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Dozens Suspended In Harvard University Cheat Scandal

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.'"

2 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Not Surprising by RearNakedChoke · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The new generation of kids cheat as if that's how things get done.

    I was talking to a 15 year old kid, how his grades suffered because he decided he wasn't going to cheat anymore. He admitted he previously cheated freely and openly, without shame. Why? EVERYONE cheated, so there was no shame in it. But he realized that cheating was shortsighted and sooner or later, he would have to actually learn stuff. So he resolved to stop cheating, but at the cost of his previous good grades.

    HE is an encouraging example. But the rest of his classmates aren't. Cheating is the norm and our future is screwed.

  2. Re:My Theory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    One of the problems with Capitalism is it can force Managers to compete with each other to screw everyone; their employee's, customers and ultimately the environment; the best. The classic method of constraining it has always been to involve government. For example; The Red Triangle fire resulted in 120 Americans dieing on the 8th floor of a high-rise factory floor from a fire that started on the 10th; the bosses surmised they only needed a few buckets of water in the corner, locked their workers in, and weren't around to let them out when the fire started. The result of this was a "general strike" and hundreds of laborers unionizing overnight as everyone came to the realization they were putting up with something they aught not to put up with.

    The lesson here is, if management and labor don't work together, neither of them will be employed for long. The pride of management blinds them to the obvious dangers they place labor, and ultimately themselves, at, and labor if they follow management down the rabbit hole will lead inevitably and invariably to injury.

    I work at a company run by lawyers, they're always fighting over the slightest nuance of communication instead of looking at what's really going on; a infrastructure built with products promised to last decades but because foreigners cut corners as there was no real repricussion for doing so, thus it is in decay. An entire generation retiring oblivious to the peril management has placed their pensions in. Men Dieing or getting injured in the field from too many hours of overtime worked. Managers putting in 16hr shifts because their managers need to feel like the lower managers are "with them". Accountants oblivious to all of the above.