[wps]

I've sat in classes where people at my table genuinely took pictures of the exam while the professor's back was turned (being kind to us and giving us useful information on the board) and uploaded the entire exam to the Gemini app.

Cheating is all around disheartening and is now incredibly easy with all the free multi-modal models around. Real active proctoring is needed and devices need to be confiscated during exams. This is common practice in many other countries.

[mynameisash]

My son is taking an AP chem class - he's doing really well, super interested in the subject. It's a difficult class, to be sure. Many of his peers are just goofing off and don't understand things. My son regularly tells me about people in his lab group that are cheating off his papers (and, I think, even his test). He tries to cover up answers, but it's not always possible to do.

What is even more frustrating is that the teacher knows this and does nothing about it. Maybe one could argue that, in the end, these students fail to learn and will get their just rewards. But it seems to me that the lack of immediate corrective action (eg, an F on an assignment) is a failing of the system.

[userbinator]

What is even more frustrating is that the teacher knows this and does nothing about it.

When teachers are evaluated based on how students perceive them, and are in turn evaluated by others based on the grades their students receive, there's a perverse incentive/conflict of interest for them to allow cheating.

[eclipticplane]

Read r/teachers for 20 minutes and you'll understand why some teachers in the US don't do anything.

(And then mute r/teachers because it's depressing as all hell.)

[asdff]

If I were your son, next exam I would physically move my desk to the corner of the room out of protest. He should also report everyone he sees cheating.

[mynameisash]

He started writing his answers in French so that his peers wouldn't understand:D

[asdff]

Hopefully the teacher can

[neilv]

I'm very interested in how this cheating is perceived by other students.

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.?

[typs]

As someone who attended an elite school in the post-covid era, here was my experience:

There is relatively little stigma against cheating. Maybe in smaller seminars and classes with higher collaboration there is some, but much less so in large STEM lectures. Many of the incentives in classes where exams were online led to arms races and widespread cheating (without exaggeration, over 80% of the class). For instance, a certain math class I knew of had all grades based on remote and often asynchronous tests. Many people would cheat/collaborate and ace them, leading to the professor increasing difficulty (as scores were very high). This led to more cheating and so on. It got to the point where the problem sets had such difficult problems in this intro class that only a handful of people (who had taken advanced course work in high school) in the entire 100+ person seminar were distributing proofs for everyone else. Really not great dynamics all around and it's worth noting that my school does not have a reputation for being ones with an especially competitive and cutthroat culture.

[amirhirsch]

At least in my experience (MIT ’06) many of the people most comfortable gaming academics ended up in finance.

I've always felt that it was these kind of folks that caused the 2008 financial crisis

[gregw2]

That's a very interesting call out, the connection between gaming academics and (gaming) finance.

They both do have very concrete point systems with a parallel set of less-measured but very real externalities, don't they?

This brings me to a bit of a related story.

A family member of mine who attended Princeton and was an undergraduate Residential Advisor (RA) in the dorms responsible for care of freshmen recalled hearing a presentation in the early 2000s to parents of students from an academic dean or faculty member. The dean boasted to the parents how great their kids were, describing how each year in the last decade they kept adding more work to the students and the students kept rising to the challenge. My family member RA, very aware of the resulting stress the students were under was horrified. This family member thrived at Princeton and loved it, but is quite wary of trying to put their own children on a track to get there or go there.

This event correlates with the increasing fraction of students at Princeton going into finance which began in the early 1990s and which peaked in 2006 with 46% of students at Princeton going into Finance. I had not considered a correlation between student psychological stress and psychology of "gaming"/cheating and the psychological going into finance until your comment.

At that time, there was some sense that perhaps many Princetonians went into Finance because they had to pay of the huge loans from the price tag. After a couple decades on working on financial aid improvements, now that Princeton (tuition) is free for people with family incomes under $250k/year and has been for a while, and still large numbers (admittedly not quite as large) are still going into finance, I'm not sure some of the psychological factors around taboo topics like gaming/cheating and/or more prosaic related factors like reducing cheating while properly sizing the expected workload for the non-cheating population have been explored.

[lesuorac]

Intentionally or negligently caused '08?

[Ekaros]

Intentional negligence? In many parts any reasonable looking into future should have made it clear things were unsustainable. Both on loan origination where rates would end up unsustainable for borrowers but also the derivative side with unsustainable liabilities. Screams of being intentional and negligent at same time, but it did make money.

[joquarky]

Intention is becoming worthless in the disinformation age.

[MyHonestOpinon]

Covid and Chatgpt are no the only changes in society in the recent years.

If you are an all around liar and cheater you can even be president!!

[userbinator]

It's not just "the recent years". There's a reason the phrase "honest politician" is an oxymoron.

[tdeck]

In the past there was more of the expectation that if you were caught in a major scandal your political career would be over. In that sense there has definitely been a decline.

[tdeck]

In my alma mater it was well known that business school professors were lazy and gave the same exams year after year, so all the fraternities kept backfiles of the old exams.

Since I was in the engineering school and most professors actually cared, it didn't affect us as much.

[toephu2]

Have a phones-free classroom. Problem solved.

[Krasnol]

I can't imagine why you would be so stupid to allow phones to exams.

Is this normal in the US?

[traderj0e]

Usually the rule is you can't have a phone out of your pocket or backpack during a test. Students still have phones on them. If they disallowed that too, how would that work, an airport security style check going in?

[spuz]

When I had exams in the 90s we'd have to hand phones in at the start. If the phone was seen during the exam, your test would be forfeited. If the rules were that strict then, I can't imagine how they could be less strict now given how much more powerful phones are today.

[traderj0e]

Most colleges today will consider phone use during a test cheating, then it depends on the school but at least a 0 on the test is likely. I've had some professors say upfront that they'll go further and wreck cheaters as much as they possibly can.

They probably don't ask for phones upfront, but I don't see how that'd do anything. The only way to make this stricter would be to search students like they do for big standardized tests.

[eclipticplane]

If NYC schools can do it at scale (1,600 schools this year banned cell phones), Princeton could certainly do it.

Students either leave phones at home, or the school provides pouches/mini lockers for each student.

[eviks]

They can't do it at scale, they can only mandate it at scale

[bombcar]

Yes, that kind of thing can and is done, if the stakes are high enough.

[traderj0e]

They do it for big standardized tests like the MCAT. If I went to school and saw this for every exam, I'd think wow I'm in a bad school, not that there's anything wrong with it per se but it's not commonly done.

[gizajob]

That’s pretty sad. Even sadder is that those people will hardly even feel it to be cheating because they’re now using AI for absolutely everything and so suddenly contented with a situation where it can’t be used they still can’t help but use it. Not a good sign.