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.
I think this is part of a larger phenomenon than simply Zoom classes. COVID severely damaged the already decaying social contract of the US and we have mostly been trying to ignore that ever since. The most prevalent viewpoint of American life is now that the only thing that matters is the individual and therefore anything an individual can do to better their station in life is inherently justified. We can see this on so many levels from politics to rampant academic cheating to quiet quitting to prediction markets full of insiders. When we don't owe each other anything and the consequences are minimal, rarely applied, or completely non-existent, the only reason to not give into cheating, scamming, and corruption is your own personal morals.
Colleges will need to remodel the rooms where these tests are given to become large SCIF type rooms so that wireless communication is not possible. Let the students go back to writing on their arms, wearing eye patches, or shoving notes up their casts. Yeah, I've probably seen Spies Like Us a couple of times:
Even recently when I last spoke to them, the profs described how students were refusing to think for themselves even when given open ended projects. They were just having ChatGPT come up with the project idea for them instead of taking advantage of the freedom to do something they enjoyed.
I think the issue is largely that in the age of AI, learning a skill requires one to be deliberate and dedicated, but the entire reason grades and exams are so prominent is because most students need the threat of near term failure to learn.
Open ended projects were always my favorite ones because I was able to utilize some of my personal projects on them. Profs also enjoy seeing students' passion for their topic. That kind of student is probably still doing well.
Those kinds of projects are a big trap for certain kinds of people. If I had used ChatGPT in college, maybe I wouldn't have come up with overly-ambitious projects that seemed doable at the time but instead took several full weeks of work and basically made my semester miserable.
Ensures that students have a plan, that the goals are achievable, and can help to spread out the project's points.
Also helps when profs make it clear that they're more concerned about seeing what you know/learned and how you approached the problem, not whether or not you achieved exactly what you promised.
LLM over-reliance has an analogous problem: People start using LLMs to start projects that get in over their heads, then when the LLM has gone through all of the easy and medium problems they're left with only the hardest problems to solve on top of a project where they didn't learn much doing the easy and medium parts first.
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.
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.
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.
Obviously the first. How is this even a question?
Loyalty is a fundamental moral principle. Loyalty to a friend carries a lot of moral weight. Humans are a social animal, and loyalty to a friend can easily outweigh loyalty to some abstract institution. Like, my friend will still have my back five years from now. The university I went to won't do shit for me.
Like, if you're talking about loyalty to a friend who wants you to cover up an unjustified murder they committed, then I think most people will say the value of telling the cops about the murder outweighs the loyalty to your friend.
But for cheating on some test where probably 30% of the other students are cheating anyways? I think the vast majority of people will say that loyalty to your friend is the more important moral principle here. We all make mistakes in life, and the whole idea of loyalty and love to a friend is that we support them even though they make mistakes. As long as the mistakes are common mistakes like cheating on a test or cheating on a boyfriend, as opposed to things like felony crimes.
But what you are doing here is justifying behavior. That’s separate from a discussion about what’s right or wrong. You have to not only consider one’s friendship, but the negative effects across society that their actions cause. In other words, reporting the friend negatively affects (in general) only two individuals, while cheating affects many more people and cultural values and norms. I’m not a Utilitarian, but intent and effect matter.
I could buy the argument if the friend had a moment of weakness, regretted it, won't do it again, and please don't report it. They've learned their lesson, that's enough.
But if they do it and they're fine with it and they're going to do it again and what's the big deal? Refusing to report that isn't loyalty anymore, it's not sticking with someone who made a mistake, it's protecting deliberate bad behavior.
The question is simply how you balance loyalty to the institution vs loyalty to a friend.
A lot of people will think that cheating in a context where a lot of other people cheat too, is just not a big deal. That it's certainly not worth losing a friendship over. Like, are you going to end a friendship because someone jaywalks? Because they habitually speed 5 mph over the legal limit? Because they sometimes take illegal drugs? Because they deducted things on their tax return that you know weren't actually business expenses?
The size or importance of a moral violation matters, when weighing up conflicting moral obligations.
I think cheating is pretty serious. It qualifies as self-harm, and it harms your classmates by devaluing their eventual degree.
Jaywalking and minor speeding are not even immoral at all, in my view. I don't mean they're insignificant, I mean they're outright not morally wrong to me, so that comparison suggests that we have a pretty strong difference in what we consider to be morally good here.
It's very easy to argue speeding is immoral: it's immoral to disobey any law or regulation passed by a democratically elected government if these is no other conflicting moral principle. So you can speed to rush to a hospital, for example, but everyday speeding is immoral both because it breaks the morally legitimate democratic law and increases the chance of physical harm.
For many people, cheating on a test is little different from speeding. Calling it "self-harm" is a stretch, and there's zero direct harm to your classmates if it's not graded on a curve (which I haven't seen in a long time). And you could easily argue that the marginal difference it makes to the value of everyone's degree from that institution overall is basically as negligible as the marginal difference it makes to public safety as speeding by 5 mph does.
Also, different exams are different. Fewer people will be bothered by cheating on a freshman year calculus exam, whereas cheating on a final qualification to become any type of emergency responder is far, far more serious because somebody could directly die as a result of your lack of knowledge.
I have to say, this is not the sort of attitude I expected to find on this site. Especially from someone defending cheating on exams. Anyway, I'm sure I won't convince you to change your mind on this, and you certainly won't convince me.
And I find it somewhat bizarre that you seem to think there is no moral value in following the law? Especially when I added the caveat "if there is no other conflicting moral principle", which means you believe there is nothing bad about the law?
Or is it the caveat you disagree with, and you think the law must be followed no matter what?
No, I don't see any moral value in following the law. Following the law can be and often is morally good by coincidence because the law encodes some piece of morality, e.g. the laws against theft or murder. But if the law says I'm only allowed to cross the street at designated locations, and I can safely cross at a different location, there is no moral issue with doing so, in my view. If speeding is immoral it is only because of the safety concerns, not because it's illegal. If I refrain from speeding on a road where I believe it's safe to go significantly faster than the limit, it's only because I want to avoid the potential consequences of breaking the law, not because I think it's somehow wrong.
Just so you know, that's not a position most moral philosophers take, as long as the law is decided by sufficiently democratic procedures.
The fact that you belong to a group of people, and the people decide on rules, means that violating those rules is a moral violation against that community of people.
To say that has no moral weight at all is a pretty extreme position. Now obviously if there's a conflict with another principle, there are times that other moral principle should win. But to say that there is no moral value whatsoever in following the law is not something I think many people will agree with. And thank goodness.
Not that it's going to change my view, but I'm curious if that's really the position they take.
And "sufficiently democratic" basically means freedom of political speech, adult citizens can vote, representatives are chosen by majority rule, elections are fairly conducted and not rigged, and laws are passed by majority rule.
Obviously you can always quibble over details such as unicameral vs bicameral legislatures, single-member district vs. multi-member district representation, gerrymandering, judicial review, and so forth.
But if people are allowed to freely debate and the franchise is universal and elections are free and fair and elections and decisions are based on majority rule, then those are the basic conditions. So the US and France and the UK are sufficiently democratic; Russia and Iran and China are not (despite holding elections).
Edit: actually I do have one other thing to say. It's quite a coincidence that the conditions you laid out happen to be those that were met in the US right about the time that book came out. Feels like it might have been working backwards from the conclusion.
I'm not even defending it. I'm just describing the mainstream ethical foundation used today.
Teachers/Professors are already used to accommodating dumb planning/mistakes from students. An honest "I spent too much time partying and fell behind, can I get an extension" email will often get you very far.
Also baffled to hear cheating on a boyfriend included there, cheating of that sort would be friendship ending.
Im not convinced that's the case, if it's a person who can normalise cheating.
They've already made the decision that benefit to themselves outweighs everything else.
The more usual perspective would be that they're both bad.
>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
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.
Salvadorans.
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.
...yeah, yeah, greener grass, i know.
To the school's credit, they responded as best they could. They considered each case, interviewed the students, and punished them on a sliding scale based on how much cheating, ranging from a zero on that one assignment up to suspension.
Then, for the next semester, they simply changed the rules. You were now officially allowed to cheat all you wanted on homework, but it now only counted for 5% of your grade. That was REALLY bad for people who weren't doing the homework, but it also sucked for people who were just lousy test takers.
I went to a school with an honor code and cheating was rampant among the premeds and future Obamas.
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
If 44.6% of students saw an honor code violation and didn't report it, and 0.4% of students saw an honor code violation and did report it, that means that 99.2% of Princeton students that pledge to report honor code violations break that pledge. And that's only counting the voluntary reporters, meaning that the actual rate is presumably even worse!
But also, how would reporting a suspected honor code violation even work? There's intentionally no staff witnessing the exam, and you aren't likely to know the names and faces of your whole class, so what would the professor even do with that information? "Professor, I saw someone take his phone out, I think maybe he was cheating, I don't know his name." Okay, thanks Captain Non-Actionable. We'll file that in the circular academic integrity investigation bin.
However, the 44.6% was the category of "respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report," and the 0.4% was the category of "had reported a peer for an Honor Code violation."
Everybody who saw a violation was in one of those two categories (did report or didn't report), so we can compare them to see what percent of people who saw honor code violations did, and the answer is that >99% of them failed to uphold their pledge.
The 44.6% appears to refer to the proportion of respondents who saw a violation and did not report it.
- 0.4% saw and reported
- 44.6% saw and did not report
- 55% did not see (but may have erroneously reported, though that seems unlikely)
If this is correct, 44.6% of respondents are in breach of the honor code. If we assume that the non-witnesses behave similarly to the witnesses, 99.111% of the students do not ‘honor’ the code.
Looks like they started doing this senior survey in 2022, so unfortunately there's no pre-COVID info.
2022 20.9% cheating, 31.5% non-reporting
2023 25.4% cheating, 33.6% non-reporting
2024 28.8% cheating, 42.0% non-reporting
2025 29.9% cheating, 44.6% non-reporting
So from this it seems like cheating has been increasing significantly over just the last few years
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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
It’s good for the brand in general. It’s pretty easy to find a 3.8 GPA kid from Harvard. There’s no C students to dirty up the alumni network.
You’re mostly buying into a tribe. Other tribes do well too.
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?).
I wouldn't reduce student motivations to career vs. learning.
College can also be about aspiring to a better society, with the university as microcosm.
For example, a society in which people are honest, and have integrity.
I'm not, that's why I said "Students are at school for a lot of [...] reasons".
> College can also be about aspiring to a better society, with the university as microcosm.
> For example, a society in which people are honest, and have integrity.
Sure, but that's irrelevant:
1. A cheater is capable of not cheating when they're taking a proctored exam, but it doesn't make them honest--they'll just cheat later in life when given the opportunity.
2. People don't suddenly become cheaters when they're given the opportunity to cheat--the people who would cheat when an exam isn't proctored were going to cheat in other areas anyway.
Integrity and honesty are values, and it's pretty difficult to change people's values. I don't think either policy changes anyone's values. That's particularly true of integrity and honesty as those are how people behave when nobody's watching--if you watch and people know you're watching, everyone behaves honestly.
If you want to change people's values, I'd argue universities are pretty poorly-situated to do that. Philosophers are better at finding ethical ideologies that justify unethical behaviors than they are at getting anyone to give a shit about what behaviors they find ethical or unethical. Changing people's values is best achieved by a society that rewards values we uphold and gives us leaders that embody those values. What we have for leadership is pedophiles and grifters, and a lot of those came from our most prestigious educational institutions.
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.
Yes, any university understands that many (most?) of their students are simply there for a diploma that opens up opportunities, and the parts of an institution that view it as a business are going to want to maintain the value of that product.
But the faculty of a university isn't typically in it for the money--in most fields you can make more money in industry than in education. A lot of teachers just want their students to learn, whether their students want to learn or not. Faculty senates aren't powerless in steering an institution, and sometimes knowingly make unprofitable decisions--something a lot of HN can't imagine or understand. ;P
And a lot of students are there for that--in fact some of the most profitable students are. Do you think a Saudi prince need a diploma to open up opportunities? No--they're there because they, or someone in their family, values something else about the institution, be it knowledge, networking, etc.
But when push comes to shove, that's still the ideology that drives the universities as institutions. That's not a new phenomenon. I was in college 40 years ago, and I saw faculty members who were outstanding teachers get second-rate treatment compared to those whose classes were horrible, but who had the right connections to bring in the grants and promote the brand.
Why would a Saudi prince be a more profitable student? The only difference between him and most of the other students as far as money is concerned is that his family can afford to pay the grossly inflated tuition out of pocket instead of having to get financial aid. But the money is the same in either case as far as the university is concerned.
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.
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.
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.
sure, but it seems exceptionally silly to continue to blindly trust them when a sizeable portion of them admit to not being trustworthy
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)
I'm angry at the people who control the current incarnation of neoliberalism, the elites, they have led to the complete moral decay of the world. Luckily they fucked up so bad that American imperialism will go back to its rightful place of fucking around in the Americas while murdering civilians for capitalists. Just as the founders intended.
Clearly the actions were helpful for maintaining that illusion,
while also maintaining the illusion of academic excellence,
despite rigorous courses.
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.
They know not to bite the hand that feeds them.