Harvard Engulfed in Major Cheating Scandal

It’s okay. It was “Intro To Congress.”

Just means they were paying attention.

Perhaps, it speaks volumes to societal pressures to perform (even at Harvard, maybe especially at Harvard) and what the society ostensibly esteems.

More fallout from the secularization of America.

How so?

When a person believes in the God of the Bible as Christianity teaches, they are less incline to lie & cheat as they know that they’ll eventually be held accountable even if they skate free in this life.

Did I say it right, Mr. Mead?

“This speaks volumes about the moral problems we are facing as a country.” (Walter Russell Mead)

No it doesn’t; it speaks volumes about the tendency of critics to make a mountain out of a mole hill. It’s hard to imagine a post more self righteous than this particular offering from Via Meadia; how full of yourself can you get.

Working in a group is not cheating just because some lazy good for nothing of a professor supposedly told his students not to. If s/he didn’t want the students collaborating then the professor in question should have hauled their sorry tuckus into a class room and given the examination in a proctored setting. It’s not the students who should be criticized it’s the lazy college faculty member who despite standing in front of students for six hours a week or less (depending on whether they teach one course or two; virtually no one teaches three) still couldn’t bear the thought of wasting a couple of hours of their incredibly valuable time watching their students take a test. I wonder whether the Professor in question even graded their own test or had one or more graduate students assigned to that job that I am sure they consider menial.

The scandal here is not the fact that students collaborated; they are encouraged to do that all the time; even if they were warned not to in this case, they can hardly be blamed for engaging in activity that they are routinely advised to engage in. The scandal here is that the teacher in question was such a lazy good for nothing that he wanted the test administered in a manner that made his job as easy as possible. The this tool of a professor announces that he is shocked, just shocked when the students collaborated.

Give me a break. Don’t punish the students; fire the Professor.

And then we have Professor Mead’s hypocrisy to deal with. How long ago was it that someone he knows pretty well was caught up in a scandal; a plagiarism scandal looks a lot like cheating to me. Professor Mead wrote two posts on the subject; the first one made excuses for Zakaria; Mead insisted that for someone as talented as Zakaria to plagiarize it must have just been a regrettable mistake. In his second post on the Zakaria scandal, Professor Mead announced how relieved he was that an investigation by Zakaria’s employer, Time Warner, exonerated the journalist.

I guess it didn’t occur to Professor Mead that Zakaria’s exoneration came after a brief (two day) investigation by the very company that earns big profits from Zakaria’s work and has an ongoing financial interest in Zakaria’s reputation remaining intact.

It’s hard to know which is worse; the self-righteousness of this post or Professor Mead’s blindness to his own double standards while he was penning it.

Jim,

That was WigWag, not Thibaud….though in truth, it is hard to tell them apart…

For anyone who may be interested, here is the home page for the knuckle head who was shocked after his students collaborated on a take home test that he says he asked them not to collaborate on.

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~mplatt/

No wonder, Professor Platt couldn’t take the time to spend a couple of hours proctoring a test for his students in a classroom setting; as anyone can see from the research page of his site, he’s obviously preoccupied conducting his incredibly important research activities. It’s surely a matter of national concern for Professor Platt to be devoting every spare minute to his research activities instead of wasting time tending to his teaching responsibilities.

In response to your question, Jim, yes, the Professor was asking for it. Students at Ivy League Institutions are routinely encouraged to collaborate on course work. In fact, in today’s day and age, collaboration between students is the default position routinely encouraged by faculty. I’m not defending or criticizing this reality, but it is the reality nevertheless, especially in the social sciences and humanities.

Students are routinely asked to collaborate on class presentations, writing projects and even on graded assignments. This approach has become so ubiquitous, especially at Harvard, that these students can be forgiven for not taking Professor Platt’s admonition about not collaborating seriously.

By the way, collaboration is not only the default position for class assignments, it’s also the default position for studying. Study groups are a ubiquitous part of student life and these groups are frequently facilitated by the college or university; social networking has encouraged this process still further.

If the Professor is so lazy that he’s going to assign a take home test (in my day they were called “open book tests”) what’s the harm in student collaboration anyway? Does it really matter if the student looks at his notes and his texts while answering the test questions himself or does it as part of a group?

The class in question was a Government class. If the test was designed to be taken at home, would the students have been cheating if they consulted the internet? What about if they called their Congressman to ask a few questions? What if they called Professor Mead to solicit his help? If none of these things would have been a violation of the rules, why was collaborating a violation of the rules?

Most of the blame here resides with the Professor, the Institution and the culture that pervades contemporary academic institutions. I don’t know anything more about the situation than Professor Mead does; like him, I only know what I read in the New York Times. My guess is that many of the students didn’t realize that they were doing anything wrong and that they had little reason to believe that they were doing anything wrong. I also suspect that Professor Platt is mostly to blame and is reaping the results of his own laziness. If he is really so shocked that students collaborated on a take-home examination, maybe he should be in another line of work.

Am I absolutely sure that all of the students in question are blameless? Of course not. But what I am sure of is that Professor Mead’s breathless claim that the incident “speaks volumes about the moral problems we are facing as a country” is little more than hysterical hyperbole.

I am also sure that Farid Zakaria’s plagiarism is far more emblematic of the moral problems that we are facing as a county than the incident that transpired at Harvard. Yet Professor Mead waxes eloquent about the situation at Harvard while celebrating the whitewash of the Zakaria scandal after a short investigation by Zakaria’s employer who had every motivation to cover up his wrong doing.

My question for Professor Mead is, why the double standard?

Professor Mead doesn’t need to respond for us to know the answer; Zakaria is a colleague of his while the students at Harvard represent little more than a juicy target for his moral indignation.

Take-home exams are a bad idea. Most people are generally honest, but all are potentially susceptible to temptation, peer pressure, etc. Trust, but verify. Institutional laziness should not be passed off as an “honor system.”

WRM seems surprised by this news. Hate to sound like a scold but, Sir- where you been for the last 30 years? Ever heard of relativism, or postmodernism, or “find your own values”? C. S. Lewis wrote about it 50 years ago in “Men Without Chests”. We mock virtue in academia, and then we’re shocked (shocked!) to find that the kids are scoundrels. I agree with Mike, who said never mind the future, our current crop of morally challenged leaders/ businesspeople act in accordance with their education. I wish I could believe the problem is confined to the Ivy League.

Harvard’s most famous faculty member for many years was SJ Gould now recognized (by all except his fellow marxists) as a cheat.

If this is “Harvard”, what about the unisities of developing nations? This is not sad but a matter of surprise. These dream institutions must keep their sanctity. We can only wish for the same.