Where the elite meet to cheat

/

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.”

Darn it, our kids will be missing out on the cultural enrichment of mixing with Norwegians.

/

'Living in fear': Multilingual student enrollment drops in CT schools amid Trump immigration crackdown

It’s a quiet kind of shift — showing up in empty desks, names uncalled and school doors that some students no longer walk through.

Amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, community leaders say the dread of deportation has turned the trip to school into a risk some families won’t take, leaving fewer multilingual students in Connecticut’s classrooms.

Statewide data from this school year encapsulates that same story, as multilingual — or non-native English speaker — student enrollment in Connecticut public schools saw the biggest single-year plunge in at least 20 years. 

Advocates who work with Connecticut’s multilingual students and immigrant families say this drop reflects what they are hearing on the ground in their communities every day: Parents have been choosing between sending their children to school, keeping them home and fleeing altogether. Statewide data does not track the reasons for the decline.

The multilingual student population in the state has been steadily growing over the years and is still much greater than it was a few years ago. However, there were 2,148 fewer multilingual learner students enrolled this school year compared to the last one, according to statewide enrollment data.

A multilingual learner, also referred to as an English learner, is a student between the ages of 3 and 21 who is not a native English speaker and is not yet proficient enough in English to participate equally in the regular school program. Multilingual learners include recent immigrants to the country, children born in the U.S. who speak a language other than English at home and any student in the process of acquiring English proficiency. 

It may be time for Tucker’s family to stage an intervention

/

no no, i’m fine! I’m fine, i tell you, leave me alone! leave me alooooone! Agggahahahaha!

No predjudicial mugshots here because it's LA — no one will be arrested

/

Gang storms luxury LA apartments and brawl with doormen following street takeover

A mob tied to a late-night street takeover stormed the lobby of a luxury downtown Los Angeles apartment tower and brawled with staff — leaving smashed glass and overturned furniture in their wake, shocking shows.

The chaos unfolded around 3 a.m. Sunday at the Circa LA Apartments on South Figueroa Street, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

Authorities told KTLA a group involved in a nearby street takeover descended on the upscale high-rise and began damaging the property.

>>>

Some members of the group remained outside smashing the building’s glass doors and windows, including one person who hurled a metal barricade at the entrance.

Inside the lobby, the group could be seen flipping over furniture and running through the building as chaos erupted.

At least one person appeared to grab a box from the front desk while others rummaged through it before the gang scattered as sirens approached, according to the footage shared by KTLA.

Police said the building sustained exterior damage including broken glass doors and windows.

Another ChatGPT failure, but we'll give it a participation trophy

/

but i did what you told me to!

This first-round draft pick was clearly not ready for prime time, even with the benefit of coaching.

Ex-Jets linebacker, charged with first-degree murder, allegedly consulted ChatGPT about cover-up

Darron Lee was charged in the death of ex-partner Gabriella Carvalho Perpétuo, who was found stabbed and beaten to death last month

"Decline is a choice"

/

The voters of Austria seem poised to overthrow their ruling class, but we’ll see if that ruling class permits them to do so; France didn’t, nor did the EU itself.

In neighboring Germany, however, no problem: the sheeple, possibly because of some vague sense of collective guilt, have voted, again, for their own suicide. Reminds me of England, and residents of our own blue states.

Beege Welborn, HotAir:

Double Deutsch Down on Dummkopf

>>>>

…. Sometimes, it's the spectre of history years past and old habits that are the undoing of the voting public, out of obstinacy. When they completely move against their own obvious best interest in a baffling way.

It has happened in the local elections this past Sunday in Baden-Württemberg, known as Germany's 'Auto Heartland' - ah. Maybe you can see where I'm heading with this.

The area is legendary, and nearly on its knees.

Baden-Württemberg’s election is overshadowed by worries over deindustrialisation

... A vast Mercedes museum on Stuttgart’s outskirts, opened by Angela Merkel in 2006, testifies to the car’s role in building Baden-Württemberg’s wealth. But the sector may be facing “the greatest challenge in its history”, says Nicole Hoffmeister-Kraut, the economy minister. Over 200,000 jobs in and around Stuttgart, the state capital, depend on it. Mercedes and Porsche are laying off workers. Bosch, one of the largest suppliers, will cut 22,000 jobs by 2030, many here in its home state.

Still more troubled are the smaller Mittelstand firms dotted around the state, many of which depend on the internal combustion engine, which faces obsolescence as cars electrify. Companies that might once have downsized are now being wound up, says Martin Mucha, a Stuttgart-based corporate lawyer. Firms’ travails are curbing tax revenues, forcing towns and cities to slash services. Stuttgart’s corporate-tax receipts have fallen by almost half in two years. Nearly half of voters tell pollsters the region could face the fate of Detroit, which fell into destitution and bankruptcy when its car sector crumbled.

… Baden-Württemberg’s rural spots are wealthy too, not at all like the ramshackle, depopulated areas of eastern Germany where the afd thrives. Take Hohenlohe, a region in the state’s north dotted with successful companies. Tim Breitkreuz, the energetic young candidate for the conservative Christian Democrats (cdu), is campaigning here. The houses are big and well kept. Unemployment is just 3.7%. Yet Mr Breitkreuz is locked in battle with an afd rival. A natural optimist, he says he has to dwell on problems to secure voters’ trust. At a cdu campaign event nearby, some party activists rage against what they regard as idiotic decisions imposed by lefties in Berlin, or dogmatic Eurocrats prematurely killing the combustion engine. 

>>>>

Welborn: “To someone watching from afar, it is inconceivable that the Greens, who have been so much at the forefront of the energy disaster that is Germany right now - the Green candidate for minister-president, Cem Özdemir, worked closely with Robert Halbeck, architect of much of the current energywoes besetting the country - should be leading the polling or anywhere near the top.

Once yesterday's votes were counted, however, it turns out they'd won the whole shebang.”

As German blogger eugyppius calls them:

 Stupid people in Baden-Württemberg hand massive electoral victory to the Greens so they can continue to sacrifice their industry to the weather gods

In 2011, Angela Merkel idiotically accelerated the German nuclear phase-out just a few months after her coalition passed legislation that would’ve slowed it down by twelve years. Because of an earthquake and a tsunami that happened 13,000 kilometers away in Japan, Merkel suddenly decided that Germany needed to abandon nuclear power as soon as possible, although the Federal Republic knows neither tsunamis nor earthquakes and not even the Japanese drew this drastic conclusion from the Fukushima disaster.

Merkel’s real motivations were, as always, tactical: She hoped to deny the surging Green Party a winning electoral issue in the Baden-Württemberg elections that year, and so we can call her move a twofold failure: The Greens won over 24% of the vote anyway, which was just enough to form a coalition with the Social Democrats and force the CDU into opposition. And today, citizens of a denuclearised Federal Republic must live with a declining economy and ongoing deindustrialisation, thanks in large part to having some of the highest electricity prices in continental Europe. It was a multi-dimensional fractal f**kup, what Merkel did in 2011. We’re still paying for it.

And yet, the voters voted to lather, rinse, repeat.

...Yesterday evening, the bill for all of this humdrum imbecility came due. The Greens emerged as the winners, if barely, with 30.2% of the vote – just a few points down from their historic high of 32.6% in 2021. The CDU improved over their last showing but managed to underperform even the most pessimistic forecasts, with a mere 29.7%.

>>>>

This was a predictable outcome, and nevertheless it is astounding. The Greens and the CDU are the undisputed architects of German decline, and yet the prosperous voters of this beautiful southern state have sent both of these terrible parties back into the Landtag with an enormous mandate to do more of the same. This is proof number 5,234,345 that deep and lasting prosperity has the power to do what few other forces can, namely turn millions of otherwise sensible intelligent people into walking retards. Alas, there seems to be no way to de-zombify the voters without making them massively poorer.

AND

 In order to keep this post short enough for even the limited attention span of our Irish readers, I won’t cite here the many, many warnings energy producers have fired off to California’s and New York’s governments, alert them to the disastrous results forthcoming if they continue with their green energy policies, but there’s no shortage of such warning, many of which I’ve posted here earlier. Still, when Armageddon does arrive, the vistims will be shocked to discover that they voted for it, repeatedly.

Nadler on ICE: shoot to kill

/

I can’t decide whether these people are finally dropping their masks, or if their derangement has reached a new level, but I’m leaning towards the former.