NYT: Harvard Students in Cheating Scandal Say Collaboration Was Accepted

Colleges & Universities Harvard University
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<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/education/students-of-harvard-cheating-scandal-say-group-work-was-accepted.html?_r=1&hpw[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/education/students-of-harvard-cheating-scandal-say-group-work-was-accepted.html?_r=1&hpw&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>These students should NOT be let off so easily. Harvard University supposedly harbors the best students in the world - best in brains and in heart. If they let they incident go, the students will only be more inclined to cheat in the future - both on tests, and in the financial market! Imagine a Harvard graduate cheating innocents on Wall Street all because he had a blunted sense of the consequences of cheating. Expel these cheaters!</p>

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<p>So this is not necessarily a defense of the students implicated in this mess, but I do remember one of the most common ways of studying/prepping for exams was the creation of massive study guides. These study guides were often compiled by groups of students because there was simply too much reading material to summarize by one student in a short period of time. So the reading material/lectures notes would be divided among members in the group and then compiled in preparation for the exam. Now, normally, these exams were not take home, so usually nothing improper goes on. (still, I can see how similar paraphrasing may end up in the exams of different students without it being cheating…simply because they (study guide group) would have studied using the same study guide. </p>

<p>In this case, if study groups prepared a study guide in advance of receiving the exam, does it count as ‘having discussed’/‘collaborated with colleagues’ if the exam questions were not specifically discussed among students? Groups of 5-10 students may have studied from the same study guide with the same bullet points and summaries (and any mistakes and inaccuracies) It’s not unreasonable to find similar phrasing in the exams. </p>

<p>Again, I’m not necessarily defending the students, but this may not actually be as nefarious of a situation as it seemed when the story first broke.</p>

<p>(of course, we can ask why students didn’t just take copious notes of the readings during the semester and wait till the last minute to put together study guides assuming they knew the conditions of the course…but I’m not sure we should go there)</p>

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<p>". . . there was simply too much reading material to summarize by one student in a short period of time. So the reading material/lectures notes would be divided among members in the group and then compiled in preparation for the exam."</p>

<p>My daughter, who is a current junior, was not implicated in the cheating scandal, but she constantly complains that professors assign SO MUCH reading material that it is impossible to keep up unless they form a study group. As windcloudultra noted, the result is that students form a study group and prepare handouts on the books they have read – and share those handouts with the members of the study group. Although my daughter’s tests have not been take-home, I’m sure that she (and other students) cannot help but memorize another student’s notes on the subject matter and repeat those notes on their tests – especially for books they have not read. </p>

<p>BTW: As an example of the work-load: in one of my daughter’s classes, the professor assigned two to three books per week to read; each of those books was anywhere from 100 to 300 pages. If every professors assigns similar work, it’s really impossible to keep up with the work load without forming a study group.</p>

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<p>I’m sorry, but 100-300 pages PER WEEK is NOT a harsh COLLEGE workload. In high school, my English teacher assigned 100-150 pages of reading a week. As a freshman in college this year, my history teacher has been assigning atleast 200 pages each week - and that’s on a good night! If you want to know what a harsh workload really is, go ask MIT/Caltech/Berkeley engineering students - they have it worst. Besides, this is Harvard, which houses the best of the best. They can do better.</p>

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<p>@Lucyan: multiply 300 by 3 and that’s close to a thousand pages. Look. There’s a lot of variation in the amount of reading; depending on your concentration/major, it’s a different balance between readings and psets. I’m petty sure Math 55 students or Physics 16 students would take issue with that claim that their work load is any less onerous than their MIT or Caltech colleague. </p>

<p>By the tone of your posts, you seem to want to assume the students are all guilty as charged. Let’s see what happens with the investigation. I know there are also people ready to jump in for a round of schadenfreude whenever Harvard affiliated people do (or are accused of doing) something not so great. It’s really getting annoying. If they are guilty, they’re guilty. But the story could also be more complicated.</p>

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<p>Thank you windcloudultra; I agree about Lucyan’s tone. </p>

<p>Keep in mind that it’s 1000 pages of reading per week in addition to lectures, papers, research , labs, Psets – not to mention any job or extracurricular activities students may have. Study groups are not unique to Harvard. I’m sure they happen at MIT, Caltech and everywhere else where professors pile on the work.</p>

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<p>I’m a junior here at Harvard, and I have… a lot of thoughts about this story. Here are my two cents. Sorry for the rant. </p>

<p>First of all, I can see at least two obvious ways in which the supposed ‘cheating’ wasn’t anything reprehensible. </p>

<p>The part of this article that resonated the most with me was the claims of the accused students that the course’s teaching fellows (TF) were pretty much just giving out answers to the take-home exam to those who sought them, and that this accounts for the similarity of many answers (since if many people go to the same perfectly acceptable source, a TF, they’re all going to have the TF’s answer).</p>

<p>This is an EXTREMELY familiar experience - I’ve /often/ been in classes where, due to some combination of poorly-formulated questions, inaccessibility of professors, bad planning, and maybe TF laziness, answers are pretty much just handed out. I’ve never seen it done on a take-home exam, but that’s only because I’ve never been in a class with a take-home exam. I can say from personal experience that it’s REGULARLY done in biology and mathematics (mostly the intro series, like 21a/b) classes. </p>

<p>The students in the article say that the TFs themselves regularly didn’t understand the exam questions, and that there was an ill-defined term on this particular exam that would naturally lead many students to seek help from TFs. I have no trouble at all believing that the TFs outlined answers to questions for the students. </p>

<p>I obviously don’t know what form the “similarity” of the answers that prompted this investigation took. If the sentences are EXACTLY the same, then that’s a different story. But I can easily believe that the particular approach to answering a question was common to many exams, that this caught the attention of the Ad Board, and that this is accounted for by the giving out of answers by TFs. </p>

<p>As someone else has already mentioned, it’s also entirely possible that the students collectively compiled a study guide before the exam, and that this study guide was used on the open-note take-home final. This is an EXTREMELY common practice in the humanities and social sciences here, so I’m having trouble understanding how the Ad Board is distinguishing this perfectly legal possibility from outright cheating.</p>

<p>Beyond that, though, I’m deeply disappointed in this entire situation. </p>

<p>None of the possibilities that I’ve mentioned above, although they would alleviate the charge of academic dishonesty, are anything that I’m proud of saying happens at my school. If a class is so bad and/or students are so desperate for grades that TFs are regularly giving out answers to those who seek them, there is something fundamentally wrong. If students aren’t really learning the material for whatever reason but are instead compiling massively collaborative study guides that they then essentially copy onto their exams, there is a fundamental problem. This is the darker side of academics here. People cut corners because they ARE desperate to get the grade, and there are essentially institutionalized ways of going about the corner-cutting, though this is more prevalent in some academic disciplines than others. </p>

<p>I’m disappointed in Jay Harris’ decision to publicize the investigation. This is an internal matter that should be handled within the confines of the school. When I, a Harvard student, am finding out key pieces of information about this story not from the administration or even from the Crimson but from the New York Times, something is wrong. </p>

<p>Every school has cheating scandals. This isn’t new. But most of them don’t publicize it, because it can be handled internally and because it makes the school look bad. Harris chose to needlessly publicize this when he certainly knew that the Harvard name would attract a lot of press, tarnish the school’s reputation, devalue the degrees of those of us who do put forth an honest effort to learn material honestly and thoroughly, and, most relevantly, make it extremely dicey for undergrads to take this semester off. (If you’re a potential employer, and you see Gov 1310 on a Harvard student’s resume after learning that they’ve taken the semester off, and you’ve seen all the media coverage, you’re pretty obviously going to jump to some conclusions.) Basically, I find it extremely inconsiderate, presumptuous, and inappropriate to publicize this information BEFORE the Ad Board has concluded their investigation. </p>

<p>I’m disappointed in how atrociously slowly the Ad Board has handled this case; accused students now have to decide whether or not to move in and start classes for the semester when they could be booted out in November, despite the Ad Board having had all summer to investigate further. </p>

<p>Basically, this entire situation leaves me with a bad taste - about the school’s underlying academic problems and about our ridiculous bureaucracy of an administration that always seems to put the well-being of its students last, or to not consider it at all.</p>

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<p>@Elanorci: Thank you.</p>

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<p>The fault of this episode really lies with the professor who is in charge of the course. A take-home exam should be a long essay, not a group of short answer questions. Honestly, how many ways can you say that the sky is blue? Allowing open internet use but disallowing collaboration is also silly.</p>