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.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

hint: look at canada.

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.

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.

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).

That's your future cardiologist.

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.

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.?

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.

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.

If 44.6% of students saw an honor code violation and didn't report it, and 0.4% of students saw an honor code violation and did report it, that means that 99.2% of Princeton students that pledge to report honor code violations break that pledge. And that's only counting the voluntary reporters, meaning that the actual rate is presumably even worse!

But also, how would reporting a suspected honor code violation even work? There's intentionally no staff witnessing the exam, and you aren't likely to know the names and faces of your whole class, so what would the professor even do with that information? "Professor, I saw someone take his phone out, I think maybe he was cheating, I don't know his name." Okay, thanks Captain Non-Actionable. We'll file that in the circular academic integrity investigation bin.

Looks like they started doing this senior survey in 2022, so unfortunately there's no pre-COVID info.

2022 20.9% cheating, 31.5% non-reporting

2023 25.4% cheating, 33.6% non-reporting

2024 28.8% cheating, 42.0% non-reporting

2025 29.9% cheating, 44.6% non-reporting

So from this it seems like cheating has been increasing significantly over just the last few years

Exames were previously proctored, and it led to a "us vs them" mentality that meant students banded together to

The Honor Code system, and removing proctors was a way to route around that—it made all of the students responsible for catching cheaters and turned the "Students vs Faculty" mentality into a "Honor vs Cheaters" mentality among the students.

Unfortunately, it seems like the "Students vs Faculty" mentality has seen too much of a resurgence due to outside factors, and the Honor Code is no longer a match for the current climate. That's what the article is about

What is it at other universities? I went to a big public school, and remember cheating being halfway rampant. The penalty, moreover, was never expulsion.

It’s good for the brand in general. It’s pretty easy to find a 3.8 GPA kid from Harvard. There’s no C students to dirty up the alumni network.

You’re mostly buying into a tribe. Other tribes do well too.

It is possible that when the metric becomes the target(AKA Goodhart's law) cheating can be beneficial but this is failure of the institution because it means you are no longer there to learn.

And, the way you guide youth to act in a certain way is by treating them that way. If you want them to be trustworthy, you trust them. This is not a totally fringe idea.

It was eye opening to find cheat sheets and other cheating materials obviously left behind by students. The majority of the stuff we'd find we either inaccurate and completely wrong. Like a half awake student copied something they thought was the right equation or solution, when in fact, it was for something completely different that wasn't on the test.

So I agree with your notion, but its one thing to try and cheat. Its a completely different one to do so successfully.

Students are at school for a lot of poorly-thought-out reasons: inertia, not knowing what else to do, because their parents made them go, etc. If they're not there to learn, you can't make them learn. No, not even by proctoring exams. The only purpose that achieves is to gatekeep.

And, gatekeeping for doctors and pilots is a good thing. We don't want to let just anyone become a doctor or pilot. But frankly, I don't give any shits about whether an AI programmer has made it through a gatekept degree. That stuff can be gatekept at other points--if they show up to work pretending and don't know anything, that will become obvious, and degrees maybe aren't the only or even best way to obtain that knowledge anyway.

All that's to say: if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options (i.e. a career) then proctored exams make sense. But if higher education is just for learning, it's stupid to put all this gatekeeping around it--that simply closes doors to interested learners, while allowing people who can "college" well to thrive without really learning. Let the cheaters cheat--they're only hurting their own learning--and I think it's often because you're forcing them to take some gen-ed thing that isn't useful knowledge to them (I'm looking at you, calculus--why was I forced to take 4 semesters of calc, when I always knew that the prob and stat classes I took as electives were more useful?).

Like voter ID. It's not some partisan issue. None of the political parties are fighting Elections Canada over it and its been around my whole life. Its just not a thing(tm). You go to vote, show your ID and and voilà, done. And yet somehow, this is a "big deal" down south?

That's interesting. How do they do that?

Whereas the rest of us were always assumed to be cheaters until absolutely cleared otherwise.

Just look at how people are treated by the dalits who run Proctorio. We were teated as less than human.

It's Princeton. They're given due process, not administrative fiat. Also, on what planet does having "parents who pay for parts of the school" swing a student (versus administrator) run process?

As a result, we still have 1/3 of the future leaders of American business/politics cheating and not facing any consequences. Princeton appears to be an unprincipled institution and is shown to lack any useful standard to evaluate the quality of its graduates. When you see a Princeton graduate with high marks you should always consider that they may have cheated to finish their degree.

As a non-cheater, I didn't want draconian measures to catch cheating, just wanted there to be real consequences when someone was caught. I didn't need 4.00, but what if I did?

I agree that humans are generally honorable for things with low stakes. Consider our cultural view of politicians for a non-SV example of where we fully expect high stakes to lead to selfish and dishonorable actions.

I personally believe this (that people are generally honest and good). BUT, the numbers don't lie: 30% of Princeton students admit to having cheated on an exam. This is a "your house is on fire" moment. An honor code has has to be enforced, and that is apparently not happening at Princeton. Frankly, as someone working at a school that also has an honor code (most do, in my experience), that is where the problem lies: if you turn a blind eye to violators, it sends the message to everyone that the honor code is just words, it doesn't mean anything.

Edit: not that I'm pro-shoplifting, it's that the article talks about them breaking the "social contract" (though the article is more of a reality show-esque piece as it's a opinions writer beefing with Twitch streamers and doesn't talk to any people actually shoplifting).

Hasan Piker (one of the people in that link) is a streamer who got popular for extremist takes and controversy. He's just doing what he does to stay famous in that interview. The other person is a writer for The New Yorker who apparently enjoys controversy too.

This interview isn't representative of anything other than two people trying to be edgy because they want their interview to go viral.

Are unsupervised examinations common in the US? Or is this, in fact, simply one institution coming in to line with common US national and international practice?

  “But what about the argument that if everyone just starts stealing wantonly,” Spiegelman replies, “Whole Foods will eventually raise the prices?”

  “Yeah, chaos,” Piker says. “Full chaos. Let’s go.”

  “I kind of am inclined toward this,” Tolentino adds. “Everyone, try it. See what happens.”

Source: gas station snack acquisition after 10pm in some USA urban areas, plus stories from abroad

Turning into what from where is the interesting part.

These days college kids are just as jaded. Of course they cheat the instant they think they can get away with it.

The college is there to serve the college, not them and these days the kids know it. Even if everyone cheating degrades the value of the degree there's no guarantee the college won't do that itself if everyone is honest so might as well get away with what you can while you can. Nobody likes this, it's just a rational adaptation to the perceived state of affairs.

It's the K-shaped economy. Those not participating in the upsides are electing to either not participate in the system at all or to destroy it. Most people think Luigi Mangione is a hero.

We had a good post-WWII run. We had factories, then globalization. Massive growth for all economic backgrounds for several generations. But the world caught up. Now the average worker has to compete against their increasingly competent and economically enabled peers around the globe. Costs for everything are rising.

We used to have a super sized Big Mac economy propped up by the fact that America was (relatively) peerless. The worker saw so much upside. Now they don't even get free refills, so to speak.

I'm hoping the AI boom helps bring down the cost of goods without putting people out of work. If it goes the other way, I think we might be heading for 1790's France.

Given that we're at a point in American history where inequality is quite extreme, I don't think it's fair to compare shoplifting to the corruption of the ruling class that is largely responsible for the current levels of inequality in the first place.

To be quite frank, under current conditions, it is a moral failure to see fault with impoverished people for stealing what they need to survive, not the other way around.

As Princeton's demo skewed hard into a more international student body, the underlying cultural assumptions have shifted.

The Christian extension of the Ninth Commandment from not bearing false witness to a blanket ban on lying is unique. Islam has explicit exceptions through Taqiyya, Hinduism gets nuanced with dharma and adharma, Buddhism sees it as one of the ten unwholesome actions, ...

WASPs built and defined Princeton, but that is long over.

Interesting that this is posed as the American left disregarding the social contract. I think you could make a pretty good case that the American right disregarded the social contract first in electing an extremely destructive pedophile who starts wars for reasons that can't even be articulated, pardons war criminals, engages in blatant nepotism enriching his family to the tune of billions at taxpayer's expense, large-scale fraud including being convicted of felony, adjudicated rapist, and a list of social contract violations going on for about 300 more pages that I'd be here all day typing out. And once the social contract is gone, it would be pretty weird to expect the other side to continue abiding by the terms. I don't personally make a habit of binding myself to one-sided contracts that impose no obligations on the other party.