Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
dailyprincetonian.com268 points by bookofjoe 6 hours ago
268 points by bookofjoe 6 hours ago
I was a grad student @ Princeton a handful of decades ago.
I was a TA for a few classes and, given the honor code, we did not proctor the exams for undergrads. We just handed them out (left the room) and returned to collect them at the end.
- One of the exams in a course that I TAed had 5 free-response questions.
- There were also 5 TAs in that class, so we un-stapled the exams and each TA graded one question (for consistency).
- We re-assembled the exams and returned them to the students.
- A few days after the exam, one of "my" students (she attended my recitation) came to me with her exam and explained that I had incorrectly graded question 2.
- I told her that I didn't grade question 2, so she had to go take it up with "TA # 2"
- A few hours later, "TA #2" pays me a visit and she (TA#2) is annoyed. She tells me, "Your student is trying to pull a fast one. She answered Q2 incorrectly. She erased her answer and put in the correct answer and she wants it re-graded"
- I briefly defended the student and said something like, "Why would she do that... and how could you even know?"
- "TA#2" responded with "... because I photocopied all of the student responses after I graded them."
- Then I felt like a piece of shit for doubting my fellow TA. And felt even worse being naive enough to not be suspicious.
- "TA#2" and I brought all of this info up with the prof. who was running the course.
- We were told that the situation would be handled by an Honor Committee or something like that. We forwarded the information to the committee, but no one spoke to us and we were not allowed to participate in the deliberations.
- After about a week, all we were told was that the student was able to explain the "discrepancy" between her exam and the photocopy.
To this day, I have no idea what that student could have possibly said to explain her actions.
After that, I started photocopying every damned scrap of paper that I graded.
edits for clarity. The student did not get a zero on the exam, nor was she booted from the course. I don't remember if she was given credit for Question 2, but the TA and I were both expecting her to be tossed, which obviously didn't happen.
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.
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.
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.
What is your evidence for your assertion that it was enforced along racially discriminatory lines? Or did you go to school in 1964?
What, did racism end with “I have a dream…”?
Public high schools in Georgia were still holding segregated proms no more than 10 years ago.
I had a similar experience when I was a TA at UT Austin that I wrote about on HN years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23163472
That student was shameless for success. I’m sure she has navigated her way through plenty of institutions by now, confusing getting away with it for being clever.
If OP remembers her name I’d be really curious to hear what she’s doing now (anonymized of course).
I have no recollection of the student's name.
~150 students in the class, so they were all a blur.
This was also a few years before the web took hold, so I could not have "Google-stalked" her even if I had been so inclined.
I do remember my fellow TA's name! But that's probably not surprising.
Maybe your fellow TA still has the photocopy or remembers her name? Please contact them. This is the beginning of an investigative story. Don’t let us down!
If you want rage bait, read the proceedings of honor code committees at your school. At least at Northwestern they were public record (sometimes with reactions of identities). The number of people who got off with obviously bullshit excuses was maddening even to read about.
I once was accused and brought before the honor counsel for a really stupid innocent mistake.
Basically it was a history worksheet requiring written paragraph answers and I swapped around answers under the wrong questions so the teacher thought I cheated. It was a careless mistake I made because I had lost the original worksheet and was working off a loose leaf copy in the cafeteria at the last minute but it made it look like I copied someone else’s work.
I don’t known if the committee bought my story or was feeling lenient but I am very thankful for lax prosecution of these cases and think a lot of the value is in scaring people straight.
So, they didn't face any consequences. Did they at least keep the original grade or was this so well explained they also got the re-grade?
Unfortunately, I don't remember except that it seemed unjust to all the students who didn't cheat.
She certainly wasn't penalized, but I don't remember if she was given credit for her answer to Q2.
iirc, the student stopped attending my recitation after that.
There is an easy solution to Princeton’s problem, and it’s to have an honor system with a backbone. The way honor historically worked.
At my private high school, and at my university (although they later gutted it), we had a “single sanction” honor code.
That is, if you were caught lying, cheating, or stealing - in any way, and in or out of school, though usually it was in - you were immediately expelled. No mitigating circumstances. No negotiation.
To many of my peers this sounded very harsh, especially since these were very good schools you worked hard to get to and succeed in. But part of why they were good schools was because of this.
We do zero tolerance for so many things but integrity is the one thing that misses it for some reason.
> 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton
Wow
People blame AI but in reality it's more about America transitioning from a high-trust society to a low-trust one.
Maybe a bit that - but it's far more the change of elite 'class' institutions - to elite 'competitive' institutions.
'Grades Did Not Matter' 100 years ago so much.
It was where 'the only educated people sent their kids to be educated'.
Or maybe the nouveau riche bourgois did.
Now it's a 'Giant International Competition'.
You can see this where students are competitive with grades elsewhere in the world.
They're competing for jobs at OpenAI among a million others.
I'm shamed to admit I can't remember the quote from someone who lamented the fact that traditionally people 'knew their place' and there was on some level a quietude in that, a zen - but when 'anyone can be anything' it creates hyper competition, anxiety, sense of failure for most people who can never live up to being the 'most exceptional at whatever', and the constant stress of 'keeping up with the Jones's'.
See: Instagram - it's not pictures of family and friends - it's almost entirely 'social competition through lifestyle narration' ... which that includes University's as 'brand'.
Hence the competition.
That’s a really good point. I do think the old ruling elite was in some ways more honest within the particular framework of their morality. But maybe that was easier when getting into Harvard meant being smart-ish from a prestigious family, instead of grinding to compete against not only everyone in America, but the biggest grinders and geniuses in India and China too.
This is exactly right. Gone are the days when you could get a C+ average at Harvard and still land a good job or a spot in a prestigious law program – purely by virtue of having gone to Harvard.
Everyone is in competition now. Everyone has to prove their worth, all the time. It's more egalitarian but it also creates a lot of stress.
I mean, I find myself saying this all the time. It explains so, so much about American culture. We're transitioning from an honor culture to a "don't be a sucker" culture.
The example I always point to is golf. I'm a huge golf nerd, and if there's one thing I hate it's professional golf. They sit there and pretend it's a "gentleman's game" and then let people like Patrick Reed openly and obviously cheat... repeatedly. They even got rid of the ability for fans to call in rules violations. Why? Because it's no fun, boo. Players used to want to not win when they broke the rules.
Gambling in college and pro sports? We went from the Black Sox shame and a Pete Rose being banned, to now players getting slaps on the wrist. Our society does not reward honor, so most people will not be honorable, plain and simple. Yes, there are plenty of us who will care more about integrity, but the vast majority of us won't care.
> it's more about America transitioning from a high-trust society to a low-trust one.
We're talking about Princeton, here. Trust among elites remains persistently high. In fact, it's likely higher than ever due to assortative mating & geographic sorting. Elites, even students in the Ivies, still have trust of government and elite institutions, which the elite stratum itself runs. Trust between elites and lower strata has declined, where elites and middle- and lower-classes have significant mistrust between each other, and the latter have lower trust within their own strata than in the past.
What's more likely IMO is that 1) the cost of cheating (i.e. the cost of assembling a ripped off assignment multiplied by the risk of being caught) has declined precipitously due to LLMs and 2) elite institutions remain the most ruthlessly competitive in the country and even the world.
When was the USA a high trust society?
Parts of America still are high trust: https://qctimes.com/entertainment/dining/article_5371e735-53...
When Lee Kuan Yew visited London for the first time after World War II, he was impressed by the fact that it had unattended newspaper stands where people were trusted to take a newspaper and leave money: https://youtu.be/b_6H26fpZp8. As someone from a low trust society, I fully concur with his assessment that this was the mark of a truly “civilized society.”
Right after WW2, trust was way higher. There was a belief in common good and progress and all that.
Something tells me this trust evaporated once the Vietnam War was in full swing and the USA started murdering labor activists in South America.
When supermajority White. Say what you will about multiculturalism but it is indisputable that it destroys social cohesion.
It is most definitely disputable that it destroy social cohesion. The US was cohesive after WWII, by that point we already had a LOT of non-white people. Also black Americans have been here since the start.
Tell that to Hawaii. Your whole argument is destroyed by Hawaii’s culture. America (the continent) is broken socially because American whites cannot get along with others and they’ve gone mask off, destroying the cohesion we once had when they were trying to seem less hateful.
Chicken or the egg: multiculturalism doesn’t work or multiculturalism doesn’t work because assholes treat people with different cultures like shit.
Also what’s the definition of multiculturalism? Can orthodox Christians be chill with Catholics? How about Japanese with Korean?
Stupid shit.
Also what’s your definition of white? Does it include Mediterranean climates? Fair-skinned Arabs? How about the Irish? What about a French citizen born in Morocco who has a passing French accent but is fluent in Arabic, but isn’t Muslim - is he white?
Can’t believe in the year of our lord 2026 we’ve still got buffoons writing shit like this in earnest.
you're just racist
It later resolves, but by definition of the human condition, it does initially I'm afraid. It's less about colour and more about values and creed
It might not be quite that simple. See for example: https://www.jstor.org/stable/48588978
You know, back when it was a noble democracy where all men were free, or something.
Being a high trust society isn’t the same thing as being a fully egalitarian society.
Getting to “high trust for the majority” is the 0 to 1 of civilizational development. Most societies never get there—they’re low trust for everyone.
I don't think we were ever a "high trust" society in the way that like Denmark is or something. But I'd find it hard to argue with the assertion that rather, the US has become increasingly more of a low trust society recently, more than we already were.
Obviously subjective, but I would argue it was higher before stores began putting the items behind glass/locks.
In the General Social Survey, the share of adults saying “most people can be trusted” fell from 46% in 1972 to 34% in 2018, and Pew found the same 34% in a 2023 to 2024 poll. - https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on...
cheating in school has always existed though-- the article mentions that. AI has made it easier.
Princeton is a strange place. What on earth could be the objection to proctoring? I'd much rather have a proctor than have to narc on a classmate. And even then, the proctor just reports the matter to a student-run body? Wild.
> What on earth could be the objection to proctoring?
There is a unique pride in being part of a community built around honor. You see this on the Swiss metro and in small-town vegetable stalls. Unproctored exams force every student to weigh the value of their honor against a better grade. That's a personal moral reckoning that might be worth the entire degree.
That’s just the propaganda they sell during college visits. When I was at Caltech the honor code didn’t inspire any pride, because the only way anyone got through that course load was by “cheating”*. No one had any time for pride (GO BEAVERS!)
An honor code is an admission that your curriculum is so sadistic, not even cheating will help. Princeton just isn’t prestigious enough to keep up that charade.
* At Caltech the line between collaboration and cheating was whether you listed your collaborators or not. Unless the professor explicitly indicated that it was a solo exam, group work was implied. Proctoring explicitly forbidden so every exam was take home except a few where we needed lab access (professors and TAs were forbidden from attending).
I went to Rice which had a similarly strong honor code, and it absolutely inspired pride. In me, and from what I could tell in many of my classmates.
Is it propaganda? In some sense, yes, the only way to maintain such a culture is to repeatedly insist on its importance to prospective and current students. But if so, then it is self-fulfilling propaganda, and in my opinion the honor code made my experience richer.
This mirrors my experience at Stevens. The professor would not babysit us during exams and that really did inspire pride. Also the exams were often brutally hard which inspired despair.
It's a win-win.
It also made the experience richer for people who cheated witih impunity.
Im surprised to hear that. I went to Caltech for my postgrad and never collaborated on an test, and it would have never ocurre me to do so (and no, the professor didn’t have to explicitly say they collaboration was not allowed. It was just the standard honor code).
We all suspected of people that didn’t adhere to the honor code and it was frowned upon, and they could have faced repercussions if anyone had reported them.
I did ChemE for undergrad and aerospace focused on systems engineering for postgrad so that colored my experience a bit. The former was brutal and the latter naturally collaborative with a bunch of projects, so we all worked together.
The postgrad continuum mechanics class (I think taught by the geophysics department?) was the biggest exception so I’m betting there’s quite a bit of variance among fields.
I don’t doubt there’s academic fraud (living in the dorm my first year wiped away any illusion) but within my major it didn’t end well.
He or she is telling on himself. Cheaters always project.
I looked at materials hidden in my desk for one question during a quiz in fifth grade and it still gnaws at me. Cheaters suck.
I was an undergrad at Caltech in the late 80s and likewise it never even occurred to us to cheat on take-home exams. Maybe things have changed.
People did plenty of collaboration on homework sets. Some of the harder ones were almost impossible unless you did, like those 20 page Phys98 homework sets...
> they could have faced repercussions if anyone had reported them.
Did people report them?
> every exam was take home
When I was at MIT, most exams were in-class, but open book, open notes, open whatever you wanted to bring with you. And of course that just meant the exams were much harder, because they could assume you had all the necessary reference materials at hand and didn't have to conjure things up from memory. "Cheating" was pointless, because everyone else in the room was struggling just as hard as you were.
The advantage(?) of take-home exams à la Caltech is that they can be open everything and 3–5 hours long :-P (For what it's worth, being able to listen to music during an exam, ctrl+F a digital textbook, etc. was super awesome; it would deeply sadden me if that becomes infeasible in the future once enough students stop caring about the Honor Code....)
I had in-class exams at MIT that were up to 3 hours long. Take home would definitely have been nicer.
I only recall some finals at MIT being that long. Which classes had normal exams that long?
They were finals, not ordinary tests or midterms. Junior and senior year, I think one was Chemical Engineering, but I can't remember the exact name or number.
"Cheating" was pointless, because everyone else in the room was struggling just as hard as you were.
That reminds me of what an instructor (one of the best ones I've had) said a long time ago in response to one of my classmates asking if the exam could be open-book: "I could make it so, but it's not going to get any easier." The same instructor also responded to another question with "it doesn't mean I won't change the length of the exam."
> That’s just the propaganda they sell during college visits
I'm speaking generally, not just about colleges. If you've never been in a high-trust commuity, I strongly recommend travelling to find one. It's about as mind blowing as transiting from one such community to a low-trust, high-cynicism one.
Can you give examples of what you consider to be high trust communities? Without specifics it’s hard to calibrate and figure out whether we‘re talking past each other.
I spent two seasons working with the SPCC Icefall Doctors who put up the infrastructure to cross the Khumbu Icefall each year for Everest climbers so I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what a high trust community looks like (the Nepalese guiding community on Everest). Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen what happens when the situation quickly turns dire, but I’m skeptical that there’s anything special about high trust communities other than a higher baseline of morale
> I’m skeptical that there’s anything special about high trust communities other than a higher baseline of morale
Strictly speaking I'd agree with you -- but I would consider a higher baseline of morale to be itself quite special! Especially when it is shared amongst the entire community.
Japan is a classic example. You can drop your wallet there and someone will send it to you with all the cash intact. It makes you realize how much overhead it causes when you need to guard against cheaters and thieves.
This is an unbelievably pretentious take that sounds like it's coming from someone who is either lying or was oblivious to the cheating that was going on around them.
"An honor code is an admission that your curriculum is so sadistic,
No, that's completely wrong and far too cynical.
It's not even an 'honour code' - it's an expectation that people are not cheaters - and that is not only reasonable, it's a very lower bar.
Tech schools is not representative of most places of higher learning - precisely because they tend to have 'sadistic course loads' which distorts things a bit.
As an Engineer, I was always 'overloaded' - and shocked at how relatively little the Arts Majors had to do in comparison and how vague it was.
'University' - is traditionally centred around those Liberal Arts people, or at least not Engineering.
It was never supposed to be 'sadistically' intense - that's just what some of the very technical majors turned it into - and usually not on purpose.
Mostly due to the fact that certain people think that everyone 'must' have a background in such-and-such to be considered 'well rounded'.
And it's not fair to suggest that people 'have to cheat' to get through, maybe more reasonably, the course load is so crazy, that people have to share / work together to fight hard to make it through the course load.
Purely technical schools often don't represent what institutions of higher learning are in the traditional sense, and do get caught up 'in the course knowledge' as opposed to the higher order premise.
I think this 'too much intensity' is a side effect of culture and a few other things, that just makes more civil things difficult to process.
There's no reason to 'cheat' 100 years ago if you're from a wealthy family just getting your education, whereas the competition is fierce now.
Things may have changed, but I don't recall any group exams during my time at Caltech, and conversely I do recall a strong sense of pride in the Honor Code. Also, if your professor allows collaboration, then it's definitionally not cheating: There is a vast moral difference between "the professor made the assignments difficult with the specific expectation that people will collaborate" and "the professor doesn't want collaboration but people did it anyway".
Frankly, this comment feels almost entirely foreign to my experience—I suppose things could've changed over the years (although my impression is that things have gotten much worse recently, not better), or it could be major-specific, or I just got lucky with the specific people I happened to hang out with?
The article says that according to a survey of Princeton seniors from 2025, 29.9% admitted to cheating on an assignment and 44.6% admitted to knowing of cheating that they chose not to report. I guess they could continue acting as if they were a community built around honor, but when they have been empirically proven to not be honorable I think acknowledging this reality is the more practical solution.
What is "Swiss metro"? Curious now.
It's incredibly common all over Europe, not just Switzerland. Not only the metros but the trams and even buses often rely on this system where there's no turnstile or barrier, you just walk in.
Not sure it's about being a high trust society or not, there's frequent inspections where they block the doors, and you get a hefty fine if you're caught without a valid ticket. I certainly wouldn't call Prague or Rome or Dublin high trust societies on par with a Swiss city.
Buy a ticket and get on was the standard everywhere for trams and trolleys because you didn’t have enough enforcers and you didn’t have controlled access.
Spot checking kept people honest but it only really works when most people are honest.
I assume they are referring to systems like TPG in Geneva. Basically you buy a pass and when you get on an off a bus or street car there is no checking of payment it is just assumed everyone is "honoring" the agreement to pay. Every once and a while transit cops will board and check that everyone has a pass/has paid somehow and if you get caught not paying it can affect your ability to rent housing etc.
"if you get caught not paying it can affect your ability to rent housing etc"
What's a realistic outcome for someone who gets caught, they have to pay more for housing or they become homeless?
> it can affect your ability to rent housing
This is insane, but I guess it fits the Swiss (and Geneva more specifically) quite well. And before anyone starts babbling here about the Swiss's rectitude, Geneva itself is host to this giant international money-laundering abomination:
> Geneva Freeport (French: Ports Francs et Entrepôts de Genève SA) is a warehouse complex in Geneva, Switzerland, for the storage of art and other valuables and collectibles. It is the world's oldest and largest freeport facility, and the one with the most artworks, with 40% of its collection being art with an estimated value of US$100 billion
But yeah, not pay the tram ticket once or twice and suddenly you're not worthy of renting in that shithole called Geneva, meanwhile the city itself launders hundreds of billions of dollars.
All of that is sophistry in defense of fucking over those who choose not to cheat.
In this case yes. In general, the point of an honor system is supposed to be honor. It's great when it works, but unfortunately it's not working at Princeton.
> There is a unique pride in being part of a community built around honor.
It has been 100(s) of years since community like this existed, now this is utopia
I definitely still see honor system pay boxes in the USA. Maybe not in big cities, but outside of them.
Disc golf courses, fire wood piles, that day’s chicken eggs in a wooden box on the side of the road.
I came to this country as an immigrant and one of the first memories I have was walking to the gas station to get the Sunday paper for my host father. I remember opening up the door and seeing tens of Sunday papers and was taken aback thinking how can this be, wouldn't someone just put in a quarter and take ALL of the Sunday papers home with her/him. In today's society (and especially if we are talking Princeton-like places) I do not believe honor-anything "works" anymore and am wondering just how small a place needs to be where this exists today...
just as a small recent-ish example, I live in a white-collar affluent area and this Halloween we took our daughter to her friend's neighborhood but left a dish full of candy outside with a sign to take a couple. we have a camera outside and the very first "group" of 3 kids (with two adults) that came took all of the candy that was there...
FWIW, I would expect this behavior more in white collar affluent areas more than the rural areas the GP comment is referring to.
Many people get into these positions of affluence by participating in competitions that repeatedly normalize that exact variety of deviance.
Honor-anything works when you create and maintain systems that normalize honorable behaviors and shame deviant behaviors (for any definition of honorable and deviant), and you can only measure peoples’ honor by the circumstances they’re given to prove themselves.
In bourgeois corners of the US, we’ve implicitly normalized deviance by removing the expectation for honor in competitive environments. “Win at any cost” (you don’t think the other team isn’t doing everything they can to get ahead, do you? How naïve!) has quietly replaced “be prepared” and “give it your best”.
There are places today in the USA where the roadside stands don’t even have a lockbox, just a bowl of money.
We specifically don’t tell you where because we’d like to keep it that way.
I think that is not an exception, but is pretty common almost anywhere in the US rural enough to have a roadside stand. Although bowls are not immune to wind, so generally the exact implementation takes that into account. Often a slotted box with no lock, etc.
There is no benefit to taking all the newspapers out of the stack. What do you do next? Try and hawk them to people walking by? Candy though, you can eat all that candy.
see I often wonder the same thing like why would you take 20 newspapers when you don’t need 19 of them but human mind works in misterious ways. my answer would be cause it is free and I’ll burn the 19 of them in my backyard for fun. or just like “it is ‘free’ I am taking it!”
I had a similar experience going to an all-you-can-eat restaurant for the first time. the universal reaction from anyone I talked to about this experience (same as mine) was “there is no way in hell place like this in my home country would be in business more than a month.” people be eating not until full but until their body would physically reject additional food :)
Maybe some did that certainly, but in those days, yesterdays newspapers were in abundant supply and available all over the place for various hobby craft efforts or budding arson hobbies. It would not be worth the initial quarter if you merely wanted a stack of newsprint.
Princeton was that way in my lifetime (and I'm not that old : ) - corruption is not inevitable nor should honor be considered some sort of utopian dream.
> I'm not that old
I'm not sure. Most HNers appear to be in their late 30s to early 40s, which is a massive generation gap.
Classes and incentive structures have changed for people who graduated in the early 2010s compared to the late 1990s or early 2000s and neither would understand students who graduate in the mid-late 2020s.
You'd hope, but humans are humans - even if they attend an Ivy.
Some individuals have heady thoughts and morals like you mentioned. Others are using it as a checkbox.
As I understand it Americans pay tens of thousands of dollars for university.
In my country if you can't hack it you just transfer to something else. Much less pressure. And let's face it if you can't even pass the exams maybe it is not your career? Don't live in a lie and go do something you'll enjoy.
> And let's face it if you can't even pass the exams maybe it is not your career
Most target career paths in the US (eg. Investment Banking, VC, Tech, Consulting, Entrepreneurship) now require a STEM or Engineering background, so a large subset of students do have an incentive to study a major they have no interest in.
As you are Dutch, think about it the same way certain numerus fixus programs at TU Delft, UvA, or UL open career paths unavailable to most other Dutch graduates (eg. Optiver, MBB, DeepMind, EU think tanks).
This is basically Princeton's equivalent of setting up a numerus fixus because of the deluge of students enrolling in target degree programs without the interest or background.
In all honesty cheating is common in all universities - the incentive structures for students are the same as a large portion of students do want to end up in a high prestige career.
The American higher ed system is similar to the French, British, and Italian system with regards to prestige and target programs.
> As I understand it Americans pay tens of thousands of dollars for university
Not at Ivies and Ivy-tier programs. Plenty of us got really competitive scholarships and I attended back when Obama was still in office.
> humans are humans - even if they attend an Ivy
I specifically called out two non-Ivy examples. Humans are humans. And one of those capacities is for behaving with honor. The enemy of honor, it turns out, isn't dishonor, but cynicism. (It isn't surprising that the dominant emotion on a Silicon Valley board towards an honor system is scorn.)
I agree about the cynicism thing, I like the idea of an honor code if/when it actually works, but the bad reaction here is because 1/3 of students admitted to cheating.
No argument there. Tbf given my professional and personal background, I automatically assume the worst in all people so even though I never abused honor codes (and honestly never had the need to anyhow because I liked the classes I took with one as they tend to be the kinds of classes where professors and teacher staff are the most engaged) I think it is almost impossible to enforce one in classes beyond 30 students, because anonymity does beget some amount of bad behavior.
Seriously, if you are a lazy or too slow son of a wealthy family, do you care about "honour" or what your daddy will give you if you pass?
It smells like a backdoor.
In a truly honorable community anyone who thinks that it's a backdoor will find out that it's not.
don't know about the phone era, but previously schools were widely separated by reputation and practice. "lazy or too slow son of a wealthy family" went to certain schools that had that element. The really competitive and state-of-the-art schools really did not do that "directly". There were approaches for example sports, and niche majors that were easier for sure. Another observation is that some advanced students were into specific and dedicated cheating in order to win. Others had a "party" orientation and just did not do as much schoolwork. A criticism based on "rich kid" also does not ring true as a general statement about University in the USA to me.
Right, but there’s really only two directions you can go.
1. Install a culture of honour/virtue/accountability. Rely on duty and moral justice to keep the majority in-line.
2. An arms race to prevent ever more sophisticated methods of cheating, and the reduction in human dignity this implies. (E.g. the proctor must follow you into the toilet).
We all want the systems to be fair and just; but we also all want to be treated with dignity. No easy answers.
As someone who has attended this kind of program, it's because some students will cheat and view proctoring as an annoyance.
Imo it's both on the students (plenty of students are optimizing just to get a class out of the way to do more interesting stuff) and the programs (some classes just aren't up-to-date or are rightfully viewed as busywork).
Personally, I found courses that were output heavy and regurgitation light tended to be the most successful from an honor code perspective - you can't cheat your way out of "learning by doing" when you are held accountable for the output (eg. A research grade paper or implementing a fully functional Linux kernel).
Sadly, even at Ivies most lower div classes are just rote memorization because class sizes would be massive for plenty of core classes (100-500 students for some classes).
I dont know what it means, but you missed an important category that was mentioned elsewhere ... brutal, even sadistic levels of work to filter students. I was in these kind of classes in my undergrad.
I would never NARC on someone shoplifting or dealing drugs but cheating on exams? Yeah no fuck you we're not India here.
That's your future cardiologist.
Stanford has this policy too. Students get livid when proctoring is proposed, even though cheating is rampant (afaict)
yeah it is interesting. when I was at Stanford I was a TA and we just had to leave the room during exams after passing them out and come back at the end to collect the exams. just as I was graduating they started doing the pilot for proctoring exams and I remember students were really upset about it, though my fellow TAs were mostly in agreement that it was a good idea.
side note is that it’s kind of funny because sometimes the seating would be auditorium style so you could easily see papers in front of you if you were higher up… probably difficult to avoid accidentally glancing at someone else’s paper while taking a break, lol.
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/04/faculty-senate-pro... April 23rd, 2026
The Faculty Senate voted to allow proctoring of in-person exams following a pilot overseen by the Academic Integrity Working Group.
The Faculty Senate unanimously voted to permit proctoring of in-person assessments following a presentation from the Academic Integrity Working Group (AIWG) on Thursday.
Formed in 2024 after updates to the Honor Code and Fundamental Standard, the AIWG was charged with studying the scope of academic dishonesty at Stanford and overseeing a multi-year proctoring pilot study, which launched the same year. Historically, proctoring was not permitted at Stanford; students were expected to report peers for academic misconduct.
“What we’re finding is that a lot of the expectations we might be putting on our students is creating an unsustainable moral burden on them,” in which students must choose to cheat to keep up or report their peers, said Jennifer Schwartz Poehlmann, AIWG co-chair and senior lecturer in chemistry.
During the pilot, instructors reported that it helped them better assess students’ learning goals, clarified academic integrity standards, and reduced student frustration, said AIWG Student co-Chair Xavier Millan, ’26, an undergraduate in computer science.
The proctoring policy was previously passed by the AIWG, the Board on Conduct Affairs, the Undergraduate Senate, and the Graduate Student Council.
Poehlmann and Millan highlighted some of the student feedback that showed support for proctoring, including one who said proctoring feels like “more of a fair level playing field.”
Some schools love to pride themselves on their students' integrity. They don't proctor because they think their students don't cheat and can be trusted. I don't know about Princeton but a college my family attended had stats showing no difference between test scores in proctored vs. unproctored exams. That was before LLMs would have made it so easy to cheat. Maybe that school has changed its policy as well.
As a former TA the cheaters were never acing the test. They were like a turd circling the drain desperate for anything to grab on to. Often they'd cheat off eachother, sitting next to eachother, turning in identically incorrect exams. That being said if they were smart enough to cheat off the smart kids instead, maybe they wouldn't be so dumb to cheat and get caught. Oftentimes they had their head fully turned staring at another students exam without even hiding it. Very blatant cheating a lot of cases.
I've sat in classes where people at my table genuinely took pictures of the exam while the professor's back was turned (being kind to us and giving us useful information on the board) and uploaded the entire exam to the Gemini app.
Cheating is all around disheartening and is now incredibly easy with all the free multi-modal models around. Real active proctoring is needed and devices need to be confiscated during exams. This is common practice in many other countries.
My son is taking an AP chem class - he's doing really well, super interested in the subject. It's a difficult class, to be sure. Many of his peers are just goofing off and don't understand things. My son regularly tells me about people in his lab group that are cheating off his papers (and, I think, even his test). He tries to cover up answers, but it's not always possible to do.
What is even more frustrating is that the teacher knows this and does nothing about it. Maybe one could argue that, in the end, these students fail to learn and will get their just rewards. But it seems to me that the lack of immediate corrective action (eg, an F on an assignment) is a failing of the system.
What is even more frustrating is that the teacher knows this and does nothing about it.
When teachers are evaluated based on how students perceive them, and are in turn evaluated by others based on the grades their students receive, there's a perverse incentive/conflict of interest for them to allow cheating.
Read r/teachers for 20 minutes and you'll understand why some teachers in the US don't do anything.
(And then mute r/teachers because it's depressing as all hell.)
If I were your son, next exam I would physically move my desk to the corner of the room out of protest. He should also report everyone he sees cheating.
I'm very interested in how this cheating is perceived by other students.
There is no peer pressure not to cheat?
Students aren't considered sketchy or jerky for cheating?
Being seen cheating has no adverse affect on their ability to date, to join group projects, to join student startups, etc.?
As someone who attended an elite school in the post-covid era, here was my experience:
There is relatively little stigma against cheating. Maybe in smaller seminars and classes with higher collaboration there is some, but much less so in large STEM lectures. Many of the incentives in classes where exams were online led to arms races and widespread cheating (without exaggeration, over 80% of the class). For instance, a certain math class I knew of had all grades based on remote and often asynchronous tests. Many people would cheat/collaborate and ace them, leading to the professor increasing difficulty (as scores were very high). This led to more cheating and so on. It got to the point where the problem sets had such difficult problems in this intro class that only a handful of people (who had taken advanced course work in high school) in the entire 100+ person seminar were distributing proofs for everyone else. Really not great dynamics all around and it's worth noting that my school does not have a reputation for being ones with an especially competitive and cutthroat culture.
At least in my experience (MIT ’06) many of the people most comfortable gaming academics ended up in finance.
I've always felt that it was these kind of folks that caused the 2008 financial crisis
Covid and Chatgpt are no the only changes in society in the recent years.
If you are an all around liar and cheater you can even be president!!
It's not just "the recent years". There's a reason the phrase "honest politician" is an oxymoron.
Have a phones-free classroom. Problem solved.
I can't imagine why you would be so stupid to allow phones to exams.
Is this normal in the US?
Usually the rule is you can't have a phone out of your pocket or backpack during a test. Students still have phones on them. If they disallowed that too, how would that work, an airport security style check going in?
If NYC schools can do it at scale (1,600 schools this year banned cell phones), Princeton could certainly do it.
Students either leave phones at home, or the school provides pouches/mini lockers for each student.
Yes, that kind of thing can and is done, if the stakes are high enough.
They do it for big standardized tests like the MCAT. If I went to school and saw this for every exam, I'd think wow I'm in a bad school, not that there's anything wrong with it per se but it's not commonly done.
That’s pretty sad. Even sadder is that those people will hardly even feel it to be cheating because they’re now using AI for absolutely everything and so suddenly contented with a situation where it can’t be used they still can’t help but use it. Not a good sign.
huh, i had no idea princeton specifically disallowed proctors, and instead relied on an honor system. seems... like a poorly thought out system, especially given:
"29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report."
crazier is the people protesting by saying: “students should behave honorably, and that faculty and students should trust each other given the 1893 Honor Code compact.”. obviously that isnt happening if 1/3rd of the student body has admitted to cheating (meaning that the real percent of cheating is even higher).
A couple of my friends teach university classes. Mostly undergrad. I get to hear some of their interesting stories when we game together.
My impression is that there was a sharp shift around COVID. Doing classes over Zoom with a talking head broke the connection they had with their professors and other students. College felt closer to a video game operated through your screen than a community.
When I was in college not all that long ago, cheating was a scandalous thing. I knew a friend of a friend who cheated on an exam with some tricks and it resulted in suspension for a semester. There were rumors of someone hiring a service to write their papers for them and it was a wild story.
Now students have ChatGPT to write their papers and they've been practicing how to use cell phones without the teacher noticing for 10 years before getting to college. Combine that with social media grumblings about how college is "just a piece of paper" and doomerism about how they're never going to get a job or buy a house and cheating starts to look the only rational option to some.
The pattern is not contained to college. Every time the topic of cheating comes up on Hacker News there are more comments defending cheating than I would expect from this crowd. The usual justification is that the system is broken in a hand-wavey way and therefore nobody can be blamed for cheating.
>My impression is that there was a sharp shift around COVID. Doing classes over Zoom with a talking head broke the connection they had with their professors and other students.
I think this is part of a larger phenomenon than simply Zoom classes. COVID severely damaged the already decaying social contract of the US and we have mostly been trying to ignore that ever since. The most prevalent viewpoint of American life is now that the only thing that matters is the individual and therefore anything an individual can do to better their station in life is inherently justified. We can see this on so many levels from politics to rampant academic cheating to quiet quitting to prediction markets full of insiders. When we don't owe each other anything and the consequences are minimal, rarely applied, or completely non-existent, the only reason to not give into cheating, scamming, and corruption is your own personal morals.
If AI is going to steal all white collar work - why use AI to get a degree to do white collar work, paying both the AI and the college for it? Wild times.
For the legacy clout of the big college name?
more valuable, i think, is the social networking opportunities. not many places you can be chummy and party with a bunch of millionaire/billionaire heirs.
> Now students have ChatGPT to write their papers and they've been practicing how to use cell phones without the teacher noticing for 10 years before getting to college.
Colleges will need to remodel the rooms where these tests are given to become large SCIF type rooms so that wireless communication is not possible. Let the students go back to writing on their arms, wearing eye patches, or shoving notes up their casts. Yeah, I've probably seen Spies Like Us a couple of times:
Note that this is how the FAA has been doing its written tests for years: you go to a proctor test facility and through a metal detector. The entire thing is videotaped.
This fits with my priors. I was in grad school during covid and had some professors I was close to (and whose class I was taking) reach out asking for feedback on their exam because students were blatantly cheating despite the allowances the professors were making (up to being open to the internet, just no direct communication). They couldn't punish them, and they were perplexed why anyone would bother cheating on even trivial exams.
Even recently when I last spoke to them, the profs described how students were refusing to think for themselves even when given open ended projects. They were just having ChatGPT come up with the project idea for them instead of taking advantage of the freedom to do something they enjoyed.
Hmm, anxiety of making the wrong choice and have it on record? I’ve read that later gens are extremely aware of “the internet never forgets” and are terrified of any choice being the embarrassing and defining moment of the rest of their life
I feel like that anxiety has been a thing with regard to education for a while. Worrying about bad grades following you through life has been a thing for much longer than the internet's existence.
I think the issue is largely that in the age of AI, learning a skill requires one to be deliberate and dedicated, but the entire reason grades and exams are so prominent is because most students need the threat of near term failure to learn.
Open ended projects were always my favorite ones because I was able to utilize some of my personal projects on them. Profs also enjoy seeing students' passion for their topic. That kind of student is probably still doing well.
Wait, why can't the students be punished?
This was during the start of the covid disruptions, so students were allowed to get away with almost anything in the name of covid-related stress.
As someone who went there (albeit many decades ago) I can tell you FWIW when I was there folks took it seriously. I literally knew of no one who ever cheated on an exam. And I'm pretty sure that anyone I knew who observed cheating would have taken it seriously enough to bring it to the process. It was pretty much a fixture of how students thought about things. So it worked (near as I could tell) back then.
But institutions take awhile to adjust to new realities, and it while looks like Princeton may have been a bit behind the curve on this one, I can understand why they were reluctant to abandon this practice. Living in an honest community cuts a lot of extra effort out - crap that you don't even have to think about. Princeton will be a less productive place to learn going forward.
I'd wager the main difference between "many decades ago" and mid 2000s onwards is the perceived stakes of college. My time in college (around that time) was perceived by most as "make or break": either you did well in college, or you were doomed to a sub-standard lifestyle (not to mention the debt of college tuition).
Obviously, whether this was true or not is a whole discussion, but the attitude did lead to a lot more cheating (due to desperation) than I'd imagine past generations had.
A midterm being worth 25-33% of a grade, plus some classes only being offered in fall or spring semesters meant a bad test could roughly cost you tens of thousands of dollars, since the next time you could retake the class would be in a year, and it often was a prerequisite for another class. It just leads to an environment that encourages desperate "survival" behavior.
Which is bad, someone who cheats on a test or someone who rats out their friend for cheating on a test?
It really is a cultural thing, and that sort of culture is primarily passed down from upperclassmen to underclassmen. I went to a different college with an honor code (Harvey Mudd) and when I graduated in 2019 it was still doing relatively well, but from what I've heard COVID really killed students caring about / adhering to the honor code.
I'm in Mudd's class of '27 (and I was on the honor board for 2 years), and I do think the honor code system has gotten somewhat less functional over the time I've been here. But I think a majority of students and faculty still want to make it work.
> Which is bad, someone who cheats on a test or someone who rats out their friend for cheating on a test?
Obviously the first. How is this even a question?
This is not obvious at all.
Loyalty is a fundamental moral principle. Loyalty to a friend carries a lot of moral weight. Humans are a social animal, and loyalty to a friend can easily outweigh loyalty to some abstract institution. Like, my friend will still have my back five years from now. The university I went to won't do shit for me.
Like, if you're talking about loyalty to a friend who wants you to cover up an unjustified murder they committed, then I think most people will say the value of telling the cops about the murder outweighs the loyalty to your friend.
But for cheating on some test where probably 30% of the other students are cheating anyways? I think the vast majority of people will say that loyalty to your friend is the more important moral principle here. We all make mistakes in life, and the whole idea of loyalty and love to a friend is that we support them even though they make mistakes. As long as the mistakes are common mistakes like cheating on a test or cheating on a boyfriend, as opposed to things like felony crimes.
You’re introducing additional details and scenarios that are part of a different conversation, one in which is certainly nuanced and well-worth discussing.
But what you are doing here is justifying behavior. That’s separate from a discussion about what’s right or wrong. You have to not only consider one’s friendship, but the negative effects across society that their actions cause. In other words, reporting the friend negatively affects (in general) only two individuals, while cheating affects many more people and cultural values and norms. I’m not a Utilitarian, but intent and effect matter.
I don't consider it loyalty to know a friend has cheated, and let them get away with it.
Teachers/Professors are already used to accommodating dumb planning/mistakes from students. An honest "I spent too much time partying and fell behind, can I get an extension" email will often get you very far.
Also baffled to hear cheating on a boyfriend included there, cheating of that sort would be friendship ending.
It's not a mistake if they do it routinely.
I could buy the argument if the friend had a moment of weakness, regretted it, won't do it again, and please don't report it. They've learned their lesson, that's enough.
But if they do it and they're fine with it and they're going to do it again and what's the big deal? Refusing to report that isn't loyalty anymore, it's not sticking with someone who made a mistake, it's protecting deliberate bad behavior.
We can make mistakes in our ongoing behaviors. Nobody's perfect.
The question is simply how you balance loyalty to the institution vs loyalty to a friend.
A lot of people will think that cheating in a context where a lot of other people cheat too, is just not a big deal. That it's certainly not worth losing a friendship over. Like, are you going to end a friendship because someone jaywalks? Because they habitually speed 5 mph over the legal limit? Because they sometimes take illegal drugs? Because they deducted things on their tax return that you know weren't actually business expenses?
The size or importance of a moral violation matters, when weighing up conflicting moral obligations.
I guess this really comes down to differences in morality.
I think cheating is pretty serious. It qualifies as self-harm, and it harms your classmates by devaluing their eventual degree.
Jaywalking and minor speeding are not even immoral at all, in my view. I don't mean they're insignificant, I mean they're outright not morally wrong to me, so that comparison suggests that we have a pretty strong difference in what we consider to be morally good here.
Yeah, those are exactly the differences.
It's very easy to argue speeding is immoral: it's immoral to disobey any law or regulation passed by a democratically elected government if these is no other conflicting moral principle. So you can speed to rush to a hospital, for example, but everyday speeding is immoral both because it breaks the morally legitimate democratic law and increases the chance of physical harm.
For many people, cheating on a test is little different from speeding. Calling it "self-harm" is a stretch, and there's zero direct harm to your classmates if it's not graded on a curve (which I haven't seen in a long time). And you could easily argue that the marginal difference it makes to the value of everyone's degree from that institution overall is basically as negligible as the marginal difference it makes to public safety as speeding by 5 mph does.
Also, different exams are different. Fewer people will be bothered by cheating on a freshman year calculus exam, whereas cheating on a final qualification to become any type of emergency responder is far, far more serious because somebody could directly die as a result of your lack of knowledge.