Watching this story unfold at Harvard feels like watching a slow motion train wreck. I worry that the story reveals an educational model that tolerates and encourages this behavior. The students are to blame, for sure, but there is more than enough blame to go around. I wonder how the administration will protect themselves in the end.
Many will focus on the quotes from over privileged students. It isn’t cheating because everyone else does it. You can’t charge me with cheating because I’ll lose my job.
But look a little deeper, and you may see a system that tolerated such behavior for a long time.
Why has the Administration and the Department of Government allowed a course like “Introduction to Government” to exist for so long? The course has long been know as a “gut.” There are 279 students in lecture and 10 discussion sections that meet once a week (an average of 28 students per discussion section–at my own school we cap classes at 24). The exams consist of four take-home, open book, open note, open Internet exams.
Why did the instructor (if reports are to be believed) write an exam full of “gotcha” items that were not in any of the lectures or readings? Did the instructor actually supervise the teaching fellows, who (again if reports are to be believed) criticized the exam (didn’t the TAs and instructor discuss and collaborate on creating the exam?) and gave out answers? Same question for the teaching fellows–if the exam was that problematic, did any one of them convey this back to the instructor? Or did they just go along with the system that just pushes students through the course?
The honor system principle (thanks for the catch @ACESGroup) at Reed College is alive and well. It’s endured some strains because of controversies over drug and alcohol use and sexual harassment cases, but on the academic side, it remains strong. What struck me about the Harvard case is not just how different the culture is from Reed, but how different the students are. I don’t think Reed students would have intellectually allowed the kinds of arguments made at Harvard to prevail.
I suppose that’s how honor systems are maintained, not just by rules and procedures, but by a culture of learning (as many studies have shown) and a solid set of ethical principles.