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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.'"
I guess all of these students were planning on going into politics.
Sports figures, politicians, business leaders, Ivy college students... all cheat to get what they want. At least Beyonce wouldn't lie to us. Oh, wait...
Ha-vahd students too lazy and ignorant to get a clue about Congress. What will they do when Daddy buys them a seat? (besides feel up the interns?)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
1+1=2 they all had. Obviously cheats.
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 :)
Anyone else looked at the syllabus for some of these classes? I was looking at one online and I thought it looked more like it belonged in a community college.
I was surprised at the poor quality of classes I found, maybe actually being there in the class with the other 150 students makes a difference.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The course is Government 1310: "Introduction to Congress" so I'd think cheating was required.
Ever notice that Cobra Commander sounds an awful lot like Star scream?
For sure!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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.
Clearly these esteemed institutions have failed in their mission.
Seastead this.
One has to be careful with these sorts of stories. A few years back at my University, newspapers went wild when an entire engineering ethics class was given an F for cheating. The reality of it? The professor gave no instructions on how to properly cite things, gave an assignment, and 'taught everyone a lesson' by failing them all for plagiarism when they didn't follow the exact standards of reference citing. These were engineers- imagine how little they know or care about perfection in reference citing. Nobody was intending to cheat the system, except for a professor who wanted to make some kind of point, by ruining the GPAs of a hundred students.
In this situation, I see certain similarities- one professor, one paper, and few details.
There's your problem right there.
I wonder why oral exams aren't more common in the United States. When I came to do graduate studies in Europe, they really forced me to shape up and learn my stuff. Not only do they make cheating impossible, but when you are judged on how fast you provide the answer, you also internalize it better.
Sure, written exams are the norm for science fields where one must note down specialist notation like mathematics or chemistry, but in the humanities -- and the "political science" of this article -- they seem an excellent way of judging student progress.
I see some new, expensive buildings being donated to Harvard in the near future.
Look, how surprising is this really? I'd say about as surprising as the sun rising. Our cultural icons don't just cheat (think performance enhancing drugs) but when they are caught the repercussions are so minor (at least as portrayed by the media) that it makes cheating almost mandatory because everyone does it and when things are competitive or, say, graded on a curve, you're kind of screwed into following suit.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
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.
Actually most students do not cheat. While the number of cheating incidents is sadly on the rise - probably by about a factor of 2-3 since I started as a prof 10 years ago - the vast majority of university students do not cheat. So while it is always bad to hear of cases like this it is worth getting a little perspective: many students work extremely hard for their degrees and we should not devalue that because some idiots insist on cheating.
Who could have seen that coming?
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Getting caught!
Our colleges are supposed to train our students to succeed in society. That means, we need to wee out the ones who are going to get caught when they cheat. The truly successful in our society are the ones who cheat without getting caught.
I feel so cynical today.
You can take this course on line. for $1,045 to $2000. At Harvard, I would have expected "Introduction to Congress" to be taught by an former member of Congress, but it's just an ordinary instructor.
I'm watching the first video. At the beginning, the instructor says that all you need to know to start this course is that "Congress" exists. At 00:02:35, he's talking about the proposal to change the rules to prevent filibusters from stalling Congress (only the Senate, actually). The speaker is interesting, but if you don't already know a lot about American politics and the structure of Congress, you'll be totally lost.
Or maybe - just possibly - the Ivy League universities continually turn out entrepreneurs because they teach the same material better.
Maybe it's because they foster a culture of exploration and innovation.
Maybe it's because people are surrounded by other self-starters.
Maybe it's because people wanting to kick something new off have access to wealthy individuals.
It's definitely there, I suspect it's a combination of several of those things, and I know that if I were seeking a university in the US I'd be applying straight to MIT and fuck the cost.
But I went to university in the UK, at one of the top five business schools in the world (when I was there - only in the top 20 or so now). I did fuck all on my degree but gained skills I'm still using personally and professionally two decades later.
A university education is almost nothing to do with the details of the subject matter.
Can't Tell The Difference Between Reality And The Onion.
sig fault
Plus logic dictates that with this number of people it's not the first time it ever happened.
When you realize that the discovery was made because of:
similarities on a handful of take-home exams in his spring course Government 1310
you have to wonder if this professor was clueless, idealistic, or engaged in an "honesty" research project of some kind.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You wonder why oral exams are not more common?
There were 279 students enrolled in this class. Assuming a ten minute oral exam for each and two minutes to grade the answers it takes 55.8 hours to examine all the students. This oral exam would take at least two weeks in a 14 week semester, and ten minutes is really too little time to judge the work of an entire semester.
If anyone other than the professor grades the student, then they cry foul.
If the exams begin in the fifth week of the 14 week semester, the students examined last cry foul since they must study significantly more material.
There should be only twenty students in a class? Good luck with that. I suppose you could raise tuition and hire more professors or have the classes taught by lecturers.
Actually, in the USA most classes are taught by lecturers, and the classes are still huge.