't this system forbid you from cheating?

~~~
genwin
No, e.g. cheating can be okay when the exam is unrelated to the lectures. The
system doesn't forbid you from breaking the law either, like not paying your
state's use taxes on stuff you buy online.

~~~
pdonis
How does this square with the Golden Rule? Last I checked, that rule didn't
say "I can break rules I don't like to get gold."

~~~
genwin
You're not getting gold, you're restoring fairness where the rule or law is
unfair. You get the gold by leveraging your renewed equal opportunity.

"All versions and forms of the proverbial Golden Rule have one aspect in
common: they all demand that people treat others in a manner in which they
themselves would like to be treated." The Golden Rule doesn't only demand that
you treat others that way; it also demands that others treat you that way,
which may require action on your part.

~~~
pdonis
> You're not getting gold, you're restoring fairness where the rule or law is
> unfair.

But how do you know what's fair? More to the point, how do you know what all
the other people, whom you're supposed to treat the way they themselves would
like to be treated, think is fair? You've assumed that cheating on an exam
which you believe to be unrelated to the course material is "fair"; how do you
know all the other people who are affected by your action would agree?

Also, I probably should have made it clearer at the outset that judging that
something is "unfair" to you is highly subjective and prone to error. I do not
really believe that the exams the Harvard students cheated on were "unfair"; I
think the students were just too lazy to learn the material and then tried to
weasel out of the consequences. But they themselves probably sincerely believe
that the exam was unfair and unrelated to the course. The fact that so much
was at stake makes their judgment that the exam was unfair quite different
from, for example, my judgment that I know better than the people who put up
speed limit signs what a "safe" speed is under the current driving conditions.
See further comments below.

> You get the gold by leveraging your renewed equal opportunity.

Cheating doesn't give you "equal" opportunity; it gives you an extra
opportunity that the people who don't cheat don't have. Whether that is
actually "fair" is, as I said above, highly subjective, and it's very easy to
judge wrongly if you have a strong personal stake in the outcome. That's why
we have ethical norms that don't allow people to make such judgments
unilaterally in cases where self-serving judgments are highly likely and have
large consequences.

Since I asked for a principle that distinguishes when it's OK to "cheat" and
when it isn't, I should offer one of my own--actually two, following on from
the above comments. I see at least two key differences between, for example,
the case of exceeding speed limits, and the case of cheating on exams:

(1) I can make a good case that I, driving my car on a particular road under
particular conditions, can better judge what a safe speed is in that situation
than lawmakers or regulators who just have very general rules for setting
speed limits: I am there and they are not, and I'm the one who risks injury if
I have an accident. So I have more information and am motivated to make good
judgments. The case of students cheating on exams is opposite in these
respects: the students do not have more information than the professor does,
and they are highly motivated to make self-serving judgments about whether the
exam is "fair", rather than accurate ones.

(2) I gain no significant advantage over other drivers from speeding. I get
where I'm going faster than I otherwise would, but that does not hinder any
other driver from getting where they're going. There's no competitive element
involved. In the case of students cheating on exams, there certainly _is_ a
competitive element; a student who cheats does not just gain an advantage, he
takes away an advantage from others.

So I would distinguish "cheating" that should be prohibited from infractions
like speeding, by these two principles: the motivation for self-serving
judgments, and the competitive element where one person gaining an advantage
means others lose it.

> The Golden Rule doesn't only demand that you treat others that way; it also
> demands that others treat you that way, which may require action on your
> part.

I'm not sure the Golden Rule includes this, but that's an argument about
terminology, not ethics. Basically, you're saying that you have to let other
people know how you want to be treated. I agree with that general principle,
but I'm not sure cheating accomplishes that purpose. Are the students who
cheated at Harvard being treated more like they wanted to be treated because
they cheated?

~~~
genwin
> Are the students who cheated at Harvard being treated more like they wanted
> to be treated because they cheated?

Had they gotten away with it, maybe! It depends on what the circumstances
actually were. Like you say, they may have just been lazy. My point is that
cheating, rule-breaking and lawbreaking can be okay under the right
circumstances. If it's to unfairly gain an advantage over others, that
violates the Golden Rule. In this case the students may have been justified,
if indeed the exam was completely unrelated to the lectures.

> how do you know all the other people who are affected by your action would
> agree?

It doesn't matter what they think; they may well disagree with you. It was
illegal for Rosa Parks to sit in the front of the bus, but her interpretation
of fairness trumped the law. No doubt plenty of people felt that killing her
would be a fair punishment; after all, her crime had large consequences,
namely it fomented a rebellion, encouraging millions of others to break (Jim
Crow) laws. Had the rebellion failed, history may have recorded that she was a
horrible person, instead of her bus being in a museum.

> That's why we have ethical norms that don't allow people to make such
> judgments unilaterally in cases where self-serving judgments are highly
> likely and have large consequences.

So when there's a draft, people should trust their leaders and submit to
combat, not bothering to examine whether the war is just? Many of those
ethical norms are designed to benefit the privileged few at the expense of the
rest. The "large consequences" are often a lie. The norms should be used only
as a guideline for your own judgement, lest you become someone's pawn.

~~~
pdonis
> So when there's a draft, people should trust their leaders and submit to
> combat, not bothering to examine whether the war is just?

Avoiding the draft is a good test case that we haven't considered yet. It
certainly meets my second condition, that people have a strong motivation to
make self-serving judgments instead of correct ones. It also may meet my first
condition: citizens who judge that a war is unjust probably can't claim to
have significant information that their political leaders do not. (In fact,
the political leaders probably have information that the citizens do not.)

However, I can see a third principle that this example brings out: does the
other party in the case, the one which is _being_ "cheated" (the government in
the case of the draft, the professor in the case of the exam), _also_ have a
strong motivation to make self-serving judgments? Certainly that is the case
for a draft: political leaders have all kinds of motivations to claim that a
draft is justified when it isn't. So in this case I would agree with you that
"cheating" might be justifiable.

I'm not sure the case of cheating on exams meets this third condition,
although it could be argued that professors do have motivations, if not to
purposely make exams unfair, at least to not expend a lot of effort making
them fair. But professors also have motivations to keep students coming to
their school, for financial if no other reasons, which gives them an incentive
to expend effort to make classes and exams fair.

> The norms should be used only as a guideline for your own judgement, lest
> you become someone's pawn.

I don't disagree with this, but "your own judgment" is not infallible either.
That's why I have been trying to find some principles that can help guide
one's judgment. You appear to agree with this general idea, since you too draw
a distinction between justified "cheating" and unjustified cheating. Your
definition of "unjustified" is "if it's to unfairly gain an advantage over
others", but that merely postpones the problem: what counts as "unfairly"
gaining an advantage? That's what I've been trying to get a handle on.

~~~
genwin
I'm a bit biased. I had a professor who informed his classes, after the drop
deadline, that < 85% on any test meant an F for the semester. I had no
opportunity to cheat. All but a few students failed. It was $hundreds wasted
for me. He was demoted to a non-teaching position when everyone complained.

In this case Harvard may go overboard on a crackdown, to shore up their
reputation that's worth a lot of money to them. In that case the students may
need to counter with a lawsuit, to restore fairness.

> what counts as "unfairly" gaining an advantage?

Ultimately it's best for you to decide, as fallible as your judgement may be.
Anyone else may have their interests at heart, over yours. Their pet interests
may be enshrined in the rules, the law, and/or the public psyche.

~~~
pdonis
> I'm a bit biased. I had a professor who informed his classes, after the drop
> deadline, that < 85% on any test meant an F for the semester.

Wow. In that situation I would certainly agree that the professor was being
egregiously unfair. I'm glad that complaining at least got him demoted, but
the school should also have corrected the grades of everyone who was affected
--I'm guessing they didn't since you didn't mention it.

------
nateburke
This is not surprising. The culture of varsity sports on campus is a relic of
an institution that has optimized its admissions process for corporate job
placement over academic integrity and originality of thought. This makes sense
--if you can swell your endowment by letting in athletes who are a-ok with
taking easy classes and then using their one-track brains to 'flip decks' at
Goldman, why not? It's good for them (Goldman pays) and it's good for your own
job security as a university administrator. The culture produces student-
athletes who are some of the most tenacious, personable, and loyal people you
can find. They make great leaders of companies that consist of giant pyramids
of people doing menial tasks.

This culture, however, does not optimize for original thought.

Regarding the exam structure: (humanities + short answer questions + take-
home) = increased likelihood of similar answers, given internet search.

The professor here was lazy, too--these problems could have been avoided with
a comprehensive 20-page paper instead of a more-easily-graded short-answer
final exam.

~~~
Evbn
How does an essay cover anywhere near the full breadth of course material.

~~~
cturner
Exam room essays are a great way to measure knowledge, and difficult to cheat
on. You have to know the domain thoroughly in order to be ready to write an
essay response. Being able to write this demonstrates integrated understanding
of the concepts. And probably breadth of knowledge. The easy solution for
universities is give people take-home work during the semester and return it
marked, but have 100% of the course score determined by a sit-down exam at the
end of the period.

~~~
stevesearer
You're correct. I taught high school history for several years and used in-
class essay responses as the primary testing method. Essays allowed me to
understand what students actually know and how their overall knowledge on a
topic has developed.

Multiple choice-style questions (or any memorization-style question) do test
knowledge, but I regularly found that many of the students who could easily
memorize facts had a hard time explaining them in a coherent essay describing
how the events were interconnected. And students who might get a C on
memorization tests often had a better grasp of the period as a whole.

Unfortunately, most teachers don't want to take the time to read essay
responses because shoving scantron tests through a machine is much easier and
less time consuming.

------
patmcguire
Four or five years ago Columbia threw out the final for the Western Lit class
because one professor gave the last year's exam to her section and it spread
through the football team.

The school found out because they changed a question and it looked suspicious
when a quarter of the freshman class gave an answer about Crime and Punishment
to a question about the Inferno.

------
tribeofone
> series of discoveries that led him to bring the final take-home exams
> submitted by his students

What? They have final TAKE HOME exams at Harvard?

~~~
tzs
Do people find that surprising?

I don't, but I went to Caltech so am used to the idea of take home exams. At
Caltech, essentially all exams, including finals, are take home. If a
professor wants to give an in-class exam, he has to get special permission to
do so.

I think MIT now also has take home exams, but I'm not sure. Any MIT people
here who can clarify?

~~~
pdonis
I never took any take-home exams when I was at MIT (1983-1988). Most of the
in-class exams I took there, though, were open-book, open-notes, etc., so
making them take-home would not have been too much of a change. (Someone
upthread commented that a good take-home exam is much more difficult because
the professor can assume you have access to _all_ reference materials. That
fits my experience with the open-book, open-notes MIT exams.)

~~~
tzs
No take home tests while you were there fits in with what I infer from this
document: <http://web.mit.edu/faculty/reports/exam-termregs/report.html>

It's a report from their Faculty Policy Committee's Subcommittee on
Examination Terms and Regulations, undertaking in 1998. Among the things the
report covers is consideration of lifting the ban on take home tests. From the
documents they reference, it appears that MIT tried in experiment starting in
1992 to allow take home tests, and discontinued the experiment in 1994.

In that report, they recommend allowing out-of-room exams, where the exam
would be given out at 1:30 PM, the students would have until 7:30 pm to turn
it in, and the students can take the test where they want. It looks like the
main point of this was to make it so students could have access to computers
and libraries during these tests.

Their concern with allowing take-home tests seems to be that professors might
give monstrous take-home tests that would consume too much time.

Upon further Googling, it sounds like this policy or something similar was
adopted and is still in place today:
<http://web.mit.edu/catalog/overv.chap5.html>

------
makmanalp
> Ellison declined to comment on the letter, saying it is a confidential Ad
> Board document—indeed, it is branded with a “CONFIDENTIAL” stamp.

Wow, I wonder why it is confidential. Isn't it a right to know what you're
being accused of?

edit: I see, that's fair, as long as the accused get to see.

~~~
rst
The board's procedures do give the accused the right "to review all materials
considered by the Board in making a decision". The confidentiality rule
forbids disclosure of that stuff to those without a "need to know", which
would include reporters from the campus paper and the general public.

On procedures:
[http://www.adboard.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k62415...](http://www.adboard.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k62415&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup88723)

On confidentiality:
[http://www.adboard.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k62415...](http://www.adboard.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k62415&pageid=icb.page430450)

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Right, here's another.
<http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html>

------
K2h
If everything is typed, it seems they might be able to run that through
<http://turnitin.com>. I think it is meant for mostly essay papers, but I
would think with the influence of Harvard they could get a special deal to
adapt it to traditional question/answer things and be done with it.

Academic dishonesty is a no win situation. It makes the students look bad -
and then it makes the school look bad for having low quality students. maybe
ethics needs to be a required first quarter class.

~~~
noahc
Our computer science professors always claimed to be able to detect cheating
because of similar answers, however, I never really believed them.

Change the way the program works here or there and rename all the variables,
and always use the same variables for your loops (x,y,z or i,k,l for example)
between assignments and it'd be hard to detect.

Of course, if you went through the effort of doing all that, I always figured
it'd be faster just to do it your self.

Any ex-TA's or professors want to weigh on this?

~~~
barik
> Change the way the program works here

Then it isn't really the same program if the changes are fundamentally
different, so in essence, it isn't direct copying anymore. But changing
another person's program in non-superficial ways is often as difficult as just
solving the problem from scratch.

Cheating is also harder to detect in introductory classes because there are
often few good ways to implement the algorithm in the first place (say,
factorial, or pre-order traversal of a binary tree). Consequently, these tools
tend to work better in larger projects, such as in an operating systems class.

> rename all the variables, and always use the same variables for your loops
> (x,y,z or i,k,l for example) between assignments and it'd be hard to detect.

It turns out this is trivial to detect; see MOSS [1] for an example of the
type of analysis that is done on programs.

However, more often than not, cheating is detected by teaching assistants
simply by hand ("Hmm, this submission looks familiar"), but instructors
pretend that there is some sophisticated cheat-finding system to scare off
students. Usually typos are dead give-aways, especially when two students have
the same typo in the same comment at the same identical spot. In my academic
misconduct cases, students were most often identified through spelling and
grammar errors.

I imagine that there exist many more instances of cheating than instructors
catch, and that we really only get the low-hanging fruit (and frankly, my job
isn't to be the cheating police, so I don't go out of my way to find it). But
catching the most obvious cases and having a severe punishment as a deterrence
is often enough. ("If you cheat, you likely won't get caught, but if you do,
goodbye -- it's automatic failure at minimum, and possibly suspension or
expulsion.")

[1] <http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/> and the actual research paper
[http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/sigmod...](http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/sigmod03.pdf)

~~~
noahc
Specifically regarding changing how the program works. I meant it in the sense
of using hashes in place of arrays, and maybe even using while instead of for
loops, etc. So fundamentally, it's the same input and output, but how the
program stores and computes that is the same.

The variable thing makes sense though. I would use the 'changing the program'
tactic to stop computers and the variables to stop teachers from detecting it.
However, from another poster, using the same variables between assignments
maybe unnecessary.

~~~
anonymouz
If the program is non-trivial (e.g. contains some classes, many functions),
then usually the program structure alone will give it away (1), unless you
invest _a lot_ of time into changing things.

From my experience (as a student), the people that copy programs don't even
work that hard to obfuscate their plagiarism. Usually they just rename a
couple of variables and reformat things a bit. A former professor of mine
wrote a program to "fuzzily" compare two source codes and show how close they
are, which quite nicely showed of clusters of programs where a bunch of
students had copied-and-slightly-modified from one student.

(1) i.e., give the instructor a feeling of "Hm, I've seen that before...".

