As someone who has attended this kind of program, it's because some students will cheat and view proctoring as an annoyance.

Imo it's both on the students (plenty of students are optimizing just to get a class out of the way to do more interesting stuff) and the programs (some classes just aren't up-to-date or are viewed as busywork).

Personally, I found courses that were output heavy and regurgitation light tended to be the most successful from an honor code perspective - you can't cheat your way out of "learning by doing" when you are held accountable for the output (eg. A research grade paper or implementing a fully functional Linux kernel).

Sadly, even at Ivies most lower div classes are just rote memorization because class sizes would be massive for summary classes (100-500 students for some classes).

> 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.

Right, but there’s really only two directions you can go.

1. Install a culture of honour/virtue/accountability. Rely on duty and moral justice to keep the majority in-line.

2. An arms race to prevent ever more sophisticated methods of cheating, and the reduction in human dignity this implies. (E.g. the proctor must follow you into the toilet).

We all want the systems to be fair and just; but we also all want to be treated with dignity. No easy answers.

Stanford has this policy too. Students get livid when proctoring is proposed, even though cheating is rampant (afaict)

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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 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

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.

> so the rich kids that have parents who pay for parts of the school can still get a pass?

It's Princeton. They're given due process, not administrative fiat. Also, on what planet does having "parents who pay for parts of the school" swing a student (versus administrator) run process?

Princeton has so much money that they could make it free for all undergrads and literally never run out of money.

The fish rots from the head. It's a sucker's game to aspire to selflessly serve the greater good when the most powerful people in the land are brazenly corrupt pedophiles. In other words: monkey see, monkey do.

It's the K-shaped economy. Those not participating in the upsides are electing to either not participate in the system at all or to destroy it. Most people think Luigi Mangione is a hero.

We had a good post-WWII run. We had factories, then globalization, massive growth. But the world caught up. Now the average worker has to compete against their increasingly competent and economically enabled peers around the globe. Costs for everything are rising.

We used to have a super sized Big Mac economy propped up by the fact that America was (relatively) peerless. The worker saw so much upside. Now they don't even get free refills, so to speak.

I'm hoping the AI boom helps bring down the cost of goods without putting people out of work. If it goes the other way, I think we might be heading for 1790's France.

This doesn't seem particularly related?

> in some left-wing corners of the commentariat, is out; flagrant disregard of the social contract is in.

Interesting that this is posed as the American left disregarding the social contract. I think you could make a pretty good case that the American right disregarded the social contract first in electing an extremely destructive pedophile who starts wars for reasons that can't even be articulated, pardons war criminals, engages in blatant nepotism enriching his family to the tune of billions at taxpayer's expense, large-scale fraud including being convicted of felony, adjudicated rapist, and a list of social contract violations going on for about 300 more pages that I'd be here all day typing out. And once the social contract is gone, it would be pretty weird to expect the other side to continue abiding by the terms. I don't personally make a habit of binding myself to one-sided contracts that impose no obligations on the other party.

Moral acceptance of petty theft always increases with inequality. When the poor take from the rich, people don't care as much. The poorer the thief and the richer the victim, the less people care. Go far enough, and people view the thief as a Robin Hood-style hero.

Given that we're at a point in American history where inequality is quite extreme, I don't think it's fair to compare shoplifting to the corruption of the ruling class that is largely responsible for the current levels of inequality in the first place.

To be quite frank, under current conditions, it is a moral failure to see fault with impoverished people for stealing what they need to survive, not the other way around.

Moral code is downstream from culture and not every culture sees cheating as a moral failing.

As Princeton's demo skewed hard into a more international student body, the underlying cultural assumptions have shifted.

The Christian extension of the Ninth Commandment from not bearing false witness to a blanket ban on lying is unique. Islam has explicit exceptions through Taqiyya, Hinduism gets nuanced with dharma and adharma, Buddhism sees it as one of the ten unwholesome actions, ...

WASPs built and defined Princeton, but that is long over.

> it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.

Are unsupervised examinations common in the US? Or is this, in fact, simply one institution coming in to line with common US national and international practice?

  “But what about the argument that if everyone just starts stealing wantonly,” Spiegelman replies, “Whole Foods will eventually raise the prices?”

  “Yeah, chaos,” Piker says. “Full chaos. Let’s go.”

  “I kind of am inclined toward this,” Tolentino adds. “Everyone, try it. See what happens.”

Personal shoppers for everyone! Point at what you want or add it on an app. Eventually would take force/fraud/violence to shoplift (hey I said EVENTUALLY!) :)

Source: gas station snack acquisition after 10pm in some USA urban areas, plus stories from abroad

> [...] it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.

Turning into what from where is the interesting part.

People can still behave honorably despite all this. It's easy (and wrong) to justify someone's dishonorable behavior by pointing to the leaders.

I've known a lot of people who justify crimes like shoplifting by the fact that these corporations have stolen from them (and not in some abstract way, often literal wage theft) and felt like the social contract was already broken. And it's not like the leaders at the large corporations I've worked at generally seem to care about their employees or customers (I would describe most places I worked at as, at best, amoral. I've heard "well, if we didn't do it some other less ethical company would" too many times).

Nah, it's just that I went to college and saw cheating. When an assignment was take-home, people were forming cheating rings, but because they wanted an upper hand but because they were afraid others were doing the same. I saw even some top-notch students cheat a little bit, cause they wanted 4.00 not 3.95.

As a non-cheater, I didn't want draconian measures to catch cheating, just wanted there to be real consequences when someone was caught. I didn't need 4.00, but what if I did?

Chegg was a $15B company before AI came out. I promise that wasn't because it was the best platform to learn the material.

I agree that humans are generally honorable for things with low stakes. Consider our cultural view of politicians for a non-SV example of where we fully expect high stakes to lead to selfish and dishonorable actions.

That’s pretty sad. Even sadder is that those people will hardly even feel it to be cheating because they’re now using AI for absolutely everything and so suddenly contented with a situation where it can’t be used they still can’t help but use it. Not a good sign.

Have a phones-free classroom. Problem solved.

Yes, this is really depressing. I don't want to have to ban devices from exams, but it is something I might have to think about.

I honestly think it's that. I've seen it before at other private schools, where someone is caught cheating and let off with very minor consequences. Private high schools were hiding it from colleges too.

This class form of racism always gets a chuckle out of me. Want to trade calipers?

Sorry, can you state your hypothesis clearly here? You are saying Princeton would not need to make this change if it admitted only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants?

What?