Where the elite meet to cheat

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Back to the future?

Citing concerns over academic integrity and advancements in technology, Princeton University faculty may require proctoring for all in-person exams, the Daily Princetonian recently reported.

Such a move would buck 133 years of precedent and “would mark a departure from the traditionally unproctored exam format under the Honor Code,” which was established in 1893, the student newspaper reported. “Currently, only individual and small group examinations are proctored.”

But the Honor Committee chair told the Princetonian that, in November, professors were instructed to proctor individual and small-group exams, such as make-up exams, exams taken by student-athletes while traveling, and exams taken with disability accommodations. 

Currently under the Honor Code students take their exams without supervision and subscribe to the pledge: “I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination.”

News of the proctor proposal made headlines last week, but in late January concerns about the Honor Code were already broached.

A Jan. 28 student op-ed in the Daily Princetonian headlined “Why the Honor Code doesn’t work” argued the current system is broken.

“[D]espite what the Honor Code stipulates, no one wants to be a tattletale — a longstanding aversion of Princeton students. Rather than reporting, some students turn a blind eye to cheating, or deliberately avoid sitting near the back row of a lecture hall to avoid catching their peers in the act,” the columnist argued.

“Princeton’s vaunted Honor Code can sometimes feel like the butt of a running joke. Despite the policy’s insistence that students report in-person cases of cheating, there’s still a sense that academic dishonesty runs unchecked on some exams.”

The recent news that faculty are seriously considering the proposal drew mixed reactions on Reddit.

“I’ve always been proud of the Honor Code and what it says about us. Do current Princeton students lack personal integrity? That’s just embarrassing,” one person stated.

But another argued: “As someone who teaches here, instituting more handwritten things I think is a necessary change given how tempted students are to use AI for everything (and I mean EVERYTHING).”

Another sign of the sad decline of higher education:

Professors are calling out the alarming rise in students diagnosed as “disabled” at elite universities to get special accommodations in class and on exams.

One in five students at Brown and Harvard are now registered as having some form of disability, according to an analysis by The Atlantic — but professors suspect some of them are bogus.

Do ya think? I seriously doubt that 20% of the students at Harvard and Brown are mentally disabled. Badly misinformed, probably, but not disabled.

Many students claim they suffer anxiety, ADHD or depression, among other conditions. It’s not just unfair — it’s also potentially degrading the function of exams as a test of ability.

Of course, the function of exams as a test of ability is pretty degraded already. I’m not sure why you need more time for an exam at Harvard; doesn’t pretty much everyone get an A anyway?

It’s not just Harvard and Brown:

At Stanford, 38% of students have registered with the Office of Accessible Education, and 1 in 8 undergraduates received accommodations as of this fall.

The number of students receiving testing accommodations has tripled in eight years at the University of Chicago and quintupled in the past 15 years at UC Berkeley, the Atlantic reported.

I don’t doubt that many students are anxious about exams and depressed if they don’t do well, but until recently this wasn’t considered a disability. But here, as in so many areas of contemporary life, alleged victimhood is rewarded:

Extra time is beneficial to students with learning disabilities and allows them to perform statistically better than their disabled peers without accommodations, according to the Institute of Education Sciences. But students who do not legitimately need extra time can benefit unfairly if accommodations are granted.

Call me hard-hearted, but if you can’t complete a set of tasks in the same amount of time as your competitors, shouldn’t that impact the evaluation of your performance? In the real world, if it takes you twice as long as someone else to complete a task, you are only worth half as much on an hourly basis.

Higher education, at least at the “elite” level, has turned into something of a joke. I agree with this professor:

[Professor Wolfinger] also suspects that some less privileged students are also turning to accommodations because they aren’t necessarily cut out for college.

“I am very sympathetic to a critique that just too many young people pursue four-year degrees now,” he said.

“We might be better off in the long run if some of those students pursued two-year technical degrees or other opportunities.”