Dozens Suspended In Harvard University Cheat Scandal 264
johnsnails writes "Around 60 students at Harvard University have been suspended and others disciplined in a mass cheating scandal at the elite college, the campus newspaper reports. The Harvard Crimson quoted an email from Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean Michael Smith that said more than half of the cases heard by administrators in the scandal, which erupted last year, had resulted in suspension orders. 'After professor Matthew B. Platt reported suspicious similarities on a handful of take-home exams in his spring course Government 1310: “Introduction to Congress,” the College launched an investigation that eventually expanded to involve almost half of the 279 students enrolled in the course.'"
First reaction was... (Score:2, Insightful)
No wonder.. take home exams... open book exams.. what do you expect from the low level colleges... Then it actually hit me that this is Harvard.edu we are talking about.
I guess I was just lucky to finish eng and comp sci from a place where they filtered us from 450 in first year to 5 with diplomas in fourth, without ANY of this open-book-exam nonsense.
Then again, I'm unemployed at the time and work is tough to find... if I only went for a bigger name university... had the grades, didn't have the money... ah the ways of the world :)
Re:My Theory (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this is a joke, but it's more than relevant.
I am guessing the people getting off in this case are getting off more for lack of evidence rather than exoneration. Plus logic dictates that with this number of people it's not the first time it ever happened.
What upsets me most personally about the United States is that we've developed a culture where doing the right thing is NEVER rewarded and doing the WRONG thing usually is. We've got a political culture right now where a politician MUST be a huxster or they can't compete. The US Government does suck at every level, but it's an outgrowth of the sickness of the culture itself. Nice guys don't finish last; nice guys don't finish AT ALL.
On a take-home exam? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:First reaction was... (Score:5, Insightful)
well sure your community college does not have an outraged parent who just cut a $45k check to answer to; there is little in the way of them having standards.
When cultural icons like Lance Armstrong .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My Theory (Score:5, Insightful)
What upsets me most personally about the United States is that we've developed a culture where doing the right thing is NEVER rewarded and doing the WRONG thing usually is. We've got a political culture right now where a politician MUST be a huxster or they can't compete.
What on earth makes you think that's unique to the US?
Re:Completely Predictable (Score:5, Insightful)
Even fewer are those who will continue to do this after the first few times. After a while you begin to believe that the real rules and the stated ones have little to do with each other, and anyone following the stated rules isn't any more moral or ethical or in any way better; they're just a chump.
Re:My Theory (Score:5, Insightful)
we've developed a culture where doing the right thing is NEVER rewarded and doing the WRONG thing usually is.
I'd argue that it's not so much about right versus wrong, it's more about the end result trumping the method of getting there. A "win" is considered vindication of the means. If the means are "right" then that's great, but if the means are "wrong", it's too often considered OK to look the other way. The more rewarding the win, the more likely people are to overlook the wrong, especially if those who *should* be doing the looking stand to benefit from the win in the first place. Look at Lance Armstrong. Do you think *nobody* in his inner circle knew he was doping? Sure they did. But they also knew fame and fortune would come from Armstrong's wins, and they could bask in that to considerable benefit. Thus they became complicit.
In a perfect world, there would be ample benefits and public glorification of the person who came forward to expose cheating. Instead, they typically have everything to lose and very, very little to gain by doing so. Hence the culture of cheating prospers in sports, business, academia...pretty much anywhere the stakes are high enough.
Re:My Theory (Score:2, Insightful)
+1 your comment.
It's nothing new and certainly ingrained. In high school back in the 80's, pretty much everyone in my courses cheated (NMB Senior, Class of 88). I never once cheated, ever, and it was galling to watch them walk away week after week with A's and 100's even though I and many others knew that it was unearned. Even simple things -- an art class self portrait (the cheaters asked the more artistic folks to draw for them), a take home physics exam (Mr. Sturgelewski's class) was copied from person to person, a children's book in English class (someone even copied Curious George and handed it in) -- was not immune. These are the cheats and liars that are in business and law now.
Re:First reaction was... (Score:3, Insightful)
You realise that open-book exams give a lecturer a much better insight of what students have actually learned, rather than what they remember from cramming the night before? Open-book exams test insights. If you can recite of the books and other literature for a course, but you never actually did anything, you're highly likely to fail it. Fact memorisation exams don't show that you learned something: rather, they show you memorised things: most students tend to forget those things before the next semester is over. And then you have to teach it to them all over again when they need it.
Re:My Theory (Score:5, Insightful)
The heartening result is that Harvard takes cheating seriously. They suspended about 60 students over it and a bunch of others are on probation -- probably because they couldn't prove those students cheated.
You call that 'serious'?
Harvard admits somewhere in the range of 5-6 percent of those who apply. Even if we assume that the bottom 75% or so of the applicant pool are just deluded optimists, Harvard could replace its entire class two or three times over with people who would love to have been admitted. If they were remotely serious, they could have banhammered everyone involved in cheating and called it a day. Instead they are being 'temporarily asked to leave'. That's crazy lenient given how trivial it would be to replace them, and how meaningful a degree from Harvard is supposed to be.
Re:My Theory (Score:4, Insightful)
offtopic shameless repuglican TROLL.