
The Fall of Academics at Harvard - protomyth
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/2/28/fall-of-harvard-academics/
======
asafira
I am a Princeton graduate ('12) that is currently a graduate student at
Harvard.

I have a few thoughts on this, but first I wanted to share an experience I had
during a mandatory course I am in on "TA'ing at Harvard". The professor of one
of the largest undergrad classes discussed with us how it is very, very clear
that the students' #1 priorities at Harvard are _not_ academics, but rather
their extracurriculars. Despite this, they will still curve the class up so
that a very large percentage of students get A's (I don't have a number here,
but I was told that in his class, the median grade on an exam is curved to a
B+, and that is very harsh by Harvard's standards). At the very least, I think
that this small tidbit falls inline with "The Fall of Academics at Harvard".

Personally, I think one thing that has to change is this perception that many
overachieving highschoolers bring with them as they become undergradautes at
these universities: that is, that college is a stepping stone to a
prestigious, well-paying job. Furthermore, these historically high-achieving
students aren't going easily let go of their stellar grade track record.
Together, I think it's then easy to miss part of the point of the
undergraduate experience all together, and there's an incentive to cheat.

Lastly, I wanted to include that I think this is also largely a cultural
issue. I agree with others in this thread that there is this mentality of just
feeding into these "prestigious" jobs (Finance, Consulting, etc.), and I think
that greatly contributes towards the degradation of the school's ability to
foster an academic environment.

------
hkmurakami
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.

~~~
econnors
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.

~~~
mjmahone17
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.

------
simonsarris
Of course this is the Harvard Crimson writing about Harvard, but the words in
the article could be applicable to damn near any institution, at least in the
U.S.

> The institution and the community condones, if not promotes, academic
> dishonesty, emphasizing prestige over intellectual growth. Academics are no
> longer the priority of the students or teachers at Harvard College.

~~~~~

> This prevalence of academic dishonesty is symptomatic of a pervading
> mentality on campus that neglects the classroom.

> Nicolaus Mills ’60, a literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College, points
> to a weak emphasis on undergraduate teaching as an underlying factor that
> enabled the scandal to take place on Harvard’s campus.

> ... As professors invest less time in the classroom—a product of pressures
> to establish themselves primarily as researchers—so too do teaching fellows
> and students.

The above attitude unfortunately has been (and will continue to be) copied by
any institution hoping to place itself among prestigious names. My alma mater,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) made a huge shift in recent years
(2006-) towards firing much of the "clinical faculty", which was the name
reserved for faculty who did not engage in research, and instead merely
taught.

Unfortunately for students, faculty who do engage in research often consider
the teaching component of their careers as an afterthought (or worse, an
annoyance).

~~~~~

The single most important thing I learned when I was a child tutor is this:
Without enthusiasm you've got nothing - zero - to work with in a student. And
if they don't have it coming in you've got a non-trivial problem. You can't
teach enthusiasm, it's imparted only one way.

Enthusiasm is contagious. It's part of the draw of being in a school in the
first place, around so many other bright people who are willing to be there
and spend the time learning. Then you get to this:

> “The modal Harvard student takes their courses as seriously as they think
> the instructor is taking the course,”

And it's painfully understandable that the experience will be damning for the
average student, regardless of institution.

~~~
ender7
Some random anecdotes:

I went to Pomona College, which was a very different place than the one
described in the Crimson article. While I'm sure cheating did take place, I
was never witness to it, nor was there any cultural expectation that it
occurred. Students tended to view cheating as just screwing yourself over in
the long run (paying that much money to avoid get an education is a waste of
time).

Harvey Mudd College, which was right next door, had an even more aggressive
stance on cheating and honorable behavior -- one which was woven into the way
pretty much everything was structured over there. Students were endowed with a
huge helping of trust and were expected to act responsibly (and the actual
student culture seemed to actually reflect this).

Both institutions provide excellent educations. However, PC and HMC are both
small and neither of them have graduate students or research faculty. The
faculty that are there are very accomplished in their fields, but their focus
is on teaching.

I've also been the equivalent of an RA at MIT, where things are obviously a
bit different. I don't think they're as bad as at Harvard, but it's clear that
for many faculty the priority is not on teaching. Combined with the large size
(~200 students) of many intro classes and this can create an environment where
students do not feel that their success or failure is either cared about or
monitored, which I'm sure makes it easier to cheat. However, MIT's technical
focus may help to alleviate this problem since all of your later classes will
depend on the stuff you're supposed to be learning now, so you'll be screwed
later on even if you cheat. Sadly, I don't have a ton of data here -- all I
can say is that out of the population of 40 on my hall there wasn't a culture
of cheating. Getting bad grades was a shocking right of passage for many
first-years.

Finally, my mother taught at a large research institution for many years.
There cheating in the form of copying papers was rampant and the university
seemed loathe to actually punish students caught in the act. My mother
eventually gave up trying. These problems were worst in the large intro
classes -- once things got down to smaller (<30 students) seminars and
classes, cheating became both extremely easy to identify and rare.

~~~
spikels
Do you really think nobody was cheating at Pomona & Harvey Mudd? Perhaps those
schools follow educational philosophies that deemphasize relative performance
like Brown's gradeless system or emphasizing "cooperation" over individual
ability. If your performance did not matter then perhaps there would be no
incentive to cheat (or study). However these students are still humans and
humans are lazy, greedy and proud - thus prone to cheating.

Maybe because they are small and there is no incentive to publicize episodes
of cheating and damage their brand no stories have come out yet. Still a quick
search finds several articles indicating concerns at these schools. And sister
school Claremont McKenna has had several major scandals in recent years.

I wish there were angels who we could trust to always be honest (imagine how
well government would run!) but we only have humans. Many are honest much if
not all of the time but how can we ever know who or when with any certainty.
Sadly this is a curse we cannot escape. These and the other human weaknesses
are ultimately responsible for so many of our persistent problems.

[http://blogs.pomona.edu/eng87-2012f/2012/11/12/what-does-
pom...](http://blogs.pomona.edu/eng87-2012f/2012/11/12/what-does-pomona-think-
of-my-work-i-have-no-idea/)

<http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/23/essays>

[http://www.claremontportside.com/print-
edition/april-2011-is...](http://www.claremontportside.com/print-
edition/april-2011-issue/plagiarism-in-paradise/)

~~~
Pinckney
I graduated from HMC last year.

>Do you really think nobody was cheating at Pomona & Harvey Mudd? Perhaps
those schools follow educational philosophies that deemphasize relative
performance like Brown's gradeless system or emphasizing "cooperation" over
individual ability. If your performance did not matter then perhaps there
would be no incentive to cheat (or study). However these students are still
humans and humans are lazy, greedy and proud - thus prone to cheating.

I can't speak for Pomona, but many HMC classes have timed, closed book take
home exams. It would be trivially easy to cheat on these. On homework,
collaboration was usually encouraged, with the caveat that problems sets
should ultimately be written up individually -- what policy to take was the
choice of the professor.

We certainly had grades.

>Maybe because they are small and there is no incentive to publicize episodes
of cheating and damage their brand no stories have come out yet. Still a quick
search finds several articles indicating concerns at these schools. And sister
school Claremont McKenna has had several major scandals in recent years.

I'm appending data collected in a survey last year. The data was shared with
students, but not AFAIK published outside. My personal perception is that
cheating is uncommon, and I did not know of anybody I knew doing so. I believe
very few people I knew would be open to cheating if approached by a friend. I
agree that the administration has no incentive to publicize issues, but I do
honestly believe that the issues were few.

With all due respect to Claremont McKenna, their culture is very different. I
would not extrapolate from them.

...

There was a survey of student and faculty perceptions of cheating on campus.
Unfortunately I don't have details of how this was conducted. Presumably it
was anonymous.

In response to : "I believe nearly all HMC Students respect the Honor Code"

Students: Agree: 84% Neutral: 8% Disagree: 8%

Faculty: Agree: 88% Neutral: 5% Disagree: 7%

"Most HMC Students adhere to the Honor Code in their academic work.":

Students: Agree: 92% Neutral: 4% Disagree: 4%

Faculty: Agree: 90% Neutral: 10% Disagree: 0%

"Most HMC Students adhere to the Honor Code in matters unrelated to their
academic work.":

Students: Agree: 66% Neutral: 22% Disagree: 12%

Faculty: Agree: 53% Neutral: 33% Disagree: 14%

(For this question, I do not know the number of respondents): Faculty: In the
past 3 years, have any of the following Honor Code violations occurred in the
classes you teach:

Plagiarism: 18 Cheating: 10 Collaboration: 10 Other: 3

Faculty: On average, how frequently have Honor Code violations come to your
attention?":

1/yr: 77% 2-3/yr: 23%

Faculty: Do you currently give take home exams in any of your Core classes"?
[Core classes are required for all students].

Yes: 32% No: 42% N/A: 26%

Faculty: Do you currently give take home exams in any of your non-Core
classes"?

Yes: 86% No: 14%

Students: "Have you ever violated the honor code?"

No: 80% 1x: 15% 2x: 1% >2x: 4%

Students: "Did you self report?

Yes: 17% No: 83%

------
a_p
I thought that the quality of writing in the article was very poor. As a side
note, I also found it funny that many are worried that the "prestige" of
Harvard is besmirched, because the original meaning (now obsolete) of
_prestige_ was

    
    
      An illusion; a conjuring trick; a deception, an imposture.
    

EDIT: Even the title of the article is unintentionally funny. Because
_academics_ may also be the plural of _academic_ (better described as an
_academician_ ), the title may be taken literally.

>As professors focus on their research, and students worry about securing
career opportunities, both sides become increasingly disinterested in the
classroom.

This sentence is atrocious, not only because of the use of "disinterested" for
"uninterested" (Bryan Garner classifies this usage as Stage 4 on the language
change index, meaning that it is ubiquitous but still not quite accepted [1]),
but because the meaning is ambiguous. Are the views of the students about the
idea of classroom learning changing, or do the students feel apathetic inside
the classrooms of professors who ignore cheating?

Another poorly written sentence:

>The roughly 30-member committee was established in the fall of 2010 and
includes about eight student members.

This sentence would be fine in informal speech. In formal writing, especially
in a respected newspaper such as the _Crimson_ , it is unacceptable.

Somewhere, John Simon is muttering under his breath.[2]

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Garners-Modern-American-Usage-
Garner/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Garners-Modern-American-Usage-
Garner/dp/0195382757/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1362270376&sr=8-1&keywords=bryan+garner+modern+american+usage)
[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Paradigms-Lost-Reflections-John-
Simon/...](http://www.amazon.com/Paradigms-Lost-Reflections-John-
Simon/dp/0517540347/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362271756&sr=1-2&keywords=paradigms+lost)

~~~
bane
"As a side note, I also found it funny that many are worried that the
"prestige" of Harvard is besmirched, because the original meaning (now
obsolete) of prestige was An illusion; a conjuring trick; a deception, an
imposture."

Great point...

Of course prestige _is_ the primary product for sale at such a place of
business.

------
com2kid
Homework is how one prepares for tests. Long form take home assignments should
be designed with collaboration in mind.

Students explaining their understanding of a topic to each other is one of the
most powerful ways for them to learn. I am fond of the saying that one doesn't
truly understand a topic until one has explained it to another.

In class tests should be long, brutal, and test student's ability to come to
their own conclusions based on concepts that were covered throughout the
class.

~~~
starky
I fully agree, and I had professors at my school that also believed in this.
Educational institutions need to modernize their teaching methods to ensure
that students are actually committed to their education and have disincentive
to cheat.

The fact is that we live in a world where people almost always work in a
connected fashion and you have to expect that the students are going to work
together and the course should be designed around this. Team based learning is
a fantastic tool for teaching, and by designing assessments properly you can
make it practically impossible for cheating to occur, both due to open ended
nature of the problems and because your fellow students that you are working
with keep you from being dishonest.

I had one course where you worked in a group of about 6, and the assignments
were all design problems where you needed to optimize your solutions, which
always meant working closely with your teammates to make everything work
together. You learn so much more when you have to explain and understand what
everyone's MATLAB code does. It was in your best interest to make sure you
knew everything inside and out because there was going to be something like
that problem on the exam and they were so long that you had to know exactly
what you were doing or else you weren't going to finish (but were always short
enough to finish). I can without a doubt say this was one of the best courses
I took during school, and the course I remember the most about 2.5 years
later.

------
jechen
It's no different at Carnegie Mellon. I spoke to a former SCS dean who
revealed that cheating rates in CS courses are as high as 70%, yet most
professors turn a blind eye (which as the Crimson article points out, may be
attributed to apathy or inability to enforce class policy at a large scale).

The fact that academic dishonesty is so prevalent these days makes me inclined
to believe that cheating is symptomatic of the state of higher education (and
maybe the way pedagogy is approached in the modern classroom), especially in
light of rising tuition and unemployment rates. When a majority of students
across institutions resort to compromising their integrity and learning for a
letter grade, at which point do we start reassessing education at large?

~~~
shivak
I disagree thoroughly. I've been to both Harvard and CMU, and assisted classes
at the latter. CMU SCS undergrads work much harder than Harvard undergrads,
and their work is more honest.

Actually, CMU students are perhaps a bit too isolated. This leads to some
academic stratification, because the smart kids hang out with one another.
There is less support and camaraderie. Lots of promising students struggle at
SCS and drop out. The attrition rate, not cheating, is actually the primary
academic concern.

Harvard is at the other extreme. The stratification isn't academic, it's
social (via finals clubs and such.) Everyone collaborates. There are two
common practices I find especially distasteful. Harvard has a very long,
class-free study period right before exams. Also, Harvard provides students
with Adderall at no cost with essentially no questions asked. A lot of
students blow off the assignments then cram with loads of amphetamines.
They're smart, so they succeed, but they don't really learn anything.

~~~
bane
"Harvard provides students with Adderall at no cost with essentially no
questions asked."

Can you elaborate on what this means? Can you pretty much just roll into the
nurse's office and get some amphetamines?

------
scarmig
Academia is broken as a mechanism for education and learning. And MOOCs,
despite their advantages, really can't reclaim what has been lost.

Nowadays many--most, I'd suspect--universities aren't really distinguishing
themselves as the places for the building of men and women into better people
and citizens of the world. Instead, they serve at the lower end as a
credentialing mechanism to corporate society that someone has acceptable
impulse control and willingness to embrace the system, and at the higher end
as a finishing school for the finance and government elite.

Certainly at both ends some people interested in intellectually appreciating
the natural and social worlds come out, but that's despite, not because of,
its actual current social function. I remember the second lecture in my
quantum class the professor literally reading straight out, word-for-word,
from the Griffiths textbook and ran out of the classroom as soon as it was
scheduled to be over. Which is an extreme example, but certainly the majority
of my major classes got their value from the problem sets and textbook they
forced us to work through and the people I worked with on them, not through
the value-add the professor or university provides.

Why shouldn't people cheat? Our society is fine with it outside the academy
(maybe not explicitly, but you can tell by how it values and punishes who do
cheat). If universities exist to serve it commercially, might as well
inculcate its values while it's at it.

~~~
voyou
"And MOOCs, despite their advantages, really can't reclaim what has been
lost."

The contrary, in fact - MOOCs take this kind of situation (inaccessible, out-
of-touch professors; overworked, underqualified TAs) and generalize it.

------
bane
Regular 'ol state school grad here:

I observed that cheating, especially in the first year or two was pretty
common among certain groups of students. But it was treated especially
harshly. Most of the students who were caught cheating were given a scare and
a second chance, but by and large the systemic cheaters were kicked out or
changed to an easier major by the 3rd year.

By the 4th year, the average class size was around 10% of the average 1st
year.

My school was so strongly into fighting cheating, that they invested heavily
into licensing cheat detection software when it was available and spending
quite a bit of money researching and selling/licensing anti-cheat tools to
other schools.

It turns out to be an interesting CS problem that cut across most majors and
definitely made an impact on killing off endemic cheating in the school.

Academics were taken _very_ seriously at my school.

------
jvrossb
Is it possible to craft a course that assumed that students would
collaborate/copy from each other and the internet while completing any take
home assignment (so homework and projects but not in-class tests), allow for
it explicitly, and still teach as much as the existing courses would have if
students didn't collaborate/copy?

~~~
kruken
Yes, absolutely possible - it's just a lot more work. As simonsarris points
out above, this will be the exception rather than the rule in a system where
universities and faculty are not measured/rewarded for quality of teaching.

------
crabasa
I'm astonished that commenters are generalizing the issues in this article to
U.S. in general. I never encountered anything remotely at this scale when I
attended the College of William & Mary ('00). I'd guess that the culture of
cheating written about in this article is simply a byproduct of amassing the
kind of people who can get into Harvard in the first place: straight A, hyper
competitive achievers.

~~~
Evbn
Or maybe colleges are diverse and you had a well behaved group of friends.

------
rezendi
Plus ça change. Communal work on weekly/monthly assignments was basically
ubiquitous when I went to university mumblemumble years ago. (OK, fine;
electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo, graduated 1996.)

It didn't really _feel_ like cheating to anyone, including me, who rarely-if-
ever participated, fwiw. (Not due to any moral high ground, but because a) I
was not particularly social at the time b) "100% of your grade is based on
your final exam score" was usually an option, and (relative to other students)
my exams were far better than my assignments.)

Was it? Mmm. Probably yes, in the end, but it seems to me that you could make
a reasonable prescriptive/descriptive case that it wasn't.

Was it evidence of a serious moral flaw pervasive throughout that generation,
or excessive pressure to excel (Waterloo is basically Canada's MIT), or
anything like? Hell no. It was just a grotesque but essentially harmless
cultural artifact. With twenty years of hindsight, I'd advise against reading
too much into it.

------
thinkcomp
As a Harvard '04-'05 grad (two numbers meaning I left early) I think The
Crimson, as per usual, misses the mark.

It is indeed partly the part of the faculty for not engaging with students
(e.g. teaching) enough. But even if some of the faculty had engaged more with
us as students when I was there, I might have run for my life even faster than
I already did, because some of the faculty just weren't that great. In fact,
some were awful. (I've written a not-very-popular book in which this is a
major theme.)

Harry Lewis's attempt to protect the students from blame here is admirable,
but similarly mistaken. Harvard's admissions office (which used to be run by
his wife, I'm not sure if it still is) selects for the best and the brightest,
but inevitable in such a selection process is a tendency to pick what William
Deresiewicz calls "excellent sheep"--kids who do (or appear to do) what
they're told _extremely_ well. When you pair that with an Office of Career
Services (OCS) that acts as a funnel to Wall Street--many people in my class
ended up destroying the world at Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Goldman
Sachs--what do you expect to happen? You've got a huge population of smart
kids whose end goal is a place in a culture where success at any cost is not
just appropriate, it's encouraged.

A large portion of football team cheated on a midterm in Economics 1010a in
2003 (they took advantage of a scheduling conflict with Statistics 104 to get
extra time on the exam), but no one ever got in trouble for it. My guess is
that half of the people who knew about it wished that they had been so
"smart."

The cheating scandal is major, but in a way, I think it's the least of
Harvard's problems. They haven't even touched on the Adderall problem, or the
kinds of faculty conflicts of interest highlighted in Inside Job, and they've
only slightly addressed the draconian, opaque and backwards nature of the Ad
Board. Even knowing about some of the important research that goes on there,
in my opinion, Harvard's real problem is that its general role of late has
been pretty far from a force for good, let alone truth. It's just been a
rubber stamp for the broken society we read about in the headlines daily.
Correcting that problem requires actual leadership which, since Larry Summers
was President, has been sorely lacking.

P.S. If you think the Valley or even YC is disconnected from this dynamic,
don't kid yourself. CS50 enrollment is way up because everyone thinks that
they'll be the next billionaire like Mark. But CS50 is not why Bill Gates,
Mark, Sheryl Sandberg (Summers's former assistant) or Nathan Blecharczyk sit
atop billion-dollar companies (see
<http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=70>). And with Jim Breyer
of Accel now elected to the Harvard Corporation... You get the picture.
Cheating has its rewards.

~~~
s_kanev
Disclaimer: I was a '12 grad, and currently doing a PhD in CS there.

> because some of the faculty just weren't that great

I think this is anecdotal evidence against anecdotal evidence. In my case, a
lot of the faculty were that great. A few concrete names that immediately pop
to mind would be: Margo Seltzer, Mike Smith, Greg Morrisett, Matt Welsch (now
at google), David Malan, Howard Georgi, ...

> admissions office [..] selects [..] "excellent sheep"--kids who do (or
> appear to do) what they're told extremely well

Au contraire, my anecdotal evidence is that the admissions office tends to
lean a lot on the "liberal arts" side. I come from a background with a strong
respect of science and academics, and would often get very surprised to see
some people not focus on those areas as much. But then I'd see them play their
instrument, direct a play, qualify for the Olympics, etc. Most of those people
ended up in consulting or teaching (TFA and the like) actually.

But no, I am not going to argue that a lot of people don't end up on Wall
Street. And quite frankly, I don't see anything wrong with that. In the tech
sector, we are quite fortunate that a large fraction of funding is provided
through VCs. But a lot of other sectors don't have that luxury and need to
resort to other sources of liquidity, private equity firms and i-banks. In
those areas, it is much harder to define an actual measure of product goodness
(in CS, we can always say that app X runs Y% faster or that Z% of the large
number of users prefer it), and individual performance is evaluated much more
based on _soft skills_. This is the exact skill set that is developed by the
non-acacdemic parts of college. As tech people, we might feel cheated in some
sense by that (the same way we feel cheated by a good salesman who "doesn't
contribute anything"), but as long as there are requirements for capital, I
don't see any alternative.

edit: grammar

------
mathattack
The amazing thing to me are the comments. There is little disagreement on the
existence of rampant cheating, and more about how and why.

Quotes from the comments:

"Harry Lewis can also be part of the problem. He is, along with Bob Scalise
and Tom Stemberg, one of the three biggest cheerleaders on campus in favor of
lowering academic standards to produce a championship basketball team."

"Not only are "less than As" at Harvard occasionally seen as a sign that the
student isn't smart or isn't working hard, but actual As aren't recognized or
appreciated that much because they've been set as the status quo. This means
that no matter what the grade, students here can feel the need to keep pushing
themselves and striving for that elusive recognition and appreciation."

"Here's my thought on why cheating is so widespread here: I think that the
motivation is simple, and is rooted in the fact that before coming here, we
were among the very best at our high school. Then, when we got here, most of
us still wanted to be among the best, to still get all A's while being a
leader in extracurriculars, and so on. However, courses here are probably much
harder than what we dealt with in high school."

It was also strange seeing Mankiw under the bus. Like or dislike his politics,
he is a prolific blogger which generally suggests being in touch.
<http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/>

Again from the comments: "Harry Lewis is correct in stating that students
cheat more in classes where they themselves feel "cheated" by the professor.
It is baffling and inexcusable that Harvard continues to let Mankiw "teach" Ec
10 which affords him a credential he does not deserve. Talk about lying on
your resume."

------
leephillips
From the article: "The institution and the community condones, if not
promotes, academic dishonesty, emphasizing prestige over intellectual growth."

This institution has employed, as professors, various characters including
Henry Kissinger and Dave Winer. This assessment is in line with the impression
that gives me.

~~~
hga
Heh, but Winer's one year as a research fellow at the Law School, which is a
distinct part of the Harvard "empire", doesn't quite put him in the same
league as a young Henry Kissinger.

------
jccalhoun
I'm really surprised that the people teaching at Harvard don't seem to be
putting forth any effort to make assignments that are at least somewhat
difficult to cheat on. I'm only a grad student at a Big Ten school but I
always try to make my assignments require something that they can't just copy
down from someone else even if it is just randomized questions. Obviously this
is easier in some disciplines than others but even when I was an undergrad
back in the early 90s I took an intro-level Physics course where every
student's test was randomly generated from a bank of questions (admittedly it
wasn't very good. One test I remember getting the same question 3 times!).

------
waylandsmithers
Colgate alum here-- cheating was just as bad when I was in school as it seems
to be at Harvard now. All you had to do is look in your fraternity's 'library'
and how about that? the test hasn't changed in 15 years?

Edit: I'll add that there was an honor code that all students were required to
sign, but it seemed that the gist was 'we'll give you a ton of leeway, but if
you are dumb enough to get caught, the consequences will be extremely harsh.'
That way both sides win: students can share test questions and answers with
little risk of being caught, and the school can seem serious about cheating by
occasionally expelling the most egregious violators.

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ajm81
On the point of Harvard professors being more concerned about research than
teaching, Sean Carroll has a blog post from a few years ago that is relevant:
The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People
([http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/the-
purpose-of-harvard-is-not-to-educate-people/)).

To quote: "the purpose of Harvard is not to educate students. If anything, its
primary purpose is to produce research and scholarly work."

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zallarak
Why do we care about cheating undergrads at Harvard again? I'd care about an
article on Harvard undergrads if they were actually doing _something_ I care
about! Post about that if you want to.

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RawData
I mean...you go to Harvard for the connections... You go to like a Washu if
you're interested in academics.

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patmcguire
The comments on the Crimson site are insane. These are some jaded people.

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Cardeck1
Cheating is a complex subject to speak of, especially in US. Let me share my
experience with some of these cheaters.I would like to point out that I do not
admire them nor I take their side, yet I am trying to understand the problem
and find some reasoning behind these actions.

Everyone thinks you are stupid or evil if you cheat yet it has a deeper
meaning here.We have to ask ourselves, why would someone cheat?Does it matter
if it's Harvard or Stanford?No, it doesn't.The reasons are usually the same
wherever you go.

The first one I can think of is Lack of Interest.The student simply doesn't
give a ____about a certain course, and he knows he will never use it after
graduation so he decides to cheat on the exam.Cheating himself?No, because he
doesn't like that course at all and he will not use it in the future, so why
wasting his time.No benefits, nothing coming out of this course.

An example would be the GE in the first 2 years of college.I believe it's a
waste of time and money. That's why other countries don't use it.

The second one is Lack of Enthusiasm. Maybe the student doesn't like the
professor or the way he teaches.Maybe he knows more than the professor.Maybe
he needs something extra.Who knows...But surely this can lead to cheating as
well, although this would definitely impact your future if the course is
connected with your job aspirations.

The third one is No Social Life/Seeking Popularity among certain groups.Some
students think that by cheating they can get in some fraternities or joining
famous campus groups or getting the "girl next door" etc. A shortcut to
something which they cannot obtain through other means.You don't see a movie
where cheating is not cool, do you?Look at some of the commercials.Nothing
negative about cheating.

Forth would be the so called "corporate mindset".They look at some billionaire
stories and unethical companies that make a lot of money through schemes and
cheating.I mean look at the Wall Street movies.I don't think there is one
movie where characters make money by being ethical.So students think that's
cool.Heck, they even drop college thinking they can become a SJ or BG.There is
no other way...

I think I'll stop here but there are many more.Should we consider all of them
stupid?Well, not really.The truth is the world today is not the same as the
one 10-20 years ago.And yes, companies don't play fair.How can you encourage
someone to be ethical when most of the top 500 companies are on the other side
of the spectrum.

How can you survive as a business if most of the competition is cheating in
some way?You cannot.

Let's take an example here:

Student A = Cheating/Unethical Student B = Studying/Ethical

A gets a 4.0 GPA by cheating through college.* B gets a 3.5 by playing it
fair.

*Assuming Student A is not retarded or anything and he cheats when he needs to, not to the point where he couldn't bring any value to a company after graduating.

Who will get the job at a top company? Probably A because if a 4.0 is a
requirement, the recruiter will completely ignore B.Can you blame the
recruiter?Not really.It's impossible to ask 1000 people if they cheated or not
and so on. Not fair for the hard-working student.

That's just my 2 cents.Sorry for my bad writing.

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doctorpangloss
The real story: How much better CS50 is than all of the other offerings.

