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.

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.

The history of the Honor Code system might be instructive: https://universityarchives.princeton.edu/2015/01/i-pledge-my...

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

Even more astounding is the reporting number.

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.

The burning question for me is how does this compare to previous years?

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

> 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

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.

When I was at Rice a quarter century ago, I can honestly say everyone I knew took the honor system seriously.

Ivy League has always been like this. Everyone gets goods grades. It’s a legacy of the good old boy network.

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.

My guess is that the vast majority of those self-reported cases where relating to a take-home assignment (e.g., copying off a classmate's solution). Even without proctoring, you need to be a lot more brazen to cheat on an in-person exam.

Not just Princeton, my uni had a similar honor code and changed it a couple years ago to have proctors after a bunch of cheating events. I don't really get it either. Cheating has been going up exponentially since 2020 but it existed before then. I don't think it's COVID related strictly. Things moved online so cheating became easier and then LLMs became popular and from what I hear that's the most common way of cheating now. I have tested LLMs on undergrad level algorithms problems and was surprised it easily solved them so I think their use goes well beyond just coding assignments.

I've heard that it's the same at <other elite private university I don't want to name>, and people cheat, to the point where non-cheaters are suspicious that it's just a method of grade inflation

The honor systems is the correct system for an institution where learning is the goal as the tests are there to help you internalize the material and know how well you've absorbed it. Instead we've turned universities into vocational schools where the goal is the degree and testing is seen as a hurdle to overcome to attain it.

It's nothing crazy about it. Why do you study? To learn. The exams are there to benchmark your progress. If you cheat, everything falls apart for you.

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.

It's interesting that people can anonymously admit to cheating. It's a way of saying "don't hate the player, hate the game."

Note, "cheating on assignment or exam during your time at the institution" is a ridiculously broad net to cast. It includes everything from "merely asking one friend on one random night if they got the same numerical answer on the first freshman-year homework (despite both of you working independently and figuring out the entire derivations onto your own)" to "blatantly copying every answer on your final exams every single semester." The fact that they don't distinguish radically different things makes their 30% figure suspect.

AIUI, these schools see their mission as training the next generation of leaders and elites. They aim for people with strong abilities, and moral character.

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.

Here in Canada, a housemate of mine used ChatGPT to cheat in all his courses. He got caught on only a single one because he scored 100%. Then he did it again and got caught again in the same course. For some reason, the professor never reported him to the dean or whoever is supposed to deal with this kind of stuff. He graduated but his degree is basically a degree in cheating.

The interesting thing is that cheating is much easier when done online. When I was a TA and we were in the process of moving quite a bit of the classes to online, we still mandated in person testing.

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.

I think it really depends on how you view our high education system. As a middle-aged man returning to school to switch careers, my entire reason for going to school is to learn, and I'd never cheat because that would undermine my own goals. To me the purpose of school isn't the degree--I made an entire career already without one--it's to learn.

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?).

are feelings more strongly felt more valid? the same things are happening at caltech - that is, just as much cheating - and they have an honor code. but they feel much stronger about their honor code, so it is more valid.

To people who have not grown up in extremely honor-bound societies and communities the idea sounds strange, yes. To those of us who did, however, events like this remind us of how fragile those systems are and that entry should be severely restricted.

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