[earthnail]

Stanford has an honour code. Meant no oversight even during exams. Worked surprisingly well when I was there. The flipside is, if you’re ever caught cheating, there are no second chances.

I imagine this applies here, too, if they want to enforce it strictly.

[asdff]

>Worked surprisingly well when I was there.

How could you tell? I proctored. People cheat pretty frequently and other students are none the wiser. It really takes like 4 proctors if you want to do it right. Even then I'm sure the clever ones are slipping through. These were scantron though. Short response/essay format you'd be screwed if you didn't know your stuff.

[i_am_proteus]

Once upon a time. The modern cheating student does the following:

- Quick cell phone photograph of the page, phone placed in lap

- OCR + AI = answer

- Glance down, copy

- Repeat

For a more surreptitious variant, use the front-facing camera against the bottom of the page, then flip the page. Cell phone can remain in lap.

[henry2023]

Marc Tessier-Lavigne was Stanford's president from 2016 to 2023. Not sure if the honor code means anything nowadays.

[fn-mote]

At least he had the honor to resign when caught, instead of doubling down on his innocence.

[djeastm]

Did you know Theo Baker? He's got a book out about Stanford that says differently.

>Cheating has become omnipresent. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t used A.I. to get through some assignment in college, yet the school was at first slow to realize how widespread this would become. As freshman year went on, some professors suggested that the “nuclear option” might be called for: allowing faculty to proctor in-person exams, a practice banned at the university for over a century to demonstrate “confidence in the honor” of students.

snip

>In junior year, 49 percent of the 849 computer science majors who responded to an annual campus survey said they would rather cheat on an exam than fail.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/opinion/chatgpt-ai-colleg...

[shimman]

You mean it worked well for cheaters right? The more I learn about these "honor codes" the more I realize how sheltered these American elites have become.

[earthnail]

No, I mean it generally worked well. I can't really say how it worked in undergrad because grad and undergrad school were so separate. I can only talk about grad school. I was really surprised myself how well it worked because I didn't know this coming from my university in Germany, but it really did work, at least in every exam I saw. And I don't consider myself overly naive. I guess it has to do with the fact that people who get admitted to Stanford grad school have already proven a certain work ethic and really want to do the exams to learn more. Your final grade isn't as important when you graduate from Stanford; it only really matters if you want to do a PhD, otherwise it's borderline irrelevant. "I went to Stanford" is all you need for your CV. So I didn't feel a lot of pressure being there of always having to have the best grades, it was more about using your very expensive time there wisely to learn as much as you can, and I felt my peers were the same.

Now, I'm not saying every place can be like that, I'm just trying to explain why at this particular university, the honor code is a reasonable policy that may work perfectly well on policing AI in exams. You can't copy that to other institutions, but it answers how they do it here.