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#51
08-31-2007, 10:01 AM
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Re: Honor Systems
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[ QUOTE ] The honor code is very important to Caltech culture. Although there is still cheating, it's pretty rare. [/ QUOTE ] What exactly is the evidence for this assertion? Do you just mean that the honor committee hears relatively few cases each semester? From the teaching side of things, such a committee is a huge pain in the ass and thus a pretty strong disincentive for people to report things, so unless the teacher takes that stuff exceptionally seriously or the offense is particularly egregious a lot of stuff probably just slides. [/ QUOTE ] Hmm...I guess I don't really know that there is less cheating, but I was much more aware of cheating during high school and when my friends at other schools talk about it. It could just be that everyone here is sneaky. 
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#52
08-31-2007, 10:44 AM
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Re: Honor Systems
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[ QUOTE ] I liked the earlier mention of all the homes left empty every day. We never even locked the door when I was a kid. Neither did anyone else. We trusted our neighbors not to rip us off and they trusted us. It worked, but it could easily have been a disaster if humans weren't predisposed towards cooperation. Imagine if we had to worry about our next door neighbors looting our homes every time we went out? [/ QUOTE ] What kind of place/area was this? I would be more afraid of non-neighbours coming by. [/ QUOTE ] Suburban Nashville during the 70's. Was actually only a 5 minute drive from a pretty rough part of town, but felt like it was a lot further.
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#53
08-31-2007, 11:16 AM
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Re: Honor Systems
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The honor code is very important to Caltech culture. Although there is still cheating, it's pretty rare. The fact that there is so much trust among members of the caltech community is nice cuz you can do things like take home tests, leave your door unlocked, have access to any building on campus, etc. There are graded homeworks where the profs post the solutions online and just trust that you won't look until you finish which I imagine wouldn't work elsewhere. [/ QUOTE ] People are skepical, but the honor code works remarkably well at Caltech, in part because people want it to work. It applies to far more than just cheating. I found very little evidence of cheating compared with exams I graded elsewhere. In one case at Caltech, there was a lot of suspiciously similar notation, but a TA had used that notation in study materials, and the proofs were not verbatim copies. Elsewhere, I've received verbatim copies. By the way, I turn people in for cheating despite knowing that it's a royal pain, and not in my self interest.
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#54
08-31-2007, 12:46 PM
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Re: Honor Systems
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By the way, I turn people in for cheating despite knowing that it's a royal pain, and not in my self interest. [/ QUOTE ] How serious must the infraction be? I caught a bunch of kids copying homework solutions that were posted a day early by mistake; the other TA rushed the solution and made a bunch of errors which were exactly repeated (with no other mistakes made) in the relevant problem sets. The professor basically told me "I'll back you up if you want to do something, but in my opinion for the scale of the infraction it's really not worth your time or mine." EDIT: I meant to say I'm pretty sure I'd still turn people in for cheating on exams.
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#56
08-31-2007, 02:11 PM
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Re: Honor Systems
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How serious must the infraction be? I caught a bunch of kids copying homework solutions that were posted a day early by mistake; the other TA rushed the solution and made a bunch of errors which were exactly repeated (with no other mistakes made) in the relevant problem sets. [/ QUOTE ] In my opinion, that's pretty serious. I don't think a little copying is ok. It's not accidental or ambiguous. It provides incorrect feedback to the instructor on the difficulty of the material, and can decrease the grades of other students and quality of the comments in letters of recommendation. The possibility of cheating means I have to waste valuable class time proctoring less reliable short exams, unlike at Caltech, and change other procedures to make cheating more difficult. Some people make a distinction between exams and homework, but in my classes, both count toward the final grade. In fact, there is less of an excuse to cheat on homework, since there should be little time pressure, there are resources available such as office hours, etc. One student turned homework in late, copying the solution sets verbatim. Even the cartoon figure I drew in the solution set was copied, badly, along with comments that only made sense in a solution set. A review of past and subsequent homework sets showed that the student was cheating the same way repeatedly, sneaking his homework in late after the solution set was given out, or obtaining the solution set early. I dropped the student's grade for the course by one letter, from a D that a 0 on the homeworks would have earned, to an F, which I think caused him some financial aid problems, and referred the matter to the dean's office. The assistant dean commended him for showing some character by finally admitting to cheating when confronted with the cartoon characters. If I hadn't noticed the cheating, a perfect score on those homeworks would have earned the student at least a C for the course, and I might have given someone else a D. That was more of a headache than I thought it was going to be, but I feel it is part of the duties of teaching. Well, I'm a stickler. In another course, the homework was almost all of the grade, and I failed a senior for cheating the same way. (He begged me to accept late homework that I don't normally accept, and he had copied my solution set verbatim.) He had to drop his mathematics major as a result, since passing my class was a requirement. Failing a student in an advanced mathematics class was shocking to others in the department, as even a C is rare, and I withstood some pressure to do it. What was shocking to me was how he got to my class with no understanding of mathematics at all, so that his only chance was to cheat. I think he cheated his way through earlier classes.
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#57
09-01-2007, 02:42 PM
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Re: Honor Systems
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[ QUOTE ] There is a relatively famous Honor Code at Princeton University for all papers and exams. There is no policing: no proctors or teachers in the room while taking exams, many exams are take-home (even if they are timed exams and/or closed book - you are on your honor not to take more than the allotted time and not to use prohibited materials). Once, instead of turning in a final exam, I accidentally put it in my backpack and took it home. The next day, I opened my backpack and, to my surprise, saw the exam there. I immediately wrote to my professor saying what had happened. He told me to bring the exam to his office. I went and he asked me if I had completed it on time without using any books, completely in the manner that was appropriate. I said I had. He made me sign the honor code again in his presence and then took the exam and graded it. Of course there is cheating at Princeton, but I don't think it's any worse than anywhere else. And the fact that you can take your exams in such freedom and people can assign takehomes and stuff makes everything so much nicer. It's not like a police state and you're not like a prisoner. It's a place to learn and you're a valued student. I think that 99% of the people really value the honor code (even those who might cheat it once or twice) and therefore people don't rampantly cheat because they know that would cause it to go away. [/ QUOTE ] To be fair though to get into Princeton you have to go through a fairly rigorous selection process. You already have a much higher percentage of intelligent hard working kids who take pride in what they do by the time they get into that school. [/ QUOTE ] FWIW, many of my friends there could not have cared less about grades and were experts in gaming the system to graduate while doing as little as possible (or in some cases, not graduate while doing as little as possible...), and none of them would have ever dreamt of cheating to get by - aside from the stigma attached to it, the consequences of getting caught are just awful. The only person I know who ever had to go in front of the honor committee had turned in a paper where a section set apart from the text as a block quote had a blank footnote - he missed it in proofreading, but it was pretty clear from the formatting that he wasn't claiming the text of the quote as his own. For not having a citation, he was forced to leave school for a year - this was the least severe punishment the honor committee gave out. Its pretty hard to actually fail a class, and I just can't imagine cheating being worth it when the probable consequence of getting caught is expulsion, and merely having a minor screw-up make you go in front of the honor committee, even if you're eventually found innocent, is a huge social stigma. There's just no way it makes sense.
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#58
09-01-2007, 04:03 PM
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Re: Honor Systems
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The only person I know who ever had to go in front of the honor committee had turned in a paper where a section set apart from the text as a block quote had a blank footnote - he missed it in proofreading, but it was pretty clear from the formatting that he wasn't claiming the text of the quote as his own. For not having a citation, he was forced to leave school for a year - this was the least severe punishment the honor committee gave out. [/ QUOTE ] Huh - this exact thing happened when I was an undergrad (Yale, no honor code). Some Indian dude my year - same offense same punishment. Since I didn't personally know the guy I always thought it might be some kind of urban legend or the story was missing pertinent details (like, the dude actually cheated somehow). I understand plagiarism is a huge issue and should be dealt with harshly, but this seems ridiculously over the top for what is basically an undergrad-level academic oversight (it's less forgive-able an offense as a graduate student, imo). -Al
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