[jechen]

It's no different at Carnegie Mellon. I spoke to a former SCS dean who revealed that cheating rates in CS courses are as high as 70%, yet most professors turn a blind eye (which as the Crimson article points out, may be attributed to apathy or inability to enforce class policy at a large scale).

The fact that academic dishonesty is so prevalent these days makes me inclined to believe that cheating is symptomatic of the state of higher education (and maybe the way pedagogy is approached in the modern classroom), especially in light of rising tuition and unemployment rates. When a majority of students across institutions resort to compromising their integrity and learning for a letter grade, at which point do we start reassessing education at large?

[shivak]

I disagree thoroughly. I've been to both Harvard and CMU, and assisted classes at the latter. CMU SCS undergrads work much harder than Harvard undergrads, and their work is more honest.

Actually, CMU students are perhaps a bit too isolated. This leads to some academic stratification, because the smart kids hang out with one another. There is less support and camaraderie. Lots of promising students struggle at SCS and drop out. The attrition rate, not cheating, is actually the primary academic concern.

Harvard is at the other extreme. The stratification isn't academic, it's social (via finals clubs and such.) Everyone collaborates. There are two common practices I find especially distasteful. Harvard has a very long, class-free study period right before exams. Also, Harvard provides students with Adderall at no cost with essentially no questions asked. A lot of students blow off the assignments then cram with loads of amphetamines. They're smart, so they succeed, but they don't really learn anything.

[bane]

"Harvard provides students with Adderall at no cost with essentially no questions asked."

Can you elaborate on what this means? Can you pretty much just roll into the nurse's office and get some amphetamines?

[Nav_Panel]

CMU undergrad and 15-122 (intro to CS) TA here.

As far as I can tell, there's a lot of awareness against cheating here. Most, if not all, of my professors have gone out of their way to stress how cheating is a terrible thing, devalues the degree, etc.

As a TA, I've seen some cheating on homework, but not nearly as much as described in the article. Our professor certainly does NOT turn a blind eye to it, assuming it's caught via software or we're able to catch it on the written part.

One of the worst parts of CMU is this weird aversion to seeking help. We try our best to hold a lot of office hours, especially in the lower level courses, but a fair number of students don't take advantage of them, or of the other helpful opportunities (e.g. one-on-one tutoring), because they fear some stigma against them. The worst part of CMU academic culture is that attitude: that it's not okay to seek help if you're struggling.

Shivak (another responder to your post) put it pretty well: academic stratification is what happens here, as well as some social stratification. If you're part of that group of people who fits well at the Gates 3K cluster, then you can get basically all the help you need from the myriad of upper level TAs who hang out there (hay geohot how do i kernel???). Also, CMU can be pretty fucked up socially in general, but that's for another post.