huh, i had no idea princeton specifically disallowed proctors, and instead relied on an honor system. seems... like a poorly thought out system, especially given:
"29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report."
crazier is the people protesting by saying: “students should behave honorably, and that faculty and students should trust each other given the 1893 Honor Code compact.”. obviously that isnt happening if 1/3rd of the student body has admitted to cheating (meaning that the real percent of cheating is even higher).
A couple of my friends teach university classes. Mostly undergrad. I get to hear some of their interesting stories when we game together.
My impression is that there was a sharp shift around COVID. Doing classes over Zoom with a talking head broke the connection they had with their professors and other students. College felt closer to a video game operated through your screen than a community.
When I was in college not all that long ago, cheating was a scandalous thing. I knew a friend of a friend who cheated on an exam with some tricks and it resulted in suspension for a semester. There were rumors of someone hiring a service to write their papers for them and it was a wild story.
Now students have ChatGPT to write their papers and they've been practicing how to use cell phones without the teacher noticing for 10 years before getting to college. Combine that with social media grumblings about how college is "just a piece of paper" and doomerism about how they're never going to get a job or buy a house and cheating starts to look the only rational option to some.
The pattern is not contained to college. Every time the topic of cheating comes up on Hacker News there are more comments defending cheating than I would expect from this crowd. The usual justification is that the system is broken in a hand-wavey way and therefore nobody can be blamed for cheating.
If AI is going to steal all white collar work - why use AI to get a degree to do white collar work, paying both the AI and the college for it? Wild times.
As someone who went there (albeit many decades ago) I can tell you FWIW when I was there folks took it seriously. I literally knew of no one who ever cheated on an exam. And I'm pretty sure that anyone I knew who observed cheating would have taken it seriously enough to bring it to the process. It was pretty much a fixture of how students thought about things. So it worked (near as I could tell) back then.
But institutions take awhile to adjust to new realities, and it while looks like Princeton may have been a bit behind the curve on this one, I can understand why they were reluctant to abandon this practice. Living in an honest community cuts a lot of extra effort out - crap that you don't even have to think about. Princeton will be a less productive place to learn going forward.
I'd wager the main difference between "many decades ago" and mid 2000s onwards is the perceived stakes of college. My time in college (around that time) was perceived by most as "make or break": either you did well in college, or you were doomed to a sub-standard lifestyle (not to mention the debt of college tuition).
Obviously, whether this was true or not is a whole discussion, but the attitude did lead to a lot more cheating (due to desperation) than I'd imagine past generations had.
A midterm being worth 25-33% of a grade, plus some classes only being offered in fall or spring semesters meant a bad test could roughly cost you tens of thousands of dollars, since the next time you could retake the class would be in a year, and it often was a prerequisite for another class. It just leads to an environment that encourages desperate "survival" behavior.
Which is bad, someone who cheats on a test or someone who rats out their friend for cheating on a test?
It really is a cultural thing, and that sort of culture is primarily passed down from upperclassmen to underclassmen. I went to a different college with an honor code (Harvey Mudd) and when I graduated in 2019 it was still doing relatively well, but from what I've heard COVID really killed students caring about / adhering to the honor code.
Only in certain fucked up moral systems. Though I guess Confucianism would be one of those:
>The Duke of She said to Confucius, “Among my people there is one we call ‘Upright Gong.’ When his father stole a sheep, he reported him to the authorities.”
>Confucius replied, “Among my people, those who we consider ‘upright’ are different from this: fathers cover up for their sons, and sons cover up for their fathers. ‘Uprightness’ is to be found in this.”
I wasn't at Princeton, but I remember blatant cheating going on and 'study groups' in CS classes that were mere passing around of completed code. (1997-2001)
I'd asked them what they expected would happen when they tried to get jobs or landed one. Like how do you fake work? They just said all jobs are group-based like their study group. (Keep in mind they were soliciting my code as their group was struggling to find solutions to assignments.)
The answer is a one of them works at a grocery store as a cashier, another one I saw now manages a bagel store (didn't know all of them). A waste of time, money, and effort to get a CS degree then just not be able to use it.
"Culture" works by having a system that collectively punishes cheaters, so that people learn from their own (or others') experiences and internalize that cheating is bad and won't pay off in the long term.
That's how you get a culture against cheating. You ensure that cheating doesn't pay, and eventually people learn that cheating doesn't pay. The enforcement is part of the culture.
El Salvadorians (from The country) would starkly disagree with you. It took a dictator and a martial state (no human rights) to end maras in less than five years. The culture is the same.
They just replaced the street gangs with a single state operated gang. El Salvadorians still have to live in fear for their lives, but it will be the government coming for them.
My guess is that the vast majority of those self-reported cases where relating to a take-home assignment (e.g., copying off a classmate's solution). Even without proctoring, you need to be a lot more brazen to cheat on an in-person exam.
Exames were previously proctored, and it led to a "us vs them" mentality that meant students banded together to
The Honor Code system, and removing proctors was a way to route around that—it made all of the students responsible for catching cheaters and turned the "Students vs Faculty" mentality into a "Honor vs Cheaters" mentality among the students.
Unfortunately, it seems like the "Students vs Faculty" mentality has seen too much of a resurgence due to outside factors, and the Honor Code is no longer a match for the current climate. That's what the article is about
It's nothing crazy about it. Why do you study? To learn. The exams are there to benchmark your progress. If you cheat, everything falls apart for you.
It is possible that when the metric becomes the target(AKA Goodhart's law) cheating can be beneficial but this is failure of the institution because it means you are no longer there to learn.
> 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report
What is it at other universities? I went to a big public school, and remember cheating being halfway rampant. The penalty, moreover, was never expulsion.
Public schools are public schools. They're more or less compulsory and are just meant to try and get you to a point where you can contribute meaningfully to the society.
Princeton is very much optional and is a school for future elites. They're supposed to produce CEOs, politicians, and Nobel prize winners. So the standards should be different.
Of course, expectations are a part of the problem. Many kids go to Princeton or Stanford or MIT because they had wealthy parents who really wanted their kids to go there. And many of these kids are mostly interested in computer games, weed, and the opposite sex. A combination of unmotivated students and high academic standards lead to predictable outcomes.
Public universities (what Americans call public schools in the context of higher education) are optional to the exact same degree as private ones. In other words they are all schools that you apply to.
They also produce more "elites" than "elite" schools do if you go by executives at F500 companies and politicians.
Are we going to pretend that Berkley, Michigan, UNC-CH, UVA etc. do not produce world class educations from world class people?
Pretty much my observation. Professors could give lenience and a warning by not reporting it, but if they reported it to Academic Affairs, the Provost would probably end up throwing them out.
One time, several people cheated on physics homework (apparently in a very obvious way), and the professor took fifteen minutes out of the next lecture to basically say "you know who you are, you got a zero, and if I see it again, I'm going straight to the Provost."
I've heard that it's the same at <other elite private university I don't want to name>, and people cheat, to the point where non-cheaters are suspicious that it's just a method of grade inflation
The interesting thing is that cheating is much easier when done online. When I was a TA and we were in the process of moving quite a bit of the classes to online, we still mandated in person testing.
It was eye opening to find cheat sheets and other cheating materials obviously left behind by students. The majority of the stuff we'd find we either inaccurate and completely wrong. Like a half awake student copied something they thought was the right equation or solution, when in fact, it was for something completely different that wasn't on the test.
So I agree with your notion, but its one thing to try and cheat. Its a completely different one to do so successfully.
AIUI, these schools see their mission as training the next generation of leaders and elites. They aim for people with strong abilities, and moral character.
And, the way you guide youth to act in a certain way is by treating them that way. If you want them to be trustworthy, you trust them. This is not a totally fringe idea.
You can game theory it out and see that everyone gets to cheat and nobody reports is the best outcome for the group. Defectors must be punished in some way or perhaps the profs are not carrying through with punishments for cheaters.
Most of us have done something stupid once in our lives. That does not mean we do stupid things all the time, nor does it mean that we didn't learn from the experience. The goal of school is to help immature young adults grow into mature ones.
>The goal of school is to help immature young adults grow into mature ones.
agreed!
however, having a proctor that stands in the classroom for your exam does not hinder the growth process, in my experience. (i teach, if thats worth anything to my statement)
Okay and they shouldn't cheat? Why do we always side with the better angels of the elites in America when the elites in America are the literal cause of our misery? If they can't handle having a proctor ensuring they aren't cheating, they're free to go to the local community college.
This has to be one of the most pretentious things I've ever read about post secondary education.
I'm completely flabbergasted to learn that an Ivy League holds students to a far different and much lower standard than I what I was held to at a regular university in Canada.
From now on I don't see how I can't be skeptical of the credentials of someone from Princeton knowing that their exams weren't proctored.
I think it really depends on how you view our high education system. As a middle-aged man returning to school to switch careers, my entire reason for going to school is to learn, and I'd never cheat because that would undermine my own goals. To me the purpose of school isn't the degree--I made an entire career already without one--it's to learn.
Students are at school for a lot of poorly-thought-out reasons: inertia, not knowing what else to do, because their parents made them go, etc. If they're not there to learn, you can't make them learn. No, not even by proctoring exams. The only purpose that achieves is to gatekeep.
And, gatekeeping for doctors and pilots is a good thing. We don't want to let just anyone become a doctor or pilot. But frankly, I don't give any shits about whether an AI programmer has made it through a gatekept degree. That stuff can be gatekept at other points--if they show up to work pretending and don't know anything, that will become obvious, and degrees maybe aren't the only or even best way to obtain that knowledge anyway.
All that's to say: if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options (i.e. a career) then proctored exams make sense. But if higher education is just for learning, it's stupid to put all this gatekeeping around it--that simply closes doors to interested learners, while allowing people who can "college" well to thrive without really learning. Let the cheaters cheat--they're only hurting their own learning--and I think it's often because you're forcing them to take some gen-ed thing that isn't useful knowledge to them (I'm looking at you, calculus--why was I forced to take 4 semesters of calc, when I always knew that the prob and stat classes I took as electives were more useful?).
>As a middle-aged man returning to school to switch careers, my entire reason for going to school is to learn
indeed, i have never had a single issue with any of my "mature" students (we classify anyone 25+ as a mature student).
>But if higher education is just for learning, it's stupid to put all this gatekeeping around it--that simply closes doors to interested learners, while allowing people who can "college" well to thrive without really learning.
having an exam proctor is not a gatekeeping mechanism, though. nothing about the curriculum, grading, or any of the important bits are changed.
>Let the cheaters cheat--they're only hurting their own learning
this is not true, in my experience. students are not happy if they suspect or know someone cheated and received a higher grade than them. its unfair and demotivating.
>I think it's often because you're forcing them to take some gen-ed thing that isn't useful knowledge to them
i agree with this. i have tried many times (unsuccessfully) to reduce the number of gen-ed credits my students need.
> if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options
From the institution's perspective--or at least an "elite" institution like Princeton--that is what it is. When they confer a degree, they're conferring something valuable, even if its main value is as a status marker and ticket to future options. They can't afford to take the attitude of "let the cheaters cheat, they'll only hurt themselves", no matter how true it is, because it would destroy their brand.
To people who have not grown up in extremely honor-bound societies and communities the idea sounds strange, yes. To those of us who did, however, events like this remind us of how fragile those systems are and that entry should be severely restricted.
are feelings more strongly felt more valid? the same things are happening at caltech - that is, just as much cheating - and they have an honor code. but they feel much stronger about their honor code, so it is more valid.
Princeton is a strange place. What on earth could be the objection to proctoring? I'd much rather have a proctor than have to narc on a classmate. And even then, the proctor just reports the matter to a student-run body? Wild.
> What on earth could be the objection to proctoring?
There is a unique pride in being part of a community built around honor. You see this on the Swiss metro and in small-town vegetable stalls. Unproctored exams force every student to weigh the value of their honor against a better grade. That's a personal moral reckoning that might be worth the entire degree.
That’s just the propaganda they sell during college visits. When I was at Caltech the honor code didn’t inspire any pride, because the only way anyone got through that course load was by “cheating”*. No one had any time for pride (GO BEAVERS!)
An honor code is an admission that your curriculum is so sadistic, not even cheating will help. Princeton just isn’t prestigious enough to keep up that charade.
* At Caltech the line between collaboration and cheating was whether you listed your collaborators or not. Unless the professor explicitly indicated that it was a solo exam, group work was implied. Proctoring explicitly forbidden so every exam was take home except a few where we needed lab access (professors and TAs were forbidden from attending).
When I was at MIT, most exams were in-class, but open book, open notes, open whatever you wanted to bring with you. And of course that just meant the exams were much harder, because they could assume you had all the necessary reference materials at hand and didn't have to conjure things up from memory. "Cheating" was pointless, because everyone else in the room was struggling just as hard as you were.
> That’s just the propaganda they sell during college visits
I'm speaking generally, not just about colleges. If you've never been in a high-trust commuity, I strongly recommend travelling to find one. It's about as mind blowing as transiting from one such community to a low-trust, high-cynicism one.
Can you give examples of what you consider to be high trust communities? Without specifics it’s hard to calibrate and figure out whether we‘re talking past each other.
I spent two seasons working with the SPCC Icefall Doctors who put up the infrastructure to cross the Khumbu Icefall each year for Everest climbers so I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what a high trust community looks like (the Nepalese guiding community on Everest). Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen what happens when the situation quickly turns dire, but I’m skeptical that there’s anything special about high trust communities other than a higher baseline of morale
This is an unbelievably pretentious take that sounds like it's coming from someone who is either lying or was oblivious to the cheating that was going on around them.
Im surprised to hear that. I went to Caltech for my postgrad and never collaborated on an test, and it would have never ocurre me to do so (and no, the professor didn’t have to explicitly say they collaboration was not allowed. It was just the standard honor code).
We all suspected of people that didn’t adhere to the honor code and it was frowned upon, and they could have faced repercussions if anyone had reported them.
I did ChemE for undergrad and aerospace focused on systems engineering for postgrad so that colored my experience a bit. The former was brutal and the latter naturally collaborative with a bunch of projects, so we all worked together.
The postgrad continuum mechanics class (I think taught by the geophysics department?) was the biggest exception so I’m betting there’s quite a bit of variance among fields.
I don’t doubt there’s academic fraud (living in the dorm my first year wiped away any illusion) but within my major it didn’t end well.
The article says that according to a survey of Princeton seniors from 2025, 29.9% admitted to cheating on an assignment and 44.6% admitted to knowing of cheating that they chose not to report. I guess they could continue acting as if they were a community built around honor, but when they have been empirically proven to not be honorable I think acknowledging this reality is the more practical solution.
I assume they are referring to systems like TPG in Geneva. Basically you buy a pass and when you get on an off a bus or street car there is no checking of payment it is just assumed everyone is "honoring" the agreement to pay. Every once and a while transit cops will board and check that everyone has a pass/has paid somehow and if you get caught not paying it can affect your ability to rent housing etc.
This is insane, but I guess it fits the Swiss (and Geneva more specifically) quite well. And before anyone starts babbling here about the Swiss's rectitude, Geneva itself is host to this giant international money-laundering abomination:
> Geneva Freeport (French: Ports Francs et Entrepôts de Genève SA) is a warehouse complex in Geneva, Switzerland, for the storage of art and other valuables and collectibles. It is the world's oldest and largest freeport facility, and the one with the most artworks, with 40% of its collection being art with an estimated value of US$100 billion
But yeah, not pay the tram ticket once or twice and suddenly you're not worthy of renting in that shithole called Geneva, meanwhile the city itself launders hundreds of billions of dollars.
It's incredibly common all over Europe, not just Switzerland. Not only the metros but the trams and even buses often rely on this system where there's no turnstile or barrier, you just walk in.
Not sure it's about being a high trust society or not, there's frequent inspections where they block the doors, and you get a hefty fine if you're caught without a valid ticket. I certainly wouldn't call Prague or Rome or Dublin high trust societies on par with a Swiss city.
I specifically called out two non-Ivy examples. Humans are humans. And one of those capacities is for behaving with honor. The enemy of honor, it turns out, isn't dishonor, but cynicism. (It isn't surprising that the dominant emotion on a Silicon Valley board towards an honor system is scorn.)
No argument there. Tbf given my professional and personal background, I automatically assume the worst in all people so even though I never abused honor codes (and honestly never had the need to anyhow because I liked the classes I took with one as they tend to be the kinds of classes where professors and teacher staff are the most engaged) I think it is almost impossible to enforce one in classes beyond 30 students, because anonymity does beget some amount of bad behavior.
I came to this country as an immigrant and one of the first memories I have was walking to the gas station to get the Sunday paper for my host father. I remember opening up the door and seeing tens of Sunday papers and was taken aback thinking how can this be, wouldn't someone just put in a quarter and take ALL of the Sunday papers home with her/him. In today's society (and especially if we are talking Princeton-like places) I do not believe honor-anything "works" anymore and am wondering just how small a place needs to be where this exists today...
just as a small recent-ish example, I live in a white-collar affluent area and this Halloween we took our daughter to her friend's neighborhood but left a dish full of candy outside with a sign to take a couple. we have a camera outside and the very first "group" of 3 kids (with two adults) that came took all of the candy that was there...
Princeton was that way in my lifetime (and I'm not that old : ) - corruption is not inevitable nor should honor be considered some sort of utopian dream.
I'm not sure. Most HNers appear to be in their late 30s to early 40s, which is a massive generation gap.
Classes and incentive structures have changed for people who graduated in the early 2010s compared to the late 1990s or early 2000s and neither would understand students who graduate in the mid-late 2020s.
Right, but there’s really only two directions you can go.
1. Install a culture of honour/virtue/accountability. Rely on duty and moral justice to keep the majority in-line.
2. An arms race to prevent ever more sophisticated methods of cheating, and the reduction in human dignity this implies. (E.g. the proctor must follow you into the toilet).
We all want the systems to be fair and just; but we also all want to be treated with dignity. No easy answers.
Some schools love to pride themselves on their students' integrity. They don't proctor because they think their students don't cheat and can be trusted. I don't know about Princeton but a college my family attended had stats showing no difference between test scores in proctored vs. unproctored exams. That was before LLMs would have made it so easy to cheat. Maybe that school has changed its policy as well.
As someone who has attended this kind of program, it's because some students will cheat and view proctoring as an annoyance.
Imo it's both on the students (plenty of students are optimizing just to get a class out of the way to do more interesting stuff) and the programs (some classes just aren't up-to-date or are rightfully viewed as busywork).
Personally, I found courses that were output heavy and regurgitation light tended to be the most successful from an honor code perspective - you can't cheat your way out of "learning by doing" when you are held accountable for the output (eg. A research grade paper or implementing a fully functional Linux kernel).
Sadly, even at Ivies most lower div classes are just rote memorization because class sizes would be massive for plenty of core classes (100-500 students for some classes).
I've sat in classes where people at my table genuinely took pictures of the exam while the professor's back was turned (being kind to us and giving us useful information on the board) and uploaded the entire exam to the Gemini app.
Cheating is all around disheartening and is now incredibly easy with all the free multi-modal models around. Real active proctoring is needed and devices need to be confiscated during exams. This is common practice in many other countries.
That’s pretty sad. Even sadder is that those people will hardly even feel it to be cheating because they’re now using AI for absolutely everything and so suddenly contented with a situation where it can’t be used they still can’t help but use it. Not a good sign.
Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting [1] and unprecedented corruption and criminality among our national leaders, it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.
The fish rots from the head. It's a sucker's game to aspire to selflessly serve the greater good when the most powerful people in the land are brazenly corrupt pedophiles. In other words: monkey see, monkey do.
Yes, and: the rot started long ago, this is just what it looks like when it goes unchecked. To quote Mencius:
Mencius went to see King Hui of Liang.
The king said, “Venerable sir, since you have not counted it far to come here, may I presume that you are provided with counsels to profit my kingdom?”
Mencius replied, “Why must Your Majesty use that word ‘profit’? What I am provided with are counsels to benevolence and righteousness, and these are my only topics.
If Your Majesty say, ‘What is to be done to profit my kingdom?’ the great officers will say, ‘What is to be done to profit our families?’ and the inferior officers and common people will say, ‘What is to be done to profit our persons?’ Superiors and inferiors will try to snatch this profit one from another, and the kingdom will be endangered.”
The old adage that the people elect the governance they deserve; comes to mind. The concepts of Virtue, Honour, Duty, and Justice have been declining in the West over a very long period (this is not a US specific thing). The rotting head reflects the rotting society.
> It's a sucker's game to aspire to selflessly serve the greater good when the most powerful people in the land are brazenly corrupt
You don’t act honourably because that will “get you ahead”. You act honourably because it is right.
You don't need "virtue", "honour", and "duty" to have NOT have voted the way people did. It is plain to see which chosen leader will torch the nation and which will not, regardless of people's distaste for the establishment politicians.
It is worse than self interest. It is brazen ignorance.
> You don’t act honourably because that will “get you ahead”. You act honourably because it is right.
As much as I would like to believe that’s true I don’t think it is.
You act honourably because society incentivises you to. To act dishonourably is to be disadvantaged, to be shamed, to be cast out. That is the part that’s missing today.
I see where you’re coming from, but something about this framing bothers me.
I think acting honorably has to come from within. It’s something that people need to do regardless of rewards or incentives. Now, how we create a culture that actually does so… that has to come from society. But, imo, if people only act honorably because they’re rewarded for it, and they don’t when no one is looking… that’s not acting honorably at all.
You can both be right. I live in a high trust society (Japan), but was born elsewhere. When I first came here, there were times I had to suppress my instinct to take opportunistic advantage. That was intrinsic motivation.
Later, I had adapted to the culture around me. Such instincts rarely arise as it became extrinsic.
The brazenly corrupt also own the vast media ecosystem that can help swing elections. Should we all know better? Probably. But they control the education system too, so…
Hard to say for certain. Though I do think it goes both ways. People at the bottom influence culture from bottom up, folks at the top from the top down.
If we flip the snake so it goes along the political spectrum, with the biting ends being extremists, I suppose the fish does rot from the heads. Top-down versus bottom-up is a more-complicated situation, and I suspect it's closer to turbulence than anything monotonic.
It really doesn’t. Trump wouldn’t survive election if the electorate didn’t seek, or at least tolerate whatever the hell you can call that. Americans will conveniently point fingers at him (as is their political tradition) but he’s a consequence of a much deeper disease.
Yeah I think Reagan's reforms of the antitrust laws, and the subsequent fall of the Soviet union are probably some of the first dominoes toward the new gilded age.
The lack of competition from the Soviets is probably one of the bigger systemic causes. The cold war in no small part a war for hearts and minds in the democratic world. It was existentially important that the west believed in America, both the US itself and its allies. As long as the Soviets were around as existence proof for an alternate world order, the US needed at least visibly have its shit in order.
If today's clown fiesta had unfolded 50 years ago, well comrade, сегодня мы все говорили бы по-русски.
It's a nice saying, but the "head" changes every 4-8 years and this is a problem that has gotten worse over decades. Sometimes the rot doesn't start from the head.
Everyone has an anecdote of the immigrant they know who's a much better "American" in their values. The same for anecdotes of the people with the least American values being home grown and inbred
I've known a lot of people who justify crimes like shoplifting by the fact that these corporations have stolen from them (and not in some abstract way, often literal wage theft) and felt like the social contract was already broken. And it's not like the leaders at the large corporations I've worked at generally seem to care about their employees or customers (I would describe most places I worked at as, at best, amoral. I've heard "well, if we didn't do it some other less ethical company would" too many times).
Edit: not that I'm pro-shoplifting, it's that the article talks about them breaking the "social contract" (though the article is more of a reality show-esque piece as it's a opinions writer beefing with Twitch streamers and doesn't talk to any people actually shoplifting).
Chomsky called corporations legal psychopaths in the documentary "The Corporation". He was right.
If companies can engage in terrible illegal behavior and then only pay 10% of profit as a fine, so can I.
If that means I cancel all streaming services, help friends also cancel streaming services, set up a Jellyfin/Navidrome box and grab everything, I do not give one fuck. Hell, the AI companies grabbed Annas Archive and Libgen. Why not me?
So, yeah. I wouldnt steal from fellow humans. I value humans. But companies and corporate "property"? <SPIT>
> Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting [1]
Hasan Piker (one of the people in that link) is a streamer who got popular for extremist takes and controversy. He's just doing what he does to stay famous in that interview. The other person is a writer for The New Yorker who apparently enjoys controversy too.
This interview isn't representative of anything other than two people trying to be edgy because they want their interview to go viral.
Hasan piker has extremely bland and milquetoast takes compared to most of the left. He's just the one sold to boomers as a terrorist. But any sane country would see him as a moderate (moderating between "anarchy" and the insanity of two identical corporate parties beholden to israel)
I mean, given that belief in moral decline is essentially based on illusory perceptions anyway[1], it's not too surprising that someone handwringing about it would also hallucinate connections between two disparate phenomena they opted to characterize as examples of such.
If you opt to habitually rationalize human behavior in a manner that is detached from concern with nuance or driving forces then some amount of reality denial is probably inevitable
> it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.
Are unsupervised examinations common in the US? Or is this, in fact, simply one institution coming in to line with common US national and international practice?
This is not common in an in-person setting -- nearly "unheard of" outside of elite schools or particular faculty at particular programs. So it is the latter
Idk about corruption, but the shoplifting trend has come from corporate america's wholesale looting of the country. The social contract was abandoned many decades ago.
“But what about the argument that if everyone just starts stealing wantonly,” Spiegelman replies, “Whole Foods will eventually raise the prices?”
“Yeah, chaos,” Piker says. “Full chaos. Let’s go.”
“I kind of am inclined toward this,” Tolentino adds. “Everyone, try it. See what happens.”
Personal shoppers for everyone! Point at what you want or add it on an app. Eventually would take force/fraud/violence to shoplift (hey I said EVENTUALLY!) :)
Source: gas station snack acquisition after 10pm in some USA urban areas, plus stories from abroad
Isn't that how stores used to work, before store owners decided it'd be cheaper to just let shoppers bring up a basket of goods? You'd go up to the shopkeeper behind the counter with a list, they'd get it all for you?
> in some left-wing corners of the commentariat, is out; flagrant disregard of the social contract is in.
Interesting that this is posed as the American left disregarding the social contract. I think you could make a pretty good case that the American right disregarded the social contract first in electing an extremely destructive pedophile who starts wars for reasons that can't even be articulated, pardons war criminals, engages in blatant nepotism enriching his family to the tune of billions at taxpayer's expense, large-scale fraud including being convicted of felony, adjudicated rapist, and a list of social contract violations going on for about 300 more pages that I'd be here all day typing out. And once the social contract is gone, it would be pretty weird to expect the other side to continue abiding by the terms. I don't personally make a habit of binding myself to one-sided contracts that impose no obligations on the other party.
>Interesting that this is posed as the American left disregarding the social contract.
Yeah no kidding, where's the commentary on the "right-wing corners" that are rolling coal, "owning the libs", storming the Capitol, denying vaccine science and refusing to wear masks during a pandemic etc., and the consideration of whether this posture is a frustrated response to that.
Also the right wing love to ignore every single bit of their own crimes.
It's like the idea that those that voted for Trump have never committed misdemeanors cannot even be discussed, when the actual crime statistics show that yea, they are just as apt to load up the steaks and walk out of the store.
But I will say they've done a damned good job controlling the conversation so it's not brought up in the first place.
To be clear, I do not live in America. Not every place in the world has wantonly abandoned the social contract.
Everything changes when people no longer feel bound to it, so it's an outcome you should rather desire to avoid. Some examples are the shoplifting mentioned in the article, Luigi Mangione, or the guy who threw molotovs at Altman's mansion. The justice system is a mutual agreement to forsake violence owing to the belief that conflicts and grievances can be mediated in a peaceful manner. If that belief dies, if people believe the justice system and government can not be trusted to deliver justice to violators of the social contract and compensation to the wronged, then people will take matters into their own hands by any means necessary. It is not a pretty state of affairs, but perhaps the people who initially disregarded the contract might've considered that before disposing of it.
The US justice system has always existed to benefit the rich and or majority of the time. I mean, really American history is filled with example where those in power ignored the less powerful below them and social unrest broke out. Every once in a while a rich person got blasted for the absolute unethical behavior they were engaged in.
Again, that is nothing new.
What is new is media and how people are subjected to this. There is no such thing as a local problem any longer. Anything at anytime can get shown to the entire world even if it's not real. So suddenly what would be an issue has thousands to millions of people talking about it. Unlike old media where they had some semblance of decorum, you get groups saying the most outrageous shit in an attempt to whip up crowds, it's even better when we find out later they've been paid off by foreign nationals and are acting like agents.
> Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting
It's the K-shaped economy. Those not participating in the upsides are electing to either not participate in the system at all or to destroy it. Most people think Luigi Mangione is a hero.
We had a good post-WWII run. We had factories, then globalization. Massive growth for all economic backgrounds for several generations. But the world caught up. Now the average worker has to compete against their increasingly competent and economically enabled peers around the globe. Costs for everything are rising.
We used to have a super sized Big Mac economy propped up by the fact that America was (relatively) peerless. The worker saw so much upside. Now they don't even get free refills, so to speak.
I'm hoping the AI boom helps bring down the cost of goods without putting people out of work. If it goes the other way, I think we might be heading for 1790's France.
Given that UHC started approving lots of procedures and drugs after the assassination shows that their medical insurance mass fraud did happen and paid off... And they quit it.
And then they were sued by shareholders for approving said procedures. Boo fucking hoo the shareholders lost a buck.
Note that insurance fraud ALWAYS targets the individual policyholder, and NEVER the insurance company.
If Luigi did it, then he should be significantly credited for a massive harm reduction by using violence to ensure less fraud perpetrated by UHC.
The US government wouldnt do their fucking job (investigation amd criminal charges of insurance fraud). So a citizen had to.
Are they being honest? Did Princeton students not need proctoring in the past because the had no means to cheat, or they both maintained some honor, and fear of the institution.
Moral code is downstream from culture and not every culture sees cheating as a moral failing.
As Princeton's demo skewed hard into a more international student body, the underlying cultural assumptions have shifted.
The Christian extension of the Ninth Commandment from not bearing false witness to a blanket ban on lying is unique. Islam has explicit exceptions through Taqiyya, Hinduism gets nuanced with dharma and adharma, Buddhism sees it as one of the ten unwholesome actions, ...
WASPs built and defined Princeton, but that is long over.
It is rather disappointing to see a take as unsubtle as "white people are pure and honest God-fearing Christians and Asians are dirty heathens with no concept of morality" on this site.
No, it is culture, not race. A friend of mine (half asian, half white) and by happenstance devot christian got his graduate degree at a top 3 school in the US, and he was shocked the international student brazenness in cheating. He reported it and it was brushed under the rug, and this severely disillusioned my friend. Every professor I know reports this cultural difference.
And obviously we see it with SDE interivews with 1point3acres and the other "interview study" sites and AI tools.
Nobody said that. Yes, Princeton was founded by Presbyterians and that was a huge influence on ethical norms there. But most of the white people at Princeton aren't Calvinists either, and any that are would tell you that literally nobody is pure and honest.
Do you have any data to support your disappointment? There seems to be data supporting the GP's observation, which is different than your crude strawman.
It's not unreasonable to look for fire when you smell smoke.
"A 2016 study of more than 100 UK universities by The Times found that non-EU students were four times more likely to be caught cheating than UK and EU students. In the US, they were found to be five times as likely to be caught cheating than their local peers, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 14 leading US colleges."
https://studyinternational.com/news/the-complex-problem-of-a...
"Public universities in the U.S. recorded 5.1 reports of alleged cheating for every 100 international students, versus one report per 100 domestic students, in a Wall Street Journal analysis"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-...
In 2015, 4,540 international students were enrolled at Iowa. Of those, 2,797 were from China. That’s 9 percent of the school’s student body. Most or all of the students accused of cheating are Chinese nationals.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-...
Moral acceptance of petty theft always increases with inequality. When the poor take from the rich, people don't care as much. The poorer the thief and the richer the victim, the less people care. Go far enough, and people view the thief as a Robin Hood-style hero.
Given that we're at a point in American history where inequality is quite extreme, I don't think it's fair to compare shoplifting to the corruption of the ruling class that is largely responsible for the current levels of inequality in the first place.
To be quite frank, under current conditions, it is a moral failure to see fault with impoverished people for stealing what they need to survive, not the other way around.
My types? The person I was responding to claims that if I have a problem with someone shoplifting alcohol and condoms from Walgreens, then it's a moral failing on my part. I responded because I found that absurd. For the record, I do not condone managers editing timecards.
> If a suspected Honor Code violation occurs, proctors will document their observations and submit a report to the student-run Honor Committee, where they may later testify under the same standards used for other witnesses.
is this so the rich kids that have parents who pay for parts of the school can still get a pass?
> so the rich kids that have parents who pay for parts of the school can still get a pass?
It's Princeton. They're given due process, not administrative fiat. Also, on what planet does having "parents who pay for parts of the school" swing a student (versus administrator) run process?
Seems unlikely the student-run honor committee decision would be immune to being 'reviewed' or 'considered' by faculty. Why would they cede that power?
I was a TA at Princeton ~5 years ago, and I had forgotten about the honor code until reading this. Yes it's true, we did not proctor exams, and students seemed to take pride in it. On every test, you got the names/signatures of those sitting next to you. But also, I had a student who was accused of not putting his pencil down when the test had concluded, and the bureaucratic process to fight the accusation was so crippling that they had to take a semester of leave anyway. So I don't see harm in tearing it down.
The technical ability for the student to cheat in the present day is unprecedented.
For exams in most subjects, the cellular phone is held in the lap. The student needs only briefly expose the exam page to the camera of the phone: immediate photograph of the page, ingestion of the page by an artificial intelligence, and then: the student flips the page to view the side exposed to the camera, and glances down to see the answer on the telephone.
I’m sort of surprised that they’re not banned already; dating myself but when I was at Uni in the late 2000s they were banned then. Despite probably not being very useful for cheating on nascent 3G!
Could it be non-proctoring has served Princeton by inflating grades due to some cheating, but only now have cheating become rampant enough that it must be curtailed to destroy the reputation entirely?
I honestly think it's that. I've seen it before at other private schools, where someone is caught cheating and let off with very minor consequences. Private high schools were hiding it from colleges too.
I wonder to what extent this is due to the changing roles of university. I would guess 133 years ago university was mostly upper class folks trying to better their minds, and less people wanting a degree to open up a job. Much more incentive to cheat if you just care about the piece of paper at the end.
Maybe I haven't scrolled down far enough, but gut feeling is telling me that a lot of the rise in cheating is coming from international (read: chinese) students. Plenty of stories and personal experience of cheating rings. I tried to get into one just to see what was going on, but even though I looked the part I couldn't talk the talk.
The numbers don't play out because international chinese students only make up 5-7% (maybe less) of the undergraduate student body. Self-reported cheating frequencies are much higher.
So now I finally understand why Americans use the expression "proctored exams". Because not all exams are proctored.
Here in Spain, we don't have an equivalent expression because there is no such thing as an unproctored exam. The idea of being proctored is already included in the word "exam".
Difficult to imagine that people were not using phones to search for stuff while taking an exam. I can understand this being the case 18 years ago. But since the iPhone, how was honor still a thing?
I would argue that the student behavior - ~30% admitting to cheating on academic work - reflects the value system shown by those holding positions/stature the students aspire to.
It is a combination of FOMO (everyone else is doing it, I must also to not fall behind) similar to that which drives hype adoption, combined with a perception that moral behavior grows optional in proportion with wealth or power. The latter is empirically evident in how American society has addressed moral failures of wealthy/powerful leaders (i.e. crimes without punishment)
Comments express surprise that this honor code has been in place. Many schools have similar honor codes.
Despite HN trendiness, SV and business world advocacy of 'animal instincts', and current cultural trends, humans are generally honest and honorable - obviously people in many places have thought that. It's good news, though many will resist it because, I think, it violates the anarcho-libertarian norms that are fundamental to these cultural trends (i.e., arguing that corruption is inevitable, human nature, etc.).
Nah, it's just that I went to college and saw cheating. When an assignment was take-home, people were forming cheating rings, but because they wanted an upper hand but because they were afraid others were doing the same. I saw even some top-notch students cheat a little bit, cause they wanted 4.00 not 3.95.
As a non-cheater, I didn't want draconian measures to catch cheating, just wanted there to be real consequences when someone was caught. I didn't need 4.00, but what if I did?
Chegg was a $15B company before AI came out. I promise that wasn't because it was the best platform to learn the material.
I agree that humans are generally honorable for things with low stakes. Consider our cultural view of politicians for a non-SV example of where we fully expect high stakes to lead to selfish and dishonorable actions.
> Despite HN trendiness, SV and business world advocacy of 'animal instincts', and current cultural trends, humans are generally honest and honorable
I personally believe this (that people are generally honest and good). BUT, the numbers don't lie: 30% of Princeton students admit to having cheated on an exam. This is a "your house is on fire" moment. An honor code has has to be enforced, and that is apparently not happening at Princeton. Frankly, as someone working at a school that also has an honor code (most do, in my experience), that is where the problem lies: if you turn a blind eye to violators, it sends the message to everyone that the honor code is just words, it doesn't mean anything.
A WASP ethical framework cannot survive either the extirpation of WASPs from the student body or the transformation of the education system into a high stakes mandarin style death struggle.
Sorry, can you state your hypothesis clearly here? You are saying Princeton would not need to make this change if it admitted only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants?
huh, i had no idea princeton specifically disallowed proctors, and instead relied on an honor system. seems... like a poorly thought out system, especially given:
"29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report."
crazier is the people protesting by saying: “students should behave honorably, and that faculty and students should trust each other given the 1893 Honor Code compact.”. obviously that isnt happening if 1/3rd of the student body has admitted to cheating (meaning that the real percent of cheating is even higher).
A couple of my friends teach university classes. Mostly undergrad. I get to hear some of their interesting stories when we game together.
My impression is that there was a sharp shift around COVID. Doing classes over Zoom with a talking head broke the connection they had with their professors and other students. College felt closer to a video game operated through your screen than a community.
When I was in college not all that long ago, cheating was a scandalous thing. I knew a friend of a friend who cheated on an exam with some tricks and it resulted in suspension for a semester. There were rumors of someone hiring a service to write their papers for them and it was a wild story.
Now students have ChatGPT to write their papers and they've been practicing how to use cell phones without the teacher noticing for 10 years before getting to college. Combine that with social media grumblings about how college is "just a piece of paper" and doomerism about how they're never going to get a job or buy a house and cheating starts to look the only rational option to some.
The pattern is not contained to college. Every time the topic of cheating comes up on Hacker News there are more comments defending cheating than I would expect from this crowd. The usual justification is that the system is broken in a hand-wavey way and therefore nobody can be blamed for cheating.
If AI is going to steal all white collar work - why use AI to get a degree to do white collar work, paying both the AI and the college for it? Wild times.
For the legacy clout of the big college name?
As someone who went there (albeit many decades ago) I can tell you FWIW when I was there folks took it seriously. I literally knew of no one who ever cheated on an exam. And I'm pretty sure that anyone I knew who observed cheating would have taken it seriously enough to bring it to the process. It was pretty much a fixture of how students thought about things. So it worked (near as I could tell) back then.
But institutions take awhile to adjust to new realities, and it while looks like Princeton may have been a bit behind the curve on this one, I can understand why they were reluctant to abandon this practice. Living in an honest community cuts a lot of extra effort out - crap that you don't even have to think about. Princeton will be a less productive place to learn going forward.
I'd wager the main difference between "many decades ago" and mid 2000s onwards is the perceived stakes of college. My time in college (around that time) was perceived by most as "make or break": either you did well in college, or you were doomed to a sub-standard lifestyle (not to mention the debt of college tuition).
Obviously, whether this was true or not is a whole discussion, but the attitude did lead to a lot more cheating (due to desperation) than I'd imagine past generations had.
A midterm being worth 25-33% of a grade, plus some classes only being offered in fall or spring semesters meant a bad test could roughly cost you tens of thousands of dollars, since the next time you could retake the class would be in a year, and it often was a prerequisite for another class. It just leads to an environment that encourages desperate "survival" behavior.
Which is bad, someone who cheats on a test or someone who rats out their friend for cheating on a test?
It really is a cultural thing, and that sort of culture is primarily passed down from upperclassmen to underclassmen. I went to a different college with an honor code (Harvey Mudd) and when I graduated in 2019 it was still doing relatively well, but from what I've heard COVID really killed students caring about / adhering to the honor code.
> Which is bad, someone who cheats on a test or someone who rats out their friend for cheating on a test?
Obviously the first. How is this even a question?
> Obviously the first.
The more usual perspective would be that they're both bad.
Only in certain fucked up moral systems. Though I guess Confucianism would be one of those:
>The Duke of She said to Confucius, “Among my people there is one we call ‘Upright Gong.’ When his father stole a sheep, he reported him to the authorities.”
>Confucius replied, “Among my people, those who we consider ‘upright’ are different from this: fathers cover up for their sons, and sons cover up for their fathers. ‘Uprightness’ is to be found in this.”
-from the Confucian Analects
I wasn't at Princeton, but I remember blatant cheating going on and 'study groups' in CS classes that were mere passing around of completed code. (1997-2001)
I'd asked them what they expected would happen when they tried to get jobs or landed one. Like how do you fake work? They just said all jobs are group-based like their study group. (Keep in mind they were soliciting my code as their group was struggling to find solutions to assignments.)
The answer is a one of them works at a grocery store as a cashier, another one I saw now manages a bagel store (didn't know all of them). A waste of time, money, and effort to get a CS degree then just not be able to use it.
Maybe he's happier managing a bagel store rather than dealing with Kubernetes.
the longer i stay, the more i think "amen to that".
...yeah, yeah, greener grass, i know.
The stats beg to differ. ⅓ admitted to cheating. Cheating was rampant at my uni and we also had an “honor code”
Bad argument. All countries have laws yet criminality rates varies a lot from country to country. It’s all about the culture.
"Culture" works by having a system that collectively punishes cheaters, so that people learn from their own (or others') experiences and internalize that cheating is bad and won't pay off in the long term.
That's how you get a culture against cheating. You ensure that cheating doesn't pay, and eventually people learn that cheating doesn't pay. The enforcement is part of the culture.
The accuracy of measuring criminality also varies, yet you seem to take it at face value that those stats are accurate.
O and one person’s anecdote is better? I’ll take the stat if we’re wagering (500 Princeton seniors).
El Salvadorians (from The country) would starkly disagree with you. It took a dictator and a martial state (no human rights) to end maras in less than five years. The culture is the same.
They just replaced the street gangs with a single state operated gang. El Salvadorians still have to live in fear for their lives, but it will be the government coming for them.
> El Salvadorians
Salvadorans.
recent stats.
Ok what do the old ones say?
And you will think less of the people who go there. 30% cheated!!
My guess is that the vast majority of those self-reported cases where relating to a take-home assignment (e.g., copying off a classmate's solution). Even without proctoring, you need to be a lot more brazen to cheat on an in-person exam.
The history of the Honor Code system might be instructive: https://universityarchives.princeton.edu/2015/01/i-pledge-my...
Exames were previously proctored, and it led to a "us vs them" mentality that meant students banded together to
The Honor Code system, and removing proctors was a way to route around that—it made all of the students responsible for catching cheaters and turned the "Students vs Faculty" mentality into a "Honor vs Cheaters" mentality among the students.
Unfortunately, it seems like the "Students vs Faculty" mentality has seen too much of a resurgence due to outside factors, and the Honor Code is no longer a match for the current climate. That's what the article is about
It's nothing crazy about it. Why do you study? To learn. The exams are there to benchmark your progress. If you cheat, everything falls apart for you.
It is possible that when the metric becomes the target(AKA Goodhart's law) cheating can be beneficial but this is failure of the institution because it means you are no longer there to learn.
>Why do you study? To learn.
mature students (25+, at my school) are indeed there to learn. the 18 year olds are mostly there because its what is expected of them, no more.
> 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report
What is it at other universities? I went to a big public school, and remember cheating being halfway rampant. The penalty, moreover, was never expulsion.
Public schools are public schools. They're more or less compulsory and are just meant to try and get you to a point where you can contribute meaningfully to the society.
Princeton is very much optional and is a school for future elites. They're supposed to produce CEOs, politicians, and Nobel prize winners. So the standards should be different.
Of course, expectations are a part of the problem. Many kids go to Princeton or Stanford or MIT because they had wealthy parents who really wanted their kids to go there. And many of these kids are mostly interested in computer games, weed, and the opposite sex. A combination of unmotivated students and high academic standards lead to predictable outcomes.
Public universities (what Americans call public schools in the context of higher education) are optional to the exact same degree as private ones. In other words they are all schools that you apply to.
They also produce more "elites" than "elite" schools do if you go by executives at F500 companies and politicians.
Are we going to pretend that Berkley, Michigan, UNC-CH, UVA etc. do not produce world class educations from world class people?
Anyone caught cheating at my university, especially if they lied about it, was expelled more or less immediately.
Pretty much my observation. Professors could give lenience and a warning by not reporting it, but if they reported it to Academic Affairs, the Provost would probably end up throwing them out.
One time, several people cheated on physics homework (apparently in a very obvious way), and the professor took fifteen minutes out of the next lecture to basically say "you know who you are, you got a zero, and if I see it again, I'm going straight to the Provost."
When I was at Rice a quarter century ago, I can honestly say everyone I knew took the honor system seriously.
Same. I knew exactly one student reprimanded for plagiarism in four years. The idea of cheating on a test was absurd.
I've heard that it's the same at <other elite private university I don't want to name>, and people cheat, to the point where non-cheaters are suspicious that it's just a method of grade inflation
The interesting thing is that cheating is much easier when done online. When I was a TA and we were in the process of moving quite a bit of the classes to online, we still mandated in person testing.
It was eye opening to find cheat sheets and other cheating materials obviously left behind by students. The majority of the stuff we'd find we either inaccurate and completely wrong. Like a half awake student copied something they thought was the right equation or solution, when in fact, it was for something completely different that wasn't on the test.
So I agree with your notion, but its one thing to try and cheat. Its a completely different one to do so successfully.
AIUI, these schools see their mission as training the next generation of leaders and elites. They aim for people with strong abilities, and moral character.
And, the way you guide youth to act in a certain way is by treating them that way. If you want them to be trustworthy, you trust them. This is not a totally fringe idea.
You can game theory it out and see that everyone gets to cheat and nobody reports is the best outcome for the group. Defectors must be punished in some way or perhaps the profs are not carrying through with punishments for cheaters.
Is it though if the value of the degree for the overall group is collectively diminished?
>If you want them to be trustworthy, you trust them.
sure, but it seems exceptionally silly to continue to blindly trust them when a sizeable portion of them admit to not being trustworthy
Most of us have done something stupid once in our lives. That does not mean we do stupid things all the time, nor does it mean that we didn't learn from the experience. The goal of school is to help immature young adults grow into mature ones.
>The goal of school is to help immature young adults grow into mature ones.
agreed!
however, having a proctor that stands in the classroom for your exam does not hinder the growth process, in my experience. (i teach, if thats worth anything to my statement)
Okay and they shouldn't cheat? Why do we always side with the better angels of the elites in America when the elites in America are the literal cause of our misery? If they can't handle having a proctor ensuring they aren't cheating, they're free to go to the local community college.
The worst people in society right now are immoral elites. Why would any elite be moral when it’s obvious that you get more by being immoral?
This has to be one of the most pretentious things I've ever read about post secondary education.
I'm completely flabbergasted to learn that an Ivy League holds students to a far different and much lower standard than I what I was held to at a regular university in Canada.
From now on I don't see how I can't be skeptical of the credentials of someone from Princeton knowing that their exams weren't proctored.
No, they frame their mission that way.
Clearly the actions were helpful for maintaining that illusion,
while also maintaining the illusion of academic excellence,
despite rigorous courses.
Seems like it's had the opposite effect.
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I think it really depends on how you view our high education system. As a middle-aged man returning to school to switch careers, my entire reason for going to school is to learn, and I'd never cheat because that would undermine my own goals. To me the purpose of school isn't the degree--I made an entire career already without one--it's to learn.
Students are at school for a lot of poorly-thought-out reasons: inertia, not knowing what else to do, because their parents made them go, etc. If they're not there to learn, you can't make them learn. No, not even by proctoring exams. The only purpose that achieves is to gatekeep.
And, gatekeeping for doctors and pilots is a good thing. We don't want to let just anyone become a doctor or pilot. But frankly, I don't give any shits about whether an AI programmer has made it through a gatekept degree. That stuff can be gatekept at other points--if they show up to work pretending and don't know anything, that will become obvious, and degrees maybe aren't the only or even best way to obtain that knowledge anyway.
All that's to say: if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options (i.e. a career) then proctored exams make sense. But if higher education is just for learning, it's stupid to put all this gatekeeping around it--that simply closes doors to interested learners, while allowing people who can "college" well to thrive without really learning. Let the cheaters cheat--they're only hurting their own learning--and I think it's often because you're forcing them to take some gen-ed thing that isn't useful knowledge to them (I'm looking at you, calculus--why was I forced to take 4 semesters of calc, when I always knew that the prob and stat classes I took as electives were more useful?).
>As a middle-aged man returning to school to switch careers, my entire reason for going to school is to learn
indeed, i have never had a single issue with any of my "mature" students (we classify anyone 25+ as a mature student).
>But if higher education is just for learning, it's stupid to put all this gatekeeping around it--that simply closes doors to interested learners, while allowing people who can "college" well to thrive without really learning.
having an exam proctor is not a gatekeeping mechanism, though. nothing about the curriculum, grading, or any of the important bits are changed.
>Let the cheaters cheat--they're only hurting their own learning
this is not true, in my experience. students are not happy if they suspect or know someone cheated and received a higher grade than them. its unfair and demotivating.
>I think it's often because you're forcing them to take some gen-ed thing that isn't useful knowledge to them
i agree with this. i have tried many times (unsuccessfully) to reduce the number of gen-ed credits my students need.
> if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options
From the institution's perspective--or at least an "elite" institution like Princeton--that is what it is. When they confer a degree, they're conferring something valuable, even if its main value is as a status marker and ticket to future options. They can't afford to take the attitude of "let the cheaters cheat, they'll only hurt themselves", no matter how true it is, because it would destroy their brand.
To people who have not grown up in extremely honor-bound societies and communities the idea sounds strange, yes. To those of us who did, however, events like this remind us of how fragile those systems are and that entry should be severely restricted.
are feelings more strongly felt more valid? the same things are happening at caltech - that is, just as much cheating - and they have an honor code. but they feel much stronger about their honor code, so it is more valid.
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Princeton is a strange place. What on earth could be the objection to proctoring? I'd much rather have a proctor than have to narc on a classmate. And even then, the proctor just reports the matter to a student-run body? Wild.
> What on earth could be the objection to proctoring?
There is a unique pride in being part of a community built around honor. You see this on the Swiss metro and in small-town vegetable stalls. Unproctored exams force every student to weigh the value of their honor against a better grade. That's a personal moral reckoning that might be worth the entire degree.
That’s just the propaganda they sell during college visits. When I was at Caltech the honor code didn’t inspire any pride, because the only way anyone got through that course load was by “cheating”*. No one had any time for pride (GO BEAVERS!)
An honor code is an admission that your curriculum is so sadistic, not even cheating will help. Princeton just isn’t prestigious enough to keep up that charade.
* At Caltech the line between collaboration and cheating was whether you listed your collaborators or not. Unless the professor explicitly indicated that it was a solo exam, group work was implied. Proctoring explicitly forbidden so every exam was take home except a few where we needed lab access (professors and TAs were forbidden from attending).
> every exam was take home
When I was at MIT, most exams were in-class, but open book, open notes, open whatever you wanted to bring with you. And of course that just meant the exams were much harder, because they could assume you had all the necessary reference materials at hand and didn't have to conjure things up from memory. "Cheating" was pointless, because everyone else in the room was struggling just as hard as you were.
> That’s just the propaganda they sell during college visits
I'm speaking generally, not just about colleges. If you've never been in a high-trust commuity, I strongly recommend travelling to find one. It's about as mind blowing as transiting from one such community to a low-trust, high-cynicism one.
Can you give examples of what you consider to be high trust communities? Without specifics it’s hard to calibrate and figure out whether we‘re talking past each other.
I spent two seasons working with the SPCC Icefall Doctors who put up the infrastructure to cross the Khumbu Icefall each year for Everest climbers so I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what a high trust community looks like (the Nepalese guiding community on Everest). Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen what happens when the situation quickly turns dire, but I’m skeptical that there’s anything special about high trust communities other than a higher baseline of morale
This is an unbelievably pretentious take that sounds like it's coming from someone who is either lying or was oblivious to the cheating that was going on around them.
Im surprised to hear that. I went to Caltech for my postgrad and never collaborated on an test, and it would have never ocurre me to do so (and no, the professor didn’t have to explicitly say they collaboration was not allowed. It was just the standard honor code).
We all suspected of people that didn’t adhere to the honor code and it was frowned upon, and they could have faced repercussions if anyone had reported them.
I did ChemE for undergrad and aerospace focused on systems engineering for postgrad so that colored my experience a bit. The former was brutal and the latter naturally collaborative with a bunch of projects, so we all worked together.
The postgrad continuum mechanics class (I think taught by the geophysics department?) was the biggest exception so I’m betting there’s quite a bit of variance among fields.
I don’t doubt there’s academic fraud (living in the dorm my first year wiped away any illusion) but within my major it didn’t end well.
The article says that according to a survey of Princeton seniors from 2025, 29.9% admitted to cheating on an assignment and 44.6% admitted to knowing of cheating that they chose not to report. I guess they could continue acting as if they were a community built around honor, but when they have been empirically proven to not be honorable I think acknowledging this reality is the more practical solution.
What is "Swiss metro"? Curious now.
I assume they are referring to systems like TPG in Geneva. Basically you buy a pass and when you get on an off a bus or street car there is no checking of payment it is just assumed everyone is "honoring" the agreement to pay. Every once and a while transit cops will board and check that everyone has a pass/has paid somehow and if you get caught not paying it can affect your ability to rent housing etc.
> it can affect your ability to rent housing
This is insane, but I guess it fits the Swiss (and Geneva more specifically) quite well. And before anyone starts babbling here about the Swiss's rectitude, Geneva itself is host to this giant international money-laundering abomination:
> Geneva Freeport (French: Ports Francs et Entrepôts de Genève SA) is a warehouse complex in Geneva, Switzerland, for the storage of art and other valuables and collectibles. It is the world's oldest and largest freeport facility, and the one with the most artworks, with 40% of its collection being art with an estimated value of US$100 billion
But yeah, not pay the tram ticket once or twice and suddenly you're not worthy of renting in that shithole called Geneva, meanwhile the city itself launders hundreds of billions of dollars.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Freeport
It's incredibly common all over Europe, not just Switzerland. Not only the metros but the trams and even buses often rely on this system where there's no turnstile or barrier, you just walk in.
Not sure it's about being a high trust society or not, there's frequent inspections where they block the doors, and you get a hefty fine if you're caught without a valid ticket. I certainly wouldn't call Prague or Rome or Dublin high trust societies on par with a Swiss city.
Could be https://www.myswitzerland.com/en-ch/experiences/metro-lausan...
You'd hope, but humans are humans - even if they attend an Ivy.
Some individuals have heady thoughts and morals like you mentioned. Others are using it as a checkbox.
> humans are humans - even if they attend an Ivy
I specifically called out two non-Ivy examples. Humans are humans. And one of those capacities is for behaving with honor. The enemy of honor, it turns out, isn't dishonor, but cynicism. (It isn't surprising that the dominant emotion on a Silicon Valley board towards an honor system is scorn.)
No argument there. Tbf given my professional and personal background, I automatically assume the worst in all people so even though I never abused honor codes (and honestly never had the need to anyhow because I liked the classes I took with one as they tend to be the kinds of classes where professors and teacher staff are the most engaged) I think it is almost impossible to enforce one in classes beyond 30 students, because anonymity does beget some amount of bad behavior.
> There is a unique pride in being part of a community built around honor.
It has been 100(s) of years since community like this existed, now this is utopia
I definitely still see honor system pay boxes in the USA. Maybe not in big cities, but outside of them.
Disc golf courses, fire wood piles, that day’s chicken eggs in a wooden box on the side of the road.
I came to this country as an immigrant and one of the first memories I have was walking to the gas station to get the Sunday paper for my host father. I remember opening up the door and seeing tens of Sunday papers and was taken aback thinking how can this be, wouldn't someone just put in a quarter and take ALL of the Sunday papers home with her/him. In today's society (and especially if we are talking Princeton-like places) I do not believe honor-anything "works" anymore and am wondering just how small a place needs to be where this exists today...
just as a small recent-ish example, I live in a white-collar affluent area and this Halloween we took our daughter to her friend's neighborhood but left a dish full of candy outside with a sign to take a couple. we have a camera outside and the very first "group" of 3 kids (with two adults) that came took all of the candy that was there...
Princeton was that way in my lifetime (and I'm not that old : ) - corruption is not inevitable nor should honor be considered some sort of utopian dream.
> I'm not that old
I'm not sure. Most HNers appear to be in their late 30s to early 40s, which is a massive generation gap.
Classes and incentive structures have changed for people who graduated in the early 2010s compared to the late 1990s or early 2000s and neither would understand students who graduate in the mid-late 2020s.
exactly this
All of that is sophistry in defense of fucking over those who choose not to cheat.
Right, but there’s really only two directions you can go.
1. Install a culture of honour/virtue/accountability. Rely on duty and moral justice to keep the majority in-line.
2. An arms race to prevent ever more sophisticated methods of cheating, and the reduction in human dignity this implies. (E.g. the proctor must follow you into the toilet).
We all want the systems to be fair and just; but we also all want to be treated with dignity. No easy answers.
Some schools love to pride themselves on their students' integrity. They don't proctor because they think their students don't cheat and can be trusted. I don't know about Princeton but a college my family attended had stats showing no difference between test scores in proctored vs. unproctored exams. That was before LLMs would have made it so easy to cheat. Maybe that school has changed its policy as well.
As someone who has attended this kind of program, it's because some students will cheat and view proctoring as an annoyance.
Imo it's both on the students (plenty of students are optimizing just to get a class out of the way to do more interesting stuff) and the programs (some classes just aren't up-to-date or are rightfully viewed as busywork).
Personally, I found courses that were output heavy and regurgitation light tended to be the most successful from an honor code perspective - you can't cheat your way out of "learning by doing" when you are held accountable for the output (eg. A research grade paper or implementing a fully functional Linux kernel).
Sadly, even at Ivies most lower div classes are just rote memorization because class sizes would be massive for plenty of core classes (100-500 students for some classes).
Stanford has this policy too. Students get livid when proctoring is proposed, even though cheating is rampant (afaict)
I've sat in classes where people at my table genuinely took pictures of the exam while the professor's back was turned (being kind to us and giving us useful information on the board) and uploaded the entire exam to the Gemini app.
Cheating is all around disheartening and is now incredibly easy with all the free multi-modal models around. Real active proctoring is needed and devices need to be confiscated during exams. This is common practice in many other countries.
I'm very interested in how this cheating is perceived by other students.
There is no peer pressure not to cheat?
Students aren't considered sketchy or jerky for cheating?
Being seen cheating has no adverse affect on their ability to date, to join group projects, to join student startups, etc.?
At least in my experience (MIT ’06) many of the people most comfortable gaming academics ended up in finance.
I've always felt that it was these kind of folks that caused the 2008 financial crisis
That’s pretty sad. Even sadder is that those people will hardly even feel it to be cheating because they’re now using AI for absolutely everything and so suddenly contented with a situation where it can’t be used they still can’t help but use it. Not a good sign.
Have a phones-free classroom. Problem solved.
Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting [1] and unprecedented corruption and criminality among our national leaders, it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/hasan-piker-jia-to...
The fish rots from the head. It's a sucker's game to aspire to selflessly serve the greater good when the most powerful people in the land are brazenly corrupt pedophiles. In other words: monkey see, monkey do.
Yes, and: the rot started long ago, this is just what it looks like when it goes unchecked. To quote Mencius:
Mencius went to see King Hui of Liang. The king said, “Venerable sir, since you have not counted it far to come here, may I presume that you are provided with counsels to profit my kingdom?”
Mencius replied, “Why must Your Majesty use that word ‘profit’? What I am provided with are counsels to benevolence and righteousness, and these are my only topics.
If Your Majesty say, ‘What is to be done to profit my kingdom?’ the great officers will say, ‘What is to be done to profit our families?’ and the inferior officers and common people will say, ‘What is to be done to profit our persons?’ Superiors and inferiors will try to snatch this profit one from another, and the kingdom will be endangered.”
> The fish rots from the head.
The old adage that the people elect the governance they deserve; comes to mind. The concepts of Virtue, Honour, Duty, and Justice have been declining in the West over a very long period (this is not a US specific thing). The rotting head reflects the rotting society.
> It's a sucker's game to aspire to selflessly serve the greater good when the most powerful people in the land are brazenly corrupt
You don’t act honourably because that will “get you ahead”. You act honourably because it is right.
You don't need "virtue", "honour", and "duty" to have NOT have voted the way people did. It is plain to see which chosen leader will torch the nation and which will not, regardless of people's distaste for the establishment politicians.
It is worse than self interest. It is brazen ignorance.
> You don’t act honourably because that will “get you ahead”. You act honourably because it is right.
As much as I would like to believe that’s true I don’t think it is.
You act honourably because society incentivises you to. To act dishonourably is to be disadvantaged, to be shamed, to be cast out. That is the part that’s missing today.
I see where you’re coming from, but something about this framing bothers me.
I think acting honorably has to come from within. It’s something that people need to do regardless of rewards or incentives. Now, how we create a culture that actually does so… that has to come from society. But, imo, if people only act honorably because they’re rewarded for it, and they don’t when no one is looking… that’s not acting honorably at all.
You can both be right. I live in a high trust society (Japan), but was born elsewhere. When I first came here, there were times I had to suppress my instinct to take opportunistic advantage. That was intrinsic motivation.
Later, I had adapted to the culture around me. Such instincts rarely arise as it became extrinsic.
> You act honourably because it is right.
Well, and because it's not typically fatal in very short order.
The problem comes in when honor makes you a target to erase by people more powerful than you. Being dead right gets you nowhere.
> fish rots from the head
Does it? Did it? We elected the "brazenly corrupt pedophiles."
This question seems complex and important enough to not be resolved with a truism.
The brazenly corrupt also own the vast media ecosystem that can help swing elections. Should we all know better? Probably. But they control the education system too, so…
Hard to say for certain. Though I do think it goes both ways. People at the bottom influence culture from bottom up, folks at the top from the top down.
> I do think it goes both ways
If we flip the snake so it goes along the political spectrum, with the biting ends being extremists, I suppose the fish does rot from the heads. Top-down versus bottom-up is a more-complicated situation, and I suspect it's closer to turbulence than anything monotonic.
It really doesn’t. Trump wouldn’t survive election if the electorate didn’t seek, or at least tolerate whatever the hell you can call that. Americans will conveniently point fingers at him (as is their political tradition) but he’s a consequence of a much deeper disease.
Trump was not the beginning of the decline, only the terminal symptom.
Yeah I think Reagan's reforms of the antitrust laws, and the subsequent fall of the Soviet union are probably some of the first dominoes toward the new gilded age.
The lack of competition from the Soviets is probably one of the bigger systemic causes. The cold war in no small part a war for hearts and minds in the democratic world. It was existentially important that the west believed in America, both the US itself and its allies. As long as the Soviets were around as existence proof for an alternate world order, the US needed at least visibly have its shit in order.
If today's clown fiesta had unfolded 50 years ago, well comrade, сегодня мы все говорили бы по-русски.
Terminal? We don't know if worse is yet to come.
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It's a nice saying, but the "head" changes every 4-8 years and this is a problem that has gotten worse over decades. Sometimes the rot doesn't start from the head.
Or it is a dilution of the culture through mass media, social media, and immigration from countries with different values.
Everyone has an anecdote of the immigrant they know who's a much better "American" in their values. The same for anecdotes of the people with the least American values being home grown and inbred
You cannot criticize immigration.
Not if your criticism is meant to scapegoat immigrants for homegrown American-made problems.
None of those corrupt leaders is from elsewhere. And native born americans have higher criminality then immigrants.
All of that corrupt leadership is celebrated by american americans who see themselves as true americans.
I've known a lot of people who justify crimes like shoplifting by the fact that these corporations have stolen from them (and not in some abstract way, often literal wage theft) and felt like the social contract was already broken. And it's not like the leaders at the large corporations I've worked at generally seem to care about their employees or customers (I would describe most places I worked at as, at best, amoral. I've heard "well, if we didn't do it some other less ethical company would" too many times).
Edit: not that I'm pro-shoplifting, it's that the article talks about them breaking the "social contract" (though the article is more of a reality show-esque piece as it's a opinions writer beefing with Twitch streamers and doesn't talk to any people actually shoplifting).
Literal wage theft is rampant, so yeah in some ways I understand why people would feel that way.
I’m still mad about a company I worked at over 12 years ago who stole from me and never paid my Super.
Justifying one's crime because other crime exists - isnot a winning position long term.
Corporations don’t follow or care about morals, and so their customers and workers begin to follow suit.
Chomsky called corporations legal psychopaths in the documentary "The Corporation". He was right.
If companies can engage in terrible illegal behavior and then only pay 10% of profit as a fine, so can I.
If that means I cancel all streaming services, help friends also cancel streaming services, set up a Jellyfin/Navidrome box and grab everything, I do not give one fuck. Hell, the AI companies grabbed Annas Archive and Libgen. Why not me?
So, yeah. I wouldnt steal from fellow humans. I value humans. But companies and corporate "property"? <SPIT>
> Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting [1]
Hasan Piker (one of the people in that link) is a streamer who got popular for extremist takes and controversy. He's just doing what he does to stay famous in that interview. The other person is a writer for The New Yorker who apparently enjoys controversy too.
This interview isn't representative of anything other than two people trying to be edgy because they want their interview to go viral.
Hasan piker has extremely bland and milquetoast takes compared to most of the left. He's just the one sold to boomers as a terrorist. But any sane country would see him as a moderate (moderating between "anarchy" and the insanity of two identical corporate parties beholden to israel)
This doesn't seem particularly related?
I mean, given that belief in moral decline is essentially based on illusory perceptions anyway[1], it's not too surprising that someone handwringing about it would also hallucinate connections between two disparate phenomena they opted to characterize as examples of such.
If you opt to habitually rationalize human behavior in a manner that is detached from concern with nuance or driving forces then some amount of reality denial is probably inevitable
[1] See e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x
Lack of honour, low trust, the breakdown of the social contract. Seems all related to me.
> it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.
Are unsupervised examinations common in the US? Or is this, in fact, simply one institution coming in to line with common US national and international practice?
This is not common in an in-person setting -- nearly "unheard of" outside of elite schools or particular faculty at particular programs. So it is the latter
It’s pretty common in WASP-y circles.
Idk about corruption, but the shoplifting trend has come from corporate america's wholesale looting of the country. The social contract was abandoned many decades ago.
People can still behave honorably despite all this. It's easy (and wrong) to justify someone's dishonorable behavior by pointing to the leaders.
Source: gas station snack acquisition after 10pm in some USA urban areas, plus stories from abroad
Isn't that how stores used to work, before store owners decided it'd be cheaper to just let shoppers bring up a basket of goods? You'd go up to the shopkeeper behind the counter with a list, they'd get it all for you?
> [...] it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.
Turning into what from where is the interesting part.
> in some left-wing corners of the commentariat, is out; flagrant disregard of the social contract is in.
Interesting that this is posed as the American left disregarding the social contract. I think you could make a pretty good case that the American right disregarded the social contract first in electing an extremely destructive pedophile who starts wars for reasons that can't even be articulated, pardons war criminals, engages in blatant nepotism enriching his family to the tune of billions at taxpayer's expense, large-scale fraud including being convicted of felony, adjudicated rapist, and a list of social contract violations going on for about 300 more pages that I'd be here all day typing out. And once the social contract is gone, it would be pretty weird to expect the other side to continue abiding by the terms. I don't personally make a habit of binding myself to one-sided contracts that impose no obligations on the other party.
>Interesting that this is posed as the American left disregarding the social contract.
Yeah no kidding, where's the commentary on the "right-wing corners" that are rolling coal, "owning the libs", storming the Capitol, denying vaccine science and refusing to wear masks during a pandemic etc., and the consideration of whether this posture is a frustrated response to that.
Also the right wing love to ignore every single bit of their own crimes.
It's like the idea that those that voted for Trump have never committed misdemeanors cannot even be discussed, when the actual crime statistics show that yea, they are just as apt to load up the steaks and walk out of the store.
But I will say they've done a damned good job controlling the conversation so it's not brought up in the first place.
I can assure you with 100% certainty that the American Right did not elect Bill Clinton.
If you can’t understand the difference, I’m honestly impressed you remembered your password.
I'm no fan of Clinton, but pretending that he's even remotely as bad as Trump only confirms how leftists see people on the right.
Is this an announcement of engaging in these behaviors?
What will change once you no longer feel bound to this contract?
To be clear, I do not live in America. Not every place in the world has wantonly abandoned the social contract.
Everything changes when people no longer feel bound to it, so it's an outcome you should rather desire to avoid. Some examples are the shoplifting mentioned in the article, Luigi Mangione, or the guy who threw molotovs at Altman's mansion. The justice system is a mutual agreement to forsake violence owing to the belief that conflicts and grievances can be mediated in a peaceful manner. If that belief dies, if people believe the justice system and government can not be trusted to deliver justice to violators of the social contract and compensation to the wronged, then people will take matters into their own hands by any means necessary. It is not a pretty state of affairs, but perhaps the people who initially disregarded the contract might've considered that before disposing of it.
There are a few slight problems here.
The US justice system has always existed to benefit the rich and or majority of the time. I mean, really American history is filled with example where those in power ignored the less powerful below them and social unrest broke out. Every once in a while a rich person got blasted for the absolute unethical behavior they were engaged in.
Again, that is nothing new.
What is new is media and how people are subjected to this. There is no such thing as a local problem any longer. Anything at anytime can get shown to the entire world even if it's not real. So suddenly what would be an issue has thousands to millions of people talking about it. Unlike old media where they had some semblance of decorum, you get groups saying the most outrageous shit in an attempt to whip up crowds, it's even better when we find out later they've been paid off by foreign nationals and are acting like agents.
> Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting
It's the K-shaped economy. Those not participating in the upsides are electing to either not participate in the system at all or to destroy it. Most people think Luigi Mangione is a hero.
We had a good post-WWII run. We had factories, then globalization. Massive growth for all economic backgrounds for several generations. But the world caught up. Now the average worker has to compete against their increasingly competent and economically enabled peers around the globe. Costs for everything are rising.
We used to have a super sized Big Mac economy propped up by the fact that America was (relatively) peerless. The worker saw so much upside. Now they don't even get free refills, so to speak.
I'm hoping the AI boom helps bring down the cost of goods without putting people out of work. If it goes the other way, I think we might be heading for 1790's France.
> It's the K-shaped economy
Which side of the K-shaped economy do you think Princeton alumni are predominantly on?
> Most people think Luigi Mangione is a hero.
Given that UHC started approving lots of procedures and drugs after the assassination shows that their medical insurance mass fraud did happen and paid off... And they quit it.
And then they were sued by shareholders for approving said procedures. Boo fucking hoo the shareholders lost a buck.
Note that insurance fraud ALWAYS targets the individual policyholder, and NEVER the insurance company.
If Luigi did it, then he should be significantly credited for a massive harm reduction by using violence to ensure less fraud perpetrated by UHC.
The US government wouldnt do their fucking job (investigation amd criminal charges of insurance fraud). So a citizen had to.
??? This entire thread is unrelated. Princeton realized AI makes cheating too easy.
Are they being honest? Did Princeton students not need proctoring in the past because the had no means to cheat, or they both maintained some honor, and fear of the institution.
Cheating was always easy.
Moral code is downstream from culture and not every culture sees cheating as a moral failing.
As Princeton's demo skewed hard into a more international student body, the underlying cultural assumptions have shifted.
The Christian extension of the Ninth Commandment from not bearing false witness to a blanket ban on lying is unique. Islam has explicit exceptions through Taqiyya, Hinduism gets nuanced with dharma and adharma, Buddhism sees it as one of the ten unwholesome actions, ...
WASPs built and defined Princeton, but that is long over.
It is rather disappointing to see a take as unsubtle as "white people are pure and honest God-fearing Christians and Asians are dirty heathens with no concept of morality" on this site.
No, it is culture, not race. A friend of mine (half asian, half white) and by happenstance devot christian got his graduate degree at a top 3 school in the US, and he was shocked the international student brazenness in cheating. He reported it and it was brushed under the rug, and this severely disillusioned my friend. Every professor I know reports this cultural difference.
And obviously we see it with SDE interivews with 1point3acres and the other "interview study" sites and AI tools.
Nobody said that. Yes, Princeton was founded by Presbyterians and that was a huge influence on ethical norms there. But most of the white people at Princeton aren't Calvinists either, and any that are would tell you that literally nobody is pure and honest.
It’s more commonly posted here these days, but this has always been on this site. Just usually couched “better”
Do you have any data to support your disappointment? There seems to be data supporting the GP's observation, which is different than your crude strawman.
It's not unreasonable to look for fire when you smell smoke.
"A 2016 study of more than 100 UK universities by The Times found that non-EU students were four times more likely to be caught cheating than UK and EU students. In the US, they were found to be five times as likely to be caught cheating than their local peers, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 14 leading US colleges." https://studyinternational.com/news/the-complex-problem-of-a...
"Public universities in the U.S. recorded 5.1 reports of alleged cheating for every 100 international students, versus one report per 100 domestic students, in a Wall Street Journal analysis" https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-...
In 2015, 4,540 international students were enrolled at Iowa. Of those, 2,797 were from China. That’s 9 percent of the school’s student body. Most or all of the students accused of cheating are Chinese nationals. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-...
That is not what I wrote - there was no judgement, just that other cultures weigh cheating morally different.
It is all moralities. There is no absolute one.
Moral acceptance of petty theft always increases with inequality. When the poor take from the rich, people don't care as much. The poorer the thief and the richer the victim, the less people care. Go far enough, and people view the thief as a Robin Hood-style hero.
Given that we're at a point in American history where inequality is quite extreme, I don't think it's fair to compare shoplifting to the corruption of the ruling class that is largely responsible for the current levels of inequality in the first place.
To be quite frank, under current conditions, it is a moral failure to see fault with impoverished people for stealing what they need to survive, not the other way around.
What? It's a moral failure to have an issue with people shoplifting from Walgreens? Do you think they're stealing milk, eggs, and bread?
And your types are the same that would see a cashier who steals $100 go to jail....
But a manager who edits timecards of 10 people for $100 ($1000 damage) is just a civil matter.
Crime, and who punishes it, has always been a political matter. The crimes have never been equal for those with power other others.
My types? The person I was responding to claims that if I have a problem with someone shoplifting alcohol and condoms from Walgreens, then it's a moral failing on my part. I responded because I found that absurd. For the record, I do not condone managers editing timecards.
> If a suspected Honor Code violation occurs, proctors will document their observations and submit a report to the student-run Honor Committee, where they may later testify under the same standards used for other witnesses.
is this so the rich kids that have parents who pay for parts of the school can still get a pass?
> so the rich kids that have parents who pay for parts of the school can still get a pass?
It's Princeton. They're given due process, not administrative fiat. Also, on what planet does having "parents who pay for parts of the school" swing a student (versus administrator) run process?
Seems unlikely the student-run honor committee decision would be immune to being 'reviewed' or 'considered' by faculty. Why would they cede that power?
> Why would they cede that power?
That's just the culture at Princeton. (And in a lot of high-trust settings.) Nobody is ceding real power, they're devolving unrewarding work.
Princeton has so much money that they could make it free for all undergrads and literally never run out of money.
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I was a TA at Princeton ~5 years ago, and I had forgotten about the honor code until reading this. Yes it's true, we did not proctor exams, and students seemed to take pride in it. On every test, you got the names/signatures of those sitting next to you. But also, I had a student who was accused of not putting his pencil down when the test had concluded, and the bureaucratic process to fight the accusation was so crippling that they had to take a semester of leave anyway. So I don't see harm in tearing it down.
Hm, this answers something I was wondering, how do accusations work with no proctors or other evidence
The technical ability for the student to cheat in the present day is unprecedented.
For exams in most subjects, the cellular phone is held in the lap. The student needs only briefly expose the exam page to the camera of the phone: immediate photograph of the page, ingestion of the page by an artificial intelligence, and then: the student flips the page to view the side exposed to the camera, and glances down to see the answer on the telephone.
Yes, this is really depressing. I don't want to have to ban devices from exams, but it is something I might have to think about.
I’m sort of surprised that they’re not banned already; dating myself but when I was at Uni in the late 2000s they were banned then. Despite probably not being very useful for cheating on nascent 3G!
Crazy it took them 133 years to do the obvious. Assuming your *entire* student-base is morally superior to the general population
The elite have ALWAYS had special rules.
Whereas the rest of us were always assumed to be cheaters until absolutely cleared otherwise.
Just look at how people are treated by the dalits who run Proctorio. We were teated as less than human.
Could it be non-proctoring has served Princeton by inflating grades due to some cheating, but only now have cheating become rampant enough that it must be curtailed to destroy the reputation entirely?
I honestly think it's that. I've seen it before at other private schools, where someone is caught cheating and let off with very minor consequences. Private high schools were hiding it from colleges too.
I wonder to what extent this is due to the changing roles of university. I would guess 133 years ago university was mostly upper class folks trying to better their minds, and less people wanting a degree to open up a job. Much more incentive to cheat if you just care about the piece of paper at the end.
Maybe I haven't scrolled down far enough, but gut feeling is telling me that a lot of the rise in cheating is coming from international (read: chinese) students. Plenty of stories and personal experience of cheating rings. I tried to get into one just to see what was going on, but even though I looked the part I couldn't talk the talk.
The numbers don't play out because international chinese students only make up 5-7% (maybe less) of the undergraduate student body. Self-reported cheating frequencies are much higher.
Very fair.
So now I finally understand why Americans use the expression "proctored exams". Because not all exams are proctored.
Here in Spain, we don't have an equivalent expression because there is no such thing as an unproctored exam. The idea of being proctored is already included in the word "exam".
Difficult to imagine that people were not using phones to search for stuff while taking an exam. I can understand this being the case 18 years ago. But since the iPhone, how was honor still a thing?
I would argue that the student behavior - ~30% admitting to cheating on academic work - reflects the value system shown by those holding positions/stature the students aspire to.
It is a combination of FOMO (everyone else is doing it, I must also to not fall behind) similar to that which drives hype adoption, combined with a perception that moral behavior grows optional in proportion with wealth or power. The latter is empirically evident in how American society has addressed moral failures of wealthy/powerful leaders (i.e. crimes without punishment)
Very curious to see if/how the admissions distribution changes after this.
Comments express surprise that this honor code has been in place. Many schools have similar honor codes.
Despite HN trendiness, SV and business world advocacy of 'animal instincts', and current cultural trends, humans are generally honest and honorable - obviously people in many places have thought that. It's good news, though many will resist it because, I think, it violates the anarcho-libertarian norms that are fundamental to these cultural trends (i.e., arguing that corruption is inevitable, human nature, etc.).
Nah, it's just that I went to college and saw cheating. When an assignment was take-home, people were forming cheating rings, but because they wanted an upper hand but because they were afraid others were doing the same. I saw even some top-notch students cheat a little bit, cause they wanted 4.00 not 3.95.
As a non-cheater, I didn't want draconian measures to catch cheating, just wanted there to be real consequences when someone was caught. I didn't need 4.00, but what if I did?
Chegg was a $15B company before AI came out. I promise that wasn't because it was the best platform to learn the material.
I agree that humans are generally honorable for things with low stakes. Consider our cultural view of politicians for a non-SV example of where we fully expect high stakes to lead to selfish and dishonorable actions.
lol Chegg. Even the name suggests what it's for.
> Despite HN trendiness, SV and business world advocacy of 'animal instincts', and current cultural trends, humans are generally honest and honorable
I personally believe this (that people are generally honest and good). BUT, the numbers don't lie: 30% of Princeton students admit to having cheated on an exam. This is a "your house is on fire" moment. An honor code has has to be enforced, and that is apparently not happening at Princeton. Frankly, as someone working at a school that also has an honor code (most do, in my experience), that is where the problem lies: if you turn a blind eye to violators, it sends the message to everyone that the honor code is just words, it doesn't mean anything.
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So after 133 they learned to not leave dogs alone with sausages.
A WASP ethical framework cannot survive either the extirpation of WASPs from the student body or the transformation of the education system into a high stakes mandarin style death struggle.
This class form of racism always gets a chuckle out of me. Want to trade skull calipers?
WASPs in this day and age are no more immune to "high stakes mandarin style death struggles".
The word "or" grammatically indicates such a combination of conditions.
Sorry, can you state your hypothesis clearly here? You are saying Princeton would not need to make this change if it admitted only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants?
What?