What's special about Johns Hopkins?

bonanza
Wed, 08 Dec 2010 11:35:53 +0000

Hopkins has had the reputation of being “cutthroat” for a very, very long time. I’m not sure it was ever really true except for a few bad apples. When I started Hopkins a long time ago (late 60’s), the term “throat” was commonly bantered about and applied–mostly as a joke to anyone who did better than you on an exam. I only met one person at my time at Hopkins who truly earned the handle. Even then, as today, most students were friendly and cooperative. The few jerks were quickly identified and ostracised.

As an undergraduate, I served on the “Honor Commission.” In those days, Hopkins had an honor code which every student signed upon matriculation in which one took an oath relating to both academic and personal integrity. Exams were unproctored; you could actually take your exam out of the examination room if you wanted and complete it on the Beach or wherever. The honor code was enforced by the Honor Commission–which investigated and prosecuted alleged violations and made recommendations to the Dean on sanctions for those found to have violated the code, up to and including expulsion.

During my 3 years on the Honor Commission, we had numerous instances of alleged violations (mostly plagerism or copying from someone else’s exam) but only one instance of cutthroat behavior. This one instance was a student ( a pre-med of course–almost all instances of cheating was by pre-meds) who broke into a professor’s office and found the gradebook (this was well before personal computers). This fine individual not only raised his own grade, but randomly lowered grades of some of his classmates. This guy was a THROAT!

BTW, he was expelled.

Unfortunately, Hopkins did away with the honor code in the 1980’s. Today there is an ethics commission made up of both students and faculty that makes recommendations to the Dean on issues of academic intregity ( I guess that faculty involvement is supposed to add credibility to the process but in my experience the Honor Commission was pretty tough). The sad thing is that unproctored exams were eliminated. I’m not sure why; I assume that it was felt by some that the temptation to cheat was too great. I think it’s too bad, however. While the temptation to cheat was surely there, there is something to be said about overcoming that temptation. It felt good to be trusted, and there are always going to be some cheaters, regardless of proctoring or other safeguards.

AS an aside, we found that most instances of academic cheating was the result of pressure by parents to get good grades. While the competition to get into medical school has always been rather intense, I never understood why instances of cheating seemed to be so much more prevalent among pre-meds than other students. It’s often much harder to get into a top Ph.D program (they are much smaller and usually fully funded) than medical school (Hopkins has always had a very high med school placement rate) yet we rarely had problems with aspiring academics or researchers.