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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.?

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.

Turning into what from where is the interesting part.

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.

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.

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).

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?

  “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.”

Source: gas station snack acquisition after 10pm in some USA urban areas, plus stories from abroad

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.

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?

I’m still mad about a company I worked at over 12 years ago who stole from me and never paid my Super.

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

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.

Clearly the actions were helpful for maintaining that illusion,

while also maintaining the illusion of academic excellence,

despite rigorous courses.

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.

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).

Some individuals have heady thoughts and morals like you mentioned. Others are using it as a checkbox.

It has been 100(s) of years since community like this existed, now this is utopia

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 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.

Does it? Did it? We elected the "brazenly corrupt pedophiles."

This question seems complex and important enough to not be resolved with a truism.

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.

What will change once you no longer feel bound to this contract?

sure, but it seems exceptionally silly to continue to blindly trust them when a sizeable portion of them admit to not being trustworthy

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?

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."

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.

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 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 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

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.

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

All of that corrupt leadership is celebrated by american americans who see themselves as true americans.

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.

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.

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)

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.

It is worse than self interest. It is brazen ignorance.

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.

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.

Disc golf courses, fire wood piles, that day’s chicken eggs in a wooden box on the side of the road.

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.

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.

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.

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>

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.

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...

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.