[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.

[pdonis]

That would be this?

https://web.mit.edu/6.7800/www/info24.pdf

Or at least this year's version? If so, it looks like Course 6 hasn't gotten any easier over the years. Good 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.