Of course this is the Harvard Crimson writing about Harvard, but the words in the article could be applicable to damn near any institution, at least in the U.S.
> The institution and the community condones, if not promotes, academic dishonesty, emphasizing prestige over intellectual growth. Academics are no longer the priority of the students or teachers at Harvard College.
~~~~~
> This prevalence of academic dishonesty is symptomatic of a pervading mentality on campus that neglects the classroom.
> Nicolaus Mills ’60, a literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College, points to a weak emphasis on undergraduate teaching as an underlying factor that enabled the scandal to take place on Harvard’s campus.
> ... As professors invest less time in the classroom—a product of pressures to establish themselves primarily as researchers—so too do teaching fellows and students.
The above attitude unfortunately has been (and will continue to be) copied by any institution hoping to place itself among prestigious names. My alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) made a huge shift in recent years (2006-) towards firing much of the "clinical faculty", which was the name reserved for faculty who did not engage in research, and instead merely taught.
Unfortunately for students, faculty who do engage in research often consider the teaching component of their careers as an afterthought (or worse, an annoyance).
~~~~~
The single most important thing I learned when I was a child tutor is this: Without enthusiasm you've got nothing - zero - to work with in a student. And if they don't have it coming in you've got a non-trivial problem. You can't teach enthusiasm, it's imparted only one way.
Enthusiasm is contagious. It's part of the draw of being in a school in the first place, around so many other bright people who are willing to be there and spend the time learning. Then you get to this:
> “The modal Harvard student takes their courses as seriously as they think the instructor is taking the course,”
And it's painfully understandable that the experience will be damning for the average student, regardless of institution.
I went to Pomona College, which was a very different place than the one described in the Crimson article. While I'm sure cheating did take place, I was never witness to it, nor was there any cultural expectation that it occurred. Students tended to view cheating as just screwing yourself over in the long run (paying that much money to avoid get an education is a waste of time).
Harvey Mudd College, which was right next door, had an even more aggressive stance on cheating and honorable behavior -- one which was woven into the way pretty much everything was structured over there. Students were endowed with a huge helping of trust and were expected to act responsibly (and the actual student culture seemed to actually reflect this).
Both institutions provide excellent educations. However, PC and HMC are both small and neither of them have graduate students or research faculty. The faculty that are there are very accomplished in their fields, but their focus is on teaching.
I've also been the equivalent of an RA at MIT, where things are obviously a bit different. I don't think they're as bad as at Harvard, but it's clear that for many faculty the priority is not on teaching. Combined with the large size (~200 students) of many intro classes and this can create an environment where students do not feel that their success or failure is either cared about or monitored, which I'm sure makes it easier to cheat. However, MIT's technical focus may help to alleviate this problem since all of your later classes will depend on the stuff you're supposed to be learning now, so you'll be screwed later on even if you cheat. Sadly, I don't have a ton of data here -- all I can say is that out of the population of 40 on my hall there wasn't a culture of cheating. Getting bad grades was a shocking right of passage for many first-years.
Finally, my mother taught at a large research institution for many years. There cheating in the form of copying papers was rampant and the university seemed loathe to actually punish students caught in the act. My mother eventually gave up trying. These problems were worst in the large intro classes -- once things got down to smaller (<30 students) seminars and classes, cheating became both extremely easy to identify and rare.
Certainly for many of MIT's professors teaching is not a priority, but you can't get tenure if you're not an adequate teacher. I also witnessed no cheating when I attended; as you note, it's self-correcting behavior for typical MIT majors.
Harvard's something of a special case in that they're notorious for not promoting from within; that is, Harvard tries to hire the very best in the world they can recruit to be full professors, and assistant, associate, whatever their lower levels are hired with the understanding Harvard's not going to grant them tenure. (I'm sure there are exceptions to this generalization, but that what I've been told is the pattern, at least in their Arts and Sciences unit).
I wouldn't expect stellar teaching to be common in such an environment, and my Harvard friends seldom if ever raved about the quality of teaching.
Do you really think nobody was cheating at Pomona & Harvey Mudd? Perhaps those schools follow educational philosophies that deemphasize relative performance like Brown's gradeless system or emphasizing "cooperation" over individual ability. If your performance did not matter then perhaps there would be no incentive to cheat (or study). However these students are still humans and humans are lazy, greedy and proud - thus prone to cheating.
Maybe because they are small and there is no incentive to publicize episodes of cheating and damage their brand no stories have come out yet. Still a quick search finds several articles indicating concerns at these schools. And sister school Claremont McKenna has had several major scandals in recent years.
I wish there were angels who we could trust to always be honest (imagine how well government would run!) but we only have humans. Many are honest much if not all of the time but how can we ever know who or when with any certainty. Sadly this is a curse we cannot escape. These and the other human weaknesses are ultimately responsible for so many of our persistent problems.
>Do you really think nobody was cheating at Pomona & Harvey Mudd? Perhaps those schools follow educational philosophies that deemphasize relative performance like Brown's gradeless system or emphasizing "cooperation" over individual ability. If your performance did not matter then perhaps there would be no incentive to cheat (or study). However these students are still humans and humans are lazy, greedy and proud - thus prone to cheating.
I can't speak for Pomona, but many HMC classes have timed, closed book take home exams. It would be trivially easy to cheat on these. On homework, collaboration was usually encouraged, with the caveat that problems sets should ultimately be written up individually -- what policy to take was the choice of the professor.
We certainly had grades.
>Maybe because they are small and there is no incentive to publicize episodes of cheating and damage their brand no stories have come out yet. Still a quick search finds several articles indicating concerns at these schools. And sister school Claremont McKenna has had several major scandals in recent years.
I'm appending data collected in a survey last year. The data was shared with students, but not AFAIK published outside. My personal perception is that cheating is uncommon, and I did not know of anybody I knew doing so. I believe very few people I knew would be open to cheating if approached by a friend. I agree that the administration has no incentive to publicize issues, but I do honestly believe that the issues were few.
With all due respect to Claremont McKenna, their culture is very different. I would not extrapolate from them.
...
There was a survey of student and faculty perceptions of cheating on campus. Unfortunately I don't have details of how this was conducted. Presumably it was anonymous.
In response to : "I believe nearly all HMC Students respect the Honor Code"
Students:
Agree: 84%
Neutral: 8%
Disagree: 8%
Faculty:
Agree: 88%
Neutral: 5%
Disagree: 7%
"Most HMC Students adhere to the Honor Code in their academic work.":
Students:
Agree: 92%
Neutral: 4%
Disagree: 4%
Faculty:
Agree: 90%
Neutral: 10%
Disagree: 0%
"Most HMC Students adhere to the Honor Code in matters unrelated to their academic work.":
Students:
Agree: 66%
Neutral: 22%
Disagree: 12%
Faculty:
Agree: 53%
Neutral: 33%
Disagree: 14%
(For this question, I do not know the number of respondents):
Faculty: In the past 3 years, have any of the following Honor Code violations occurred in the classes you teach:
Part of this may be that collaboration is encouraged on almost all problem sets, and problems sets are designed with that in mind. Often, there's not much to actually "cheat" on, and this leads to a healthier attitude of learning together.
> The institution and the community condones, if not promotes, academic dishonesty, emphasizing prestige over intellectual growth. Academics are no longer the priority of the students or teachers at Harvard College.
~~~~~
> This prevalence of academic dishonesty is symptomatic of a pervading mentality on campus that neglects the classroom.
> Nicolaus Mills ’60, a literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College, points to a weak emphasis on undergraduate teaching as an underlying factor that enabled the scandal to take place on Harvard’s campus.
> ... As professors invest less time in the classroom—a product of pressures to establish themselves primarily as researchers—so too do teaching fellows and students.
The above attitude unfortunately has been (and will continue to be) copied by any institution hoping to place itself among prestigious names. My alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) made a huge shift in recent years (2006-) towards firing much of the "clinical faculty", which was the name reserved for faculty who did not engage in research, and instead merely taught.
Unfortunately for students, faculty who do engage in research often consider the teaching component of their careers as an afterthought (or worse, an annoyance).
~~~~~
The single most important thing I learned when I was a child tutor is this: Without enthusiasm you've got nothing - zero - to work with in a student. And if they don't have it coming in you've got a non-trivial problem. You can't teach enthusiasm, it's imparted only one way.
Enthusiasm is contagious. It's part of the draw of being in a school in the first place, around so many other bright people who are willing to be there and spend the time learning. Then you get to this:
> “The modal Harvard student takes their courses as seriously as they think the instructor is taking the course,”
And it's painfully understandable that the experience will be damning for the average student, regardless of institution.