[marsten]

Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly.

I have a friend who in college had another student take his test from the "complete" pile, erase my friend's name, and put on his own instead. It was only through blind luck that my friend figured it out. He, the TA, and the professor reported it – with smoking gun proof – but nothing happened.

The same laxness applies to academic research integrity. Universities rarely punish academics who are discovered to falsify data.

[levocardia]

Not even prestigious ones. The school needs to sound like it has strong penalties against cheating, so there are really strict-sounding policies ("zero in the course"). But also, so many students cheat that actually enforcing these policies uniformly would hurt your graduation stats, make unhappy customers (students + parents), and hurt your revenue if you actually expel them. So the equilibrium is that the burden of reporting cheating is foisted upon professors, and it is understood -- though never explicitly communicated -- that academic integrity proceedings will be a huge administrative pain for you, the professor, and it is in your interest not to initiate them.

The outcome is predictable: unless there is a scandal of massive proportions, the issues just..."go away" on their own. With some discretion for the professor to either just look the other way, or ding the student enough to feel vindicated, but not so much as to actually hurt the university's interests.

[OkayPhysicist]

The "compromise" that my university found was that if you were caught cheating in Science & Engineering school, you were given (informally) an ultimatum: either this can be escalated to the official channels, and you may be expelled (or perhaps nothing would come of it), or you can go be someone else's problem and transfer to a different subject. Typically the business school, because they're not big on ethics anyway.

As a TA, I once stumbled upon a bunch of students who had been copying each other's labs, because one student was brazen enough to turn in a printout with a the gmail header information across the top, indicating it had been received from another student. So I looked at that student's page, and noticed that they had somehow completely screwed up their rounding, and used way too many significant figures, which I recognized from another student's assignment. Digging through the pile, I found others that had rearranged stuff enough that I probably would have missed them if not for their exceptionally dull friend.

All told, 9 students had turned in the same exact assignment. 8 took up the offer to drop the course and switch majors, 1 faced the music, took their zero in the course, but did stick with the program.

[musicale]

> Typically the business school, because they're not big on ethics anyway

this is funny except that it also isn't

[Forgeties79]

> So the equilibrium is that the burden of reporting cheating is foisted upon professors, and it is understood -- though never explicitly communicated -- that academic integrity proceedings will be a huge administrative pain for you, the professor, and it is in your interest not to initiate them.

Not only that, but if you accuse a student of cheating and they are expelled, you have fundamentally altered their life forever. Talk about a burden.

[ahtihn]

That's like saying if you accuse someone of murder and they get convicted, you've altered their life forever.

That's not a burden, it's justice.

[Forgeties79]

It is not reasonable to expect a calculus professor to routinely decide if they want to derail someone’s entire future because, for whatever reason (a whole other discussion), they tried to cheat on an assignment. A lot of systems don’t have multiple strikes or are otherwise deeply flawed (as well as routinely shown to be ineffective). If you cheat and are caught, you are expelled. There is no sense of proportion or nuance to those kinds of systems and to ask faculty and students to voluntarily enforce that for your school is a ridiculous expectation.

If you’re asking me if there are situations where a student should be expelled because of cheating, the answer is yes. But I would say there are a lot of factors that have to be considered. It certainly can’t be one size fits all, which a number of institutions do. Otherwise it is not “justice” in the slightest. It’s taking a “tough on crime” approach to young adults in school enforced by their educators and peers, which is…well, let’s say “not effective.” At the end of the day these are institutions for learning. Plenty of people make huge mistakes, including massive breaches of trust, then learn their lesson and become better people for it. Giving a 0 on an assignment is often sufficient if we’re being honest. In a lot of cases that dig such a deep hole that your grade will never recover. If you want punitive measures, and one that hits where it hurts in a way that is relevant to the act of cheating, it doesn’t get much more appropriate than that. Not to mention the educator is going to watch them like a hawk for the rest of the semester.

I’m not even going to bother elaborating on how absurd it is to compare murder and cheating on a homework assignment or whatever.

[musicale]

> A lot of systems don’t have multiple strikes

The case of Katie Meyer at Stanford (not an academic integrity issue but a carelessly punitive disciplinary process nonetheless) shows that universities need to temper discipline with humanity and understanding, and to work for positive outcomes for all students.

> honor system has relied on individual accountability, with students pledging both to refrain from academic dishonesty and to report those they witness in violation

The last part is the weakness. As you note, nobody wants to potentially cause great harm to another student, even one who is guilty of cheating.

That being said, a cheating student should certainly not receive credit for the exam, as it is unearned, creates an unfair environment, undermines the assessment accuracy of course grades, and can disadvantage other students in courses with curved or grouped grade distributions. Widespread or prevalent cheating is particularly destructive because it creates bad incentives.

[Forgeties79]

>That being said, a cheating student should certainly not receive credit for the exam, as it is unearned, creates an unfair environment, undermines the assessment accuracy of course grades, and can disadvantage other students in courses with curved or grouped grade distributions.

No one disagrees with this. No one wants to encourage cheating. The question is what works and/or are there any harmful effects of current systems

[raincom]

I know a guy who TA'ed at Stanford in the 1970's. He said his professor told him to give students “gentleman’s B’s” even when their work was not fully up to par, because many of them would eventually become part of the country’s future elite and power structure.

[alfiedotwtf]

… which explains the current political climate in the US right now

[SoftTalker]

I've talked to instructors who've just given up. They know the students use AI. More and more of them do every year. The instructors can spot it easily, but if they brought them all into the academic dishonesty process, the department would grind to a halt. So they just let it go. They are all paying tuition, and they'll all get the credential they paid for.

[nradov]

I sympathize with the instructors to an extent, but the reality is that LLMs will be a pervasive part of life going forward. Schools need to completely reinvent their curriculum around that new reality. It's going to be a painful process for instructors accustomed to the old way of teaching.

[silver_silver]

The reality is that it’s not possible to learn if one offloads the work itself to an LLM

[riknos314]

A more accurate phrasing is: It's significantly less likely that one learns the portion of the work they offload to an LLM.

A random anecdote is that most of the people I know who went very far in theoretical math are relatively poor at basic mental arithmetic, because they always think in the abstract and offload addition and multiplication to the calculator. It doesn't mean they can't do it, they just aren't as practiced or as fast at it.

[Forgeties79]

The difference is that at one point they could do basic arithmetic. They went through the fundamentals/building blocks to get where they are currently. Getting weaker at something is not the same as never having to put in the effort to learn it in the first place. Just because they’re not particularly good at it anymore doesn’t mean they don’t understand how arithmetic fundamentally works (which would be incredibly concerning). They can look at a problem on a piece of paper and completely understand what it means.

Also, they are leaning on a calculator, a specific tool with a proven use that literally everyone knows how to use. LLM’s are glorified beta tests where the VC-backed companies are begging the rest of us to figure out the billion dollar application for them. It doesn’t even remotely compare from a utility standpoint. I don’t need to promise you what a calculator will eventually do when it gets better or convince you of their usefulness. It is self evident and consistent

[varjag]

That's just a poor analogy. A better one would be with lobotimized people doing math.

[novok]

Just like how you significantly increased the difficulty of exams in "open book" exams in the past where the only way to pass the open book exam was to know the material well, you similarly need to increase the difficulty of other work where it won't matter if you have an LLM, because you won't pass without knowing your shit either!

[Maken]

The problem is that only works at the advanced courses. However people need to learn the basics before they reach that level, specially when they are starting and are in many regards below the LLM's baseline.

[Forgeties79]

Blue books.

Need to type? Computer labs (“test taking labs” idk) are back baby. Simple machines, no Internet.

Pretty sure that solves 90% of the testing problem. If somebody is overly reliant on LLM’s and refuses to learn, they’ll pay with their grades on the big assignments. Bummer for teachers who don’t love blue books, but I’m sure it’s a hell of a lot better than trying to sniff out LLMs and constantly mistrusting your students.

[intended]

Says who?

Your work will be ‘graded’ by other humans who don’t know what they are talking about, or an LLM which will assume the median answer is correct?

[BarryMilo]

They learn if they have to, like we always did. In-person exams (proctored) are good for testing that.

[shermanyo]

Calculators were a part of life when I was studying math, but we used a pencil and paper because the answer wasn't the point, learning and practicing was.

[musicale]

> It's going to be a painful process for instructors accustomed to the old way of teaching.

Going back to the old(er) way of teaching may be a very good idea.

[mannanj]

Yeah because isnt it just about money and relationships? They have relationships to those student's families and need the networks. They realize too that its more about the credentials and networks and money comes in if that support those over academic honesty.

[vjk800]

> Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly.

Yes, because the working model is that the students are there because they want to learn. And they are paying for the professors to teach them. If they cheat in classes, they are really just cheating themselves, and this should be no concern to the staff.

[frank_nitti]

I would argue they are also cheating other students in their chosen field, and any future employers who place high value on prestige of applicants’ university, no?

If the only tangible, marketable value of graduating from a prestigious school was the raw knowledge and skill, I would agree with you. But it’s not.

Having worked with people who clearly got preferential treatment in hiring based on their school’s prestige, over more capable applicants from lower-tier schools, I absolutely lose respect for staff at universities who turn a blind eye to cheating.

[globalnode]

And people respect certifications, if the trust in those pieces of paper disappears, then like you said, the trust in people with those certs disappears too. I used to think it was just about the knowledge but its not.

[MaxBarraclough]

> If they cheat in classes, they are really just cheating themselves, and this should be no concern to the staff.

This is quite plainly not the case. If curve grading is used, cheating directly harms other students who aren't cheating. If curve grading isn't used, the university may end up handing out high grades like candy, and that's a problem for the university.

Higher grades can translate to better career outcomes even if undeserved. If it were clear that this wasn't the case, nobody would cheat in the first place.

[Forgeties79]

I went to a school that actually tried to enforce it, and unfortunately it ended up being enforced wildly disproportionately along racial lines. My school had a very simple rule: if you were caught cheating, you were expelled. No strikes, no exceptions.

That is a massive burden to put on an educator.

Getting expelled from your university is a very serious, mandated fork in the road for anyone it happens to. So what do they do? If they relate to/empathize with the person, they try to handle it without reporting it. If they don’t, they reported and “let the system handle it.”

As any reasonable person would expect, white people were not reported and marginalized groups were. Privileged groups also got exceptions (the football team had a massive cheating scandal that should have expelled about 15 players, and the professor reported it! But mumble mumble uhh they learned their lesson).

After over a century they finally ended the system recently and honestly? Good. I appreciated what they were attempting to do, but it didn’t work.

[f33d5173]

You could just... make punishments more proportionate? If people are regularly circumventing your punishment system because they feel it's too harsh, maybe take that as a sign.

[Forgeties79]

That’s exactly what they did. Switched to a multiple strike system. Still, it was a very controversial change.

The point though is these “honor codes” can become incredibly discriminatory and often, when scrutinized, prove not be effective at stopping cheating.

[grey-area]

The obvious answer would be to make the punishment more proportionate. Caught cheating in an exam? Lose half the marks for that exam (for example).

Expulsion is far too harsh if cheating is widespread but there should be some penalty.

[Forgeties79]

Agreed. And they finally changed it to a multi-strike system with different punishments. Which is good!

[Jiro]

Could it be that cheating was enforced dispropportionately along racial lines because cheating happened disproportionately along racial lines?

[alfiedotwtf]

Money talks and bullshit walks. I’m beginning to understand why a lot of US politician seem to come from ivy leagues yet are dumb as hell.

[vkou]

Many of them aren't even dumb, they just pretend that they are.

They know full well that what they are doing is awful.

[musicale]

Intelligence, good judgment, and ethics are not the same thing.

Brilliant, charismatic people without any sense of ethics tend to do very well in school, in politics, and in most organizations.