[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.

[throwup238]

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).

[impendia]

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.

[clbrmbr]

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.

[gowld]

It's a win-win.

It also made the experience richer for people who cheated witih impunity.

[throwaway2037]

This is a great personal experience to share on HN. It makes me wonder: What makes an honor code work (or not)? In your example (Rice), what did the university do to promote the honor code? And why was it so culturally impactful upon you?

I will never forget being in high school and seeing so many classmates cheat on homework and take-home exams, yet raised their hands with ease to give the honor code pledge. It was a farce. Please don't read my personal anecdote as doubt that honor codes can work.

[impendia]

These are very good questions, but it was a long time ago and I'm afraid I don't remember well enough to answer.

I'm not even sure I could have answered you at the time. In my memory, it was mostly students promoting the honor code. But I have to imagine that the university was quietly doing things to keep this going.

[osculum]

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.

[rayiner]

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.

[throwaway2037]

I am curious if there is a specific personality trait that is hard-wired (from birth) into certain people (like the Big Five OCEAN psychology model) to adhere more closely to honour codes. I too had a pretty strong natural adherence, even from a young age, and no one "beat it into me".

[limbicsystem]

I don't know about the big 5 but in the six-factor 'open source' version (the HEXACO) the 'H' stands for 'honesty/humility' https://hexaco.org/

[JumpCrisscross]

Bit depressing to see the mode of this board swing towards “people couldn’t possibly have honor,” huh?

[throwup238]

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.

[marsten]

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...

[lazyasciiart]

> they could have faced repercussions if anyone had reported them.

Did people report them?

[osculum]

Not that I know of. I just heard rumors but never saw it myself.

[pdonis]

> 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.

[BalinKing]

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....)

[pdonis]

I had in-class exams at MIT that were up to 3 hours long. Take home would definitely have been nicer.

[throwaway2037]

Could students use the bathroom during the exam? If not, sheesh it could hard to hold it when very nervous during a long exam!

[hawaiianbrah]

I only recall some finals at MIT being that long. Which classes had normal exams that long?

[pdonis]

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.

[throw48296]

This year 6.7800 has a both 3h midterm and a 3h final, for instance. Wish us luck.

[userbinator]

"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."

[throwaway2037]

This is genius. I wish my own university exams were similar. I wasted so much mental effort trying to memorise stuff for an exam. In the real world, what you really need is a "good mental index" to know where to look it up. Sure, you can go to an extreme (in the wrong direction -- a "know-nothing"), but I felt memorising endless organic chemistry reactions for an exam was pointless for the real world.

[wallst07]

Same, but before AI.

The thought being that the Engineering exams were so difficult that even with the text book, you had little chance of getting it right unless you knew the material.

Often, final exams were just one question, but you were graded on the multiple pages of work you had to show.

[pdonis]

> Same, but before AI.

My time at MIT was well before AI. And before smartphones. Even PCs were new then--I didn't have one until my senior year, and that PC had less computing power than is in things like microwaves nowadays.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.

[throwup238]

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

[impendia]

> 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.

[wallst07]

Reposting what I said earlier, because I'm interested in this topic.

Here is just an example of one: Moving from Brooklyn to a small surbuban town:

- very few lock their bikes at the local schools, or "town center". Bikes aren't stolen and kids don't worry about it.

- "town center" has umbrellas out for public use, people use them and put them back.

- People generally don't lock front doors, or don't worry if they aren't.

- If there are problems, people call police, they show up quick [non emergency] and they sort out the problem.

- People happy to pay taxes and they know where it goes

I can go on... these are just examples I've seen.

[throwaway2037]

Pretty much any small town anywhere in the world will be high(er) trust. You only need to drive an hour outside of a big city to find the comparison you need. When I travel, I am only cautious inside big cities. As soon as I am in a smaller town or countryside, I worry much, much less about crime or scams.

[marsten]

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.

[Teever]

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.

[JumpCrisscross]

I went to a big public school. But at the upper levels of my aerospace and finance programs, where classes were basically invitational and unofficially predicated on involvement in extracurricular activities, whether that be our amateur rocketry group and working on our professors’ NASA side gigs, or, in finance, advising the endowment and running a pocket of it, the core group was like twenty bpeople in each.

We did group projects together. We were graded on a common curve. We spent 90% of our time out of class hanging out and learning to adult together. I know every single one of those people today, I’ve been to their weddings and am godparent to their some of their kids. And I think we knew, decades prior, we’d still know each other now.

As such no, I don’t think I was oblivious because outside that group I can concede it was rampant. But within the group, if you blew off a course you blew off the test. It just wasn’t right or smart or lightly considered to cheat and screw over your friends. You also weren’t taking elective courses for the fun of it to cheat through them.

(I now live in a small town where I don’t lock my house, my bike or my car. Most farms nearby have a box you can buy stuff from in exchange for cash you’re expected to leave. It’s pretty great and yes, privileged, but it’s not a privilege money alone can buy.)

[BalinKing]

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?

[bluegatty]

"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.

[ndiddy]

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.

[gregw2]

It would also be interesting to understand how much "imposter syndrome" seen at Ivy institutions stems from just the inevitable "little fish big pond" dynamic and how much stems from cheating.

(And how much that "imposter syndrome", from either source, then drives later hard-work/success and how much doesn't.)

[throwaway2037]

    > Swiss metro

I guess you mean they don't have fare gates? I quickly Googled about it and found this article: https://lenews.ch/2025/03/21/the-rapid-rise-of-fare-dodging-...

To quote: "In 2024, more than 1 million cases of fare evasion were recorded in Switzerland, reported RTS. The number has more than doubled since 2019."

High trust, eh? Here is a better explanation: Someone smart did the math and discovered that for many Swiss mass transit systems (there are many), they could get better overall revenue by (1) removing the expense of buying and maintaining fare gates, and (2) adding fare dodging penalties and enforcement staff. FYI: Berlin is similar.

[etherealG]

And a meta-point on top of the objectively better revenue argument swinging back to the other point about honor: if some or even most of the people involved in the honor system believe it works for the purpose of maintaining honor between each other, then it will encourage honorable behavior, even when there's significant dishonorable behavior.

The fact that most people don't know that the honor system is about money not honor is part of what makes the money part of the honor system work.

[bcye]

This is the standard across Europe outside of a few metropoles (really is there anywhere else in Europe outside Paris & London that does this?)

[bluefirebrand]

Does this actually matter in a culture that doesn't reward or value individual honor in any way?

[alephnerd]

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.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.)

[alephnerd]

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.

[traderj0e]

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.

[TitaRusell]

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.

[alephnerd]

> 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.

[palata]

What is "Swiss metro"? Curious now.

[yeahwhatever10]

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.

[paganel]

> 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

[rcbdev]

Just wait until you learn of other countries' "Freeports" (Zollfreilager) like i.e. Vienna's vie:artport. It's common practice.

Adding to that, the airports and the freeports are sometimes privately run. It's not like the municipal government could do something even if they wanted to in some cases.

But sure, be angry at things you don't fully understand. That's surely healthy.

[traderj0e]

"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?

[FabCH]

The comment was exaggerated.

If you are caught, you get a big fine, 150$-ish and if you pay it nothing will change.

However, if you get caught again or don’t pay the fine, it’s not a misdemeanor, it’s a felony. You will be caught at the Schengen border and flagged as a fugitive and get a Schengen ban. Or if you are a CH or EU resident you will be summoned by the court for a court case and you could go to jail. Most likely you’ll get a 1000$+ fine.

The housing comes in when you try to rent a new place and the landlord asks „are you a felon?“ and you can’t say no anymore.

[hattmall]

Doesn't really sound like high trust, more like high risk to reward ratio.

[joefourier]

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.

[bombcar]

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.

[a34729t]

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...

[kgwgk]

Could be https://www.myswitzerland.com/en-ch/experiences/metro-lausan...

[rcbdev]

In Vienna, where there is not a single automated check for public transport tickets (annual passes are analog plastic cards, one-way tickets are paper), there is consistently a less than ~2% fraud rate. So over 98% of users have a valid ticket at any time.

The City of Vienna has concluded that the cost of building such checkpoints combined with the reduced quality of service and the destruction of the city image could never be worth it. I wonder how other cities justify this without implicitly calling their denizens morally inferior to ours.

[throwaway2037]

    > the destruction of the city image could never be worth it

This is a pretty bold claim. It sounds like some local politican talking down their nose at the petty fare dodgers of other Europeans cities with fare gates. For what it is worth, both Korea and Japan are insanely high trust by European and North American standards, and all of their mass transit has fare gates.

[bdangubic]

> 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

[galleywest200]

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.

[bdangubic]

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...

[gen220]

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”.

[jltsiren]

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.

[bombcar]

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.

[sgc]

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.

[asdff]

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.

[bdangubic]

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 :)

[asdff]

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.

[twoWhlsGud]

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.

[alephnerd]

> 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.

[aidenn0]

ggp said 100s of years. I am certain that gp is not 100s of years old.

[bdangubic]

exactly this

[jimbokun]

All of that is sophistry in defense of fucking over those who choose not to cheat.

[traderj0e]

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.

[rixed]

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.

[Krasnol]

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.

[gnerd00]

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.

[red75prime]

In a truly honorable community anyone who thinks that it's a backdoor will find out that it's not.