Posted on 02/02/2013 8:23:23 AM PST by daniel1212
As many as 60 students have been forced to withdraw from Harvard University after cheating on a final exam last year in what has become the largest academic scandal to hit the Ivy League school in recent memory.
Michael Smith, Harvard's Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, sent an email on Friday saying that more than half of the students who faced the school's Administrative Board have been suspended for a time.
Roughly 125 undergraduates were involved in the scandal, which came to light at the end of the spring semester after a professor noticed similarities on a take-home exam
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Yep. An Ivy League degree in lots of disciplines is now a red flag for a soulless climber.
Generally, you cheat for two reasons.
First, because you just refuse to study or read any of the class material, so after ten weeks...you’ve learned nothing.
Second, your professor is a loser, and you can’t learn from the idiot...but he makes these 100-question tests where the answers could be viewed in different fashions.
I had some idiot that a community college had hired for a semester. This individual was a bone-digger for a dinosaur site and the grant money just plain disappeared, and her friends got her this teaching job on geology. I realized twenty minutes into the class that she just basically read from the book and knew almost nothing on geology. She’d spend half of each lecture talking up the act of digging dinosaur bones....which had nothing to do with the class. At the end....I could not imagine how the test would work except for the two-page hand-out she gave the week prior...which had almost every answer listed, and I passed only because I read the hand-out.
And that was back when a Harvard degree meant that you had actually *accomplished* something.
I remember hearing 25 years ago that the hardest thing about Harvard was getting in.
Too late for Ted Kennedy and Al Gore to leave Harvard retroactively. I think if the truth were known, Harvard is just a name or brand and there are dozens of US small universities that are far superior to Harvard academically. I know that one Harvard student I worked with was only superior in only one category and that was arrogance.
So Douthat actually wrote something I agree with? He’s got them pretty well pegged IMO.
Beggin’ y’pahd’n, suhhh, but it’s Hahvid an’ oystuz ... ESPECIALLY in Southie !
I worked for 20 years at one of Harvard Medical School's largest teaching hospitals.The physicians there...both the junior and the established ones...were considered the cream of the crop.Graduates of Harvard...Yale...Columbia...Stanford...Johns Hopkins,you name it.Among the junior doctors we always tell the Harvard grads from all the others because *they* could talk,non-stop,for 4 hours about the uvula but were clueless if you handed them one of those pop up umbrellas.
They should just have said they were only doing what they thought useful in case they wanted to run for Senate from Massachusetts some day. Of course, they’d also have to change their names to “Edward Kennedy”, but that’s easy to do.
I and several others complained to the university. He was fired the next day, the class cancelled, and our tuition for the class was refunded. I didn't bother to take the course again. He was right about the course.
judging their lifestyle choices??
so intolerant! probably racist, sexist and anti-gay too!
where are the lawyers??
//sarc
You think they cheat now, wait until they enter the workforce with bloated egos and paychecks.
As many as 60 students have been forced to withdraw from Harvard University after cheating on a final exam last year in what has become the largest academic scandal to hit the Ivy League school in recent memory.
Good news for the Dems....that's a veto-proof majority.
Statistics:
With regard to almost all undergraduate courses, you will not “use” the subject matter of the course later in life. The purpose of these courses is not to transfer knowledge to you, as in so many facts or even so many tools, because all of that in available for free or nearly so, from the internet or in old-fashioned books. With a few exceptions (e.g., accounting, nursing, engineering, elementary school teacher), the purpose of an undergraduate education is for you to develop your ability to think for yourself. Hence, “liberal education,” as in being a free person, able to decide for yourself.
As for what an undergraduate course in statistics should involve, it should enable you to deal with the mass of data that comes like a flood from the real world. To discern tendencies from oddities, to deal with phenomena having multiple causes, and with relationships in which both X and Y are causes and effects of each other.
The reason you have to solve some problems in a statistics course is not so you can save money not having to buy a computer. It’s to demonstrate you have grasped the material being covered. It could be that you really understand the meanings of central tendency and dispersion; but, if you are unable to demonstrate that understanding, I don’t know what an educational institution can attest to your understanding. Ideally, in a program of study, you (a) learn to master the standard tools of analysis of particular disciplines, (b) learn to apply those tools of analysis to relatively simple real-world situations, and (c) learn to integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines in relatively complex real-world situations.
I am sorry that you had an asshole for an instructor. Many colleges and universities are headed by people from the humanities who themselves are oblivious to complex phenomena such as we who are in social sciences, medicine, business and other such disciplines deal with. These administrators think statistics can be reduced to so many formulae, and can be taught by foreign graduate students who have difficulty speaking English, when all “gen ed” courses should be taught by faculty who have deep knowledge of their discipline.
Liberals are two times more likely to say it is okay to cheat the government out of welfare money you don’t deserve. Peter Schweizer, “Makers and Takers,” Doubleday, June 3, 2008. http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=16895
A 2009 survey of almost 30,000 high school students nationwide found that 30% admitted to stealing from a store within the past year (19 percent who attend religious schools). 23% said they stole from a parent or relative. More than 83% stated they lied to a parent about something significant. 42 confessed that they sometimes lied to save money (up from 395 in 2006). 64 percent had cheated on a test in the past year (up from 60 percent two years earlier) and 38 percent had cheated more than once. More than 36% had used the Internet to plagiarize. 26% also confessed to lying on at least one survey question. However, 93% agreed, “I am satisfied with my own ethics and character,” and 77% affirmed , “When it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know.” Josephson Institute http://charactercounts.org/programs/reportcard/
A survey of 6,000 academic psychologists resulted in 10% reporting they had falsified research data; 67 per cent selectively reported studies that “worked”; 35% said they had doubts about the integrity of their own research. Leslie John, George Loewentstein, and Drazen Prelec in Psychological Science, December 2011
Read more: http://peacebyjesus.tripod.com/revealingstatistics.html#15#ixzz2JlZzqxnP
A lot of this is due to the fact that post-secondary education has moved away from developing a student’s love of learning and into awarding diplomas based on tests passed.
&&&
No, a lot of it is due to the fact that these jerks never learned from their parents that it is wrong to lie and to cheat. For many in their generation, honesty is for suckers.
It is most troubling to see how much cheating is taken so casually these days. In my college years, it never even occurred to me to cheat, and I am pretty sure most of my classmates were of the same mind.
Recently, I had a 40ish father that I know brag, in the presence of his children, about how he used his calculator to cheat when he was in high school.
You think they cheat now, wait until they enter the workforce with bloated egos and paychecks.
***
During my high school teaching years, I frequently asked my students, in a rhetorical manner, if they would like having their teeth worked on by a dentist who cheated his way through school.
5.56mm
I did too and since I paid my own way through my BA and my MBA cheating would have only been cheating myself. Of course I don’t have an Ivy degree, just a lowly state degree.
I sense that a lot of students have difficulty reading well enough to garner the information necessary to be successful in college. They can read, but not well. It must be an awful feeling to be at such a disadvantage that they feel compelled to cheat. Not every cheater is a lazy slacker. Some, I suspect, are feeling truly desperate.
My wife's a professor and assigns lots of papers, take-home essays, etc. She'll sit on the couch grading papers and notice a phrase or sentence that seems too well written or uncharacteristic of some particular student. She sticks the sentence into Google and up pops the document they plagiarized.
It's like shooting fish in a barrel.
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