I was a grad student @ Princeton a handful of decades ago.
I was a TA for a few classes and, given the honor code, we did not proctor the exams for undergrads. We just handed them out (left the room) and returned to collect them at the end.
- One of the exams in a course that I TAed had 5 free-response questions.
- There were also 5 TAs in that class, so we un-stapled the exams and each TA graded one question (for consistency).
- We re-assembled the exams and returned them to the students.
- A few days after the exam, one of "my" students (she attended my recitation) came to me with her exam and explained that I had incorrectly graded question 2.
- I told her that I didn't grade question 2, so she had to go take it up with "TA # 2"
- A few hours later, "TA #2" pays me a visit and she (TA#2) is annoyed. She tells me, "Your student is trying to pull a fast one. She answered Q2 incorrectly. She erased her answer and put in the correct answer and she wants it re-graded"
- I briefly defended the student and said something like, "Why would she do that... and how could you even know?"
- "TA#2" responded with "... because I photocopied all of the student responses after I graded them."
- Then I felt like a piece of shit for doubting my fellow TA. And felt even worse being naive enough to not be suspicious.
- "TA#2" and I brought all of this info up with the prof. who was running the course.
- We were told that the situation would be handled by an Honor Committee or something like that. We forwarded the information to the committee, but no one spoke to us and we were not allowed to participate in the deliberations.
- After about a week, all we were told was that the student was able to explain the "discrepancy" between her exam and the photocopy.
To this day, I have no idea what that student could have possibly said to explain her actions.
After that, I started photocopying every damned scrap of paper that I graded.
edits for clarity. The student did not get a zero on the exam, nor was she booted from the course. I don't remember if she was given credit for Question 2, but the TA and I were both expecting her to be tossed, which obviously didn't happen.
Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly.
I have a friend who in college had another student take his test from the "complete" pile, erase my friend's name, and put on his own instead. It was only through blind luck that my friend figured it out. He, the TA, and the professor reported it – with smoking gun proof – but nothing happened.
The same laxness applies to academic research integrity. Universities rarely punish academics who are discovered to falsify data.
Not even prestigious ones. The school needs to sound like it has strong penalties against cheating, so there are really strict-sounding policies ("zero in the course"). But also, so many students cheat that actually enforcing these policies uniformly would hurt your graduation stats, make unhappy customers (students + parents), and hurt your revenue if you actually expel them. So the equilibrium is that the burden of reporting cheating is foisted upon professors, and it is understood -- though never explicitly communicated -- that academic integrity proceedings will be a huge administrative pain for you, the professor, and it is in your interest not to initiate them.
The outcome is predictable: unless there is a scandal of massive proportions, the issues just..."go away" on their own. With some discretion for the professor to either just look the other way, or ding the student enough to feel vindicated, but not so much as to actually hurt the university's interests.
I know a guy who TA'ed at Stanford in the 1970's. He said his professor told him to give students “gentleman’s B’s” even when their work was not fully up to par, because many of them would eventually become part of the country’s future elite and power structure.
I've talked to instructors who've just given up. They know the students use AI. More and more of them do every year. The instructors can spot it easily, but if they brought them all into the academic dishonesty process, the department would grind to a halt. So they just let it go. They are all paying tuition, and they'll all get the credential they paid for.
I sympathize with the instructors to an extent, but the reality is that LLMs will be a pervasive part of life going forward. Schools need to completely reinvent their curriculum around that new reality. It's going to be a painful process for instructors accustomed to the old way of teaching.
A more accurate phrasing is: It's significantly less likely that one learns the portion of the work they offload to an LLM.
A random anecdote is that most of the people I know who went very far in theoretical math are relatively poor at basic mental arithmetic, because they always think in the abstract and offload addition and multiplication to the calculator. It doesn't mean they can't do it, they just aren't as practiced or as fast at it.
Just like how you significantly increased the difficulty of exams in "open book" exams in the past where the only way to pass the open book exam was to know the material well, you similarly need to increase the difficulty of other work where it won't matter if you have an LLM, because you won't pass without knowing your shit either!
Yeah because isnt it just about money and relationships? They have relationships to those student's families and need the networks. They realize too that its more about the credentials and networks and money comes in if that support those over academic honesty.
I went to a school that actually tried to enforce it, and unfortunately it ended up being enforced wildly disproportionately along racial lines. My school had a very simple rule: if you were caught cheating, you were expelled. No strikes, no exceptions.
That is a massive burden to put on an educator.
Getting expelled from your university is a very serious, mandated fork in the road for anyone it happens to. So what do they do? If they relate to/empathize with the person, they try to handle it without reporting it. If they don’t, they reported and “let the system handle it.”
As any reasonable person would expect, white people were not reported and marginalized groups were. Privileged groups also got exceptions (the football team had a massive cheating scandal that should have expelled about 15 players, and the professor reported it! But mumble mumble uhh they learned their lesson).
After over a century they finally ended the system recently and honestly? Good. I appreciated what they were attempting to do, but it didn’t work.
You could just... make punishments more proportionate? If people are regularly circumventing your punishment system because they feel it's too harsh, maybe take that as a sign.
If you want rage bait, read the proceedings of honor code committees at your school. At least at Northwestern they were public record (sometimes with redaction of identities). The number of people who got off with obviously bullshit excuses was maddening even to read about.
When I was in high school, mad dad was subscribed to the California Bar Journal, and the discipline section was one of my favorite reads. The outrageous rational lawyers had for failing their clients or downright stealing from them was hilarious, and the rate they won their appeals was appalling.
Someone wrote a book about how organizations like state bars protect their members from clients, not the clients from their members as is the stated goal: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674295421
I once was accused and brought before the honor counsel for a really stupid innocent mistake.
Basically it was a history worksheet requiring written paragraph answers and I swapped around answers under the wrong questions so the teacher thought I cheated. It was a careless mistake I made because I had lost the original worksheet and was working off a loose leaf copy in the cafeteria at the last minute but it made it look like I copied someone else’s work.
I don’t known if the committee bought my story or was feeling lenient but I am very thankful for lax prosecution of these cases and think a lot of the value is in scaring people straight.
What is this honour council I've heard in a few comments? I thought Princeton was unique in having and honour system as opposed to strict academic integrity rules.
That student was shameless for success. I’m sure she has navigated her way through plenty of institutions by now, confusing getting away with it for being clever.
Maybe your fellow TA still has the photocopy or remembers her name? Please contact them. This is the beginning of an investigative story. Don’t let us down!
I wish I as a student had this power. I took an exam once for a class I had taken before (transfer student woes). I went into the hall, took the easy exam, turned it in, and left. They lost my test.
I had no idea until 3 weeks later when exam scores were finally uploaded and mine was missing. The quarter was over and what the hell could I possibly do at that point? I had no possible evidence to give to show that I not only took the test but definitely passed because I've already taken the class
I don't think you need to feel like a piece of shit for your brief defense of the student. Erasing and replacing the answer is unusual. As is photocopying all the tests.
Asking someone for an explanation of an unusual circumstance is perfectly natural. Perhaps TA#2 should feel like a piece of shit for her lousy explanation!
Honestly - the first thing that came to my mind is that the papers got stapled back together wrong, and her original correct answer was swapped with someone else's incorrect one. And instead of simply explaining that, she decided to just erase what was there and re-submit. But who knows?
It makes some sense just to have a backup, especially if you’re dividing papers and recombining them. It’s not impossible that one could get misplaced or damaged.
Also, you could have an issue where the exam somehow becomes relevant again after you’ve handed them back, and some students may not have kept their copies (like if one student successfully challenges their grade and you realize other papers were also misgraded).
There is an easy solution to Princeton’s problem, and it’s to have an honor system with a backbone. The way honor historically worked.
At my private high school, and at my university (although they later gutted it), we had a “single sanction” honor code.
That is, if you were caught lying, cheating, or stealing - in any way, and in or out of school, though usually it was in - you were immediately expelled. No mitigating circumstances. No negotiation.
To many of my peers this sounded very harsh, especially since these were very good schools you worked hard to get to and succeed in. But part of why they were good schools was because of this.
We do zero tolerance for so many things but integrity is the one thing that misses it for some reason.
> We do zero tolerance for so many things but integrity is the one thing that misses it for some reason
Look at the type of people in positions of power these days? If we enforced any kind of integrity they would be screwed, but since they're in charge they can undermine policies that would hold them accountable as much as they like
Having integrity in elite colleges helps society. If people graduate from these places by cheating, and they see others graduating by cheating, cheating becomes a norm in elite society. If students are observed to be honest, and those that aren't are usually caught and punished, the graduates leave with a norm of honesty.
I used to proctor accounting exams. It's insane to me that people would just leave the room to students. At the very least they might have questions and then they ask the class instead of calling the proctor
I mean I get that the student broke the rules, at least per this anecdote. And what was done is dishonorable and the student deserves what is coming to the student.
But, I think it gets to a deeper issue with education.
Like, the cynic in me will say that the student learned a new tactic, one that got rewarded, and they are likely to repeat it over and over.
But the teacher, the hopeful part of me, the one that wants growth and striving, that part of me says that the student learned a lesson and is unlikely to repeat that hack. That they got dragged about, told a lot of very tough stories, saw the consequences, and then saw the light, and they will never do it again. And that experience taught them more than the class ever could about life - a much more valuable lesson in the end.
I hope that is what occurred. I think that's probably what the many admins told themself what would happen. I have worked with Princeton grads though, and it is much more likely that nothing of the sort occurred.
Most 'elite' grads think they pulled it over on the school, like they always have, that they were cleverer, somehow. That they 'won', when they really lost and learned worse than nothing, they learned the wrong thing. And then they get out into the real world and they get a successful bigjob and a nice little manageable coke habit and a not as manageable addiction or two. Then a spouse when that time comes and that other line says something no-one really wants, but not with a person they respect or that respects them. And by the time the second kid is done teething, the divorce is done and they think they are 'free' again. So they dive off a cliff in some azure water as the grandkids aren't well taken care of by expensive as hell help.
The ayahuasca vomit dries on the corner of their mouth as they check their actually-personal account for the half dozen 39th birthday wishes, they wonder where it all went wrong. They decide that it was others, not themselves, surely, that can't be true, because Dad was an asshole and Mom really wasn't ever 'there'-there when you think about it.
Because they are still trying to pull one over, to be cleverer, to be the 'good' one at whatever life is in their mind: A long fucking ladder covered in degrees and accolades and tears and jackasses. They live in the derivative.
So, look, don't be butthurt about a jackass undergrad that is too blind and treadmilled to ruin their own life.
But do be butthurt that the system is too fucking tired and old to really deeply care anymore about the young and not just hurting their 'future' - as if that could ever be measured by only a GPA.
Maybe a bit that - but it's far more the change of elite 'class' institutions - to elite 'competitive' institutions.
'Grades Did Not Matter' 100 years ago so much.
It was where 'the only educated people sent their kids to be educated'.
Or maybe the nouveau riche bourgois did.
Now it's a 'Giant International Competition'.
You can see this where students are competitive with grades elsewhere in the world.
They're competing for jobs at OpenAI among a million others.
I'm shamed to admit I can't remember the quote from someone who lamented the fact that traditionally people 'knew their place' and there was on some level a quietude in that, a zen - but when 'anyone can be anything' it creates hyper competition, anxiety, sense of failure for most people who can never live up to being the 'most exceptional at whatever', and the constant stress of 'keeping up with the Jones's'.
See: Instagram - it's not pictures of family and friends - it's almost entirely 'social competition through lifestyle narration' ... which that includes University's as 'brand'.
That’s a really good point. I do think the old ruling elite was in some ways more honest within the particular framework of their morality. But maybe that was easier when getting into Harvard meant being smart-ish from a prestigious family, instead of grinding to compete against not only everyone in America, but the biggest grinders and geniuses in India and China too.
It's wonderful that the American elite has broadened as much as it has in the past 70 years or so. With it though there was some load bearing social infrastructure that got demolished.
When it was a little club, you had to think of your family's reputation in the club, and like you say there was a particular framework of their morality.
When the elite franchise was expanded, one problem was that everyone in the elite then had different ideas of morality. When they got into business, the only thing that really united everyone was that they all liked money.
One thing that used to help that we've lost is a moral code in the universities that elites have to attend to get into the club now.
Another thing, after it became illegal to teach the bible in public schools, was "secular bible stories." You had secular saints, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ben Franklin. They each had a characteristic story, like George Washington and the cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln walking 10 miles to return 2 cents, and Ben Franklin flying a kite and discovering that lightning was electricity. Later on, MLK was added to the canon for a whole bunch of stories of courage in defense of justice. All of the stories had a moral lesson about what it meant to be a Good American.
Lately we've cancelled most of our secular saints, and my guess is that the few that are left are on borrowed time. That's not to say that these guys never did anything wrong by any means, but the point of teaching the story wasn't even necessarily even that the story actually happened exactly as it was told, the point was the moral lesson. We've basically just given up on moral education, and all we have left are things like Social Emotional Learning, but it is thin gruel.
This is exactly right. Gone are the days when you could get a C+ average at Harvard and still land a good job or a spot in a prestigious law program – purely by virtue of having gone to Harvard.
Everyone is in competition now. Everyone has to prove their worth, all the time. It's more egalitarian but it also creates a lot of stress.
To get into a radiation tech program, there are 260 applicants, almost all with all As, for 20 slots at my local community college.
Maybe in the very first instant you’d think it’s merit based. But, EVERYONE is playing the game. Getting homework and tests from friends who already took the class, taking classes at several different schools to get the easier teachers, paying multiple times the tuition cost on tutors and other study aides (eg $2k+ for all the anatomy models), every demographic is using paid ChatGPT. We all know which teachers to take. We spend much of class strategizing like this.
Every single student. It’s just another game to play or you lose.
I'm skeptical that it is really more egalitarian in practice, anyways.
There is still a lot of bias and in -group preferences present in hiring. Not to mention that most places will weight candidates who are recommended by employees higher than unconnected external applicants. That might be a reasonable filter but it unquestionably is not egalitarian
It's vastly more egalitarian than it was before- - that said, it's still a bit closed, but the manner in which it is closed is more related to 'hyper competition' than anything.
Admissions for elite schools is just crazy - they can't go purely by 'scores', they have gender/national/racial issues which are actual quite real, even if it becomes unfair - there is just no way to do it in the ultra egalitarian way in which some would want.
It's a very scarce resource and that's it.
If it were a 'common' thing - like local state college, then it takes a different form. But the acute nature of the situation really brings out some ugly dynamics.
I mean, I find myself saying this all the time. It explains so, so much about American culture. We're transitioning from an honor culture to a "don't be a sucker" culture.
The example I always point to is golf. I'm a huge golf nerd, and if there's one thing I hate it's professional golf. They sit there and pretend it's a "gentleman's game" and then let people like Patrick Reed openly and obviously cheat... repeatedly. They even got rid of the ability for fans to call in rules violations. Why? Because it's no fun, boo. Players used to want to not win when they broke the rules.
Gambling in college and pro sports? We went from the Black Sox shame and a Pete Rose being banned, to now players getting slaps on the wrist. Our society does not reward honor, so most people will not be honorable, plain and simple. Yes, there are plenty of us who will care more about integrity, but the vast majority of us won't care.
> it's more about America transitioning from a high-trust society to a low-trust one.
We're talking about Princeton, here. Trust among elites remains persistently high. In fact, it's likely higher than ever due to assortative mating & geographic sorting. Elites, even students in the Ivies, still have trust of government and elite institutions, which the elite stratum itself runs. Trust between elites and lower strata has declined, where elites and middle- and lower-classes have significant mistrust between each other, and the latter have lower trust within their own strata than in the past.
What's more likely IMO is that 1) the cost of cheating (i.e. the cost of assembling a ripped off assignment multiplied by the risk of being caught) has declined precipitously due to LLMs and 2) elite institutions remain the most ruthlessly competitive in the country and even the world.
I don't think any human alive believes this. The "elite" are just known as being scammers who lie and BS about everything very openly and they'd sell their own child if it got them a dollar. The past 10 years have been nothing but "elites" churning scams and paying bribes and bragging about it. They most certainly aren't trusting each other. Just look at how the president holds people up as his greatest ally one day, then discards and villainizes them the next day once he realizes he can get more benefit from elsewhere.
The morgue manager at Harvard Medical School spent five years selling donated body parts online. The Cornell president just backed his Cadillac into a student asking him a question in a parking lot. This isn't high-trust culture. It's people who stopped believing anyone was watching.
> It's people who stopped believing anyone was watching.
Which, in the era of social media, video surveillance, smartphones and dashcams, is crazy. Once you leave your home, you have to assume everything you do is recorded and might end up online or in court.
When Lee Kuan Yew visited London for the first time after World War II, he was impressed by the fact that it had unattended newspaper stands where people were trusted to take a newspaper and leave money: https://youtu.be/b_6H26fpZp8. As someone from a low trust society, I fully concur with his assessment that this was the mark of a truly “civilized society.”
Literally bought pumpkins to carve, firewood for the stove, and a carton of eggs from unmanned ‘honor system’ roadside stands last year. All three made it easy, venmo code posted, boop, on your way.
I don't think we were ever a "high trust" society in the way that like Denmark is or something. But I'd find it hard to argue with the assertion that rather, the US has become increasingly more of a low trust society recently, more than we already were.
Sort of, but there's a difference, the rise in anti-shoplifting stuff is in contrast to a decline in things like burglar bars. Stealing from residential property is seen as mostly the domain of drug addicts. Stealing from a multi-national corporation doesn't have the same stigma.
It's not a matter of stigma, it's a matter of lax enforcement. The majority of shoplifting is done by organized criminal gangs. They'll do it if they can escape without serious punishment, regardless of any stigma.
I've sat in classes where people at my table genuinely took pictures of the exam while the professor's back was turned (being kind to us and giving us useful information on the board) and uploaded the entire exam to the Gemini app.
Cheating is all around disheartening and is now incredibly easy with all the free multi-modal models around. Real active proctoring is needed and devices need to be confiscated during exams. This is common practice in many other countries.
My son is taking an AP chem class - he's doing really well, super interested in the subject. It's a difficult class, to be sure. Many of his peers are just goofing off and don't understand things. My son regularly tells me about people in his lab group that are cheating off his papers (and, I think, even his test). He tries to cover up answers, but it's not always possible to do.
What is even more frustrating is that the teacher knows this and does nothing about it. Maybe one could argue that, in the end, these students fail to learn and will get their just rewards. But it seems to me that the lack of immediate corrective action (eg, an F on an assignment) is a failing of the system.
What is even more frustrating is that the teacher knows this and does nothing about it.
When teachers are evaluated based on how students perceive them, and are in turn evaluated by others based on the grades their students receive, there's a perverse incentive/conflict of interest for them to allow cheating.
If I were your son, next exam I would physically move my desk to the corner of the room out of protest. He should also report everyone he sees cheating.
As someone who attended an elite school in the post-covid era, here was my experience:
There is relatively little stigma against cheating. Maybe in smaller seminars and classes with higher collaboration there is some, but much less so in large STEM lectures. Many of the incentives in classes where exams were online led to arms races and widespread cheating (without exaggeration, over 80% of the class). For instance, a certain math class I knew of had all grades based on remote and often asynchronous tests. Many people would cheat/collaborate and ace them, leading to the professor increasing difficulty (as scores were very high). This led to more cheating and so on. It got to the point where the problem sets had such difficult problems in this intro class that only a handful of people (who had taken advanced course work in high school) in the entire 100+ person seminar were distributing proofs for everyone else. Really not great dynamics all around and it's worth noting that my school does not have a reputation for being ones with an especially competitive and cutthroat culture.
Usually the rule is you can't have a phone out of your pocket or backpack during a test. Students still have phones on them. If they disallowed that too, how would that work, an airport security style check going in?
When I had exams in the 90s we'd have to hand phones in at the start. If the phone was seen during the exam, your test would be forfeited. If the rules were that strict then, I can't imagine how they could be less strict now given how much more powerful phones are today.
They do it for big standardized tests like the MCAT. If I went to school and saw this for every exam, I'd think wow I'm in a bad school, not that there's anything wrong with it per se but it's not commonly done.
That’s pretty sad. Even sadder is that those people will hardly even feel it to be cheating because they’re now using AI for absolutely everything and so suddenly contented with a situation where it can’t be used they still can’t help but use it. Not a good sign.
Princeton is a strange place. What on earth could be the objection to proctoring? I'd much rather have a proctor than have to narc on a classmate. And even then, the proctor just reports the matter to a student-run body? Wild.
> What on earth could be the objection to proctoring?
There is a unique pride in being part of a community built around honor. You see this on the Swiss metro and in small-town vegetable stalls. Unproctored exams force every student to weigh the value of their honor against a better grade. That's a personal moral reckoning that might be worth the entire degree.
That’s just the propaganda they sell during college visits. When I was at Caltech the honor code didn’t inspire any pride, because the only way anyone got through that course load was by “cheating”*. No one had any time for pride (GO BEAVERS!)
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).
I went to Rice which had a similarly strong honor code, and it absolutely inspired pride. In me, and from what I could tell in many of my classmates.
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.
This mirrors my experience at Stevens. The professor would not babysit us during exams and that really did inspire pride. Also the exams were often brutally hard which inspired despair.
Im surprised to hear that. I went to Caltech for my postgrad and never collaborated on an test, and it would have never ocurre me to do so (and no, the professor didn’t have to explicitly say they collaboration was not allowed. It was just the standard honor code).
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 did ChemE for undergrad and aerospace focused on systems engineering for postgrad so that colored my experience a bit. The former was brutal and the latter naturally collaborative with a bunch of projects, so we all worked together.
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.
I was an undergrad at Caltech in the late 80s and likewise it never even occurred to us to cheat on take-home exams. Maybe things have changed.
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...
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.
The advantage(?) of take-home exams à la Caltech is that they can be open everything and 3–5 hours long :-P (For what it's worth, being able to listen to music during an exam, ctrl+F a digital textbook, etc. was super awesome; it would deeply sadden me if that becomes infeasible in the future once enough students stop caring about the Honor Code....)
They were finals, not ordinary tests or midterms. Junior and senior year, I think one was Chemical Engineering, but I can't remember the exact name or number.
"Cheating" was pointless, because everyone else in the room was struggling just as hard as you were.
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."
> That’s just the propaganda they sell during college visits
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.
Can you give examples of what you consider to be high trust communities? Without specifics it’s hard to calibrate and figure out whether we‘re talking past each other.
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
> 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.
Japan is a classic example. You can drop your wallet there and someone will send it to you with all the cash intact. It makes you realize how much overhead it causes when you need to guard against cheaters and thieves.
This is an unbelievably pretentious take that sounds like it's coming from someone who is either lying or was oblivious to the cheating that was going on around them.
"An honor code is an admission that your curriculum is so sadistic,
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.
Things may have changed, but I don't recall any group exams during my time at Caltech, and conversely I do recall a strong sense of pride in the Honor Code. Also, if your professor allows collaboration, then it's definitionally not cheating: There is a vast moral difference between "the professor made the assignments difficult with the specific expectation that people will collaborate" and "the professor doesn't want collaboration but people did it anyway".
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?
The article says that according to a survey of Princeton seniors from 2025, 29.9% admitted to cheating on an assignment and 44.6% admitted to knowing of cheating that they chose not to report. I guess they could continue acting as if they were a community built around honor, but when they have been empirically proven to not be honorable I think acknowledging this reality is the more practical solution.
It's incredibly common all over Europe, not just Switzerland. Not only the metros but the trams and even buses often rely on this system where there's no turnstile or barrier, you just walk in.
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.
And it is common to cheat, as it is cheaper to pay the fine than to buy a pass annually. Naturally, this is done more by the foreigners I know than the natives. But the foreigners are not Japanese...
Buy a ticket and get on was the standard everywhere for trams and trolleys because you didn’t have enough enforcers and you didn’t have controlled access.
Spot checking kept people honest but it only really works when most people are honest.
I assume they are referring to systems like TPG in Geneva. Basically you buy a pass and when you get on an off a bus or street car there is no checking of payment it is just assumed everyone is "honoring" the agreement to pay. Every once and a while transit cops will board and check that everyone has a pass/has paid somehow and if you get caught not paying it can affect your ability to rent housing etc.
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.
In this case yes. In general, the point of an honor system is supposed to be honor. It's great when it works, but unfortunately it's not working at Princeton.
I came to this country as an immigrant and one of the first memories I have was walking to the gas station to get the Sunday paper for my host father. I remember opening up the door and seeing tens of Sunday papers and was taken aback thinking how can this be, wouldn't someone just put in a quarter and take ALL of the Sunday papers home with her/him. In today's society (and especially if we are talking Princeton-like places) I do not believe honor-anything "works" anymore and am wondering just how small a place needs to be where this exists today...
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...
FWIW, I would expect this behavior more in white collar affluent areas more than the rural areas the GP comment is referring to.
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”.
An honor system is a culture, where most people feel shame if they cheat. While some external enforcement is necessary to maintain the system, it mostly relies on everyone policing their own behavior. The more you focus on policing others, the further away you get from an honor system.
I think that is not an exception, but is pretty common almost anywhere in the US rural enough to have a roadside stand. Although bowls are not immune to wind, so generally the exact implementation takes that into account. Often a slotted box with no lock, etc.
There is no benefit to taking all the newspapers out of the stack. What do you do next? Try and hawk them to people walking by? Candy though, you can eat all that candy.
see I often wonder the same thing like why would you take 20 newspapers when you don’t need 19 of them but human mind works in misterious ways. my answer would be cause it is free and I’ll burn the 19 of them in my backyard for fun. or just like “it is ‘free’ I am taking it!”
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 :)
Maybe some did that certainly, but in those days, yesterdays newspapers were in abundant supply and available all over the place for various hobby craft efforts or budding arson hobbies. It would not be worth the initial quarter if you merely wanted a stack of newsprint.
Princeton was that way in my lifetime (and I'm not that old : ) - corruption is not inevitable nor should honor be considered some sort of utopian dream.
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.
As I understand it Americans pay tens of thousands of dollars for university.
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.
> And let's face it if you can't even pass the exams maybe it is not your career
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.
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.)
I agree about the cynicism thing, I like the idea of an honor code if/when it actually works, but the bad reaction here is because 1/3 of students admitted to cheating.
No argument there. Tbf given my professional and personal background, I automatically assume the worst in all people so even though I never abused honor codes (and honestly never had the need to anyhow because I liked the classes I took with one as they tend to be the kinds of classes where professors and teacher staff are the most engaged) I think it is almost impossible to enforce one in classes beyond 30 students, because anonymity does beget some amount of bad behavior.
don't know about the phone era, but previously schools were widely separated by reputation and practice. "lazy or too slow son of a wealthy family" went to certain schools that had that element. The really competitive and state-of-the-art schools really did not do that "directly". There were approaches for example sports, and niche majors that were easier for sure. Another observation is that some advanced students were into specific and dedicated cheating in order to win. Others had a "party" orientation and just did not do as much schoolwork. A criticism based on "rich kid" also does not ring true as a general statement about University in the USA to me.
Right, but there’s really only two directions you can go.
1. Install a culture of honour/virtue/accountability. Rely on duty and moral justice to keep the majority in-line.
2. An arms race to prevent ever more sophisticated methods of cheating, and the reduction in human dignity this implies. (E.g. the proctor must follow you into the toilet).
We all want the systems to be fair and just; but we also all want to be treated with dignity. No easy answers.
As someone who has attended this kind of program, it's because some students will cheat and view proctoring as an annoyance.
Imo it's both on the students (plenty of students are optimizing just to get a class out of the way to do more interesting stuff) and the programs (some classes just aren't up-to-date or are rightfully viewed as busywork).
Personally, I found courses that were output heavy and regurgitation light tended to be the most successful from an honor code perspective - you can't cheat your way out of "learning by doing" when you are held accountable for the output (eg. A research grade paper or implementing a fully functional Linux kernel).
Sadly, even at Ivies most lower div classes are just rote memorization because class sizes would be massive for plenty of core classes (100-500 students for some classes).
I dont know what it means, but you missed an important category that was mentioned elsewhere ... brutal, even sadistic levels of work to filter students. I was in these kind of classes in my undergrad.
yeah it is interesting. when I was at Stanford I was a TA and we just had to leave the room during exams after passing them out and come back at the end to collect the exams. just as I was graduating they started doing the pilot for proctoring exams and I remember students were really upset about it, though my fellow TAs were mostly in agreement that it was a good idea.
side note is that it’s kind of funny because sometimes the seating would be auditorium style so you could easily see papers in front of you if you were higher up… probably difficult to avoid accidentally glancing at someone else’s paper while taking a break, lol.
The Faculty Senate voted to allow proctoring of in-person exams following a pilot overseen by the Academic Integrity Working Group.
The Faculty Senate unanimously voted to permit proctoring of in-person assessments following a presentation from the Academic Integrity Working Group (AIWG) on Thursday.
Formed in 2024 after updates to the Honor Code and Fundamental Standard, the AIWG was charged with studying the scope of academic dishonesty at Stanford and overseeing a multi-year proctoring pilot study, which launched the same year. Historically, proctoring was not permitted at Stanford; students were expected to report peers for academic misconduct.
“What we’re finding is that a lot of the expectations we might be putting on our students is creating an unsustainable moral burden on them,” in which students must choose to cheat to keep up or report their peers, said Jennifer Schwartz Poehlmann, AIWG co-chair and senior lecturer in chemistry.
During the pilot, instructors reported that it helped them better assess students’ learning goals, clarified academic integrity standards, and reduced student frustration, said AIWG Student co-Chair Xavier Millan, ’26, an undergraduate in computer science.
The proctoring policy was previously passed by the AIWG, the Board on Conduct Affairs, the Undergraduate Senate, and the Graduate Student Council.
Poehlmann and Millan highlighted some of the student feedback that showed support for proctoring, including one who said proctoring feels like “more of a fair level playing field.”
Some schools love to pride themselves on their students' integrity. They don't proctor because they think their students don't cheat and can be trusted. I don't know about Princeton but a college my family attended had stats showing no difference between test scores in proctored vs. unproctored exams. That was before LLMs would have made it so easy to cheat. Maybe that school has changed its policy as well.
As a former TA the cheaters were never acing the test. They were like a turd circling the drain desperate for anything to grab on to. Often they'd cheat off eachother, sitting next to eachother, turning in identically incorrect exams. That being said if they were smart enough to cheat off the smart kids instead, maybe they wouldn't be so dumb to cheat and get caught. Oftentimes they had their head fully turned staring at another students exam without even hiding it. Very blatant cheating a lot of cases.
As professor I see little evidence of an increase in cheating. Microscopic earpieces and remote assistance we're problems already ten-fifteen years ago and copying has always been an issue (I teach mostly engineers who tend to be ahead of the curve at cheating).
What has perhaps changed is that now it is easier to detect cheating because AI assisted cheating is much higher quality. As such it stands out as obvious. The mere fact that a student writes a coherent sentence and a well structured argument normally puts one on alert.
That Princeton has never proctored exams strikes me as farcical. Those honor codes don't work except to support the myth that we are above all that.
huh, i had no idea princeton specifically disallowed proctors, and instead relied on an honor system. seems... like a poorly thought out system, especially given:
"29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report."
crazier is the people protesting by saying: “students should behave honorably, and that faculty and students should trust each other given the 1893 Honor Code compact.”. obviously that isnt happening if 1/3rd of the student body has admitted to cheating (meaning that the real percent of cheating is even higher).
A couple of my friends teach university classes. Mostly undergrad. I get to hear some of their interesting stories when we game together.
My impression is that there was a sharp shift around COVID. Doing classes over Zoom with a talking head broke the connection they had with their professors and other students. College felt closer to a video game operated through your screen than a community.
When I was in college not all that long ago, cheating was a scandalous thing. I knew a friend of a friend who cheated on an exam with some tricks and it resulted in suspension for a semester. There were rumors of someone hiring a service to write their papers for them and it was a wild story.
Now students have ChatGPT to write their papers and they've been practicing how to use cell phones without the teacher noticing for 10 years before getting to college. Combine that with social media grumblings about how college is "just a piece of paper" and doomerism about how they're never going to get a job or buy a house and cheating starts to look the only rational option to some.
The pattern is not contained to college. Every time the topic of cheating comes up on Hacker News there are more comments defending cheating than I would expect from this crowd. The usual justification is that the system is broken in a hand-wavey way and therefore nobody can be blamed for cheating.
>My impression is that there was a sharp shift around COVID. Doing classes over Zoom with a talking head broke the connection they had with their professors and other students.
I think this is part of a larger phenomenon than simply Zoom classes. COVID severely damaged the already decaying social contract of the US and we have mostly been trying to ignore that ever since. The most prevalent viewpoint of American life is now that the only thing that matters is the individual and therefore anything an individual can do to better their station in life is inherently justified. We can see this on so many levels from politics to rampant academic cheating to quiet quitting to prediction markets full of insiders. When we don't owe each other anything and the consequences are minimal, rarely applied, or completely non-existent, the only reason to not give into cheating, scamming, and corruption is your own personal morals.
If AI is going to steal all white collar work - why use AI to get a degree to do white collar work, paying both the AI and the college for it? Wild times.
more valuable, i think, is the social networking opportunities. not many places you can be chummy and party with a bunch of millionaire/billionaire heirs.
> Now students have ChatGPT to write their papers and they've been practicing how to use cell phones without the teacher noticing for 10 years before getting to college.
Colleges will need to remodel the rooms where these tests are given to become large SCIF type rooms so that wireless communication is not possible. Let the students go back to writing on their arms, wearing eye patches, or shoving notes up their casts. Yeah, I've probably seen Spies Like Us a couple of times:
Note that this is how the FAA has been doing its written tests for years: you go to a proctor test facility and through a metal detector. The entire thing is videotaped.
This fits with my priors. I was in grad school during covid and had some professors I was close to (and whose class I was taking) reach out asking for feedback on their exam because students were blatantly cheating despite the allowances the professors were making (up to being open to the internet, just no direct communication). They couldn't punish them, and they were perplexed why anyone would bother cheating on even trivial exams.
Even recently when I last spoke to them, the profs described how students were refusing to think for themselves even when given open ended projects. They were just having ChatGPT come up with the project idea for them instead of taking advantage of the freedom to do something they enjoyed.
Hmm, anxiety of making the wrong choice and have it on record? I’ve read that later gens are extremely aware of “the internet never forgets” and are terrified of any choice being the embarrassing and defining moment of the rest of their life
I feel like that anxiety has been a thing with regard to education for a while. Worrying about bad grades following you through life has been a thing for much longer than the internet's existence.
I think the issue is largely that in the age of AI, learning a skill requires one to be deliberate and dedicated, but the entire reason grades and exams are so prominent is because most students need the threat of near term failure to learn.
Open ended projects were always my favorite ones because I was able to utilize some of my personal projects on them. Profs also enjoy seeing students' passion for their topic. That kind of student is probably still doing well.
As someone who went there (albeit many decades ago) I can tell you FWIW when I was there folks took it seriously. I literally knew of no one who ever cheated on an exam. And I'm pretty sure that anyone I knew who observed cheating would have taken it seriously enough to bring it to the process. It was pretty much a fixture of how students thought about things. So it worked (near as I could tell) back then.
But institutions take awhile to adjust to new realities, and it while looks like Princeton may have been a bit behind the curve on this one, I can understand why they were reluctant to abandon this practice. Living in an honest community cuts a lot of extra effort out - crap that you don't even have to think about. Princeton will be a less productive place to learn going forward.
I'd wager the main difference between "many decades ago" and mid 2000s onwards is the perceived stakes of college. My time in college (around that time) was perceived by most as "make or break": either you did well in college, or you were doomed to a sub-standard lifestyle (not to mention the debt of college tuition).
Obviously, whether this was true or not is a whole discussion, but the attitude did lead to a lot more cheating (due to desperation) than I'd imagine past generations had.
A midterm being worth 25-33% of a grade, plus some classes only being offered in fall or spring semesters meant a bad test could roughly cost you tens of thousands of dollars, since the next time you could retake the class would be in a year, and it often was a prerequisite for another class. It just leads to an environment that encourages desperate "survival" behavior.
Which is bad, someone who cheats on a test or someone who rats out their friend for cheating on a test?
It really is a cultural thing, and that sort of culture is primarily passed down from upperclassmen to underclassmen. I went to a different college with an honor code (Harvey Mudd) and when I graduated in 2019 it was still doing relatively well, but from what I've heard COVID really killed students caring about / adhering to the honor code.
I'm in Mudd's class of '27 (and I was on the honor board for 2 years), and I do think the honor code system has gotten somewhat less functional over the time I've been here. But I think a majority of students and faculty still want to make it work.
Loyalty is a fundamental moral principle. Loyalty to a friend carries a lot of moral weight. Humans are a social animal, and loyalty to a friend can easily outweigh loyalty to some abstract institution. Like, my friend will still have my back five years from now. The university I went to won't do shit for me.
Like, if you're talking about loyalty to a friend who wants you to cover up an unjustified murder they committed, then I think most people will say the value of telling the cops about the murder outweighs the loyalty to your friend.
But for cheating on some test where probably 30% of the other students are cheating anyways? I think the vast majority of people will say that loyalty to your friend is the more important moral principle here. We all make mistakes in life, and the whole idea of loyalty and love to a friend is that we support them even though they make mistakes. As long as the mistakes are common mistakes like cheating on a test or cheating on a boyfriend, as opposed to things like felony crimes.
You’re introducing additional details and scenarios that are part of a different conversation, one in which is certainly nuanced and well-worth discussing.
But what you are doing here is justifying behavior. That’s separate from a discussion about what’s right or wrong. You have to not only consider one’s friendship, but the negative effects across society that their actions cause. In other words, reporting the friend negatively affects (in general) only two individuals, while cheating affects many more people and cultural values and norms. I’m not a Utilitarian, but intent and effect matter.
I don't consider it loyalty to know a friend has cheated, and let them get away with it.
Teachers/Professors are already used to accommodating dumb planning/mistakes from students. An honest "I spent too much time partying and fell behind, can I get an extension" email will often get you very far.
Also baffled to hear cheating on a boyfriend included there, cheating of that sort would be friendship ending.
I could buy the argument if the friend had a moment of weakness, regretted it, won't do it again, and please don't report it. They've learned their lesson, that's enough.
But if they do it and they're fine with it and they're going to do it again and what's the big deal? Refusing to report that isn't loyalty anymore, it's not sticking with someone who made a mistake, it's protecting deliberate bad behavior.
We can make mistakes in our ongoing behaviors. Nobody's perfect.
The question is simply how you balance loyalty to the institution vs loyalty to a friend.
A lot of people will think that cheating in a context where a lot of other people cheat too, is just not a big deal. That it's certainly not worth losing a friendship over. Like, are you going to end a friendship because someone jaywalks? Because they habitually speed 5 mph over the legal limit? Because they sometimes take illegal drugs? Because they deducted things on their tax return that you know weren't actually business expenses?
The size or importance of a moral violation matters, when weighing up conflicting moral obligations.
I guess this really comes down to differences in morality.
I think cheating is pretty serious. It qualifies as self-harm, and it harms your classmates by devaluing their eventual degree.
Jaywalking and minor speeding are not even immoral at all, in my view. I don't mean they're insignificant, I mean they're outright not morally wrong to me, so that comparison suggests that we have a pretty strong difference in what we consider to be morally good here.
It's very easy to argue speeding is immoral: it's immoral to disobey any law or regulation passed by a democratically elected government if these is no other conflicting moral principle. So you can speed to rush to a hospital, for example, but everyday speeding is immoral both because it breaks the morally legitimate democratic law and increases the chance of physical harm.
For many people, cheating on a test is little different from speeding. Calling it "self-harm" is a stretch, and there's zero direct harm to your classmates if it's not graded on a curve (which I haven't seen in a long time). And you could easily argue that the marginal difference it makes to the value of everyone's degree from that institution overall is basically as negligible as the marginal difference it makes to public safety as speeding by 5 mph does.
Also, different exams are different. Fewer people will be bothered by cheating on a freshman year calculus exam, whereas cheating on a final qualification to become any type of emergency responder is far, far more serious because somebody could directly die as a result of your lack of knowledge.
> it's immoral to disobey any law or regulation passed by a democratically elected government if these is no other conflicting moral principle.
I have to say, this is not the sort of attitude I expected to find on this site. Especially from someone defending cheating on exams. Anyway, I'm sure I won't convince you to change your mind on this, and you certainly won't convince me.
Only in certain fucked up moral systems. Though I guess Confucianism would be one of those:
>The Duke of She said to Confucius, “Among my people there is one we call ‘Upright Gong.’ When his father stole a sheep, he reported him to the authorities.”
>Confucius replied, “Among my people, those who we consider ‘upright’ are different from this: fathers cover up for their sons, and sons cover up for their fathers. ‘Uprightness’ is to be found in this.”
"Culture" works by having a system that collectively punishes cheaters, so that people learn from their own (or others') experiences and internalize that cheating is bad and won't pay off in the long term.
That's how you get a culture against cheating. You ensure that cheating doesn't pay, and eventually people learn that cheating doesn't pay. The enforcement is part of the culture.
El Salvadorians (from The country) would starkly disagree with you. It took a dictator and a martial state (no human rights) to end maras in less than five years. The culture is the same.
They just replaced the street gangs with a single state operated gang. El Salvadorians still have to live in fear for their lives, but it will be the government coming for them.
I wasn't at Princeton, but I remember blatant cheating going on and 'study groups' in CS classes that were mere passing around of completed code. (1997-2001)
I'd asked them what they expected would happen when they tried to get jobs or landed one. Like how do you fake work? They just said all jobs are group-based like their study group. (Keep in mind they were soliciting my code as their group was struggling to find solutions to assignments.)
The answer is a one of them works at a grocery store as a cashier, another one I saw now manages a bagel store (didn't know all of them). A waste of time, money, and effort to get a CS degree then just not be able to use it.
When I was at Georgia Tech back around 2002, the freshman Java CS course introduced a brand new and improved cheat detector, and they immediately caught over half of the class for cheating. It was disastrous. The penalty for being caught cheating was so onerous that they simply couldn't do it to the whole class.
To the school's credit, they responded as best they could. They considered each case, interviewed the students, and punished them on a sliding scale based on how much cheating, ranging from a zero on that one assignment up to suspension.
Then, for the next semester, they simply changed the rules. You were now officially allowed to cheat all you wanted on homework, but it now only counted for 5% of your grade. That was REALLY bad for people who weren't doing the homework, but it also sucked for people who were just lousy test takers.
If 44.6% of students saw an honor code violation and didn't report it, and 0.4% of students saw an honor code violation and did report it, that means that 99.2% of Princeton students that pledge to report honor code violations break that pledge. And that's only counting the voluntary reporters, meaning that the actual rate is presumably even worse!
But also, how would reporting a suspected honor code violation even work? There's intentionally no staff witnessing the exam, and you aren't likely to know the names and faces of your whole class, so what would the professor even do with that information? "Professor, I saw someone take his phone out, I think maybe he was cheating, I don't know his name." Okay, thanks Captain Non-Actionable. We'll file that in the circular academic integrity investigation bin.
It is true that more than half of respondees reported that they never saw a violation.
However, the 44.6% was the category of "respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report," and the 0.4% was the category of "had reported a peer for an Honor Code violation."
Everybody who saw a violation was in one of those two categories (did report or didn't report), so we can compare them to see what percent of people who saw honor code violations did, and the answer is that >99% of them failed to uphold their pledge.
Those two categories don't include everyone. 44.6% saw a violation and didn't report. 0.4% saw a violation and did report. That doesn't include people who didn't see a violation. Did I misread something?
>” In The Daily Princetonian’s 2025 Senior Survey of over 500 seniors, 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report. Only 0.4 percent of seniors responded saying that they had reported a peer for an Honor Code violation.”
The 44.6% appears to refer to the proportion of respondents who saw a violation and did not report it.
As far as I can tell there are three groups of respondents (in this respect):
- 0.4% saw and reported
- 44.6% saw and did not report
- 55% did not see (but may have erroneously reported, though that seems unlikely)
If this is correct, 44.6% of respondents are in breach of the honor code. If we assume that the non-witnesses behave similarly to the witnesses, 99.111% of the students do not ‘honor’ the code.
Exames were previously proctored, and it led to a "us vs them" mentality that meant students banded together to
The Honor Code system, and removing proctors was a way to route around that—it made all of the students responsible for catching cheaters and turned the "Students vs Faculty" mentality into a "Honor vs Cheaters" mentality among the students.
Unfortunately, it seems like the "Students vs Faculty" mentality has seen too much of a resurgence due to outside factors, and the Honor Code is no longer a match for the current climate. That's what the article is about
> 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report
What is it at other universities? I went to a big public school, and remember cheating being halfway rampant. The penalty, moreover, was never expulsion.
Pretty much my observation. Professors could give lenience and a warning by not reporting it, but if they reported it to Academic Affairs, the Provost would probably end up throwing them out.
One time, several people cheated on physics homework (apparently in a very obvious way), and the professor took fifteen minutes out of the next lecture to basically say "you know who you are, you got a zero, and if I see it again, I'm going straight to the Provost."
Public schools are public schools. They're more or less compulsory and are just meant to try and get you to a point where you can contribute meaningfully to the society.
Princeton is very much optional and is a school for future elites. They're supposed to produce CEOs, politicians, and Nobel prize winners. So the standards should be different.
Of course, expectations are a part of the problem. Many kids go to Princeton or Stanford or MIT because they had wealthy parents who really wanted their kids to go there. And many of these kids are mostly interested in computer games, weed, and the opposite sex. A combination of unmotivated students and high academic standards lead to predictable outcomes.
Public universities (what Americans call public schools in the context of higher education) are optional to the exact same degree as private ones. In other words they are all schools that you apply to.
They also produce more "elites" than "elite" schools do if you go by executives at F500 companies and politicians.
Are we going to pretend that Berkley, Michigan, UNC-CH, UVA etc. do not produce world class educations from world class people?
Not just Princeton, my uni had a similar honor code and changed it a couple years ago to have proctors after a bunch of cheating events. I don't really get it either. Cheating has been going up exponentially since 2020 but it existed before then. I don't think it's COVID related strictly. Things moved online so cheating became easier and then LLMs became popular and from what I hear that's the most common way of cheating now. I have tested LLMs on undergrad level algorithms problems and was surprised it easily solved them so I think their use goes well beyond just coding assignments.
My guess is that the vast majority of those self-reported cases where relating to a take-home assignment (e.g., copying off a classmate's solution). Even without proctoring, you need to be a lot more brazen to cheat on an in-person exam.
I've heard that it's the same at <other elite private university I don't want to name>, and people cheat, to the point where non-cheaters are suspicious that it's just a method of grade inflation
The honor systems is the correct system for an institution where learning is the goal as the tests are there to help you internalize the material and know how well you've absorbed it. Instead we've turned universities into vocational schools where the goal is the degree and testing is seen as a hurdle to overcome to attain it.
Note, "cheating on assignment or exam during your time at the institution" is a ridiculously broad net to cast. It includes everything from "merely asking one friend on one random night if they got the same numerical answer on the first freshman-year homework (despite both of you working independently and figuring out the entire derivations onto your own)" to "blatantly copying every answer on your final exams every single semester." The fact that they don't distinguish radically different things makes their 30% figure suspect.
It's nothing crazy about it. Why do you study? To learn. The exams are there to benchmark your progress. If you cheat, everything falls apart for you.
It is possible that when the metric becomes the target(AKA Goodhart's law) cheating can be beneficial but this is failure of the institution because it means you are no longer there to learn.
AIUI, these schools see their mission as training the next generation of leaders and elites. They aim for people with strong abilities, and moral character.
And, the way you guide youth to act in a certain way is by treating them that way. If you want them to be trustworthy, you trust them. This is not a totally fringe idea.
Most of us have done something stupid once in our lives. That does not mean we do stupid things all the time, nor does it mean that we didn't learn from the experience. The goal of school is to help immature young adults grow into mature ones.
>The goal of school is to help immature young adults grow into mature ones.
agreed!
however, having a proctor that stands in the classroom for your exam does not hinder the growth process, in my experience. (i teach, if thats worth anything to my statement)
Okay and they shouldn't cheat? Why do we always side with the better angels of the elites in America when the elites in America are the literal cause of our misery? If they can't handle having a proctor ensuring they aren't cheating, they're free to go to the local community college.
I don't really like to make broad general arguments about "elites". But if we're humoring this argument: I would postulate that the sudden need to police cheating and the more recent bad behavior of our elite adults are probably both symptoms of something deeper. Whatever that is, it should be what makes you angry.
It's a college made for the elite corporate class of the US and if you spent any time working for the elite corporate class they absolutely hate accountability and wealth redistribution (although they are a big fan of stealing wealth from the workers).
I'm angry at the people who control the current incarnation of neoliberalism, the elites, they have led to the complete moral decay of the world. Luckily they fucked up so bad that American imperialism will go back to its rightful place of fucking around in the Americas while murdering civilians for capitalists. Just as the founders intended.
You can game theory it out and see that everyone gets to cheat and nobody reports is the best outcome for the group. Defectors must be punished in some way or perhaps the profs are not carrying through with punishments for cheaters.
This has to be one of the most pretentious things I've ever read about post secondary education.
I'm completely flabbergasted to learn that an Ivy League holds students to a far different and much lower standard than I what I was held to at a regular university in Canada.
From now on I don't see how I can't be skeptical of the credentials of someone from Princeton knowing that their exams weren't proctored.
Here in Canada, a housemate of mine used ChatGPT to cheat in all his courses. He got caught on only a single one because he scored 100%. Then he did it again and got caught again in the same course. For some reason, the professor never reported him to the dean or whoever is supposed to deal with this kind of stuff. He graduated but his degree is basically a degree in cheating.
The interesting thing is that cheating is much easier when done online. When I was a TA and we were in the process of moving quite a bit of the classes to online, we still mandated in person testing.
It was eye opening to find cheat sheets and other cheating materials obviously left behind by students. The majority of the stuff we'd find we either inaccurate and completely wrong. Like a half awake student copied something they thought was the right equation or solution, when in fact, it was for something completely different that wasn't on the test.
So I agree with your notion, but its one thing to try and cheat. Its a completely different one to do so successfully.
I think it really depends on how you view our high education system. As a middle-aged man returning to school to switch careers, my entire reason for going to school is to learn, and I'd never cheat because that would undermine my own goals. To me the purpose of school isn't the degree--I made an entire career already without one--it's to learn.
Students are at school for a lot of poorly-thought-out reasons: inertia, not knowing what else to do, because their parents made them go, etc. If they're not there to learn, you can't make them learn. No, not even by proctoring exams. The only purpose that achieves is to gatekeep.
And, gatekeeping for doctors and pilots is a good thing. We don't want to let just anyone become a doctor or pilot. But frankly, I don't give any shits about whether an AI programmer has made it through a gatekept degree. That stuff can be gatekept at other points--if they show up to work pretending and don't know anything, that will become obvious, and degrees maybe aren't the only or even best way to obtain that knowledge anyway.
All that's to say: if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options (i.e. a career) then proctored exams make sense. But if higher education is just for learning, it's stupid to put all this gatekeeping around it--that simply closes doors to interested learners, while allowing people who can "college" well to thrive without really learning. Let the cheaters cheat--they're only hurting their own learning--and I think it's often because you're forcing them to take some gen-ed thing that isn't useful knowledge to them (I'm looking at you, calculus--why was I forced to take 4 semesters of calc, when I always knew that the prob and stat classes I took as electives were more useful?).
> if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options (i.e. a career) then proctored exams make sense. But if higher education is just for learning, it's stupid to put all this gatekeeping around it [...] Let the cheaters cheat--they're only hurting their own learning
I wouldn't reduce student motivations to career vs. learning.
College can also be about aspiring to a better society, with the university as microcosm.
For example, a society in which people are honest, and have integrity.
> if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options
From the institution's perspective--or at least an "elite" institution like Princeton--that is what it is. When they confer a degree, they're conferring something valuable, even if its main value is as a status marker and ticket to future options. They can't afford to take the attitude of "let the cheaters cheat, they'll only hurt themselves", no matter how true it is, because it would destroy their brand.
are feelings more strongly felt more valid? the same things are happening at caltech - that is, just as much cheating - and they have an honor code. but they feel much stronger about their honor code, so it is more valid.
To people who have not grown up in extremely honor-bound societies and communities the idea sounds strange, yes. To those of us who did, however, events like this remind us of how fragile those systems are and that entry should be severely restricted.
I’ve never heard of a non-proctored exam. Every exam I took in university was proctored. If you got caught (happened every once in a while and made everything very awkward) you failed the exam immediately, got kicked out, and had a department hearing. I have a vivid memory of two girls almost killing each other as a result of one such failed scheme during a CS Logic exam of all things.
I had the Naruto Chunnin Exam episodes where they write the written test on dvd as a kid and watched it all the time so it might have altered my philosophy but I’ve always viewed proctored tests as a mini game. The ability to gather information under stress, maintain composure, and evaluate the likelihood the person you were borrowing answers from knew what they were doing was always fun to me. Even on tests where I was going to get 90% guaranteed I liked seeing how much information I could parse from other people. I remember one exam I could make out another girls scantron and knew she was going to fail. She was the first person to hand in her answers and the proctor joked “wow that was quick, we’ll have to make the next one harder”.
When I was a proctor I loved trying to catch people cheating. Lots of wandering eyes but never a phone. I’d have thrown someone out so quick if the pulled out a phone and that’s before ChatGPT. I can’t imagine not having proctors. Honour systems sound great and all but not in an evaluation. Tribe mentality prevents most people from ratting on others (except for those with limited social status to lose from the jump), especially when you are 19.
I saw someone mention that having proctors “punished” students who followed the honour code which is insane. If you know what you are doing in an exam you’ll forget all about the proctors being there. The only people who will notice them are those trying to cheat…
I was a TA at Princeton ~5 years ago, and I had forgotten about the honor code until reading this. Yes it's true, we did not proctor exams, and students seemed to take pride in it. On every test, you got the names/signatures of those sitting next to you. But also, I had a student who was accused of not putting his pencil down when the test had concluded, and the bureaucratic process to fight the accusation was so crippling that they had to take a semester of leave anyway. So I don't see harm in tearing it down.
Wait, Princeton NEVER have faculty proctoring exams??? Really shocks me but is reasonable for the ivy league. Nowadays, academic integrity is indeed a problem. Almost all students are using AI in their assignments, though it violates the honor code.
It's weird, right? The US is just hands down strange in some regards to little procedural things that are important but also easy to implement, and yet for whatever reason don't do and make a big deal over it when it's a complete non-affaire in other countries.
Like voter ID. It's not some partisan issue. None of the political parties are fighting Elections Canada over it and its been around my whole life. Its just not a thing(tm). You go to vote, show your ID and and voilà, done. And yet somehow, this is a "big deal" down south?
Ivy league schools , imho, tend to operate differently--more hands-off approach. The assumption is if you're smart and determined enough to get in, that you will not cheat. The filtering to get in is intense, so this presumably filters out less honest people.
The only possible reason for a school like Princeton that is drowning in cash to not proctor exams is to allow students to cheat.
Also: admissions at all these schools are heavily biased toward wealthy legacy hires, regardless of talent, and the "most determined" are the most likely to cheat.
That's not really the assumption they were making. It used to be that going to an elite university was good enough without also having top grades. Now there's more pressure, and cheating is way easier than before. In a similar vein, higher-tier schools tend to put less effort into weeding students out, because they assume everyone who got admitted there has already proven themselves enough. Wonder if that will last.
With reference to the "cultural" allusions of many posts in this thread, I can assure you that in the WASP UK universities of Oxford and Cambridge, all exams are "proctored".
It is assumed that students will attempt to cheat, so exams are designed so that cheating is not a viable strategy to obtain high grades. So-called invigilators also patrol the exam room and will report any violations.
Mostly by requiring analysis and synthesis rather than memorization.
It's been some years for me so things might have changed, but no tech was allowed into the exam rooms, except for calculators in some subjects. Everything was done by pen and paper.
The technical ability for the student to cheat in the present day is unprecedented.
For exams in most subjects, the cellular phone is held in the lap. The student needs only briefly expose the exam page to the camera of the phone: immediate photograph of the page, ingestion of the page by an artificial intelligence, and then: the student flips the page to view the side exposed to the camera, and glances down to see the answer on the telephone.
I’m sort of surprised that they’re not banned already; dating myself but when I was at Uni in the late 2000s they were banned then. Despite probably not being very useful for cheating on nascent 3G!
I mean, so many graded assignments are online now that very little technology is needed to cheat. I would guess that is the largest driver in increased cheating at universities.
This can easily be stopped. I don’t see how you would copy whole paragraphs or the working of a physics this way without easily being caught but this can mitigated against.
I wonder to what extent this is due to the changing roles of university. I would guess 133 years ago university was mostly upper class folks trying to better their minds, and less people wanting a degree to open up a job. Much more incentive to cheat if you just care about the piece of paper at the end.
You might be interested in the history. That was definitely not the case 133 years ago. Since at least the Middle Ages education has had a big impact on profession and station wasn’t just like a pastime for curiosity.
Could it be non-proctoring has served Princeton by inflating grades due to some cheating, but only now have cheating become rampant enough that it must be curtailed to destroy the reputation entirely?
I honestly think it's that. I've seen it before at other private schools, where someone is caught cheating and let off with very minor consequences. Private high schools were hiding it from colleges too.
This is good. Everyone is a cheater if they think they can get away with it. I don't mean 50% I mean more like 95-100%. Based on personal experience being in one of those classes where the opportunity existed and it was observable.
> Everyone is a cheater if they think they can get away with it. I don't mean 50% I mean more like 95-100%.
Not convinced of this. I would imagine the majority of people are more likely to cheat if they see the a lot of people getting away with it, not merely if they think they themselves can get away with it.
I would argue that the student behavior - ~30% admitting to cheating on academic work - reflects the value system shown by those holding positions/stature the students aspire to.
It is a combination of FOMO (everyone else is doing it, I must also to not fall behind) similar to that which drives hype adoption, combined with a perception that moral behavior grows optional in proportion with wealth or power. The latter is empirically evident in how American society has addressed moral failures of wealthy/powerful leaders (i.e. crimes without punishment)
So now I finally understand why Americans use the expression "proctored exams". Because not all exams are proctored.
Here in Spain, we don't have an equivalent expression because there is no such thing as an unproctored exam. The idea of being proctored is already included in the word "exam".
Maybe I haven't scrolled down far enough, but gut feeling is telling me that a lot of the rise in cheating is coming from international (read: chinese) students. Plenty of stories and personal experience of cheating rings. I tried to get into one just to see what was going on, but even though I looked the part I couldn't talk the talk.
The numbers don't play out because international chinese students only make up 5-7% (maybe less) of the undergraduate student body. Self-reported cheating frequencies are much higher.
That's kind of a large number. Honor system is a solidarity thing. There can be 0% cheating cause nobody wants to be that person, but if 5% come in and egregiously cheat anyway, it can poison more. Most people don't want to cheat, but they may feel disadvantaged not to.
Its a clear shift back to traditional assessment. It’ll be interesting to see how students adapt and whether this improves exam integrity or just adds new pressure.
Difficult to imagine that people were not using phones to search for stuff while taking an exam. I can understand this being the case 18 years ago. But since the iPhone, how was honor still a thing?
Not having invigilated exams is truly diabolical. It may have worked back in the 1800s when everybody at Princeton was already from extremely wealthy families, but these days when half the student body is Chinese expats who need the degree to get high paying jobs back in Shanghai, and another 20% are affirmative action students from single mom poverty line households, and nearly all the students aren’t from generationally extremely wealthy families, why wouldn’t they cheat?
> If a suspected Honor Code violation occurs, proctors will document their observations and submit a report to the student-run Honor Committee, where they may later testify under the same standards used for other witnesses.
is this so the rich kids that have parents who pay for parts of the school can still get a pass?
> so the rich kids that have parents who pay for parts of the school can still get a pass?
It's Princeton. They're given due process, not administrative fiat. Also, on what planet does having "parents who pay for parts of the school" swing a student (versus administrator) run process?
Seems unlikely the student-run honor committee decision would be immune to being 'reviewed' or 'considered' by faculty. Why would they cede that power?
> Financial aid covers the full cost of attendance -- including tuition, housing, food, books and personal expenses -- for most families with incomes up to $150,000 a year. Most undergraduate families with incomes up to $250,000 will pay no tuition.
Comments express surprise that this honor code has been in place. Many schools have similar honor codes.
Despite HN trendiness, SV and business world advocacy of 'animal instincts', and current cultural trends, humans are generally honest and honorable - obviously people in many places have thought that. It's good news, though many will resist it because, I think, it violates the anarcho-libertarian norms that are fundamental to these cultural trends (i.e., arguing that corruption is inevitable, human nature, etc.).
Taking the ‘generally honest and honorable’ point without challenge, corruption is unavoidable at a level of 1500 students per year despite students generally being honorable. As the article shows 2/3 students never cheated (or would never admit it) but that doesn’t do much to soften the blow that 1/3 did cheat and got away with it.
As a result, we still have 1/3 of the future leaders of American business/politics cheating and not facing any consequences. Princeton appears to be an unprincipled institution and is shown to lack any useful standard to evaluate the quality of its graduates. When you see a Princeton graduate with high marks you should always consider that they may have cheated to finish their degree.
That result is a change. You and others write as if it has always been true, but there is no evidence of that and the people who have dealt with it directly, for well over a century, have believed otherwise.
Princeton is changing its policy because of the changed result.
Nah, it's just that I went to college and saw cheating. When an assignment was take-home, people were forming cheating rings, but because they wanted an upper hand but because they were afraid others were doing the same. I saw even some top-notch students cheat a little bit, cause they wanted 4.00 not 3.95.
As a non-cheater, I didn't want draconian measures to catch cheating, just wanted there to be real consequences when someone was caught. I didn't need 4.00, but what if I did?
Chegg was a $15B company before AI came out. I promise that wasn't because it was the best platform to learn the material.
I agree that humans are generally honorable for things with low stakes. Consider our cultural view of politicians for a non-SV example of where we fully expect high stakes to lead to selfish and dishonorable actions.
> Despite HN trendiness, SV and business world advocacy of 'animal instincts', and current cultural trends, humans are generally honest and honorable
I personally believe this (that people are generally honest and good). BUT, the numbers don't lie: 30% of Princeton students admit to having cheated on an exam. This is a "your house is on fire" moment. An honor code has has to be enforced, and that is apparently not happening at Princeton. Frankly, as someone working at a school that also has an honor code (most do, in my experience), that is where the problem lies: if you turn a blind eye to violators, it sends the message to everyone that the honor code is just words, it doesn't mean anything.
Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting [1] and unprecedented corruption and criminality among our national leaders, it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.
The fish rots from the head. It's a sucker's game to aspire to selflessly serve the greater good when the most powerful people in the land are brazenly corrupt pedophiles. In other words: monkey see, monkey do.
Yes, and: the rot started long ago, this is just what it looks like when it goes unchecked. To quote Mencius:
Mencius went to see King Hui of Liang.
The king said, “Venerable sir, since you have not counted it far to come here, may I presume that you are provided with counsels to profit my kingdom?”
Mencius replied, “Why must Your Majesty use that word ‘profit’? What I am provided with are counsels to benevolence and righteousness, and these are my only topics.
If Your Majesty say, ‘What is to be done to profit my kingdom?’ the great officers will say, ‘What is to be done to profit our families?’ and the inferior officers and common people will say, ‘What is to be done to profit our persons?’ Superiors and inferiors will try to snatch this profit one from another, and the kingdom will be endangered.”
The brazenly corrupt also own the vast media ecosystem that can help swing elections. Should we all know better? Probably. But they control the education system too, so…
Hard to say for certain. Though I do think it goes both ways. People at the bottom influence culture from bottom up, folks at the top from the top down.
If we flip the snake so it goes along the political spectrum, with the biting ends being extremists, I suppose the fish does rot from the heads. Top-down versus bottom-up is a more-complicated situation, and I suspect it's closer to turbulence than anything monotonic.
It really doesn’t. Trump wouldn’t survive election if the electorate didn’t seek, or at least tolerate whatever the hell you can call that. Americans will conveniently point fingers at him (as is their political tradition) but he’s a consequence of a much deeper disease.
Yeah I think Reagan's reforms of the antitrust laws, and the subsequent fall of the Soviet union are probably some of the first dominoes toward the new gilded age.
The lack of competition from the Soviets is probably one of the bigger systemic causes. The cold war in no small part a war for hearts and minds in the democratic world. It was existentially important that the west believed in America, both the US itself and its allies. As long as the Soviets were around as existence proof for an alternate world order, the US needed at least visibly have its shit in order.
If today's clown fiesta had unfolded 50 years ago, well comrade, сегодня мы все говорили бы по-русски.
The old adage that the people elect the governance they deserve; comes to mind. The concepts of Virtue, Honour, Duty, and Justice have been declining in the West over a very long period (this is not a US specific thing). The rotting head reflects the rotting society.
> It's a sucker's game to aspire to selflessly serve the greater good when the most powerful people in the land are brazenly corrupt
You don’t act honourably because that will “get you ahead”. You act honourably because it is right.
You don't need "virtue", "honour", and "duty" to have NOT have voted the way people did. It is plain to see which chosen leader will torch the nation and which will not, regardless of people's distaste for the establishment politicians.
It is worse than self interest. It is brazen ignorance.
I am seeing this phenomenon in my country. Once people discover that their beloved leader is corrupt, they just justify with "all politicians are the same". Society becomes so cynic that it very hard to bring change. Politicians are considered corrupt by default, I don't know how that ends.
> You don’t act honourably because that will “get you ahead”. You act honourably because it is right.
As much as I would like to believe that’s true I don’t think it is.
You act honourably because society incentivises you to. To act dishonourably is to be disadvantaged, to be shamed, to be cast out. That is the part that’s missing today.
I see where you’re coming from, but something about this framing bothers me.
I think acting honorably has to come from within. It’s something that people need to do regardless of rewards or incentives. Now, how we create a culture that actually does so… that has to come from society. But, imo, if people only act honorably because they’re rewarded for it, and they don’t when no one is looking… that’s not acting honorably at all.
You can both be right. I live in a high trust society (Japan), but was raised elsewhere. When I first came here, there were times I had to suppress my instinct to take opportunistic advantage. That was intrinsic motivation.
Later, I had adapted to the culture around me. Such instincts rarely arise as it had become extrinsic.
My pessimistic take is that the majority of the population will simply never do that. Look at organized religion. One of its key promises is “behave in life and you’ll get everything you could ever dream of in the afterlife”. I don’t think it’s coincidental.
It's a nice saying, but the "head" changes every 4-8 years and this is a problem that has gotten worse over decades. Sometimes the rot doesn't start from the head.
Everyone has an anecdote of the immigrant they know who's a much better "American" in their values. The same for anecdotes of the people with the least American values being home grown and inbred
I've known a lot of people who justify crimes like shoplifting by the fact that these corporations have stolen from them (and not in some abstract way, often literal wage theft) and felt like the social contract was already broken. And it's not like the leaders at the large corporations I've worked at generally seem to care about their employees or customers (I would describe most places I worked at as, at best, amoral. I've heard "well, if we didn't do it some other less ethical company would" too many times).
Edit: not that I'm pro-shoplifting, it's that the article talks about them breaking the "social contract" (though the article is more of a reality show-esque piece as it's a opinions writer beefing with Twitch streamers and doesn't talk to any people actually shoplifting).
The thing is grocery stores make very little money, usually low single digit percentage profits, that surprisingly low rates of shoplifting can sink a store and force it to close. Shoplifting, especially the trend of rich people performatively shoplifting, dramatically harms the local community
Yeah, I'm very much not pro-shoplifting generally, I'm just anti the idea that corporations are upholding some social contract about stealing when they've literally stolen from many of my friends (tons of wage theft, illegal firing for reporting issues, etc). From the article, both the Twitch streamer and the writer sound insufferable and I don't agree with the points either makes.
Chomsky called corporations legal psychopaths in the documentary "The Corporation". He was right.
If companies can engage in terrible illegal behavior and then only pay 10% of profit as a fine, so can I.
If that means I cancel all streaming services, help friends also cancel streaming services, set up a Jellyfin/Navidrome box and grab everything, I do not give one fuck. Hell, the AI companies grabbed Annas Archive and Libgen. Why not me?
So, yeah. I wouldnt steal from fellow humans. I value humans. But companies and corporate "property"? <SPIT>
I mean, given that belief in moral decline is essentially based on illusory perceptions anyway[1], it's not too surprising that someone handwringing about it would also hallucinate connections between two disparate phenomena they opted to characterize as examples of such.
If you opt to habitually rationalize human behavior in a manner that is detached from concern with nuance or driving forces then some amount of reality denial is probably inevitable
> Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting [1]
Hasan Piker (one of the people in that link) is a streamer who got popular for extremist takes and controversy. He's just doing what he does to stay famous in that interview. The other person is a writer for The New Yorker who apparently enjoys controversy too.
This interview isn't representative of anything other than two people trying to be edgy because they want their interview to go viral.
Hasan piker has extremely bland and milquetoast takes compared to most of the left. He's just the one currently being sold to boomers as a terrorist. But any sane country would see him as a moderate (moderating between "anarchy" and the insanity of two identical corporate parties beholden to israel)
> it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.
Are unsupervised examinations common in the US? Or is this, in fact, simply one institution coming in to line with common US national and international practice?
This is not common in an in-person setting -- nearly "unheard of" outside of elite schools or particular faculty at particular programs. So it is the latter
“But what about the argument that if everyone just starts stealing wantonly,” Spiegelman replies, “Whole Foods will eventually raise the prices?”
“Yeah, chaos,” Piker says. “Full chaos. Let’s go.”
“I kind of am inclined toward this,” Tolentino adds. “Everyone, try it. See what happens.”
Personal shoppers for everyone! Point at what you want or add it on an app. Eventually would take force/fraud/violence to shoplift (hey I said EVENTUALLY!) :)
Source: gas station snack acquisition after 10pm in some USA urban areas, plus stories from abroad
Isn't that how stores used to work, before store owners decided it'd be cheaper to just let shoppers bring up a basket of goods? You'd go up to the shopkeeper behind the counter with a list, they'd get it all for you?
Yup, and that requires extra labor to fulfill, which will cost money. Luckily, I haven't heard anyone complain about high prices of groceries lately, so I'm sure everyone would be fine with that.
Cheaper, and maybe easier to sell personal items with a little more discretion.
That kind of service should be available for those who want it, assuming demand exists. Those who want self checkout or whatever else should not worry about their access being restricted due to wealthy authors shoplifting lemons.
(obviously no one here is going to bed crying tonight about the gall of hungry people to steal bread, I’m not even anti UBI or anything, just attempting to analyze a trajectory)
Idk about corruption, but the shoplifting trend has come from corporate america's wholesale looting of the country. The social contract was abandoned many decades ago.
You ever seen a man over 40 pull a building permit for work wholly within his own home? Yeah me either.
These days college kids are just as jaded. Of course they cheat the instant they think they can get away with it.
The college is there to serve the college, not them and these days the kids know it. Even if everyone cheating degrades the value of the degree there's no guarantee the college won't do that itself if everyone is honest so might as well get away with what you can while you can. Nobody likes this, it's just a rational adaptation to the perceived state of affairs.
> Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting
It's the K-shaped economy. Those not participating in the upsides are electing to either not participate in the system at all or to destroy it. Most people think Luigi Mangione is a hero.
We had a good post-WWII run. We had factories, then globalization. Massive growth for all economic backgrounds for several generations. But the world caught up. Now the average worker has to compete against their increasingly competent and economically enabled peers around the globe. Costs for everything are rising.
We used to have a super sized Big Mac economy propped up by the fact that America was (relatively) peerless. The worker saw so much upside. Now they don't even get free refills, so to speak.
I'm hoping the AI boom helps bring down the cost of goods without putting people out of work. If it goes the other way, I think we might be heading for 1790's France.
Are they being honest? Did Princeton students not need proctoring in the past because the had no means to cheat, or they both maintained some honor, and fear of the institution.
Given that UHC started approving lots of procedures and drugs after the assassination shows that their medical insurance mass fraud did happen and paid off... And they quit it.
And then they were sued by shareholders for approving said procedures. Boo fucking hoo the shareholders lost a buck.
Note that insurance fraud ALWAYS targets the individual policyholder, and NEVER the insurance company.
If Luigi did it, then he should be significantly credited for a massive harm reduction by using violence to ensure less fraud perpetrated by UHC.
The US government wouldnt do their fucking job (investigation amd criminal charges of insurance fraud). So a citizen had to.
What a disgusting take. Leftists such as yourself are beyond the pale. Luigi murdered someone in cold blood. You can civil society like that. Leftists are always going fascists but I don’t they have a problem with fascism. Their only issue is that they want you to be the fascists. How can you not see how a civil society cannot exist if we follow your ideology? It’s fine as long as it happens to people you disagree with politically. Idiocy.
Cause yeah, we should totally give businessmen a hard pass when their decision kills 10000 a year, cause some shareholder makes more money. Thats just murder with an extra step, and somehow deemed legal and allllll good.
Do we both value a life, regardless their status? If so, Im siding with the masses.
If that businessman stands in the way of 10000 dying, Im pulling that train lever and running his ass over.
Moral acceptance of petty theft always increases with inequality. When the poor take from the rich, people don't care as much. The poorer the thief and the richer the victim, the less people care. Go far enough, and people view the thief as a Robin Hood-style hero.
Given that we're at a point in American history where inequality is quite extreme, I don't think it's fair to compare shoplifting to the corruption of the ruling class that is largely responsible for the current levels of inequality in the first place.
To be quite frank, under current conditions, it is a moral failure to see fault with impoverished people for stealing what they need to survive, not the other way around.
To be clear the shoplifters in question are all rich themselves and stealing expensive items they don’t need. The original article is about students at one of the richest and most prestigious institutions in the country. None of the criminals are poor by any stretch of the imagination. They are just lousy people who are smart enough and entitled enough to try to justify their bad behavior.
My types? The person I was responding to claims that if I have a problem with someone shoplifting alcohol and condoms from Walgreens, then it's a moral failing on my part. I responded because I found that absurd. For the record, I do not condone managers editing timecards.
Moral code is downstream from culture and not every culture sees cheating as a moral failing.
As Princeton's demo skewed hard into a more international student body, the underlying cultural assumptions have shifted.
The Christian extension of the Ninth Commandment from not bearing false witness to a blanket ban on lying is unique. Islam has explicit exceptions through Taqiyya, Hinduism gets nuanced with dharma and adharma, Buddhism sees it as one of the ten unwholesome actions, ...
WASPs built and defined Princeton, but that is long over.
It is rather disappointing to see a take as unsubtle as "white people are pure and honest God-fearing Christians and Asians are dirty heathens with no concept of morality" on this site.
No, it is culture, not race. A friend of mine (half asian, half white) and by happenstance devot christian got his graduate degree at a top 3 school in the US, and he was shocked the international student brazenness in cheating. He reported it and it was brushed under the rug, and this severely disillusioned my friend. Every professor I know reports this cultural difference.
And obviously we see it with SDE interivews with 1point3acres and the other "interview study" sites and AI tools.
I don't really know enough about life in other countries to say anything about their culture, I just know not to trust international students so much here in the US. At the very least they tend to have wack incentives. Immigrants, different story.
My feeling is people in west extrapolate asian within group variations into whole. Rich international students who invest in western degrees as pay-to-win not representative / sampling bias vs whole. Reality is international students pay for degree, university accommodates, lack of language proficiency = they'll visibly "cheat" more (i.e. patch writing) to get what's theirs, but those conditions to specific subculture/cohort. Broad statistically show western institutions has like 15-50% plagiarism/cheating rates, most of which just get swept under rug because academic misconduct not elevated officially to keep misconduct stats at ~1%. For reference PRC plagiarism data (CNKI / big data audit used to sweep through tertiary thesis) was like ~10%.
I suppose one conclusion is academically inclined East Asians cheat less in aggregate... because broadly you can't cheat national examinations (yes there are very elaborate cheating rings, but this should only reinforce it's not easy / trivial). The ones who buys academic performance, i.e. dummies who can't hack PRC tertiary and has to go western tertiary (including Ivys) cheat more than baseline. But broadly west cheats more... but institutions minimize misconduct stats because incentivized to cover/underreport/juke stats to protect brand.
Nobody said that. Yes, Princeton was founded by Presbyterians and that was a huge influence on ethical norms there. But most of the white people at Princeton aren't Calvinists either, and any that are would tell you that literally nobody is pure and honest.
Do you have any data to support your disappointment? There seems to be data supporting the GP's observation, which is different than your crude strawman.
It's not unreasonable to look for fire when you smell smoke.
"A 2016 study of more than 100 UK universities by The Times found that non-EU students were four times more likely to be caught cheating than UK and EU students. In the US, they were found to be five times as likely to be caught cheating than their local peers, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 14 leading US colleges."
https://studyinternational.com/news/the-complex-problem-of-a...
"Public universities in the U.S. recorded 5.1 reports of alleged cheating for every 100 international students, versus one report per 100 domestic students, in a Wall Street Journal analysis"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-...
In 2015, 4,540 international students were enrolled at Iowa. Of those, 2,797 were from China. That’s 9 percent of the school’s student body. Most or all of the students accused of cheating are Chinese nationals.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-...
> in some left-wing corners of the commentariat, is out; flagrant disregard of the social contract is in.
Interesting that this is posed as the American left disregarding the social contract. I think you could make a pretty good case that the American right disregarded the social contract first in electing an extremely destructive pedophile who starts wars for reasons that can't even be articulated, pardons war criminals, engages in blatant nepotism enriching his family to the tune of billions at taxpayer's expense, large-scale fraud including being convicted of felony, adjudicated rapist, and a list of social contract violations going on for about 300 more pages that I'd be here all day typing out. And once the social contract is gone, it would be pretty weird to expect the other side to continue abiding by the terms. I don't personally make a habit of binding myself to one-sided contracts that impose no obligations on the other party.
>Interesting that this is posed as the American left disregarding the social contract.
Yeah no kidding, where's the commentary on the "right-wing corners" that are rolling coal, "owning the libs", storming the Capitol, denying vaccine science and refusing to wear masks during a pandemic etc., and the consideration of whether this posture is a frustrated response to that.
Also the right wing love to ignore every single bit of their own crimes.
It's like the idea that those that voted for Trump have never committed misdemeanors cannot even be discussed, when the actual crime statistics show that yea, they are just as apt to load up the steaks and walk out of the store.
But I will say they've done a damned good job controlling the conversation so it's not brought up in the first place.
the people who got bombed during Clinton's tenure must've been delighted that their children were murdered and their homes were destroyed in a humane manner by a cool sax-playing pedo rather than a cringe orange pedo.
B52 dropping bombs vs B52 with BLM and LGBT stickers dropping bombs.jpg
To be clear, I do not live in America. Not every place in the world has wantonly abandoned the social contract.
Everything changes when people no longer feel bound to it, so it's an outcome you should rather desire to avoid. Some examples are the shoplifting mentioned in the article, Luigi Mangione, or the guy who threw molotovs at Altman's mansion. The justice system is a mutual agreement to forsake violence owing to the belief that conflicts and grievances can be mediated in a peaceful manner. If that belief dies, if people believe the justice system and government can not be trusted to deliver justice to violators of the social contract and compensation to the wronged, then people will take matters into their own hands by any means necessary. It is not a pretty state of affairs, but perhaps the people who initially disregarded the contract might've considered that before disposing of it.
The US justice system has always existed to benefit the rich and or majority of the time. I mean, really American history is filled with example where those in power ignored the less powerful below them and social unrest broke out. Every once in a while a rich person got blasted for the absolute unethical behavior they were engaged in.
Again, that is nothing new.
What is new is media and how people are subjected to this. There is no such thing as a local problem any longer. Anything at anytime can get shown to the entire world even if it's not real. So suddenly what would be an issue has thousands to millions of people talking about it. Unlike old media where they had some semblance of decorum, you get groups saying the most outrageous shit in an attempt to whip up crowds, it's even better when we find out later they've been paid off by foreign nationals and are acting like agents.
You’ll face unfairness with DEI / diversity quotas to get in to the college, and then if you graduate you’ll face unfairness by having your job outsourced to AI or H1B, but yeah cheating in school is totally where we draw the line.
A WASP ethical framework cannot survive either the extirpation of WASPs from the student body or the transformation of the education system into a high stakes mandarin style death struggle.
A "WASP ethical framework" is barely a thing, if at all. The Princeton founders were motivated by moral obligations derived from a particular subset of Protestant Christianity. They were dissenters from the Anglican establishment, so it feels weird to try to bunch them in under the "WASP" umbrella. I have no idea if people who wrote the honor code were Calvinists too, but that was the seed ideology. It's not something that generic "WASP culture" gets to claim absent from the foundational theology. I'd wager that most WASPs at Princeton today do not share genuine belief in those foundations, if they don't cheat it's only because of social pressure, which tends not to hold up as well under pressure.
The style of writing and the inclusion of the word "mandarin" made me assume that you were implying WASPs were not participating in the "high stakes struggles". You still have not explicitly stated your view one way or the other. As you can see from the other comments, almost everyone read an undercurrent of xenophobia in your post. I sense you're a skilled interlocutor- I concede I fell into your trap.
You are aware that Stewart Alsop was writing about the death of WASP elites in 1970 or so. Does that mean you think Princeton exploded in cheating in 1971?
Sorry, can you state your hypothesis clearly here? You are saying Princeton would not need to make this change if it admitted only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants?
I was a grad student @ Princeton a handful of decades ago.
I was a TA for a few classes and, given the honor code, we did not proctor the exams for undergrads. We just handed them out (left the room) and returned to collect them at the end.
- One of the exams in a course that I TAed had 5 free-response questions.
- There were also 5 TAs in that class, so we un-stapled the exams and each TA graded one question (for consistency).
- We re-assembled the exams and returned them to the students.
- A few days after the exam, one of "my" students (she attended my recitation) came to me with her exam and explained that I had incorrectly graded question 2.
- I told her that I didn't grade question 2, so she had to go take it up with "TA # 2"
- A few hours later, "TA #2" pays me a visit and she (TA#2) is annoyed. She tells me, "Your student is trying to pull a fast one. She answered Q2 incorrectly. She erased her answer and put in the correct answer and she wants it re-graded"
- I briefly defended the student and said something like, "Why would she do that... and how could you even know?"
- "TA#2" responded with "... because I photocopied all of the student responses after I graded them."
- Then I felt like a piece of shit for doubting my fellow TA. And felt even worse being naive enough to not be suspicious.
- "TA#2" and I brought all of this info up with the prof. who was running the course.
- We were told that the situation would be handled by an Honor Committee or something like that. We forwarded the information to the committee, but no one spoke to us and we were not allowed to participate in the deliberations.
- After about a week, all we were told was that the student was able to explain the "discrepancy" between her exam and the photocopy.
To this day, I have no idea what that student could have possibly said to explain her actions.
After that, I started photocopying every damned scrap of paper that I graded.
edits for clarity. The student did not get a zero on the exam, nor was she booted from the course. I don't remember if she was given credit for Question 2, but the TA and I were both expecting her to be tossed, which obviously didn't happen.
Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly.
I have a friend who in college had another student take his test from the "complete" pile, erase my friend's name, and put on his own instead. It was only through blind luck that my friend figured it out. He, the TA, and the professor reported it – with smoking gun proof – but nothing happened.
The same laxness applies to academic research integrity. Universities rarely punish academics who are discovered to falsify data.
Not even prestigious ones. The school needs to sound like it has strong penalties against cheating, so there are really strict-sounding policies ("zero in the course"). But also, so many students cheat that actually enforcing these policies uniformly would hurt your graduation stats, make unhappy customers (students + parents), and hurt your revenue if you actually expel them. So the equilibrium is that the burden of reporting cheating is foisted upon professors, and it is understood -- though never explicitly communicated -- that academic integrity proceedings will be a huge administrative pain for you, the professor, and it is in your interest not to initiate them.
The outcome is predictable: unless there is a scandal of massive proportions, the issues just..."go away" on their own. With some discretion for the professor to either just look the other way, or ding the student enough to feel vindicated, but not so much as to actually hurt the university's interests.
I know a guy who TA'ed at Stanford in the 1970's. He said his professor told him to give students “gentleman’s B’s” even when their work was not fully up to par, because many of them would eventually become part of the country’s future elite and power structure.
… which explains the current political climate in the US right now
I've talked to instructors who've just given up. They know the students use AI. More and more of them do every year. The instructors can spot it easily, but if they brought them all into the academic dishonesty process, the department would grind to a halt. So they just let it go. They are all paying tuition, and they'll all get the credential they paid for.
I sympathize with the instructors to an extent, but the reality is that LLMs will be a pervasive part of life going forward. Schools need to completely reinvent their curriculum around that new reality. It's going to be a painful process for instructors accustomed to the old way of teaching.
The reality is that it’s not possible to learn if one offloads the work itself to an LLM
A more accurate phrasing is: It's significantly less likely that one learns the portion of the work they offload to an LLM.
A random anecdote is that most of the people I know who went very far in theoretical math are relatively poor at basic mental arithmetic, because they always think in the abstract and offload addition and multiplication to the calculator. It doesn't mean they can't do it, they just aren't as practiced or as fast at it.
Just like how you significantly increased the difficulty of exams in "open book" exams in the past where the only way to pass the open book exam was to know the material well, you similarly need to increase the difficulty of other work where it won't matter if you have an LLM, because you won't pass without knowing your shit either!
They learn if they have to, like we always did. In-person exams (proctored) are good for testing that.
Yeah because isnt it just about money and relationships? They have relationships to those student's families and need the networks. They realize too that its more about the credentials and networks and money comes in if that support those over academic honesty.
Money talks and bullshit walks. I’m beginning to understand why a lot of US politician seem to come from ivy leagues yet are dumb as hell.
I went to a school that actually tried to enforce it, and unfortunately it ended up being enforced wildly disproportionately along racial lines. My school had a very simple rule: if you were caught cheating, you were expelled. No strikes, no exceptions.
That is a massive burden to put on an educator.
Getting expelled from your university is a very serious, mandated fork in the road for anyone it happens to. So what do they do? If they relate to/empathize with the person, they try to handle it without reporting it. If they don’t, they reported and “let the system handle it.”
As any reasonable person would expect, white people were not reported and marginalized groups were. Privileged groups also got exceptions (the football team had a massive cheating scandal that should have expelled about 15 players, and the professor reported it! But mumble mumble uhh they learned their lesson).
After over a century they finally ended the system recently and honestly? Good. I appreciated what they were attempting to do, but it didn’t work.
The obvious answer would be to make the punishment more proportionate. Caught cheating in an exam? Lose half the marks for that exam (for example).
Expulsion is far too harsh if cheating is widespread but there should be some penalty.
You could just... make punishments more proportionate? If people are regularly circumventing your punishment system because they feel it's too harsh, maybe take that as a sign.
I had a similar experience when I was a TA at UT Austin that I wrote about on HN years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23163472
If you want rage bait, read the proceedings of honor code committees at your school. At least at Northwestern they were public record (sometimes with redaction of identities). The number of people who got off with obviously bullshit excuses was maddening even to read about.
When I was in high school, mad dad was subscribed to the California Bar Journal, and the discipline section was one of my favorite reads. The outrageous rational lawyers had for failing their clients or downright stealing from them was hilarious, and the rate they won their appeals was appalling.
Someone wrote a book about how organizations like state bars protect their members from clients, not the clients from their members as is the stated goal: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674295421
I once was accused and brought before the honor counsel for a really stupid innocent mistake.
Basically it was a history worksheet requiring written paragraph answers and I swapped around answers under the wrong questions so the teacher thought I cheated. It was a careless mistake I made because I had lost the original worksheet and was working off a loose leaf copy in the cafeteria at the last minute but it made it look like I copied someone else’s work.
I don’t known if the committee bought my story or was feeling lenient but I am very thankful for lax prosecution of these cases and think a lot of the value is in scaring people straight.
What is this honour council I've heard in a few comments? I thought Princeton was unique in having and honour system as opposed to strict academic integrity rules.
That seems like it should be enough to suspect you but not enough to “convict.” Your explanation makes as much sense as cheating.
reactions -> redactions
Thanks, corrected.
That student was shameless for success. I’m sure she has navigated her way through plenty of institutions by now, confusing getting away with it for being clever.
If OP remembers her name I’d be really curious to hear what she’s doing now (anonymized of course).
I have no recollection of the student's name.
~150 students in the class, so they were all a blur.
This was also a few years before the web took hold, so I could not have "Google-stalked" her even if I had been so inclined.
I do remember my fellow TA's name! But that's probably not surprising.
Maybe your fellow TA still has the photocopy or remembers her name? Please contact them. This is the beginning of an investigative story. Don’t let us down!
This is HN not some doxing subreddit.
No one likes a gossip
She’s probably a banker or VC pulling in $10M a year now
Or started a company, and eventually ended up being convicted for lying to the investors? Who am I kidding? She is probably giving ted talks.
I wish I as a student had this power. I took an exam once for a class I had taken before (transfer student woes). I went into the hall, took the easy exam, turned it in, and left. They lost my test.
I had no idea until 3 weeks later when exam scores were finally uploaded and mine was missing. The quarter was over and what the hell could I possibly do at that point? I had no possible evidence to give to show that I not only took the test but definitely passed because I've already taken the class
Great story.
I don't think you need to feel like a piece of shit for your brief defense of the student. Erasing and replacing the answer is unusual. As is photocopying all the tests.
Asking someone for an explanation of an unusual circumstance is perfectly natural. Perhaps TA#2 should feel like a piece of shit for her lousy explanation!
Honestly - the first thing that came to my mind is that the papers got stapled back together wrong, and her original correct answer was swapped with someone else's incorrect one. And instead of simply explaining that, she decided to just erase what was there and re-submit. But who knows?
So, they didn't face any consequences. Did they at least keep the original grade or was this so well explained they also got the re-grade?
Unfortunately, I don't remember except that it seemed unjust to all the students who didn't cheat.
She certainly wasn't penalized, but I don't remember if she was given credit for her answer to Q2.
iirc, the student stopped attending my recitation after that.
I'm not defending the honor code or anything, but photocopying students' exams seems like an end-run around the policy.
It makes some sense just to have a backup, especially if you’re dividing papers and recombining them. It’s not impossible that one could get misplaced or damaged.
Also, you could have an issue where the exam somehow becomes relevant again after you’ve handed them back, and some students may not have kept their copies (like if one student successfully challenges their grade and you realize other papers were also misgraded).
There is an easy solution to Princeton’s problem, and it’s to have an honor system with a backbone. The way honor historically worked.
At my private high school, and at my university (although they later gutted it), we had a “single sanction” honor code.
That is, if you were caught lying, cheating, or stealing - in any way, and in or out of school, though usually it was in - you were immediately expelled. No mitigating circumstances. No negotiation.
To many of my peers this sounded very harsh, especially since these were very good schools you worked hard to get to and succeed in. But part of why they were good schools was because of this.
We do zero tolerance for so many things but integrity is the one thing that misses it for some reason.
> We do zero tolerance for so many things but integrity is the one thing that misses it for some reason
Look at the type of people in positions of power these days? If we enforced any kind of integrity they would be screwed, but since they're in charge they can undermine policies that would hold them accountable as much as they like
Having integrity in elite colleges helps society. If people graduate from these places by cheating, and they see others graduating by cheating, cheating becomes a norm in elite society. If students are observed to be honest, and those that aren't are usually caught and punished, the graduates leave with a norm of honesty.
Do we live on the same planet?
I used to proctor accounting exams. It's insane to me that people would just leave the room to students. At the very least they might have questions and then they ask the class instead of calling the proctor
I mean I get that the student broke the rules, at least per this anecdote. And what was done is dishonorable and the student deserves what is coming to the student.
But, I think it gets to a deeper issue with education.
Like, the cynic in me will say that the student learned a new tactic, one that got rewarded, and they are likely to repeat it over and over.
But the teacher, the hopeful part of me, the one that wants growth and striving, that part of me says that the student learned a lesson and is unlikely to repeat that hack. That they got dragged about, told a lot of very tough stories, saw the consequences, and then saw the light, and they will never do it again. And that experience taught them more than the class ever could about life - a much more valuable lesson in the end.
I hope that is what occurred. I think that's probably what the many admins told themself what would happen. I have worked with Princeton grads though, and it is much more likely that nothing of the sort occurred.
Most 'elite' grads think they pulled it over on the school, like they always have, that they were cleverer, somehow. That they 'won', when they really lost and learned worse than nothing, they learned the wrong thing. And then they get out into the real world and they get a successful bigjob and a nice little manageable coke habit and a not as manageable addiction or two. Then a spouse when that time comes and that other line says something no-one really wants, but not with a person they respect or that respects them. And by the time the second kid is done teething, the divorce is done and they think they are 'free' again. So they dive off a cliff in some azure water as the grandkids aren't well taken care of by expensive as hell help.
The ayahuasca vomit dries on the corner of their mouth as they check their actually-personal account for the half dozen 39th birthday wishes, they wonder where it all went wrong. They decide that it was others, not themselves, surely, that can't be true, because Dad was an asshole and Mom really wasn't ever 'there'-there when you think about it.
Because they are still trying to pull one over, to be cleverer, to be the 'good' one at whatever life is in their mind: A long fucking ladder covered in degrees and accolades and tears and jackasses. They live in the derivative.
So, look, don't be butthurt about a jackass undergrad that is too blind and treadmilled to ruin their own life.
But do be butthurt that the system is too fucking tired and old to really deeply care anymore about the young and not just hurting their 'future' - as if that could ever be measured by only a GPA.
"There is no honor among elites"
People blame AI but in reality it's more about America transitioning from a high-trust society to a low-trust one.
Maybe a bit that - but it's far more the change of elite 'class' institutions - to elite 'competitive' institutions.
'Grades Did Not Matter' 100 years ago so much.
It was where 'the only educated people sent their kids to be educated'.
Or maybe the nouveau riche bourgois did.
Now it's a 'Giant International Competition'.
You can see this where students are competitive with grades elsewhere in the world.
They're competing for jobs at OpenAI among a million others.
I'm shamed to admit I can't remember the quote from someone who lamented the fact that traditionally people 'knew their place' and there was on some level a quietude in that, a zen - but when 'anyone can be anything' it creates hyper competition, anxiety, sense of failure for most people who can never live up to being the 'most exceptional at whatever', and the constant stress of 'keeping up with the Jones's'.
See: Instagram - it's not pictures of family and friends - it's almost entirely 'social competition through lifestyle narration' ... which that includes University's as 'brand'.
Hence the competition.
That’s a really good point. I do think the old ruling elite was in some ways more honest within the particular framework of their morality. But maybe that was easier when getting into Harvard meant being smart-ish from a prestigious family, instead of grinding to compete against not only everyone in America, but the biggest grinders and geniuses in India and China too.
It's wonderful that the American elite has broadened as much as it has in the past 70 years or so. With it though there was some load bearing social infrastructure that got demolished.
When it was a little club, you had to think of your family's reputation in the club, and like you say there was a particular framework of their morality.
When the elite franchise was expanded, one problem was that everyone in the elite then had different ideas of morality. When they got into business, the only thing that really united everyone was that they all liked money.
One thing that used to help that we've lost is a moral code in the universities that elites have to attend to get into the club now.
Another thing, after it became illegal to teach the bible in public schools, was "secular bible stories." You had secular saints, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ben Franklin. They each had a characteristic story, like George Washington and the cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln walking 10 miles to return 2 cents, and Ben Franklin flying a kite and discovering that lightning was electricity. Later on, MLK was added to the canon for a whole bunch of stories of courage in defense of justice. All of the stories had a moral lesson about what it meant to be a Good American.
Lately we've cancelled most of our secular saints, and my guess is that the few that are left are on borrowed time. That's not to say that these guys never did anything wrong by any means, but the point of teaching the story wasn't even necessarily even that the story actually happened exactly as it was told, the point was the moral lesson. We've basically just given up on moral education, and all we have left are things like Social Emotional Learning, but it is thin gruel.
The NYT had a through provoking article on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps...
This is exactly right. Gone are the days when you could get a C+ average at Harvard and still land a good job or a spot in a prestigious law program – purely by virtue of having gone to Harvard.
Everyone is in competition now. Everyone has to prove their worth, all the time. It's more egalitarian but it also creates a lot of stress.
Egalitarian?
Let me explain healthcare right now.
To get into a radiation tech program, there are 260 applicants, almost all with all As, for 20 slots at my local community college.
Maybe in the very first instant you’d think it’s merit based. But, EVERYONE is playing the game. Getting homework and tests from friends who already took the class, taking classes at several different schools to get the easier teachers, paying multiple times the tuition cost on tutors and other study aides (eg $2k+ for all the anatomy models), every demographic is using paid ChatGPT. We all know which teachers to take. We spend much of class strategizing like this.
Every single student. It’s just another game to play or you lose.
I'm skeptical that it is really more egalitarian in practice, anyways.
There is still a lot of bias and in -group preferences present in hiring. Not to mention that most places will weight candidates who are recommended by employees higher than unconnected external applicants. That might be a reasonable filter but it unquestionably is not egalitarian
It's vastly more egalitarian than it was before- - that said, it's still a bit closed, but the manner in which it is closed is more related to 'hyper competition' than anything.
Admissions for elite schools is just crazy - they can't go purely by 'scores', they have gender/national/racial issues which are actual quite real, even if it becomes unfair - there is just no way to do it in the ultra egalitarian way in which some would want.
It's a very scarce resource and that's it.
If it were a 'common' thing - like local state college, then it takes a different form. But the acute nature of the situation really brings out some ugly dynamics.
> but when 'anyone can be anything' it creates hyper competition, anxiety
Not sure if you intended this but this is basically exactly Byung-Chul Han's point in The Burnout Society.
What you're talking about is often called elite overproduction: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-elite-overproduction-hypot...
There's a rather technical but not too dry book about how elite overproduction tends to cycle, with comparisons of past cycles: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691232607/we...
Not sure of the quote you have in mind, but the idea of equality causing status anxiety goes back to Tocqueville.
That's probably the reference I meant.
I mean, I find myself saying this all the time. It explains so, so much about American culture. We're transitioning from an honor culture to a "don't be a sucker" culture.
The example I always point to is golf. I'm a huge golf nerd, and if there's one thing I hate it's professional golf. They sit there and pretend it's a "gentleman's game" and then let people like Patrick Reed openly and obviously cheat... repeatedly. They even got rid of the ability for fans to call in rules violations. Why? Because it's no fun, boo. Players used to want to not win when they broke the rules.
Gambling in college and pro sports? We went from the Black Sox shame and a Pete Rose being banned, to now players getting slaps on the wrist. Our society does not reward honor, so most people will not be honorable, plain and simple. Yes, there are plenty of us who will care more about integrity, but the vast majority of us won't care.
> it's more about America transitioning from a high-trust society to a low-trust one.
We're talking about Princeton, here. Trust among elites remains persistently high. In fact, it's likely higher than ever due to assortative mating & geographic sorting. Elites, even students in the Ivies, still have trust of government and elite institutions, which the elite stratum itself runs. Trust between elites and lower strata has declined, where elites and middle- and lower-classes have significant mistrust between each other, and the latter have lower trust within their own strata than in the past.
What's more likely IMO is that 1) the cost of cheating (i.e. the cost of assembling a ripped off assignment multiplied by the risk of being caught) has declined precipitously due to LLMs and 2) elite institutions remain the most ruthlessly competitive in the country and even the world.
> Trust among elites remains persistently high
I don't think any human alive believes this. The "elite" are just known as being scammers who lie and BS about everything very openly and they'd sell their own child if it got them a dollar. The past 10 years have been nothing but "elites" churning scams and paying bribes and bragging about it. They most certainly aren't trusting each other. Just look at how the president holds people up as his greatest ally one day, then discards and villainizes them the next day once he realizes he can get more benefit from elsewhere.
The morgue manager at Harvard Medical School spent five years selling donated body parts online. The Cornell president just backed his Cadillac into a student asking him a question in a parking lot. This isn't high-trust culture. It's people who stopped believing anyone was watching.
> It's people who stopped believing anyone was watching.
Which, in the era of social media, video surveillance, smartphones and dashcams, is crazy. Once you leave your home, you have to assume everything you do is recorded and might end up online or in court.
When was the USA a high trust society?
Parts of America still are high trust: https://qctimes.com/entertainment/dining/article_5371e735-53...
When Lee Kuan Yew visited London for the first time after World War II, he was impressed by the fact that it had unattended newspaper stands where people were trusted to take a newspaper and leave money: https://youtu.be/b_6H26fpZp8. As someone from a low trust society, I fully concur with his assessment that this was the mark of a truly “civilized society.”
These sort of unmanned roadside stands are all over the southern US.
In major cities? LKY was talking about an unmanned newspaper stand and cash box in Trafalgar Square. Would that work in Times Square today?
Literally bought pumpkins to carve, firewood for the stove, and a carton of eggs from unmanned ‘honor system’ roadside stands last year. All three made it easy, venmo code posted, boop, on your way.
Right after WW2, trust was way higher. There was a belief in common good and progress and all that.
Something tells me this trust evaporated once the Vietnam War was in full swing and the USA started murdering labor activists in South America.
You know, back when it was a noble democracy where all men were free, or something.
Being a high trust society isn’t the same thing as being a fully egalitarian society.
Getting to “high trust for the majority” is the 0 to 1 of civilizational development. Most societies never get there—they’re low trust for everyone.
Given your username, you're not going to like the answer to that question.
I don't think we were ever a "high trust" society in the way that like Denmark is or something. But I'd find it hard to argue with the assertion that rather, the US has become increasingly more of a low trust society recently, more than we already were.
Obviously subjective, but I would argue it was higher before stores began putting the items behind glass/locks.
Sort of, but there's a difference, the rise in anti-shoplifting stuff is in contrast to a decline in things like burglar bars. Stealing from residential property is seen as mostly the domain of drug addicts. Stealing from a multi-national corporation doesn't have the same stigma.
It's not a matter of stigma, it's a matter of lax enforcement. The majority of shoplifting is done by organized criminal gangs. They'll do it if they can escape without serious punishment, regardless of any stigma.
https://www.inc.com/bruce-crumley/shoplifting-gangs-have-pla...
Up until the Powell memo.
In the General Social Survey, the share of adults saying “most people can be trusted” fell from 46% in 1972 to 34% in 2018, and Pew found the same 34% in a 2023 to 2024 poll. - https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on...
Back during the Red Scare obviously \s
cheating in school has always existed though-- the article mentions that. AI has made it easier.
everyone knows what the cause of that transition was.
hint: look at canada.
Canadians?!
I've sat in classes where people at my table genuinely took pictures of the exam while the professor's back was turned (being kind to us and giving us useful information on the board) and uploaded the entire exam to the Gemini app.
Cheating is all around disheartening and is now incredibly easy with all the free multi-modal models around. Real active proctoring is needed and devices need to be confiscated during exams. This is common practice in many other countries.
My son is taking an AP chem class - he's doing really well, super interested in the subject. It's a difficult class, to be sure. Many of his peers are just goofing off and don't understand things. My son regularly tells me about people in his lab group that are cheating off his papers (and, I think, even his test). He tries to cover up answers, but it's not always possible to do.
What is even more frustrating is that the teacher knows this and does nothing about it. Maybe one could argue that, in the end, these students fail to learn and will get their just rewards. But it seems to me that the lack of immediate corrective action (eg, an F on an assignment) is a failing of the system.
What is even more frustrating is that the teacher knows this and does nothing about it.
When teachers are evaluated based on how students perceive them, and are in turn evaluated by others based on the grades their students receive, there's a perverse incentive/conflict of interest for them to allow cheating.
Read r/teachers for 20 minutes and you'll understand why some teachers in the US don't do anything.
(And then mute r/teachers because it's depressing as all hell.)
If I were your son, next exam I would physically move my desk to the corner of the room out of protest. He should also report everyone he sees cheating.
He started writing his answers in French so that his peers wouldn't understand:D
I'm very interested in how this cheating is perceived by other students.
There is no peer pressure not to cheat?
Students aren't considered sketchy or jerky for cheating?
Being seen cheating has no adverse affect on their ability to date, to join group projects, to join student startups, etc.?
At least in my experience (MIT ’06) many of the people most comfortable gaming academics ended up in finance.
I've always felt that it was these kind of folks that caused the 2008 financial crisis
Intentionally or negligently caused '08?
Intention is becoming worthless in the disinformation age.
As someone who attended an elite school in the post-covid era, here was my experience:
There is relatively little stigma against cheating. Maybe in smaller seminars and classes with higher collaboration there is some, but much less so in large STEM lectures. Many of the incentives in classes where exams were online led to arms races and widespread cheating (without exaggeration, over 80% of the class). For instance, a certain math class I knew of had all grades based on remote and often asynchronous tests. Many people would cheat/collaborate and ace them, leading to the professor increasing difficulty (as scores were very high). This led to more cheating and so on. It got to the point where the problem sets had such difficult problems in this intro class that only a handful of people (who had taken advanced course work in high school) in the entire 100+ person seminar were distributing proofs for everyone else. Really not great dynamics all around and it's worth noting that my school does not have a reputation for being ones with an especially competitive and cutthroat culture.
Covid and Chatgpt are no the only changes in society in the recent years.
If you are an all around liar and cheater you can even be president!!
It's not just "the recent years". There's a reason the phrase "honest politician" is an oxymoron.
Have a phones-free classroom. Problem solved.
I can't imagine why you would be so stupid to allow phones to exams.
Is this normal in the US?
Usually the rule is you can't have a phone out of your pocket or backpack during a test. Students still have phones on them. If they disallowed that too, how would that work, an airport security style check going in?
When I had exams in the 90s we'd have to hand phones in at the start. If the phone was seen during the exam, your test would be forfeited. If the rules were that strict then, I can't imagine how they could be less strict now given how much more powerful phones are today.
If NYC schools can do it at scale (1,600 schools this year banned cell phones), Princeton could certainly do it.
Students either leave phones at home, or the school provides pouches/mini lockers for each student.
They can't do it at scale, they can only mandate it at scale
Yes, that kind of thing can and is done, if the stakes are high enough.
They do it for big standardized tests like the MCAT. If I went to school and saw this for every exam, I'd think wow I'm in a bad school, not that there's anything wrong with it per se but it's not commonly done.
That’s pretty sad. Even sadder is that those people will hardly even feel it to be cheating because they’re now using AI for absolutely everything and so suddenly contented with a situation where it can’t be used they still can’t help but use it. Not a good sign.
Princeton is a strange place. What on earth could be the objection to proctoring? I'd much rather have a proctor than have to narc on a classmate. And even then, the proctor just reports the matter to a student-run body? Wild.
> What on earth could be the objection to proctoring?
There is a unique pride in being part of a community built around honor. You see this on the Swiss metro and in small-town vegetable stalls. Unproctored exams force every student to weigh the value of their honor against a better grade. That's a personal moral reckoning that might be worth the entire degree.
That’s just the propaganda they sell during college visits. When I was at Caltech the honor code didn’t inspire any pride, because the only way anyone got through that course load was by “cheating”*. No one had any time for pride (GO BEAVERS!)
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).
I went to Rice which had a similarly strong honor code, and it absolutely inspired pride. In me, and from what I could tell in many of my classmates.
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.
This mirrors my experience at Stevens. The professor would not babysit us during exams and that really did inspire pride. Also the exams were often brutally hard which inspired despair.
It's a win-win.
It also made the experience richer for people who cheated witih impunity.
Im surprised to hear that. I went to Caltech for my postgrad and never collaborated on an test, and it would have never ocurre me to do so (and no, the professor didn’t have to explicitly say they collaboration was not allowed. It was just the standard honor code).
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.
He or she is telling on himself. Cheaters always project.
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.
I did ChemE for undergrad and aerospace focused on systems engineering for postgrad so that colored my experience a bit. The former was brutal and the latter naturally collaborative with a bunch of projects, so we all worked together.
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.
I was an undergrad at Caltech in the late 80s and likewise it never even occurred to us to cheat on take-home exams. Maybe things have changed.
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...
> they could have faced repercussions if anyone had reported them.
Did people report them?
Not that I know of. I just heard rumors but never saw it myself.
> every exam was take home
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.
The advantage(?) of take-home exams à la Caltech is that they can be open everything and 3–5 hours long :-P (For what it's worth, being able to listen to music during an exam, ctrl+F a digital textbook, etc. was super awesome; it would deeply sadden me if that becomes infeasible in the future once enough students stop caring about the Honor Code....)
I had in-class exams at MIT that were up to 3 hours long. Take home would definitely have been nicer.
I only recall some finals at MIT being that long. Which classes had normal exams that long?
They were finals, not ordinary tests or midterms. Junior and senior year, I think one was Chemical Engineering, but I can't remember the exact name or number.
This year 6.7800 has a both 3h midterm and a 3h final, for instance. Wish us luck.
"Cheating" was pointless, because everyone else in the room was struggling just as hard as you were.
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."
> That’s just the propaganda they sell during college visits
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.
Can you give examples of what you consider to be high trust communities? Without specifics it’s hard to calibrate and figure out whether we‘re talking past each other.
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
> 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.
Japan is a classic example. You can drop your wallet there and someone will send it to you with all the cash intact. It makes you realize how much overhead it causes when you need to guard against cheaters and thieves.
This is an unbelievably pretentious take that sounds like it's coming from someone who is either lying or was oblivious to the cheating that was going on around them.
"An honor code is an admission that your curriculum is so sadistic,
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.
Things may have changed, but I don't recall any group exams during my time at Caltech, and conversely I do recall a strong sense of pride in the Honor Code. Also, if your professor allows collaboration, then it's definitionally not cheating: There is a vast moral difference between "the professor made the assignments difficult with the specific expectation that people will collaborate" and "the professor doesn't want collaboration but people did it anyway".
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?
The article says that according to a survey of Princeton seniors from 2025, 29.9% admitted to cheating on an assignment and 44.6% admitted to knowing of cheating that they chose not to report. I guess they could continue acting as if they were a community built around honor, but when they have been empirically proven to not be honorable I think acknowledging this reality is the more practical solution.
Does this actually matter in a culture that doesn't reward or value individual honor in any way?
What is "Swiss metro"? Curious now.
It's incredibly common all over Europe, not just Switzerland. Not only the metros but the trams and even buses often rely on this system where there's no turnstile or barrier, you just walk in.
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.
And it is common to cheat, as it is cheaper to pay the fine than to buy a pass annually. Naturally, this is done more by the foreigners I know than the natives. But the foreigners are not Japanese...
Buy a ticket and get on was the standard everywhere for trams and trolleys because you didn’t have enough enforcers and you didn’t have controlled access.
Spot checking kept people honest but it only really works when most people are honest.
I assume they are referring to systems like TPG in Geneva. Basically you buy a pass and when you get on an off a bus or street car there is no checking of payment it is just assumed everyone is "honoring" the agreement to pay. Every once and a while transit cops will board and check that everyone has a pass/has paid somehow and if you get caught not paying it can affect your ability to rent housing etc.
Doesn't really sound like high trust, more like high risk to reward ratio.
"if you get caught not paying it can affect your ability to rent housing etc"
What's a realistic outcome for someone who gets caught, they have to pay more for housing or they become homeless?
> it can affect your ability to rent housing
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Freeport
Could be https://www.myswitzerland.com/en-ch/experiences/metro-lausan...
All of that is sophistry in defense of fucking over those who choose not to cheat.
If one is honorable only for the reward, is one really honorable though?
Either it is a principle or it is a strategy, can't be both.
In this case yes. In general, the point of an honor system is supposed to be honor. It's great when it works, but unfortunately it's not working at Princeton.
> There is a unique pride in being part of a community built around honor.
It has been 100(s) of years since community like this existed, now this is utopia
I definitely still see honor system pay boxes in the USA. Maybe not in big cities, but outside of them.
Disc golf courses, fire wood piles, that day’s chicken eggs in a wooden box on the side of the road.
I came to this country as an immigrant and one of the first memories I have was walking to the gas station to get the Sunday paper for my host father. I remember opening up the door and seeing tens of Sunday papers and was taken aback thinking how can this be, wouldn't someone just put in a quarter and take ALL of the Sunday papers home with her/him. In today's society (and especially if we are talking Princeton-like places) I do not believe honor-anything "works" anymore and am wondering just how small a place needs to be where this exists today...
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...
FWIW, I would expect this behavior more in white collar affluent areas more than the rural areas the GP comment is referring to.
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”.
An honor system is a culture, where most people feel shame if they cheat. While some external enforcement is necessary to maintain the system, it mostly relies on everyone policing their own behavior. The more you focus on policing others, the further away you get from an honor system.
There are places today in the USA where the roadside stands don’t even have a lockbox, just a bowl of money.
We specifically don’t tell you where because we’d like to keep it that way.
I think that is not an exception, but is pretty common almost anywhere in the US rural enough to have a roadside stand. Although bowls are not immune to wind, so generally the exact implementation takes that into account. Often a slotted box with no lock, etc.
There is no benefit to taking all the newspapers out of the stack. What do you do next? Try and hawk them to people walking by? Candy though, you can eat all that candy.
see I often wonder the same thing like why would you take 20 newspapers when you don’t need 19 of them but human mind works in misterious ways. my answer would be cause it is free and I’ll burn the 19 of them in my backyard for fun. or just like “it is ‘free’ I am taking it!”
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 :)
Maybe some did that certainly, but in those days, yesterdays newspapers were in abundant supply and available all over the place for various hobby craft efforts or budding arson hobbies. It would not be worth the initial quarter if you merely wanted a stack of newsprint.
Princeton was that way in my lifetime (and I'm not that old : ) - corruption is not inevitable nor should honor be considered some sort of utopian dream.
> I'm not that old
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.
ggp said 100s of years. I am certain that gp is not 100s of years old.
exactly this
You'd hope, but humans are humans - even if they attend an Ivy.
Some individuals have heady thoughts and morals like you mentioned. Others are using it as a checkbox.
As I understand it Americans pay tens of thousands of dollars for university.
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.
> And let's face it if you can't even pass the exams maybe it is not your career
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.
> humans are humans - even if they attend an Ivy
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.)
I agree about the cynicism thing, I like the idea of an honor code if/when it actually works, but the bad reaction here is because 1/3 of students admitted to cheating.
No argument there. Tbf given my professional and personal background, I automatically assume the worst in all people so even though I never abused honor codes (and honestly never had the need to anyhow because I liked the classes I took with one as they tend to be the kinds of classes where professors and teacher staff are the most engaged) I think it is almost impossible to enforce one in classes beyond 30 students, because anonymity does beget some amount of bad behavior.
Seriously, if you are a lazy or too slow son of a wealthy family, do you care about "honour" or what your daddy will give you if you pass?
It smells like a backdoor.
In a truly honorable community anyone who thinks that it's a backdoor will find out that it's not.
don't know about the phone era, but previously schools were widely separated by reputation and practice. "lazy or too slow son of a wealthy family" went to certain schools that had that element. The really competitive and state-of-the-art schools really did not do that "directly". There were approaches for example sports, and niche majors that were easier for sure. Another observation is that some advanced students were into specific and dedicated cheating in order to win. Others had a "party" orientation and just did not do as much schoolwork. A criticism based on "rich kid" also does not ring true as a general statement about University in the USA to me.
Right, but there’s really only two directions you can go.
1. Install a culture of honour/virtue/accountability. Rely on duty and moral justice to keep the majority in-line.
2. An arms race to prevent ever more sophisticated methods of cheating, and the reduction in human dignity this implies. (E.g. the proctor must follow you into the toilet).
We all want the systems to be fair and just; but we also all want to be treated with dignity. No easy answers.
As someone who has attended this kind of program, it's because some students will cheat and view proctoring as an annoyance.
Imo it's both on the students (plenty of students are optimizing just to get a class out of the way to do more interesting stuff) and the programs (some classes just aren't up-to-date or are rightfully viewed as busywork).
Personally, I found courses that were output heavy and regurgitation light tended to be the most successful from an honor code perspective - you can't cheat your way out of "learning by doing" when you are held accountable for the output (eg. A research grade paper or implementing a fully functional Linux kernel).
Sadly, even at Ivies most lower div classes are just rote memorization because class sizes would be massive for plenty of core classes (100-500 students for some classes).
I dont know what it means, but you missed an important category that was mentioned elsewhere ... brutal, even sadistic levels of work to filter students. I was in these kind of classes in my undergrad.
Stanford has this policy too. Students get livid when proctoring is proposed, even though cheating is rampant (afaict)
yeah it is interesting. when I was at Stanford I was a TA and we just had to leave the room during exams after passing them out and come back at the end to collect the exams. just as I was graduating they started doing the pilot for proctoring exams and I remember students were really upset about it, though my fellow TAs were mostly in agreement that it was a good idea.
side note is that it’s kind of funny because sometimes the seating would be auditorium style so you could easily see papers in front of you if you were higher up… probably difficult to avoid accidentally glancing at someone else’s paper while taking a break, lol.
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/04/faculty-senate-pro... April 23rd, 2026
The Faculty Senate voted to allow proctoring of in-person exams following a pilot overseen by the Academic Integrity Working Group.
The Faculty Senate unanimously voted to permit proctoring of in-person assessments following a presentation from the Academic Integrity Working Group (AIWG) on Thursday.
Formed in 2024 after updates to the Honor Code and Fundamental Standard, the AIWG was charged with studying the scope of academic dishonesty at Stanford and overseeing a multi-year proctoring pilot study, which launched the same year. Historically, proctoring was not permitted at Stanford; students were expected to report peers for academic misconduct.
“What we’re finding is that a lot of the expectations we might be putting on our students is creating an unsustainable moral burden on them,” in which students must choose to cheat to keep up or report their peers, said Jennifer Schwartz Poehlmann, AIWG co-chair and senior lecturer in chemistry.
During the pilot, instructors reported that it helped them better assess students’ learning goals, clarified academic integrity standards, and reduced student frustration, said AIWG Student co-Chair Xavier Millan, ’26, an undergraduate in computer science.
The proctoring policy was previously passed by the AIWG, the Board on Conduct Affairs, the Undergraduate Senate, and the Graduate Student Council.
Poehlmann and Millan highlighted some of the student feedback that showed support for proctoring, including one who said proctoring feels like “more of a fair level playing field.”
Some schools love to pride themselves on their students' integrity. They don't proctor because they think their students don't cheat and can be trusted. I don't know about Princeton but a college my family attended had stats showing no difference between test scores in proctored vs. unproctored exams. That was before LLMs would have made it so easy to cheat. Maybe that school has changed its policy as well.
As a former TA the cheaters were never acing the test. They were like a turd circling the drain desperate for anything to grab on to. Often they'd cheat off eachother, sitting next to eachother, turning in identically incorrect exams. That being said if they were smart enough to cheat off the smart kids instead, maybe they wouldn't be so dumb to cheat and get caught. Oftentimes they had their head fully turned staring at another students exam without even hiding it. Very blatant cheating a lot of cases.
I would never NARC on someone shoplifting or dealing drugs but cheating on exams? Yeah no fuck you we're not India here.
That's your future cardiologist.
As professor I see little evidence of an increase in cheating. Microscopic earpieces and remote assistance we're problems already ten-fifteen years ago and copying has always been an issue (I teach mostly engineers who tend to be ahead of the curve at cheating).
What has perhaps changed is that now it is easier to detect cheating because AI assisted cheating is much higher quality. As such it stands out as obvious. The mere fact that a student writes a coherent sentence and a well structured argument normally puts one on alert.
That Princeton has never proctored exams strikes me as farcical. Those honor codes don't work except to support the myth that we are above all that.
huh, i had no idea princeton specifically disallowed proctors, and instead relied on an honor system. seems... like a poorly thought out system, especially given:
"29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report."
crazier is the people protesting by saying: “students should behave honorably, and that faculty and students should trust each other given the 1893 Honor Code compact.”. obviously that isnt happening if 1/3rd of the student body has admitted to cheating (meaning that the real percent of cheating is even higher).
A couple of my friends teach university classes. Mostly undergrad. I get to hear some of their interesting stories when we game together.
My impression is that there was a sharp shift around COVID. Doing classes over Zoom with a talking head broke the connection they had with their professors and other students. College felt closer to a video game operated through your screen than a community.
When I was in college not all that long ago, cheating was a scandalous thing. I knew a friend of a friend who cheated on an exam with some tricks and it resulted in suspension for a semester. There were rumors of someone hiring a service to write their papers for them and it was a wild story.
Now students have ChatGPT to write their papers and they've been practicing how to use cell phones without the teacher noticing for 10 years before getting to college. Combine that with social media grumblings about how college is "just a piece of paper" and doomerism about how they're never going to get a job or buy a house and cheating starts to look the only rational option to some.
The pattern is not contained to college. Every time the topic of cheating comes up on Hacker News there are more comments defending cheating than I would expect from this crowd. The usual justification is that the system is broken in a hand-wavey way and therefore nobody can be blamed for cheating.
>My impression is that there was a sharp shift around COVID. Doing classes over Zoom with a talking head broke the connection they had with their professors and other students.
I think this is part of a larger phenomenon than simply Zoom classes. COVID severely damaged the already decaying social contract of the US and we have mostly been trying to ignore that ever since. The most prevalent viewpoint of American life is now that the only thing that matters is the individual and therefore anything an individual can do to better their station in life is inherently justified. We can see this on so many levels from politics to rampant academic cheating to quiet quitting to prediction markets full of insiders. When we don't owe each other anything and the consequences are minimal, rarely applied, or completely non-existent, the only reason to not give into cheating, scamming, and corruption is your own personal morals.
If AI is going to steal all white collar work - why use AI to get a degree to do white collar work, paying both the AI and the college for it? Wild times.
For the legacy clout of the big college name?
more valuable, i think, is the social networking opportunities. not many places you can be chummy and party with a bunch of millionaire/billionaire heirs.
> Now students have ChatGPT to write their papers and they've been practicing how to use cell phones without the teacher noticing for 10 years before getting to college.
Colleges will need to remodel the rooms where these tests are given to become large SCIF type rooms so that wireless communication is not possible. Let the students go back to writing on their arms, wearing eye patches, or shoving notes up their casts. Yeah, I've probably seen Spies Like Us a couple of times:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaSUOFleNRU
Note that this is how the FAA has been doing its written tests for years: you go to a proctor test facility and through a metal detector. The entire thing is videotaped.
Local models exists…
mobile devices are not allowed in a SCIF, so now what?
This fits with my priors. I was in grad school during covid and had some professors I was close to (and whose class I was taking) reach out asking for feedback on their exam because students were blatantly cheating despite the allowances the professors were making (up to being open to the internet, just no direct communication). They couldn't punish them, and they were perplexed why anyone would bother cheating on even trivial exams.
Even recently when I last spoke to them, the profs described how students were refusing to think for themselves even when given open ended projects. They were just having ChatGPT come up with the project idea for them instead of taking advantage of the freedom to do something they enjoyed.
Hmm, anxiety of making the wrong choice and have it on record? I’ve read that later gens are extremely aware of “the internet never forgets” and are terrified of any choice being the embarrassing and defining moment of the rest of their life
I feel like that anxiety has been a thing with regard to education for a while. Worrying about bad grades following you through life has been a thing for much longer than the internet's existence.
I think the issue is largely that in the age of AI, learning a skill requires one to be deliberate and dedicated, but the entire reason grades and exams are so prominent is because most students need the threat of near term failure to learn.
Open ended projects were always my favorite ones because I was able to utilize some of my personal projects on them. Profs also enjoy seeing students' passion for their topic. That kind of student is probably still doing well.
Wait, why can't the students be punished?
This was during the start of the covid disruptions, so students were allowed to get away with almost anything in the name of covid-related stress.
As someone who went there (albeit many decades ago) I can tell you FWIW when I was there folks took it seriously. I literally knew of no one who ever cheated on an exam. And I'm pretty sure that anyone I knew who observed cheating would have taken it seriously enough to bring it to the process. It was pretty much a fixture of how students thought about things. So it worked (near as I could tell) back then.
But institutions take awhile to adjust to new realities, and it while looks like Princeton may have been a bit behind the curve on this one, I can understand why they were reluctant to abandon this practice. Living in an honest community cuts a lot of extra effort out - crap that you don't even have to think about. Princeton will be a less productive place to learn going forward.
I'd wager the main difference between "many decades ago" and mid 2000s onwards is the perceived stakes of college. My time in college (around that time) was perceived by most as "make or break": either you did well in college, or you were doomed to a sub-standard lifestyle (not to mention the debt of college tuition).
Obviously, whether this was true or not is a whole discussion, but the attitude did lead to a lot more cheating (due to desperation) than I'd imagine past generations had.
A midterm being worth 25-33% of a grade, plus some classes only being offered in fall or spring semesters meant a bad test could roughly cost you tens of thousands of dollars, since the next time you could retake the class would be in a year, and it often was a prerequisite for another class. It just leads to an environment that encourages desperate "survival" behavior.
I'd guess this is selection bias and naivete more than anything else.
I went to a school with an honor code and cheating was rampant among the premeds and future Obamas.
Which is bad, someone who cheats on a test or someone who rats out their friend for cheating on a test?
It really is a cultural thing, and that sort of culture is primarily passed down from upperclassmen to underclassmen. I went to a different college with an honor code (Harvey Mudd) and when I graduated in 2019 it was still doing relatively well, but from what I've heard COVID really killed students caring about / adhering to the honor code.
I'm in Mudd's class of '27 (and I was on the honor board for 2 years), and I do think the honor code system has gotten somewhat less functional over the time I've been here. But I think a majority of students and faculty still want to make it work.
> Which is bad, someone who cheats on a test or someone who rats out their friend for cheating on a test?
Obviously the first. How is this even a question?
This is not obvious at all.
Loyalty is a fundamental moral principle. Loyalty to a friend carries a lot of moral weight. Humans are a social animal, and loyalty to a friend can easily outweigh loyalty to some abstract institution. Like, my friend will still have my back five years from now. The university I went to won't do shit for me.
Like, if you're talking about loyalty to a friend who wants you to cover up an unjustified murder they committed, then I think most people will say the value of telling the cops about the murder outweighs the loyalty to your friend.
But for cheating on some test where probably 30% of the other students are cheating anyways? I think the vast majority of people will say that loyalty to your friend is the more important moral principle here. We all make mistakes in life, and the whole idea of loyalty and love to a friend is that we support them even though they make mistakes. As long as the mistakes are common mistakes like cheating on a test or cheating on a boyfriend, as opposed to things like felony crimes.
> Like, my friend will still have my back five years from now
Im not convinced that's the case, if it's a person who can normalise cheating.
They've already made the decision that benefit to themselves outweighs everything else.
You’re introducing additional details and scenarios that are part of a different conversation, one in which is certainly nuanced and well-worth discussing.
But what you are doing here is justifying behavior. That’s separate from a discussion about what’s right or wrong. You have to not only consider one’s friendship, but the negative effects across society that their actions cause. In other words, reporting the friend negatively affects (in general) only two individuals, while cheating affects many more people and cultural values and norms. I’m not a Utilitarian, but intent and effect matter.
I don't consider it loyalty to know a friend has cheated, and let them get away with it.
Teachers/Professors are already used to accommodating dumb planning/mistakes from students. An honest "I spent too much time partying and fell behind, can I get an extension" email will often get you very far.
Also baffled to hear cheating on a boyfriend included there, cheating of that sort would be friendship ending.
It's not a mistake if they do it routinely.
I could buy the argument if the friend had a moment of weakness, regretted it, won't do it again, and please don't report it. They've learned their lesson, that's enough.
But if they do it and they're fine with it and they're going to do it again and what's the big deal? Refusing to report that isn't loyalty anymore, it's not sticking with someone who made a mistake, it's protecting deliberate bad behavior.
We can make mistakes in our ongoing behaviors. Nobody's perfect.
The question is simply how you balance loyalty to the institution vs loyalty to a friend.
A lot of people will think that cheating in a context where a lot of other people cheat too, is just not a big deal. That it's certainly not worth losing a friendship over. Like, are you going to end a friendship because someone jaywalks? Because they habitually speed 5 mph over the legal limit? Because they sometimes take illegal drugs? Because they deducted things on their tax return that you know weren't actually business expenses?
The size or importance of a moral violation matters, when weighing up conflicting moral obligations.
I guess this really comes down to differences in morality.
I think cheating is pretty serious. It qualifies as self-harm, and it harms your classmates by devaluing their eventual degree.
Jaywalking and minor speeding are not even immoral at all, in my view. I don't mean they're insignificant, I mean they're outright not morally wrong to me, so that comparison suggests that we have a pretty strong difference in what we consider to be morally good here.
Yeah, those are exactly the differences.
It's very easy to argue speeding is immoral: it's immoral to disobey any law or regulation passed by a democratically elected government if these is no other conflicting moral principle. So you can speed to rush to a hospital, for example, but everyday speeding is immoral both because it breaks the morally legitimate democratic law and increases the chance of physical harm.
For many people, cheating on a test is little different from speeding. Calling it "self-harm" is a stretch, and there's zero direct harm to your classmates if it's not graded on a curve (which I haven't seen in a long time). And you could easily argue that the marginal difference it makes to the value of everyone's degree from that institution overall is basically as negligible as the marginal difference it makes to public safety as speeding by 5 mph does.
Also, different exams are different. Fewer people will be bothered by cheating on a freshman year calculus exam, whereas cheating on a final qualification to become any type of emergency responder is far, far more serious because somebody could directly die as a result of your lack of knowledge.
> it's immoral to disobey any law or regulation passed by a democratically elected government if these is no other conflicting moral principle.
I have to say, this is not the sort of attitude I expected to find on this site. Especially from someone defending cheating on exams. Anyway, I'm sure I won't convince you to change your mind on this, and you certainly won't convince me.
> Obviously the first.
The more usual perspective would be that they're both bad.
Only in certain fucked up moral systems. Though I guess Confucianism would be one of those:
>The Duke of She said to Confucius, “Among my people there is one we call ‘Upright Gong.’ When his father stole a sheep, he reported him to the authorities.”
>Confucius replied, “Among my people, those who we consider ‘upright’ are different from this: fathers cover up for their sons, and sons cover up for their fathers. ‘Uprightness’ is to be found in this.”
-from the Confucian Analects
The stats beg to differ. ⅓ admitted to cheating. Cheating was rampant at my uni and we also had an “honor code”
Bad argument. All countries have laws yet criminality rates varies a lot from country to country. It’s all about the culture.
"Culture" works by having a system that collectively punishes cheaters, so that people learn from their own (or others') experiences and internalize that cheating is bad and won't pay off in the long term.
That's how you get a culture against cheating. You ensure that cheating doesn't pay, and eventually people learn that cheating doesn't pay. The enforcement is part of the culture.
The accuracy of measuring criminality also varies, yet you seem to take it at face value that those stats are accurate.
O and one person’s anecdote is better? I’ll take the stat if we’re wagering (500 Princeton seniors).
El Salvadorians (from The country) would starkly disagree with you. It took a dictator and a martial state (no human rights) to end maras in less than five years. The culture is the same.
They just replaced the street gangs with a single state operated gang. El Salvadorians still have to live in fear for their lives, but it will be the government coming for them.
> El Salvadorians
Salvadorans.
recent stats.
Ok what do the old ones say?
I wasn't at Princeton, but I remember blatant cheating going on and 'study groups' in CS classes that were mere passing around of completed code. (1997-2001)
I'd asked them what they expected would happen when they tried to get jobs or landed one. Like how do you fake work? They just said all jobs are group-based like their study group. (Keep in mind they were soliciting my code as their group was struggling to find solutions to assignments.)
The answer is a one of them works at a grocery store as a cashier, another one I saw now manages a bagel store (didn't know all of them). A waste of time, money, and effort to get a CS degree then just not be able to use it.
Maybe he's happier managing a bagel store rather than dealing with Kubernetes.
Honestly. I do more with my hands and spend more time outside post-degree, post-reality, than I ever did when in school.
the longer i stay, the more i think "amen to that".
...yeah, yeah, greener grass, i know.
When I was at Georgia Tech back around 2002, the freshman Java CS course introduced a brand new and improved cheat detector, and they immediately caught over half of the class for cheating. It was disastrous. The penalty for being caught cheating was so onerous that they simply couldn't do it to the whole class.
To the school's credit, they responded as best they could. They considered each case, interviewed the students, and punished them on a sliding scale based on how much cheating, ranging from a zero on that one assignment up to suspension.
Then, for the next semester, they simply changed the rules. You were now officially allowed to cheat all you wanted on homework, but it now only counted for 5% of your grade. That was REALLY bad for people who weren't doing the homework, but it also sucked for people who were just lousy test takers.
And you will think less of the people who go there. 30% cheated!!
Even more astounding is the reporting number.
If 44.6% of students saw an honor code violation and didn't report it, and 0.4% of students saw an honor code violation and did report it, that means that 99.2% of Princeton students that pledge to report honor code violations break that pledge. And that's only counting the voluntary reporters, meaning that the actual rate is presumably even worse!
But also, how would reporting a suspected honor code violation even work? There's intentionally no staff witnessing the exam, and you aren't likely to know the names and faces of your whole class, so what would the professor even do with that information? "Professor, I saw someone take his phone out, I think maybe he was cheating, I don't know his name." Okay, thanks Captain Non-Actionable. We'll file that in the circular academic integrity investigation bin.
Could just be that about half of them never saw violations
It is true that more than half of respondees reported that they never saw a violation.
However, the 44.6% was the category of "respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report," and the 0.4% was the category of "had reported a peer for an Honor Code violation."
Everybody who saw a violation was in one of those two categories (did report or didn't report), so we can compare them to see what percent of people who saw honor code violations did, and the answer is that >99% of them failed to uphold their pledge.
Those two categories don't include everyone. 44.6% saw a violation and didn't report. 0.4% saw a violation and did report. That doesn't include people who didn't see a violation. Did I misread something?
>” In The Daily Princetonian’s 2025 Senior Survey of over 500 seniors, 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report. Only 0.4 percent of seniors responded saying that they had reported a peer for an Honor Code violation.”
The 44.6% appears to refer to the proportion of respondents who saw a violation and did not report it.
Right, there's yet another group that didn't respond to the survey. But just among those who did, there are more than two groups.
As far as I can tell there are three groups of respondents (in this respect):
- 0.4% saw and reported
- 44.6% saw and did not report
- 55% did not see (but may have erroneously reported, though that seems unlikely)
If this is correct, 44.6% of respondents are in breach of the honor code. If we assume that the non-witnesses behave similarly to the witnesses, 99.111% of the students do not ‘honor’ the code.
The history of the Honor Code system might be instructive: https://universityarchives.princeton.edu/2015/01/i-pledge-my...
Exames were previously proctored, and it led to a "us vs them" mentality that meant students banded together to
The Honor Code system, and removing proctors was a way to route around that—it made all of the students responsible for catching cheaters and turned the "Students vs Faculty" mentality into a "Honor vs Cheaters" mentality among the students.
Unfortunately, it seems like the "Students vs Faculty" mentality has seen too much of a resurgence due to outside factors, and the Honor Code is no longer a match for the current climate. That's what the article is about
The burning question for me is how does this compare to previous years?
Looks like they started doing this senior survey in 2022, so unfortunately there's no pre-COVID info.
2022 20.9% cheating, 31.5% non-reporting
2023 25.4% cheating, 33.6% non-reporting
2024 28.8% cheating, 42.0% non-reporting
2025 29.9% cheating, 44.6% non-reporting
So from this it seems like cheating has been increasing significantly over just the last few years
> 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report
What is it at other universities? I went to a big public school, and remember cheating being halfway rampant. The penalty, moreover, was never expulsion.
Anyone caught cheating at my university, especially if they lied about it, was expelled more or less immediately.
Pretty much my observation. Professors could give lenience and a warning by not reporting it, but if they reported it to Academic Affairs, the Provost would probably end up throwing them out.
One time, several people cheated on physics homework (apparently in a very obvious way), and the professor took fifteen minutes out of the next lecture to basically say "you know who you are, you got a zero, and if I see it again, I'm going straight to the Provost."
Public schools are public schools. They're more or less compulsory and are just meant to try and get you to a point where you can contribute meaningfully to the society.
Princeton is very much optional and is a school for future elites. They're supposed to produce CEOs, politicians, and Nobel prize winners. So the standards should be different.
Of course, expectations are a part of the problem. Many kids go to Princeton or Stanford or MIT because they had wealthy parents who really wanted their kids to go there. And many of these kids are mostly interested in computer games, weed, and the opposite sex. A combination of unmotivated students and high academic standards lead to predictable outcomes.
Public universities (what Americans call public schools in the context of higher education) are optional to the exact same degree as private ones. In other words they are all schools that you apply to.
They also produce more "elites" than "elite" schools do if you go by executives at F500 companies and politicians.
Are we going to pretend that Berkley, Michigan, UNC-CH, UVA etc. do not produce world class educations from world class people?
When I was at Rice a quarter century ago, I can honestly say everyone I knew took the honor system seriously.
Same. I knew exactly one student reprimanded for plagiarism in four years. The idea of cheating on a test was absurd.
Ivy League has always been like this. Everyone gets goods grades. It’s a legacy of the good old boy network.
It’s good for the brand in general. It’s pretty easy to find a 3.8 GPA kid from Harvard. There’s no C students to dirty up the alumni network.
You’re mostly buying into a tribe. Other tribes do well too.
Not just Princeton, my uni had a similar honor code and changed it a couple years ago to have proctors after a bunch of cheating events. I don't really get it either. Cheating has been going up exponentially since 2020 but it existed before then. I don't think it's COVID related strictly. Things moved online so cheating became easier and then LLMs became popular and from what I hear that's the most common way of cheating now. I have tested LLMs on undergrad level algorithms problems and was surprised it easily solved them so I think their use goes well beyond just coding assignments.
My guess is that the vast majority of those self-reported cases where relating to a take-home assignment (e.g., copying off a classmate's solution). Even without proctoring, you need to be a lot more brazen to cheat on an in-person exam.
I've heard that it's the same at <other elite private university I don't want to name>, and people cheat, to the point where non-cheaters are suspicious that it's just a method of grade inflation
The honor systems is the correct system for an institution where learning is the goal as the tests are there to help you internalize the material and know how well you've absorbed it. Instead we've turned universities into vocational schools where the goal is the degree and testing is seen as a hurdle to overcome to attain it.
Note, "cheating on assignment or exam during your time at the institution" is a ridiculously broad net to cast. It includes everything from "merely asking one friend on one random night if they got the same numerical answer on the first freshman-year homework (despite both of you working independently and figuring out the entire derivations onto your own)" to "blatantly copying every answer on your final exams every single semester." The fact that they don't distinguish radically different things makes their 30% figure suspect.
It's nothing crazy about it. Why do you study? To learn. The exams are there to benchmark your progress. If you cheat, everything falls apart for you.
It is possible that when the metric becomes the target(AKA Goodhart's law) cheating can be beneficial but this is failure of the institution because it means you are no longer there to learn.
>Why do you study? To learn.
mature students (25+, at my school) are indeed there to learn. the 18 year olds are mostly there because its what is expected of them, no more.
I think most are there to get a diploma, learning is a secondary benefit.
It's interesting that people can anonymously admit to cheating. It's a way of saying "don't hate the player, hate the game."
AIUI, these schools see their mission as training the next generation of leaders and elites. They aim for people with strong abilities, and moral character.
And, the way you guide youth to act in a certain way is by treating them that way. If you want them to be trustworthy, you trust them. This is not a totally fringe idea.
>If you want them to be trustworthy, you trust them.
sure, but it seems exceptionally silly to continue to blindly trust them when a sizeable portion of them admit to not being trustworthy
Most of us have done something stupid once in our lives. That does not mean we do stupid things all the time, nor does it mean that we didn't learn from the experience. The goal of school is to help immature young adults grow into mature ones.
>The goal of school is to help immature young adults grow into mature ones.
agreed!
however, having a proctor that stands in the classroom for your exam does not hinder the growth process, in my experience. (i teach, if thats worth anything to my statement)
Okay and they shouldn't cheat? Why do we always side with the better angels of the elites in America when the elites in America are the literal cause of our misery? If they can't handle having a proctor ensuring they aren't cheating, they're free to go to the local community college.
I don't really like to make broad general arguments about "elites". But if we're humoring this argument: I would postulate that the sudden need to police cheating and the more recent bad behavior of our elite adults are probably both symptoms of something deeper. Whatever that is, it should be what makes you angry.
It's a college made for the elite corporate class of the US and if you spent any time working for the elite corporate class they absolutely hate accountability and wealth redistribution (although they are a big fan of stealing wealth from the workers).
I'm angry at the people who control the current incarnation of neoliberalism, the elites, they have led to the complete moral decay of the world. Luckily they fucked up so bad that American imperialism will go back to its rightful place of fucking around in the Americas while murdering civilians for capitalists. Just as the founders intended.
The next generation of leaders know there are no consequences to cheating, that's what I get out of this.
You can game theory it out and see that everyone gets to cheat and nobody reports is the best outcome for the group. Defectors must be punished in some way or perhaps the profs are not carrying through with punishments for cheaters.
Is it though if the value of the degree for the overall group is collectively diminished?
No, they want to train the next generation of leaders and elites, and those elites and leader's parents pay a huge amount of money to get them there.
They know not to bite the hand that feeds them.
The worst people in society right now are immoral elites. Why would any elite be moral when it’s obvious that you get more by being immoral?
No, they frame their mission that way.
Clearly the actions were helpful for maintaining that illusion,
while also maintaining the illusion of academic excellence,
despite rigorous courses.
Seems like it's had the opposite effect.
This has to be one of the most pretentious things I've ever read about post secondary education.
I'm completely flabbergasted to learn that an Ivy League holds students to a far different and much lower standard than I what I was held to at a regular university in Canada.
From now on I don't see how I can't be skeptical of the credentials of someone from Princeton knowing that their exams weren't proctored.
Ivy Leagues have always been about having money not academic rigor.
Here in Canada, a housemate of mine used ChatGPT to cheat in all his courses. He got caught on only a single one because he scored 100%. Then he did it again and got caught again in the same course. For some reason, the professor never reported him to the dean or whoever is supposed to deal with this kind of stuff. He graduated but his degree is basically a degree in cheating.
The interesting thing is that cheating is much easier when done online. When I was a TA and we were in the process of moving quite a bit of the classes to online, we still mandated in person testing.
It was eye opening to find cheat sheets and other cheating materials obviously left behind by students. The majority of the stuff we'd find we either inaccurate and completely wrong. Like a half awake student copied something they thought was the right equation or solution, when in fact, it was for something completely different that wasn't on the test.
So I agree with your notion, but its one thing to try and cheat. Its a completely different one to do so successfully.
I think it really depends on how you view our high education system. As a middle-aged man returning to school to switch careers, my entire reason for going to school is to learn, and I'd never cheat because that would undermine my own goals. To me the purpose of school isn't the degree--I made an entire career already without one--it's to learn.
Students are at school for a lot of poorly-thought-out reasons: inertia, not knowing what else to do, because their parents made them go, etc. If they're not there to learn, you can't make them learn. No, not even by proctoring exams. The only purpose that achieves is to gatekeep.
And, gatekeeping for doctors and pilots is a good thing. We don't want to let just anyone become a doctor or pilot. But frankly, I don't give any shits about whether an AI programmer has made it through a gatekept degree. That stuff can be gatekept at other points--if they show up to work pretending and don't know anything, that will become obvious, and degrees maybe aren't the only or even best way to obtain that knowledge anyway.
All that's to say: if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options (i.e. a career) then proctored exams make sense. But if higher education is just for learning, it's stupid to put all this gatekeeping around it--that simply closes doors to interested learners, while allowing people who can "college" well to thrive without really learning. Let the cheaters cheat--they're only hurting their own learning--and I think it's often because you're forcing them to take some gen-ed thing that isn't useful knowledge to them (I'm looking at you, calculus--why was I forced to take 4 semesters of calc, when I always knew that the prob and stat classes I took as electives were more useful?).
> if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options (i.e. a career) then proctored exams make sense. But if higher education is just for learning, it's stupid to put all this gatekeeping around it [...] Let the cheaters cheat--they're only hurting their own learning
I wouldn't reduce student motivations to career vs. learning.
College can also be about aspiring to a better society, with the university as microcosm.
For example, a society in which people are honest, and have integrity.
> if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options
From the institution's perspective--or at least an "elite" institution like Princeton--that is what it is. When they confer a degree, they're conferring something valuable, even if its main value is as a status marker and ticket to future options. They can't afford to take the attitude of "let the cheaters cheat, they'll only hurt themselves", no matter how true it is, because it would destroy their brand.
are feelings more strongly felt more valid? the same things are happening at caltech - that is, just as much cheating - and they have an honor code. but they feel much stronger about their honor code, so it is more valid.
To people who have not grown up in extremely honor-bound societies and communities the idea sounds strange, yes. To those of us who did, however, events like this remind us of how fragile those systems are and that entry should be severely restricted.
I’ve never heard of a non-proctored exam. Every exam I took in university was proctored. If you got caught (happened every once in a while and made everything very awkward) you failed the exam immediately, got kicked out, and had a department hearing. I have a vivid memory of two girls almost killing each other as a result of one such failed scheme during a CS Logic exam of all things.
I had the Naruto Chunnin Exam episodes where they write the written test on dvd as a kid and watched it all the time so it might have altered my philosophy but I’ve always viewed proctored tests as a mini game. The ability to gather information under stress, maintain composure, and evaluate the likelihood the person you were borrowing answers from knew what they were doing was always fun to me. Even on tests where I was going to get 90% guaranteed I liked seeing how much information I could parse from other people. I remember one exam I could make out another girls scantron and knew she was going to fail. She was the first person to hand in her answers and the proctor joked “wow that was quick, we’ll have to make the next one harder”.
When I was a proctor I loved trying to catch people cheating. Lots of wandering eyes but never a phone. I’d have thrown someone out so quick if the pulled out a phone and that’s before ChatGPT. I can’t imagine not having proctors. Honour systems sound great and all but not in an evaluation. Tribe mentality prevents most people from ratting on others (except for those with limited social status to lose from the jump), especially when you are 19.
I saw someone mention that having proctors “punished” students who followed the honour code which is insane. If you know what you are doing in an exam you’ll forget all about the proctors being there. The only people who will notice them are those trying to cheat…
I was a TA at Princeton ~5 years ago, and I had forgotten about the honor code until reading this. Yes it's true, we did not proctor exams, and students seemed to take pride in it. On every test, you got the names/signatures of those sitting next to you. But also, I had a student who was accused of not putting his pencil down when the test had concluded, and the bureaucratic process to fight the accusation was so crippling that they had to take a semester of leave anyway. So I don't see harm in tearing it down.
Hm, this answers something I was wondering, how do accusations work with no proctors or other evidence
You end up in this wonderful place: https://rrr.princeton.edu/students-and-university/25-univers...
Wait, Princeton NEVER have faculty proctoring exams??? Really shocks me but is reasonable for the ivy league. Nowadays, academic integrity is indeed a problem. Almost all students are using AI in their assignments, though it violates the honor code.
You mean currently exams aren't proctored?! I went to the University of Toronto and can't recall a single exam which wasn't.
Stanford is also unproctored by charter.
>Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them
https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/40-percent-st...
https://archive.ph/RPegw
It's weird, right? The US is just hands down strange in some regards to little procedural things that are important but also easy to implement, and yet for whatever reason don't do and make a big deal over it when it's a complete non-affaire in other countries.
Like voter ID. It's not some partisan issue. None of the political parties are fighting Elections Canada over it and its been around my whole life. Its just not a thing(tm). You go to vote, show your ID and and voilà, done. And yet somehow, this is a "big deal" down south?
Ivy league schools , imho, tend to operate differently--more hands-off approach. The assumption is if you're smart and determined enough to get in, that you will not cheat. The filtering to get in is intense, so this presumably filters out less honest people.
"Presumably" doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The only possible reason for a school like Princeton that is drowning in cash to not proctor exams is to allow students to cheat.
Also: admissions at all these schools are heavily biased toward wealthy legacy hires, regardless of talent, and the "most determined" are the most likely to cheat.
What's next, claiming the wealthy don't steal?
Of course, why would they need to steal, they're already wealthy!
well yes, you were in Toronto, where there is a very very veeerry high cheating ratio compared to other areas.
Crazy it took them 133 years to do the obvious. Assuming your *entire* student-base is morally superior to the general population
That's not really the assumption they were making. It used to be that going to an elite university was good enough without also having top grades. Now there's more pressure, and cheating is way easier than before. In a similar vein, higher-tier schools tend to put less effort into weeding students out, because they assume everyone who got admitted there has already proven themselves enough. Wonder if that will last.
The elite have ALWAYS had special rules.
Whereas the rest of us were always assumed to be cheaters until absolutely cleared otherwise.
Just look at how people are treated by the dalits who run Proctorio. We were teated as less than human.
With reference to the "cultural" allusions of many posts in this thread, I can assure you that in the WASP UK universities of Oxford and Cambridge, all exams are "proctored".
It is assumed that students will attempt to cheat, so exams are designed so that cheating is not a viable strategy to obtain high grades. So-called invigilators also patrol the exam room and will report any violations.
> exams are designed so that cheating is not a viable strategy to obtain high grades
That's interesting. How do they do that?
Mostly by requiring analysis and synthesis rather than memorization.
It's been some years for me so things might have changed, but no tech was allowed into the exam rooms, except for calculators in some subjects. Everything was done by pen and paper.
The technical ability for the student to cheat in the present day is unprecedented.
For exams in most subjects, the cellular phone is held in the lap. The student needs only briefly expose the exam page to the camera of the phone: immediate photograph of the page, ingestion of the page by an artificial intelligence, and then: the student flips the page to view the side exposed to the camera, and glances down to see the answer on the telephone.
Yes, this is really depressing. I don't want to have to ban devices from exams, but it is something I might have to think about.
I’m sort of surprised that they’re not banned already; dating myself but when I was at Uni in the late 2000s they were banned then. Despite probably not being very useful for cheating on nascent 3G!
I mean, so many graded assignments are online now that very little technology is needed to cheat. I would guess that is the largest driver in increased cheating at universities.
This can easily be stopped. I don’t see how you would copy whole paragraphs or the working of a physics this way without easily being caught but this can mitigated against.
I wonder to what extent this is due to the changing roles of university. I would guess 133 years ago university was mostly upper class folks trying to better their minds, and less people wanting a degree to open up a job. Much more incentive to cheat if you just care about the piece of paper at the end.
You might be interested in the history. That was definitely not the case 133 years ago. Since at least the Middle Ages education has had a big impact on profession and station wasn’t just like a pastime for curiosity.
Could it be non-proctoring has served Princeton by inflating grades due to some cheating, but only now have cheating become rampant enough that it must be curtailed to destroy the reputation entirely?
I honestly think it's that. I've seen it before at other private schools, where someone is caught cheating and let off with very minor consequences. Private high schools were hiding it from colleges too.
This is good. Everyone is a cheater if they think they can get away with it. I don't mean 50% I mean more like 95-100%. Based on personal experience being in one of those classes where the opportunity existed and it was observable.
> Everyone is a cheater if they think they can get away with it. I don't mean 50% I mean more like 95-100%.
Not convinced of this. I would imagine the majority of people are more likely to cheat if they see the a lot of people getting away with it, not merely if they think they themselves can get away with it.
I would argue that the student behavior - ~30% admitting to cheating on academic work - reflects the value system shown by those holding positions/stature the students aspire to.
It is a combination of FOMO (everyone else is doing it, I must also to not fall behind) similar to that which drives hype adoption, combined with a perception that moral behavior grows optional in proportion with wealth or power. The latter is empirically evident in how American society has addressed moral failures of wealthy/powerful leaders (i.e. crimes without punishment)
So now I finally understand why Americans use the expression "proctored exams". Because not all exams are proctored.
Here in Spain, we don't have an equivalent expression because there is no such thing as an unproctored exam. The idea of being proctored is already included in the word "exam".
Maybe I haven't scrolled down far enough, but gut feeling is telling me that a lot of the rise in cheating is coming from international (read: chinese) students. Plenty of stories and personal experience of cheating rings. I tried to get into one just to see what was going on, but even though I looked the part I couldn't talk the talk.
The numbers don't play out because international chinese students only make up 5-7% (maybe less) of the undergraduate student body. Self-reported cheating frequencies are much higher.
That's kind of a large number. Honor system is a solidarity thing. There can be 0% cheating cause nobody wants to be that person, but if 5% come in and egregiously cheat anyway, it can poison more. Most people don't want to cheat, but they may feel disadvantaged not to.
Very fair.
> 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton
Wow
Yeah seems low to me.
I guess the days of advising that 'You're only cheating yourself' have come to fall on deaf ears.
Its a clear shift back to traditional assessment. It’ll be interesting to see how students adapt and whether this improves exam integrity or just adds new pressure.
Difficult to imagine that people were not using phones to search for stuff while taking an exam. I can understand this being the case 18 years ago. But since the iPhone, how was honor still a thing?
my wish maybe some liberal colleges already do this.
eliminate exams all together - have in person discussions.
if you gonna write something - to answer questions - let it be done in person then marked on the spot by your peers.
better yet to test understanding - answer questions with better questions i.e critical thinking.
since easily machines can do calculations, fact finding faster than us. but machines can't ask better questions
Not having invigilated exams is truly diabolical. It may have worked back in the 1800s when everybody at Princeton was already from extremely wealthy families, but these days when half the student body is Chinese expats who need the degree to get high paying jobs back in Shanghai, and another 20% are affirmative action students from single mom poverty line households, and nearly all the students aren’t from generationally extremely wealthy families, why wouldn’t they cheat?
Off topic but but why does Princeton need to sell my data to 1326 of their "partners"?
> If a suspected Honor Code violation occurs, proctors will document their observations and submit a report to the student-run Honor Committee, where they may later testify under the same standards used for other witnesses.
is this so the rich kids that have parents who pay for parts of the school can still get a pass?
> so the rich kids that have parents who pay for parts of the school can still get a pass?
It's Princeton. They're given due process, not administrative fiat. Also, on what planet does having "parents who pay for parts of the school" swing a student (versus administrator) run process?
Seems unlikely the student-run honor committee decision would be immune to being 'reviewed' or 'considered' by faculty. Why would they cede that power?
> Why would they cede that power?
That's just the culture at Princeton. (And in a lot of high-trust settings.) Nobody is ceding real power, they're devolving unrewarding work.
Princeton has so much money that they could make it free for all undergrads and literally never run out of money.
> Financial aid covers the full cost of attendance -- including tuition, housing, food, books and personal expenses -- for most families with incomes up to $150,000 a year. Most undergraduate families with incomes up to $250,000 will pay no tuition.
https://www.princeton.edu/admission-aid/affordable-all
Well, the average grade at Princeton is an A. Not sure how much this will change anything.
Very curious to see if/how the admissions distribution changes after this.
Comments express surprise that this honor code has been in place. Many schools have similar honor codes.
Despite HN trendiness, SV and business world advocacy of 'animal instincts', and current cultural trends, humans are generally honest and honorable - obviously people in many places have thought that. It's good news, though many will resist it because, I think, it violates the anarcho-libertarian norms that are fundamental to these cultural trends (i.e., arguing that corruption is inevitable, human nature, etc.).
Taking the ‘generally honest and honorable’ point without challenge, corruption is unavoidable at a level of 1500 students per year despite students generally being honorable. As the article shows 2/3 students never cheated (or would never admit it) but that doesn’t do much to soften the blow that 1/3 did cheat and got away with it.
As a result, we still have 1/3 of the future leaders of American business/politics cheating and not facing any consequences. Princeton appears to be an unprincipled institution and is shown to lack any useful standard to evaluate the quality of its graduates. When you see a Princeton graduate with high marks you should always consider that they may have cheated to finish their degree.
That result is a change. You and others write as if it has always been true, but there is no evidence of that and the people who have dealt with it directly, for well over a century, have believed otherwise.
Princeton is changing its policy because of the changed result.
Nah, it's just that I went to college and saw cheating. When an assignment was take-home, people were forming cheating rings, but because they wanted an upper hand but because they were afraid others were doing the same. I saw even some top-notch students cheat a little bit, cause they wanted 4.00 not 3.95.
As a non-cheater, I didn't want draconian measures to catch cheating, just wanted there to be real consequences when someone was caught. I didn't need 4.00, but what if I did?
Chegg was a $15B company before AI came out. I promise that wasn't because it was the best platform to learn the material.
I agree that humans are generally honorable for things with low stakes. Consider our cultural view of politicians for a non-SV example of where we fully expect high stakes to lead to selfish and dishonorable actions.
lol Chegg. Even the name suggests what it's for.
> Despite HN trendiness, SV and business world advocacy of 'animal instincts', and current cultural trends, humans are generally honest and honorable
I personally believe this (that people are generally honest and good). BUT, the numbers don't lie: 30% of Princeton students admit to having cheated on an exam. This is a "your house is on fire" moment. An honor code has has to be enforced, and that is apparently not happening at Princeton. Frankly, as someone working at a school that also has an honor code (most do, in my experience), that is where the problem lies: if you turn a blind eye to violators, it sends the message to everyone that the honor code is just words, it doesn't mean anything.
Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting [1] and unprecedented corruption and criminality among our national leaders, it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/hasan-piker-jia-to...
The fish rots from the head. It's a sucker's game to aspire to selflessly serve the greater good when the most powerful people in the land are brazenly corrupt pedophiles. In other words: monkey see, monkey do.
Yes, and: the rot started long ago, this is just what it looks like when it goes unchecked. To quote Mencius:
Mencius went to see King Hui of Liang. The king said, “Venerable sir, since you have not counted it far to come here, may I presume that you are provided with counsels to profit my kingdom?”
Mencius replied, “Why must Your Majesty use that word ‘profit’? What I am provided with are counsels to benevolence and righteousness, and these are my only topics.
If Your Majesty say, ‘What is to be done to profit my kingdom?’ the great officers will say, ‘What is to be done to profit our families?’ and the inferior officers and common people will say, ‘What is to be done to profit our persons?’ Superiors and inferiors will try to snatch this profit one from another, and the kingdom will be endangered.”
> fish rots from the head
Does it? Did it? We elected the "brazenly corrupt pedophiles."
This question seems complex and important enough to not be resolved with a truism.
The brazenly corrupt also own the vast media ecosystem that can help swing elections. Should we all know better? Probably. But they control the education system too, so…
Hard to say for certain. Though I do think it goes both ways. People at the bottom influence culture from bottom up, folks at the top from the top down.
> I do think it goes both ways
If we flip the snake so it goes along the political spectrum, with the biting ends being extremists, I suppose the fish does rot from the heads. Top-down versus bottom-up is a more-complicated situation, and I suspect it's closer to turbulence than anything monotonic.
It really doesn’t. Trump wouldn’t survive election if the electorate didn’t seek, or at least tolerate whatever the hell you can call that. Americans will conveniently point fingers at him (as is their political tradition) but he’s a consequence of a much deeper disease.
Trump was not the beginning of the decline, only the terminal symptom.
Yeah I think Reagan's reforms of the antitrust laws, and the subsequent fall of the Soviet union are probably some of the first dominoes toward the new gilded age.
The lack of competition from the Soviets is probably one of the bigger systemic causes. The cold war in no small part a war for hearts and minds in the democratic world. It was existentially important that the west believed in America, both the US itself and its allies. As long as the Soviets were around as existence proof for an alternate world order, the US needed at least visibly have its shit in order.
If today's clown fiesta had unfolded 50 years ago, well comrade, сегодня мы все говорили бы по-русски.
Terminal? We don't know if worse is yet to come.
> The fish rots from the head.
The old adage that the people elect the governance they deserve; comes to mind. The concepts of Virtue, Honour, Duty, and Justice have been declining in the West over a very long period (this is not a US specific thing). The rotting head reflects the rotting society.
> It's a sucker's game to aspire to selflessly serve the greater good when the most powerful people in the land are brazenly corrupt
You don’t act honourably because that will “get you ahead”. You act honourably because it is right.
You don't need "virtue", "honour", and "duty" to have NOT have voted the way people did. It is plain to see which chosen leader will torch the nation and which will not, regardless of people's distaste for the establishment politicians.
It is worse than self interest. It is brazen ignorance.
I am seeing this phenomenon in my country. Once people discover that their beloved leader is corrupt, they just justify with "all politicians are the same". Society becomes so cynic that it very hard to bring change. Politicians are considered corrupt by default, I don't know how that ends.
> You don’t act honourably because that will “get you ahead”. You act honourably because it is right.
As much as I would like to believe that’s true I don’t think it is.
You act honourably because society incentivises you to. To act dishonourably is to be disadvantaged, to be shamed, to be cast out. That is the part that’s missing today.
I see where you’re coming from, but something about this framing bothers me.
I think acting honorably has to come from within. It’s something that people need to do regardless of rewards or incentives. Now, how we create a culture that actually does so… that has to come from society. But, imo, if people only act honorably because they’re rewarded for it, and they don’t when no one is looking… that’s not acting honorably at all.
You can both be right. I live in a high trust society (Japan), but was raised elsewhere. When I first came here, there were times I had to suppress my instinct to take opportunistic advantage. That was intrinsic motivation.
Later, I had adapted to the culture around me. Such instincts rarely arise as it had become extrinsic.
My pessimistic take is that the majority of the population will simply never do that. Look at organized religion. One of its key promises is “behave in life and you’ll get everything you could ever dream of in the afterlife”. I don’t think it’s coincidental.
> You act honourably because it is right.
Well, and because it's not typically fatal in very short order.
The problem comes in when honor makes you a target to erase by people more powerful than you. Being dead right gets you nowhere.
> The old adage that the people elect the governance they deserve; comes to
this idea has always bothered me. i think people (even ones i disagree with) deserve better.
It's a nice saying, but the "head" changes every 4-8 years and this is a problem that has gotten worse over decades. Sometimes the rot doesn't start from the head.
Or it is a dilution of the culture through mass media, social media, and immigration from countries with different values.
Everyone has an anecdote of the immigrant they know who's a much better "American" in their values. The same for anecdotes of the people with the least American values being home grown and inbred
None of those corrupt leaders is from elsewhere. And native born americans have higher criminality then immigrants.
All of that corrupt leadership is celebrated by american americans who see themselves as true americans.
I've known a lot of people who justify crimes like shoplifting by the fact that these corporations have stolen from them (and not in some abstract way, often literal wage theft) and felt like the social contract was already broken. And it's not like the leaders at the large corporations I've worked at generally seem to care about their employees or customers (I would describe most places I worked at as, at best, amoral. I've heard "well, if we didn't do it some other less ethical company would" too many times).
Edit: not that I'm pro-shoplifting, it's that the article talks about them breaking the "social contract" (though the article is more of a reality show-esque piece as it's a opinions writer beefing with Twitch streamers and doesn't talk to any people actually shoplifting).
Literal wage theft is rampant, so yeah in some ways I understand why people would feel that way.
I’m still mad about a company I worked at over 12 years ago who stole from me and never paid my Super.
The thing is grocery stores make very little money, usually low single digit percentage profits, that surprisingly low rates of shoplifting can sink a store and force it to close. Shoplifting, especially the trend of rich people performatively shoplifting, dramatically harms the local community
Yeah, I'm very much not pro-shoplifting generally, I'm just anti the idea that corporations are upholding some social contract about stealing when they've literally stolen from many of my friends (tons of wage theft, illegal firing for reporting issues, etc). From the article, both the Twitch streamer and the writer sound insufferable and I don't agree with the points either makes.
Justifying one's crime because other crime exists - isnot a winning position long term.
Corporations don’t follow or care about morals, and so their customers and workers begin to follow suit.
Chomsky called corporations legal psychopaths in the documentary "The Corporation". He was right.
If companies can engage in terrible illegal behavior and then only pay 10% of profit as a fine, so can I.
If that means I cancel all streaming services, help friends also cancel streaming services, set up a Jellyfin/Navidrome box and grab everything, I do not give one fuck. Hell, the AI companies grabbed Annas Archive and Libgen. Why not me?
So, yeah. I wouldnt steal from fellow humans. I value humans. But companies and corporate "property"? <SPIT>
perhaps not, but cynicism in kind is understandable when you have no real power to effect change.
This doesn't seem particularly related?
I mean, given that belief in moral decline is essentially based on illusory perceptions anyway[1], it's not too surprising that someone handwringing about it would also hallucinate connections between two disparate phenomena they opted to characterize as examples of such.
If you opt to habitually rationalize human behavior in a manner that is detached from concern with nuance or driving forces then some amount of reality denial is probably inevitable
[1] See e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x
Lack of honour, low trust, the breakdown of the social contract. Seems all related to me.
> Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting [1]
Hasan Piker (one of the people in that link) is a streamer who got popular for extremist takes and controversy. He's just doing what he does to stay famous in that interview. The other person is a writer for The New Yorker who apparently enjoys controversy too.
This interview isn't representative of anything other than two people trying to be edgy because they want their interview to go viral.
Hasan piker has extremely bland and milquetoast takes compared to most of the left. He's just the one currently being sold to boomers as a terrorist. But any sane country would see him as a moderate (moderating between "anarchy" and the insanity of two identical corporate parties beholden to israel)
> it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.
Are unsupervised examinations common in the US? Or is this, in fact, simply one institution coming in to line with common US national and international practice?
This is not common in an in-person setting -- nearly "unheard of" outside of elite schools or particular faculty at particular programs. So it is the latter
It’s pretty common in WASP-y circles.
People can still behave honorably despite all this. It's easy (and wrong) to justify someone's dishonorable behavior by pointing to the leaders.
Source: gas station snack acquisition after 10pm in some USA urban areas, plus stories from abroad
Isn't that how stores used to work, before store owners decided it'd be cheaper to just let shoppers bring up a basket of goods? You'd go up to the shopkeeper behind the counter with a list, they'd get it all for you?
Yup, and that requires extra labor to fulfill, which will cost money. Luckily, I haven't heard anyone complain about high prices of groceries lately, so I'm sure everyone would be fine with that.
Cheaper, and maybe easier to sell personal items with a little more discretion.
That kind of service should be available for those who want it, assuming demand exists. Those who want self checkout or whatever else should not worry about their access being restricted due to wealthy authors shoplifting lemons.
(obviously no one here is going to bed crying tonight about the gall of hungry people to steal bread, I’m not even anti UBI or anything, just attempting to analyze a trajectory)
> [...] it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.
Turning into what from where is the interesting part.
Idk about corruption, but the shoplifting trend has come from corporate america's wholesale looting of the country. The social contract was abandoned many decades ago.
You ever seen a man over 40 pull a building permit for work wholly within his own home? Yeah me either.
These days college kids are just as jaded. Of course they cheat the instant they think they can get away with it.
The college is there to serve the college, not them and these days the kids know it. Even if everyone cheating degrades the value of the degree there's no guarantee the college won't do that itself if everyone is honest so might as well get away with what you can while you can. Nobody likes this, it's just a rational adaptation to the perceived state of affairs.
> Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting
It's the K-shaped economy. Those not participating in the upsides are electing to either not participate in the system at all or to destroy it. Most people think Luigi Mangione is a hero.
We had a good post-WWII run. We had factories, then globalization. Massive growth for all economic backgrounds for several generations. But the world caught up. Now the average worker has to compete against their increasingly competent and economically enabled peers around the globe. Costs for everything are rising.
We used to have a super sized Big Mac economy propped up by the fact that America was (relatively) peerless. The worker saw so much upside. Now they don't even get free refills, so to speak.
I'm hoping the AI boom helps bring down the cost of goods without putting people out of work. If it goes the other way, I think we might be heading for 1790's France.
> It's the K-shaped economy
Which side of the K-shaped economy do you think Princeton alumni are predominantly on?
??? This entire thread is unrelated. Princeton realized AI makes cheating too easy, that's it. Not every topic needs to be about Donald Trump.
Are they being honest? Did Princeton students not need proctoring in the past because the had no means to cheat, or they both maintained some honor, and fear of the institution.
Cheating was always easy.
> Most people think Luigi Mangione is a hero.
Given that UHC started approving lots of procedures and drugs after the assassination shows that their medical insurance mass fraud did happen and paid off... And they quit it.
And then they were sued by shareholders for approving said procedures. Boo fucking hoo the shareholders lost a buck.
Note that insurance fraud ALWAYS targets the individual policyholder, and NEVER the insurance company.
If Luigi did it, then he should be significantly credited for a massive harm reduction by using violence to ensure less fraud perpetrated by UHC.
The US government wouldnt do their fucking job (investigation amd criminal charges of insurance fraud). So a citizen had to.
What a disgusting take. Leftists such as yourself are beyond the pale. Luigi murdered someone in cold blood. You can civil society like that. Leftists are always going fascists but I don’t they have a problem with fascism. Their only issue is that they want you to be the fascists. How can you not see how a civil society cannot exist if we follow your ideology? It’s fine as long as it happens to people you disagree with politically. Idiocy.
Cause yeah, we should totally give businessmen a hard pass when their decision kills 10000 a year, cause some shareholder makes more money. Thats just murder with an extra step, and somehow deemed legal and allllll good.
Do we both value a life, regardless their status? If so, Im siding with the masses.
If that businessman stands in the way of 10000 dying, Im pulling that train lever and running his ass over.
Moral acceptance of petty theft always increases with inequality. When the poor take from the rich, people don't care as much. The poorer the thief and the richer the victim, the less people care. Go far enough, and people view the thief as a Robin Hood-style hero.
Given that we're at a point in American history where inequality is quite extreme, I don't think it's fair to compare shoplifting to the corruption of the ruling class that is largely responsible for the current levels of inequality in the first place.
To be quite frank, under current conditions, it is a moral failure to see fault with impoverished people for stealing what they need to survive, not the other way around.
To be clear the shoplifters in question are all rich themselves and stealing expensive items they don’t need. The original article is about students at one of the richest and most prestigious institutions in the country. None of the criminals are poor by any stretch of the imagination. They are just lousy people who are smart enough and entitled enough to try to justify their bad behavior.
What? It's a moral failure to have an issue with people shoplifting from Walgreens? Do you think they're stealing milk, eggs, and bread?
And your types are the same that would see a cashier who steals $100 go to jail....
But a manager who edits timecards of 10 people for $100 ($1000 damage) is just a civil matter.
Crime, and who punishes it, has always been a political matter. The crimes have never been equal for those with power other others.
My types? The person I was responding to claims that if I have a problem with someone shoplifting alcohol and condoms from Walgreens, then it's a moral failing on my part. I responded because I found that absurd. For the record, I do not condone managers editing timecards.
Moral code is downstream from culture and not every culture sees cheating as a moral failing.
As Princeton's demo skewed hard into a more international student body, the underlying cultural assumptions have shifted.
The Christian extension of the Ninth Commandment from not bearing false witness to a blanket ban on lying is unique. Islam has explicit exceptions through Taqiyya, Hinduism gets nuanced with dharma and adharma, Buddhism sees it as one of the ten unwholesome actions, ...
WASPs built and defined Princeton, but that is long over.
It is rather disappointing to see a take as unsubtle as "white people are pure and honest God-fearing Christians and Asians are dirty heathens with no concept of morality" on this site.
No, it is culture, not race. A friend of mine (half asian, half white) and by happenstance devot christian got his graduate degree at a top 3 school in the US, and he was shocked the international student brazenness in cheating. He reported it and it was brushed under the rug, and this severely disillusioned my friend. Every professor I know reports this cultural difference.
And obviously we see it with SDE interivews with 1point3acres and the other "interview study" sites and AI tools.
I don't really know enough about life in other countries to say anything about their culture, I just know not to trust international students so much here in the US. At the very least they tend to have wack incentives. Immigrants, different story.
My feeling is people in west extrapolate asian within group variations into whole. Rich international students who invest in western degrees as pay-to-win not representative / sampling bias vs whole. Reality is international students pay for degree, university accommodates, lack of language proficiency = they'll visibly "cheat" more (i.e. patch writing) to get what's theirs, but those conditions to specific subculture/cohort. Broad statistically show western institutions has like 15-50% plagiarism/cheating rates, most of which just get swept under rug because academic misconduct not elevated officially to keep misconduct stats at ~1%. For reference PRC plagiarism data (CNKI / big data audit used to sweep through tertiary thesis) was like ~10%.
I suppose one conclusion is academically inclined East Asians cheat less in aggregate... because broadly you can't cheat national examinations (yes there are very elaborate cheating rings, but this should only reinforce it's not easy / trivial). The ones who buys academic performance, i.e. dummies who can't hack PRC tertiary and has to go western tertiary (including Ivys) cheat more than baseline. But broadly west cheats more... but institutions minimize misconduct stats because incentivized to cover/underreport/juke stats to protect brand.
It’s more commonly posted here these days, but this has always been on this site. Just usually couched “better”
Nobody said that. Yes, Princeton was founded by Presbyterians and that was a huge influence on ethical norms there. But most of the white people at Princeton aren't Calvinists either, and any that are would tell you that literally nobody is pure and honest.
Do you have any data to support your disappointment? There seems to be data supporting the GP's observation, which is different than your crude strawman.
It's not unreasonable to look for fire when you smell smoke.
"A 2016 study of more than 100 UK universities by The Times found that non-EU students were four times more likely to be caught cheating than UK and EU students. In the US, they were found to be five times as likely to be caught cheating than their local peers, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 14 leading US colleges." https://studyinternational.com/news/the-complex-problem-of-a...
"Public universities in the U.S. recorded 5.1 reports of alleged cheating for every 100 international students, versus one report per 100 domestic students, in a Wall Street Journal analysis" https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-...
In 2015, 4,540 international students were enrolled at Iowa. Of those, 2,797 were from China. That’s 9 percent of the school’s student body. Most or all of the students accused of cheating are Chinese nationals. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-...
That is not what I wrote - there was no judgement, just that other cultures weigh cheating morally different.
It is all moralities. There is no absolute one.
> in some left-wing corners of the commentariat, is out; flagrant disregard of the social contract is in.
Interesting that this is posed as the American left disregarding the social contract. I think you could make a pretty good case that the American right disregarded the social contract first in electing an extremely destructive pedophile who starts wars for reasons that can't even be articulated, pardons war criminals, engages in blatant nepotism enriching his family to the tune of billions at taxpayer's expense, large-scale fraud including being convicted of felony, adjudicated rapist, and a list of social contract violations going on for about 300 more pages that I'd be here all day typing out. And once the social contract is gone, it would be pretty weird to expect the other side to continue abiding by the terms. I don't personally make a habit of binding myself to one-sided contracts that impose no obligations on the other party.
You left out shredding the constitution and inciting a coup.
>Interesting that this is posed as the American left disregarding the social contract.
Yeah no kidding, where's the commentary on the "right-wing corners" that are rolling coal, "owning the libs", storming the Capitol, denying vaccine science and refusing to wear masks during a pandemic etc., and the consideration of whether this posture is a frustrated response to that.
Also the right wing love to ignore every single bit of their own crimes.
It's like the idea that those that voted for Trump have never committed misdemeanors cannot even be discussed, when the actual crime statistics show that yea, they are just as apt to load up the steaks and walk out of the store.
But I will say they've done a damned good job controlling the conversation so it's not brought up in the first place.
I can assure you with 100% certainty that the American Right did not elect Bill Clinton.
If you can’t understand the difference, I’m honestly impressed you remembered your password.
Statistically maybe half the people who voted for Bill Clinton are already dead.
I'm no fan of Clinton, but pretending that he's even remotely as bad as Trump only confirms how leftists see people on the right.
the people who got bombed during Clinton's tenure must've been delighted that their children were murdered and their homes were destroyed in a humane manner by a cool sax-playing pedo rather than a cringe orange pedo.
B52 dropping bombs vs B52 with BLM and LGBT stickers dropping bombs.jpg
Is this an announcement of engaging in these behaviors?
What will change once you no longer feel bound to this contract?
To be clear, I do not live in America. Not every place in the world has wantonly abandoned the social contract.
Everything changes when people no longer feel bound to it, so it's an outcome you should rather desire to avoid. Some examples are the shoplifting mentioned in the article, Luigi Mangione, or the guy who threw molotovs at Altman's mansion. The justice system is a mutual agreement to forsake violence owing to the belief that conflicts and grievances can be mediated in a peaceful manner. If that belief dies, if people believe the justice system and government can not be trusted to deliver justice to violators of the social contract and compensation to the wronged, then people will take matters into their own hands by any means necessary. It is not a pretty state of affairs, but perhaps the people who initially disregarded the contract might've considered that before disposing of it.
There are a few slight problems here.
The US justice system has always existed to benefit the rich and or majority of the time. I mean, really American history is filled with example where those in power ignored the less powerful below them and social unrest broke out. Every once in a while a rich person got blasted for the absolute unethical behavior they were engaged in.
Again, that is nothing new.
What is new is media and how people are subjected to this. There is no such thing as a local problem any longer. Anything at anytime can get shown to the entire world even if it's not real. So suddenly what would be an issue has thousands to millions of people talking about it. Unlike old media where they had some semblance of decorum, you get groups saying the most outrageous shit in an attempt to whip up crowds, it's even better when we find out later they've been paid off by foreign nationals and are acting like agents.
You’ll face unfairness with DEI / diversity quotas to get in to the college, and then if you graduate you’ll face unfairness by having your job outsourced to AI or H1B, but yeah cheating in school is totally where we draw the line.
So after 133 they learned to not leave dogs alone with sausages.
A WASP ethical framework cannot survive either the extirpation of WASPs from the student body or the transformation of the education system into a high stakes mandarin style death struggle.
This class form of racism always gets a chuckle out of me. Want to trade skull calipers?
He's wrong, but it's not because he's being racist
A "WASP ethical framework" is barely a thing, if at all. The Princeton founders were motivated by moral obligations derived from a particular subset of Protestant Christianity. They were dissenters from the Anglican establishment, so it feels weird to try to bunch them in under the "WASP" umbrella. I have no idea if people who wrote the honor code were Calvinists too, but that was the seed ideology. It's not something that generic "WASP culture" gets to claim absent from the foundational theology. I'd wager that most WASPs at Princeton today do not share genuine belief in those foundations, if they don't cheat it's only because of social pressure, which tends not to hold up as well under pressure.
WASPs in this day and age are no more immune to "high stakes mandarin style death struggles".
The word "or" grammatically indicates such a combination of conditions.
The style of writing and the inclusion of the word "mandarin" made me assume that you were implying WASPs were not participating in the "high stakes struggles". You still have not explicitly stated your view one way or the other. As you can see from the other comments, almost everyone read an undercurrent of xenophobia in your post. I sense you're a skilled interlocutor- I concede I fell into your trap.
You are aware that Stewart Alsop was writing about the death of WASP elites in 1970 or so. Does that mean you think Princeton exploded in cheating in 1971?
Sorry, can you state your hypothesis clearly here? You are saying Princeton would not need to make this change if it admitted only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants?
What?