alt Hacker NewsAcademic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly.
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.
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I know a guy who TA'ed at Stanford in the 1970's. He said his professor told him to give students “gentleman’s B’s” even when their work was not fully up to par, because many of them would eventually become part of the country’s future elite and power structure.
> Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly.
Yes, because the working model is that the students are there because they want to learn. And they are paying for the professors to teach them. If they cheat in classes, they are really just cheating themselves, and this should be no concern to the staff.
I've talked to instructors who've just given up. They know the students use AI. More and more of them do every year. The instructors can spot it easily, but if they brought them all into the academic dishonesty process, the department would grind to a halt. So they just let it go. They are all paying tuition, and they'll all get the credential they paid for.
Yeah because isnt it just about money and relationships? They have relationships to those student's families and need the networks. They realize too that its more about the credentials and networks and money comes in if that support those over academic honesty.
Money talks and bullshit walks. I’m beginning to understand why a lot of US politician seem to come from ivy leagues yet are dumb as hell.
I went to a school that actually tried to enforce it, and unfortunately it ended up being enforced wildly disproportionately along racial lines. My school had a very simple rule: if you were caught cheating, you were expelled. No strikes, no exceptions.
That is a massive burden to put on an educator.
Getting expelled from your university is a very serious, mandated fork in the road for anyone it happens to. So what do they do? If they relate to/empathize with the person, they try to handle it without reporting it. If they don’t, they reported and “let the system handle it.”
As any reasonable person would expect, white people were not reported and marginalized groups were. Privileged groups also got exceptions (the football team had a massive cheating scandal that should have expelled about 15 players, and the professor reported it! But mumble mumble uhh they learned their lesson).
After over a century they finally ended the system recently and honestly? Good. I appreciated what they were attempting to do, but it didn’t work.
Not even prestigious ones. The school needs to sound like it has strong penalties against cheating, so there are really strict-sounding policies ("zero in the course"). But also, so many students cheat that actually enforcing these policies uniformly would hurt your graduation stats, make unhappy customers (students + parents), and hurt your revenue if you actually expel them. So the equilibrium is that the burden of reporting cheating is foisted upon professors, and it is understood -- though never explicitly communicated -- that academic integrity proceedings will be a huge administrative pain for you, the professor, and it is in your interest not to initiate them.
The outcome is predictable: unless there is a scandal of massive proportions, the issues just..."go away" on their own. With some discretion for the professor to either just look the other way, or ding the student enough to feel vindicated, but not so much as to actually hurt the university's interests.