
Cheating and the Honor System - jtbigwoo
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2011/04/14/honor-system/
======
ubertaco
Allow me to give the other side of such a story.

When I was 16, I took English 101 at a local college (joint enrollment, wanted
to get it out of the way for my college undergraduate degree).

While there, I was, to my surprise, the top of my class. My grade average was
102 (the professor gave a maximum of 105 on each paper) and I'd had two papers
read in class as exemplary.

Unfortunately, my professor was also staunchly politically-polarized, and
would frequently spark political debates in class and use absurd examples for
things that did not need to be politicized ("when citing a credible source,
such as CBS, use this format. Non-credible sources, such as Fox News, or White
House press releases [George W Bush was sitting president at the time] will
not be accepted."). In one such discussion, the professor took a very
difficult-to-support stance (I do not recall the substance now; this was in
2006) with which I and most of the class disagreed. However, as often happens
in classroom settings, I wound up as unofficial "spokesman" for the general
class consensus. The next assignment was the final paper, worth ~25% of my
grade. I was given an F due to plagarism. When asked for proof, the professor
highlighted a few sentence fragments here and there as "copied directly"
(without stating the source from which these fragments were allegedly copied)
and full paragraphs as "too far above [my] ability to be [my] original work."
Her reasoning was that, on the whole, my paper "sounded more like a seasoned
journalist than a mere college pre-freshman," so it was obviously plagarized
despite any substantial lack of proof.

Because there was no system of appeals, the F stood, and my overall grade for
the class dropped to a B. Simply because the professor disliked my political
stance.

~~~
johngalt
I agree completely, cheating is different than unexpected results.
Additionally there is little recourse if an instructor has it in for you.

When I was 14, I had an "International trade" simulation in which each student
was a "country" trying to make hamburgers. Each country was given a large
amount of 2-3 ingredients, but 6 were necessary to make a burger (lettuce,
cheese, patty, bread, tomato, mayo). So we had to trade and we'd be graded on
how many burgers we could complete. The teacher was left wing and was trying
to teach a "fixed wealth" version of trade. Some countries were specifically
given less resources. Sparking cries of "unfair!". I was given less than
average, and wasn't content to lose. So I immediately traded everything I had
2:1 to buy up all the patties; cornering the closed market trivially. Once I
could roadblock a majority of the market, I asked for a 1:10 rate in return. I
got by far the most complete hamburgers, but received an F for the exercise.

The teacher had hoped that we'd learn that wealth is pre-determined and trade
more favorably with countries that had less. I wasn't participating in the
"spirit" of the exercise. Thankfully she stopped short of calling it cheating.

------
robobenjie
My school (Stanford) the teachers _were_ required to leave the classroom
during tests and we _were_ supposed to use the honor system. I never cheated
and I don't know anyone who did. Maybe his sarcastic comment at the end has
more truth in it than he meant. People tend to live up to expectations.

If you prevent cheating by having a person who's job it is to catch you then
you feel like if you don't get caught you have won. On the other hand if you
are expected not to cheat because it is not what a honorable person does, then
if you cheat it is because you have failed.

~~~
pingswept
I was a TA at your school (Stanford). I like that policy, but I also witnessed
cheating firsthand. Specifically, I graded a take-home midterm exam where 3
students handed in the same bizarrely wrong answer. The students received
penalties on that test, but no other disciplinary action was taken. This was
in the mechanical engineering department in a graduate level mechatronics
course (that I suspect you've taken).

If I were making the rules, those students would be out of the university the
same day. There is no shortage of smart people who would love to attend
Stanford, especially the engineering school. I have no idea why enforcement is
so disgracefully lax.

In the electrical engineering department, I regularly had classmates ask me if
we could "compare answers" on homework problem sets. Sometimes (rarely), this
was for a genuine goal of education-- if your answer is wrong, you want to
know that so you can figure out the right answer. More often, it was clueless
people trying to collect answers from multiple other people. Drove me up the
wall.

~~~
Confusion
In my experience (another school, another country), it was usually allowed to
take a take-home exam together with others. The understanding was that the
exams are sufficiently hard, that students smart enough to pass do not allow
others to freeload and that working together with other smart students teaches
important skills in addition to a better understanding of the subject.

The same goes for homework problem sets: me and two others would usually first
solve them ourselves to the best of our ability and then compare answers,
which was always an educational experience; the more so when no one had
successfully solved the problem on their own or when it took someone a while
to convince the other two their (identical) solutions were wrong.

~~~
ianferrel
> The understanding was that the exams are sufficiently hard, that students
> smart enough to pass do not allow others to freeload...

That sounds like a flawed assumption to me. There are lots of social and
economic incentives that might lead someone smart to do others' work.

I tend to agree that working with others on problem sets can be quite
beneficial. Many classes I took had the same policy on those. But at some
point you have to prove you can do it yourself.

------
ejames
I can't say that I find this particular blog post that interesting. "Teacher
applies firm standards, which a spineless administration then undermines" is a
well-worn subject if you have spent time reading about education, and this
particular post is not a strong introduction if you haven't.

The site design, on the other hand, will probably stick with me for a while: a
background theme of a Soviet-style propaganda poster where the beaming
People's Workers triumphantly brandish gin and tacos.

It's distracting and the text is hard to read, but I will probably never
forget this site's URL. Sometimes there's value in picking something out of
left field and just running with it.

~~~
bdhe
> I can't say that I find this particular blog post that interesting. "Teacher
> applies firm standards, which a spineless administration then undermines" is
> a well-worn subject if you have spent time reading about education, and this
> particular post is not a strong introduction if you haven't.

I find this subject very interesting. Could you point me to some, in your
opinion, strong introductions?

~~~
ejames
I'll have to go back through my reading list to see what I recommend - I've
been following education issues to some extent for a long time, long enough
that I remember reading better articles but not where I found them.

It's a bit much for me to write up on my coffee break, but I'll try and get
back to this. Please shoot me an email (in my profile) if I forget to write it
up.

~~~
ejames
There's basically three categories where this problem shows up: grade
inflation, cheating, and discipline. Grade inflation is most relevant to
colleges, discipline only matters for levels of schooling with mandatory
attendance, and cheating cuts across all levels.

However, the same issue is in common: In theory, there are standards applied
to students, and it is an important priority to distinguish between students
who meet the standards and students who don't. In practice, the administration
does not necessarily care about applying the standards rigorously.

I think the following two articles are a good introduction to grade inflation
as a topic:

"Can Untenured Faculty Members Stop Grade Inflation?" - Chronicle of Higher
Education, [http://chronicle.com/article/Can-Untenured-Faculty-
Members/4...](http://chronicle.com/article/Can-Untenured-Faculty-
Members/45518/)

"In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" - The Atlantic Monthly,
[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-
the-b...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-basement-
of-the-ivory-tower/6810/)

It can also be useful to read up on business schools, because a business major
is not an "academic" subject; more than any other major, the students are
looking explicitly for a credential that boosts their income, and don't care
about the subject material. The book "Ahead of the Curve"
([http://www.amazon.com/Ahead-Curve-Harvard-Business-
School/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Ahead-Curve-Harvard-Business-
School/dp/B001RNOPLY/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302987751&sr=1-1)) is a
well-written appraisal of the Harvard B-School and includes chapters
specifically on both grade inflation and cheating.

Going through these publications and/or following the notes and recommended
reading therein can lead to more involved reading on the topic. Articles in
the Atlantic Monthly are always a good starting point.

The fundamental issue: If an institution of learning punishes students for
cheating, or failing classes, or behaving badly, then somebody, somewhere must
have both the authority to do so and the goal of exercising said authority.
But often, nobody wants to be that person, or the authority is conflicted, or
the goal is given less priority than the goal of making money/quota.

------
gyardley
Most universities in America are currently structured so that the students who
want to learn can learn, and the students who don't want to learn can coast
along between parties for four years.

Giving low grades, failing students, assigning a lot of mandatory homework,
making the minimum that's required remotely challenging, giving students more
than a slap on the wrist for any infraction -- all of that drives away the
coasting students, and that's bad for enrollment.

If this professor continues to fuss over this, all he's going to do is botch
his chance at tenure.

------
famousactress
A bit of an aside, but my wife spent the last 6 years teaching high school
english and I was surprised to find that there's a number of interesting
advancements in the anti-cheating industry. There are a number of anti-
plagiarism services that she (and loads of other English teachers apparently)
would submit students papers to. The papers are compared to other ones in the
database and reports are popped out for ones that match. I appreciated the
irony, since it's easy to argue that the internet has made it easier to cheat
in the first place.

~~~
mithaler
Yes, these were in use back when I was in high school (I graduated in 2005); I
remember I wrote a paper in a history class about Winston Churchill, and it
amusingly flagged the first sentence of it because it was just the basic
biographical intro that's undoubtedly common to nearly any paper about him:
"Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born XXX..." Thankfully it only marks
parts of the paper, and the teacher was smart enough to realize it wasn't a
real problem.

Sadly though, these provide no defense against the multitude of shady for-
profit services that write papers for hire that anyone can find by Googling
"term paper".

~~~
famousactress
But, the paper would have to be original.. Can you really get an original
paper written at a price that's at least conceivable for a high school student
to pay? Nuts.

...and yeah, the results of the plagiarism service were a bit soft, but I
think it would notice and annotate if things were in quotations, or likely to
be common enough to not be an issue. In fact, I think her department had a
general 'score' that they'd considered serious enough to consider cheating,
and a sentence or two lifted from the interwebs would get you a marked down
grade.

~~~
Retric
It's vary easy to accidentally lift a sentence or idea if you do enough
research and write something of length. Dropping a full grade for a short
essay is reasonable but if you handing in 60+ pages it's rather harsh IMO.

~~~
famousactress
Oh yeah, sorry I should have been more specific.. for one, the papers are much
shorter than that (this is high school).. also, when I said their grade was
marked down, I just meant that they were penalized.. I don't know by how much.

------
pbjorklund
Cheating leads to a F, what the heck is that about?

At my university, in Sweden, cheating means suspension (that includes
plagiarism) for up to 10 weeks. Just last week 5 different cases got 8 weeks
each..

~~~
RK
Wouldn't suspension lead to failing as well? (assuming you're not allowed to
withdraw from your courses)

I believe where I did my bachelor's, the standard punishment for willful
cheating was failing the course, one semester's suspension, and a permanent
note in your academic record.

~~~
Fargren
Not necessarily. At my college, attendace is not required for passing. As long
as you do well in all your exams and pass all practical your assignements (two
or three each quarter), you are ok. So suspension would bw tough but not and
automatic fail. That said, at my college cheating means you are probably
expelled, and I'm not aware of suspension as a punishment for anything.

------
yardie
I came to this conclusion very late in the game. After working my ass off for
4+ years I realized the university honor code is basically toothless. Ohh, it
will tell you a great story about all the things the university could do to
you. But in the end it's not enforced or enforced so lightly that they
shouldn't have bothered at all.

It used to be that cheating was just about the worst thing you could do in
college and the university went through great pains to remind you of that.
Robbery, murder?! that's a local police matter. Cheat, and we'll keelhaul you
on the quad.

~~~
danielford
Keep in mind that when cheaters are discovered, we're required to maintain
confidentiality. I've been tangentially involved in one situation where the
professor went full out to give the student a failing grade and get her
transcripts marked. I've also seen someone in my cohort get kicked out of the
graduate school for doing it on the qualifying exam.

On the other hand, I've also been involved in two situations where the
individuals received a slap on the wrist. So your results may vary.

------
nathanb
FWIW, Google spelunking reveals this university to be the University of
Georgia, whose policies I would have expected to be better than that. However,
public state schools do have to deal with a lot of pressure from the state to
not expel taxpayers and stuff like that, which is unfortunate and wrong.

------
WalterBright
At Caltech, we had an honor system. Proctoring of exams was not allowed. Most
exams were take home, even though they had strict time limits (normally 3
hours). Once you opened the test, you had 3 hours to finish it, but since you
were in your dorm room it was entirely and deliberately left up to your
integrity.

Tests were typically open book and open note.

Some other characteristics:

1\. Professors were not allowed to take attendance or base any part of the
grade on attendance.

2\. Homework was graded, but that grade had no influence on the course grade.
Students were encouraged to use any resource, collaberation, etc., to
understand and do the homework correctly.

3\. Grades were based on exam scores. Policy was that if you could pass the
exams, you got credit for the course even if you never showed up for class.

In essence, the university treated us like adults. They provided an
opportunity to get a first class education, and if you didn't take full
advantage of that, that was your problem.

The students liked this state of affairs immensely, and if you did cheat (and
thereby threaten the honor system) you would be ostracized. Peer pressure can
be extremely effective. I don't know anyone who cheated.

For example, I know one student who, 1 hour into a 3 hour exam, fell asleep.
He woke up a couple hours later, and finished the exam anyway. But he told the
professor what had happened, and the professor was very sorry but he had to
fail the student. The student was not angry about this, he blamed himself and
took responsibility.

~~~
mentat
"In essence, the university treated us like adults."

The funny thing is that most adults aren't "treated like adults" if your
intention is to compare this with working conditions. There are very few jobs
that don't care about attendance at all and only care if you get the project
done right and on time. I'm not saying it should be this way but rather just
that it is. It could be because most jobs don't employ everyone who is of the
same high quality of character as you relate.

------
bdhe
This is just an anecdote, but I've heard that even if some professors strongly
suspect cheating, since the system involves so much red tape and leaves the
professor with little power, it is simply not worth pursuing it and ending up
losing upwards of half a day. This means, professors, whose free time is
already perilously low have all the incentives in the world not to pursue
students who cheat, which only makes it that much easier for them to get away
with it.

------
Jd
Fairly useless unless you know the institution in question, how widespread the
problem is, and whether or not it has been worsening.

My personal observation is that many of the structure in question is oriented
specifically towards jocks who are recruited for their brawn and not brains
and are expected to spend much more time building muscle than exercising their
noggins. Given that my personal observation is limited to an ivy league
institution, I'd imagine this would be all the more so at a large public
institution in the American South, in which sports are probably considered
more important than book smarts. Moreover, many of the recruits (coming from
impoverished inner-city schools where they are moved from grade to grade
regardless of their performance) are likely completely incapable of performing
basic algebra, let alone the sort of math they would be expected to do in
standard university level courses.

In other words, this sort of behavior is entirely expected given the nature of
these institutions and probably is a fixture in them, likely neither worsening
nor improving.

~~~
yummyfajitas
In my experience, football players usually get special incompletes. Basically,
what happens is that if they are in danger of failing a class, the coach
demands that they do a lot of practices during the game. They then get an
incomplete and get to retake the course.

------
_delirium
I've noticed less bureaucratic outcomes in the cases I've observed, but that
might be good luck. If it's especially blatant, such as a student turning in
an essay that is on the internet, the informal procedure is that the professor
says, "this essay was clearly on the internet, you didn't write it, you get an
F on it". The student could insist on a formal process (which is probably
required), but the outcome of a formal process could result in them being
suspended or expelled entirely, so if the evidence is solid, is probably not a
good gamble. Admittedly a bit trickier when it isn't a piece of paper like
that.

Personally it doesn't bother me _that_ much, because the problems I'm worried
about fixing in education have more to do with learning than the value of
degrees. If people who want to learn aren't supported as well as they could
be, or are even actively discouraged/demotivated, then that's a big problem
and something teachers/lecturers/professors need to worry about. If people who
never wanted to learn are getting degrees they don't deserve, meh, I guess
that's bad, but we pay administrators to worry about PR things like the
university's image, so let them come up with a policy to deal with it (or fix
admissions to let in fewer such students). There's even a few cases of
opinionated smart kids cheating because they don't find the assignments
helpful, in which case I don't even really care about them doing so (and maybe
even care more about whether we can fix the assignments instead), though
admittedly that isn't the common case.

------
orky56
For better or worse, this is the same of type of action schools take on major
offenses. In universities, first possession of marijuana or underage drinking
is dealt with a warning and perhaps community service. In the real world,
there are real consequences for these actions as well as plagiarism.

I guess college tuition is really just an insurance policy for crimes?

~~~
redthrowaway
"Major offenses...first possession of marijuana or underage drinking..."

That's what qualifies as major? I don't give a damn if my classmates drink and
blaze; I _do_ care if they cheat and implicitly lower the value of my degree
in the process.

Then again, _nobody_ at my school cares about liquor or pot, so I guess it's
hard to compare it to schools that view either as an actual issue.

~~~
orky56
I'm just saying from an objective, legal perspective. Some of these
universities are public so you would think they would more strongly enforce
the law. When you're really young, you get a lot of lenience based on your
age. In college, I'm not really sure why you would get an excuse?

If it's about finding yourself, then it's just temporary and artificial.
Whatever you thought you knew no longer applies once the "rules" change. /rant

~~~
redthrowaway
Where I am (BC, Canada), the drinking age is 19 and nobody, police included,
cares about weed. So I guess for colleges, underage drinking would only be a
problem for freshmen. Even then, there are dorm parties all the time and no
one on campus cares about liquor.

I've never heard of campus security hassling anyone over substances. Hell, we
even have a "420 club" that meets on wednesdays at 4:20 on the field in the
center of campus and smokes piles of weed. I guess attitudes towards
substances are just much more relaxed here than most places in the US.

------
gerner
I was on one of these academic integrity hearing boards as a student
representative at Cornell. In my experience the board was strongly in favor of
failing students outright and adding a notation to their academic record. It's
not as bad as expelling them from the university. But it's not like it was
some softball slap on the wrist either.

And the cases we were presiding over were not simple. We had a case where a
student started a test early, as the exams were being handed out, but before
everyone got a copy, and we took that as a serious violation of academic
integrity (this student was not completely failed out of the course.)

Our objective was not at all to "mildly scare the students until they Learn
Their Lesson and then let them off the hook."

------
scott_s
Some universities have _very_ strict punishments for cheating - sometimes
including kicking students out of the school, permanently. Having due process
in place in order to ensure that those punishments are meted out fairly is a
good thing.

------
pjscott
Former TA here. It's surprising how often I've heard people use "I didn't know
we weren't supposed to plagiarize" as an excuse. It seems to be the first line
of defense for people who were caught copying and pasting large portions of an
assignment from the internet.

Personally, I've stopped worrying about it. If people cheat themselves out of
an education, that's unfortunate, but hard to avoid. Focus on doing the best
job possible for the people who _are_ there to learn; there aren't enough
hours in the day to try to impose an education on unwilling people by force,
and they'll hate you for trying.

------
Havoc
Wow thats the exact opposite to the environment I'm in. The lecturers in my
department are pretty much omnipotent in that regard. If one of them were
determined enough he/she could kill a students career in the field (accounting
& auditing) completely & permanently. Student gets blacklisted at all
universities providing that qualification country-wide for ethics violation of
that nature. Its only for that qualification though not a complete
blacklisting & the other departments aren't nearly as strict or powerful.

------
bhickey
As a teaching assistant I occasionally came across cheaters. Dealing with them
can be a very painful process.

In one case students were plagiarizing homework assignments. The instructor
invited the accused into his office and presented them with the evidence. He
gave them the option of withdrawing from the course or going before a dean.
They elected to withdraw. There was some ugly personal fallout from this
incident.

------
tom_b
For another point of view, as long as we are slinging ancedotes . . .

My wife teaches a large, but graduate level, seminar. Every semester, a small
number of students are caught blatantly plagiarizing sources in papers. These
cases are required to be handed over to a student-staffed and managed honor
court.

In every case that has been handed over to them, the student-staffed and
managed honor court has failed the student.

~~~
lutorm
Another anecdote: my wife's teaching a class at MIT now, and they have
problems with homeworks being basically copied from the MIT OpenCourseWare web
site, which apparently contains the solution to pretty much any problem given
in any of the previous years' classes. I'm actually genuinely troubled by what
to think of this unfortunate intersection between unprecedented access to
information and requiring students to do work beyond Googling...

------
atacrawl
At my school, before every test and on every major assignment, each student
had to write out the school's written Honor Code and then sign it, serving as
a contract through which they could nail you to the wall if you got caught
cheating.

------
hammock
What does this rant have to do with the honor system? I don't appreciate the
author throwing mud at a great self-governing system used in many schools by
invoking its name when it's not even relevant here.

------
evoltix
This drawn-out diatribe irks me. You _chose_ to teach at that school, so you
should be familiar with the cheating/plagiarism policy. Should you not?

------
Tangaroa
I had a professor who told the class to cheat. He justified it by saying that
anyone in the real world today can go online and get help for any problem they
have. Another unspoken reason is that he would not cover the material he would
test us on, which was not in the book either, so allowing cheating would cut
down on student complaints and let him do less work. I complained about it and
nothing happened since he was tenured and close to retiring. One might say he
already did.

------
michaelochurch
The penalty for cheating should be: you fail the course in which you cheated
and withdraw from all others. You're immediately suspended. You can't get back
into the college until you've logged 12 months of gainful employment in "the
real world". (Military service counts.)

Yes, the real world. Where you can do nothing wrong and get fired for looking
at a powerful person the wrong way, and where people actually struggle. Ok, so
get out there and have that experience. Now you know (a) that you're very
privileged, as a college student, and (b) you have no right to complain about
the unfairness of an 'F' for cheating; it's not unfair. Once you've learned
that lesson, welcome back but don't fucking do it again.

~~~
elechi
Privileged? Ha. What a odd way of putting it. In what way is going to school a
privilege? It's almost expected for everyone to go to a college/university
nowadays. In what way is a college student privileged?

If you get caught cheating in a class, fail him or her in THAT CLASS. Mention
it in their academic report, so that other teachers in the university are
aware, and they the teachers themselves can decide whether or not they want
that particular individual in their classroom.

~~~
Dove
A college student is privileged in that they have the free time to _learn_ ,
all day every day. They may not realize how special this is until they decide,
at thirty while supporting a family, that they want another degree -- and they
do it via night classes, working eight hours a day and studying four, and it
takes a decade.

~~~
elechi
I don't want to get too pedantic, and this may be beginning to get off-topic,
and for that I apologize. But your example still isn't one of a privilege.
What your example shows is that it is easier to concentrate on one thing
instead of two or three things. Is time really free if you're choosing to just
concentrate on one thing? Joke all we want that being a student is a job, but
in most ways it is a job. Maybe not as strict as one, but if you're doing it
properly, it should be as consuming as one.

