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).
Is it propaganda? In some sense, yes, the only way to maintain such a culture is to repeatedly insist on its importance to prospective and current students. But if so, then it is self-fulfilling propaganda, and in my opinion the honor code made my experience richer.
It also made the experience richer for people who cheated witih impunity.
I will never forget being in high school and seeing so many classmates cheat on homework and take-home exams, yet raised their hands with ease to give the honor code pledge. It was a farce. Please don't read my personal anecdote as doubt that honor codes can work.
I'm not even sure I could have answered you at the time. In my memory, it was mostly students promoting the honor code. But I have to imagine that the university was quietly doing things to keep this going.
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 looked at materials hidden in my desk for one question during a quiz in fifth grade and it still gnaws at me. Cheaters suck.
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.
People did plenty of collaboration on homework sets. Some of the harder ones were almost impossible unless you did, like those 20 page Phys98 homework sets...
Did people report them?
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.
https://web.mit.edu/6.7800/www/info24.pdf
Or at least this year's version? If so, it looks like Course 6 hasn't gotten any easier over the years. Good luck!
That reminds me of what an instructor (one of the best ones I've had) said a long time ago in response to one of my classmates asking if the exam could be open-book: "I could make it so, but it's not going to get any easier." The same instructor also responded to another question with "it doesn't mean I won't change the length of the exam."
The thought being that the Engineering exams were so difficult that even with the text book, you had little chance of getting it right unless you knew the material.
Often, final exams were just one question, but you were graded on the multiple pages of work you had to show.
My time at MIT was well before AI. And before smartphones. Even PCs were new then--I didn't have one until my senior year, and that PC had less computing power than is in things like microwaves nowadays.
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.
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
Strictly speaking I'd agree with you -- but I would consider a higher baseline of morale to be itself quite special! Especially when it is shared amongst the entire community.
Here is just an example of one: Moving from Brooklyn to a small surbuban town:
- very few lock their bikes at the local schools, or "town center". Bikes aren't stolen and kids don't worry about it.
- "town center" has umbrellas out for public use, people use them and put them back.
- People generally don't lock front doors, or don't worry if they aren't.
- If there are problems, people call police, they show up quick [non emergency] and they sort out the problem.
- People happy to pay taxes and they know where it goes
I can go on... these are just examples I've seen.
We did group projects together. We were graded on a common curve. We spent 90% of our time out of class hanging out and learning to adult together. I know every single one of those people today, I’ve been to their weddings and am godparent to their some of their kids. And I think we knew, decades prior, we’d still know each other now.
As such no, I don’t think I was oblivious because outside that group I can concede it was rampant. But within the group, if you blew off a course you blew off the test. It just wasn’t right or smart or lightly considered to cheat and screw over your friends. You also weren’t taking elective courses for the fun of it to cheat through them.
(I now live in a small town where I don’t lock my house, my bike or my car. Most farms nearby have a box you can buy stuff from in exchange for cash you’re expected to leave. It’s pretty great and yes, privileged, but it’s not a privilege money alone can buy.)
Frankly, this comment feels almost entirely foreign to my experience—I suppose things could've changed over the years (although my impression is that things have gotten much worse recently, not better), or it could be major-specific, or I just got lucky with the specific people I happened to hang out with?
No, that's completely wrong and far too cynical.
It's not even an 'honour code' - it's an expectation that people are not cheaters - and that is not only reasonable, it's a very lower bar.
Tech schools is not representative of most places of higher learning - precisely because they tend to have 'sadistic course loads' which distorts things a bit.
As an Engineer, I was always 'overloaded' - and shocked at how relatively little the Arts Majors had to do in comparison and how vague it was.
'University' - is traditionally centred around those Liberal Arts people, or at least not Engineering.
It was never supposed to be 'sadistically' intense - that's just what some of the very technical majors turned it into - and usually not on purpose.
Mostly due to the fact that certain people think that everyone 'must' have a background in such-and-such to be considered 'well rounded'.
And it's not fair to suggest that people 'have to cheat' to get through, maybe more reasonably, the course load is so crazy, that people have to share / work together to fight hard to make it through the course load.
Purely technical schools often don't represent what institutions of higher learning are in the traditional sense, and do get caught up 'in the course knowledge' as opposed to the higher order premise.
I think this 'too much intensity' is a side effect of culture and a few other things, that just makes more civil things difficult to process.
There's no reason to 'cheat' 100 years ago if you're from a wealthy family just getting your education, whereas the competition is fierce now.
(And how much that "imposter syndrome", from either source, then drives later hard-work/success and how much doesn't.)
> Swiss metro
To quote: "In 2024, more than 1 million cases of fare evasion were recorded in Switzerland, reported RTS. The number has more than doubled since 2019."
High trust, eh? Here is a better explanation: Someone smart did the math and discovered that for many Swiss mass transit systems (there are many), they could get better overall revenue by (1) removing the expense of buying and maintaining fare gates, and (2) adding fare dodging penalties and enforcement staff. FYI: Berlin is similar.
The fact that most people don't know that the honor system is about money not honor is part of what makes the money part of the honor system work.
Some individuals have heady thoughts and morals like you mentioned. Others are using it as a checkbox.
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.)
In my country if you can't hack it you just transfer to something else. Much less pressure. And let's face it if you can't even pass the exams maybe it is not your career? Don't live in a lie and go do something you'll enjoy.
Most target career paths in the US (eg. Investment Banking, VC, Tech, Consulting, Entrepreneurship) now require a STEM or Engineering background, so a large subset of students do have an incentive to study a major they have no interest in.
As you are Dutch, think about it the same way certain numerus fixus programs at TU Delft, UvA, or UL open career paths unavailable to most other Dutch graduates (eg. Optiver, MBB, DeepMind, EU think tanks).
This is basically Princeton's equivalent of setting up a numerus fixus because of the deluge of students enrolling in target degree programs without the interest or background.
In all honesty cheating is common in all universities - the incentive structures for students are the same as a large portion of students do want to end up in a high prestige career.
The American higher ed system is similar to the French, British, and Italian system with regards to prestige and target programs.
> As I understand it Americans pay tens of thousands of dollars for university
Not at Ivies and Ivy-tier programs. Plenty of us got really competitive scholarships and I attended back when Obama was still in office.
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$100 billion
But yeah, not pay the tram ticket once or twice and suddenly you're not worthy of renting in that shithole called Geneva, meanwhile the city itself launders hundreds of billions of dollars.
Adding to that, the airports and the freeports are sometimes privately run. It's not like the municipal government could do something even if they wanted to in some cases.
But sure, be angry at things you don't fully understand. That's surely healthy.
What's a realistic outcome for someone who gets caught, they have to pay more for housing or they become homeless?
If you are caught, you get a big fine, 150$-ish and if you pay it nothing will change.
However, if you get caught again or don’t pay the fine, it’s not a misdemeanor, it’s a felony. You will be caught at the Schengen border and flagged as a fugitive and get a Schengen ban. Or if you are a CH or EU resident you will be summoned by the court for a court case and you could go to jail. Most likely you’ll get a 1000$+ fine.
The housing comes in when you try to rent a new place and the landlord asks „are you a felon?“ and you can’t say no anymore.
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.
Spot checking kept people honest but it only really works when most people are honest.
The City of Vienna has concluded that the cost of building such checkpoints combined with the reduced quality of service and the destruction of the city image could never be worth it. I wonder how other cities justify this without implicitly calling their denizens morally inferior to ours.
> the destruction of the city image could never be worth it
It has been 100(s) of years since community like this existed, now this is utopia
Disc golf courses, fire wood piles, that day’s chicken eggs in a wooden box on the side of the road.
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...
Many people get into these positions of affluence by participating in competitions that repeatedly normalize that exact variety of deviance.
Honor-anything works when you create and maintain systems that normalize honorable behaviors and shame deviant behaviors (for any definition of honorable and deviant), and you can only measure peoples’ honor by the circumstances they’re given to prove themselves.
In bourgeois corners of the US, we’ve implicitly normalized deviance by removing the expectation for honor in competitive environments. “Win at any cost” (you don’t think the other team isn’t doing everything they can to get ahead, do you? How naïve!) has quietly replaced “be prepared” and “give it your best”.
We specifically don’t tell you where because we’d like to keep it that way.
I had a similar experience going to an all-you-can-eat restaurant for the first time. the universal reaction from anyone I talked to about this experience (same as mine) was “there is no way in hell place like this in my home country would be in business more than a month.” people be eating not until full but until their body would physically reject additional food :)
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.
Either it is a principle or it is a strategy, can't be both.
It smells like a backdoor.