alt Hacker News> 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.
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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.
> Swiss metro
To quote: "In 2024, more than 1 million cases of fare evasion were recorded in Switzerland, reported RTS. The number has more than doubled since 2019."
High trust, eh? Here is a better explanation: Someone smart did the math and discovered that for many Swiss mass transit systems (there are many), they could get better overall revenue by (1) removing the expense of buying and maintaining fare gates, and (2) adding fare dodging penalties and enforcement staff. FYI: Berlin is similar.
Does this actually matter in a culture that doesn't reward or value individual honor in any way?
All of that is sophistry in defense of fucking over those who choose not to cheat.
> 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
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.
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.
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).