Harvard cheating scandal - guess the course name..

I used to just hate take home exams. Some cheat and do well; others don't and suffer if the thing is graded on a curve.

you're a harvard rat?

hmmmmmmm.

How do you cheat on a Take-Home Exam?

Wait...never mind, I just figured it out.

Joe(No wonder I didn't go to Harvard.)Nation

I'm not up to speed. Could you fill me in Joe?

Ohh, and the original story link in the OP is dead.
Here's a NYTimes link (to hopefully the same cheating scandal):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/education/students-of-harvard-cheating-scandal-say-group-work-was-accepted.html

google.
thanx to cell phones, it's much easier to cheat in class.
my old school had a similar scandal recently...

Damn how could it be dead - I just opened it this afternoon!

Seems the students worked together on it - and didn't understand they weren't supposed to.

but its a class on Congress- isn't that part of the class learning how to cheat?

Sounds to me like they should all get As - unless it is they are supposed to cheat, but it isn't supposed to be that obvious - they need to deny it and hide it and get others to lie and cheat about it as well.

You get the exam and you, just you, are supposed to look up the answers and fill out the exam.
>> Excruciatingly simple, except for those who do not understand the words 'just you' or in this case :"Students shall not discuss the exam with others."

meh.

What was done was lots of group work, work with upperclassmen, note sharing and other actions that would fall within anyone's definition of 'discuss'.

~~
Old Story.
(Do you have one, Joe? Sure..... .)

1965 Fall - Emerson College- Psychology 101 -
Two hundred students jammed in a lecture hall designed for one hundred and twenty five.
Some people were standing, some people were sitting on the floor.

The Professor, whose name escapes me at the moment, opens the class by handing out what looked like an exam.
Yikes!
"It is", he announces, "the final exam, in fact, the only exam that you will take in this class."
Now????!!
"No", he said frowning, "you will take this exam on Jan 13th, 1966 at 10AM. What you see before you are three hundred multiple choice questions. If you attend my lectures twice a week you will hear, and be able to write down and study, all three hundred of the answers."
Whew, that sounds good.
"Or you can skip all the lectures and look up the answers in your text. I promise you that every answer to every question is in your textbook. All you have to do is look up the answers, write them down and study them."
Yea. Two free hours a week!!
"No one will be allowed to bring anything into this lecture hall on the morning of the exam except two Number Two pencils. No notes, no notebooks, no nothing. Ladies, no purses."
Murmurs...... . This was 1965, we weren't used to security then.
Anyone who wants to leave now, may."
About a hundred people got their stuff and left.

I stayed for the first lecture and looked through the book~ Psychology- An Introduction, or something like that.
~~
Flash forward three months, the week after New Year's 1966~~I had had mono for two weeks, missed the last three weeks of all my classes and was sitting on the floor of friend's apartment with my girlfriend, Mikki, (so much fun) going over her notes and some notes she had gotten for me from some of my friends so I could take my Finals.
Theatre classes, no problem.
American Literature, no problem,
Audiology, no problem,

Psychology......"How many of theses have you looked up?' she said.
"None."
I will never forget her blank stare.
~~
So, we looked them all up.
All three hundred of them, she borrowed a book, I had a book, we looked them all up.
And wrote them down.
And studied them.
First, I read them over and over.
Then she read the questions to me and I answered.
Over and over.
~~
and over.
~~
On the morning of January 13th, 1966 at 10AM with two number two pencils, I went into the lecture hall, received a bright shiny new copy of the exam, sat down at a desk, waited for the signal to begin and then.......when they said go!, started filling out the answer sheet.

I was done in just over twenty-five minutes.

I got a "B",
(I think some of our answers were wrong).

I didn't learn very much, for years afterwards all I could say about Maslow's hierarchy of needs was


Joe(~~~ D: All of the above.~~~~ )Nation

Why in the world have a take home exam anyway??

To teach you to research, girlie..


Memories of my first psych teacher: http://able2know.org/topic/125549-1
I only took one more psych class, and that one bored me out of my tree, plus seeming to me, what a judge, as messy science. I was a tad volatile in those years, heh.

I was in college once (yes I was) - some sort of literature course. Now although attending a predominately business school, I did love literature. A few literature, history and other stuff like classes.

As you can imagine at a business oriented college, there were not many students that were interested in a literature course. Well at the first assignment, it was paper you needed to write about a particular aspect of (I think it was Pride and Prejudice). I enjoyed the novel and wrote my paper up.

The next class after the papers were due the teacher came in and went off on our class - talking about how almost the entire class plagiarized. She said she would give us a second chance. We had to write a new paper then and there in class. If we did not plagiarized we were free to leave, but if we leave and we had we would fail and be kicked out of school.

I was torn - should I stay or not. Then said to myself no - I wrote the paper completely on my own and read the entire book. I got up and left and I'd say about 90% of the class stayed behind.

yeah - depending on the class - it is almost like having a research paper for a final exam rather than testing you and spitting by what you memorized. Perhaps some reasoning and thought provoking writing and opinions supported by facts.

The Take Homes at Harvard can be very, very hard.

I don't know about that, but I do know that you often learn more from a take-home than you ever learned in a class. I took a Class in Islam once at Harvard and I learned so much more than I did in the lecture.

It's still very hard for me to understand how one can cheat on a "take home" exam. If you're doing it at home, obviously you're going to look up answers. As for not discussing the subject with others, e.g. upperclassmen, that's just silly. We often learn more from such discussions than we do from just looking things up in a book or on the 'net. Isn't the aquisition of knowledge at least a part of the educational process?

I did think though that one thing mentioned as far as cheating was plagism. Not 100% sure though. But to me that is just dumb -- all you need to do is to make note of any research.

I agree with that, Lin. Plagiarism is strictly for people unable to write a complete sentence of their own. Seems unlikely that anyone with that handicap could have gotten admitted to those ivied halls of Harvard.

Mame and I know each other, and I was kidding, as we do, kidding with intent.

Nothin' so good as Mame as a friend. Tough woman. ; )

Ask Thomas..

We never all agree. Or not so it's noticeable.


But sure, I'm all for sparking research and thinking after researching, way to go.

I've had take home exams that I wished for an in class final. The last take home exam was in the Calculus of Variations. Ten problems, we were given a week. I spent 40 hours on that final for a 90.

Rap