Harvard University probes plagiarism outbreak involving 125 students
Source: Guardian
Harvard University probes plagiarism outbreak involving 125 students
Half the students in Ivy League college's Introduction to Congress class may have copied each other's final exams
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 30 August 2012 19.59 EDT
To be caught cheating at Harvard is bad enough. The august university prides itself on incubating America's elite in the world of law, business and politics.
But now it has been revealed that scores of Harvard students are suspected of cheating on a single class. And the course's title? An Introduction to Congress.
Though that will likely fail to surprise the many cynical observers of American politics, it has certainly stunned college officials. Harvard has immediately launched an investigation.
"These allegations, if proven represent totally unacceptable behaviour that betrays the trust upon which intellectual inquiry at Harvard depends," said Harvard president Drew Faust in a statement.
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/aug/31/harvard-university-cheating-scandal
= new reply since forum marked as read
I would just add that I think the basic factor that needs to be considered in college admissions is critical reasoning ability as displayed in writing, forget the test scores, grades, and extra-curricular activities. I would add that this true even for mathematics and science majors. That these students were so easily caught committing plagiarism is a testament to that reality. Losers.
From the comments:
Former TA and resident tutor at Harvard (5 years). I was very surprised to observe how many students studied for exams at Harvard. Instead of trying to master the material individually, many of them would band together in groups (5, 20, sometimes even larger) and create "study guides" by splitting up the material and each contributing a few pages to a small booklet of notes. They would then focus on memorizing the booklet, sometimes with haphazard results. As a TA for several large courses, I noticed that on final exams students would often simply regurgitate anything remotely related to the topic of the question; many of these "essays" had a canned feel because they came straight from the same guide that their classmates were using. The solution? 1) Admissions: stop looking for activity stars, and start looking for students who are intellectually curious and care about learning; 2) Campus culture: needs to change; there are too many students who focus on clubs and CVs, and who don't care enough about learning to think for themselves -- instead they prefer to take the easy way out, shopping for gut classes over house lists and relying on sloppily prepared guides; 3) Professors: need to stand up to the task of education; inspire students to value deep understanding over shallow cleverness, effort and integrity over quick results. There is a culture of ego at Harvard that engulfs students and teachers. It is part of the game to make things easy for everyone and pump one another up. Not enough professors take a stand against grade inflation, etc., because really putting in the time to teach would take away from research. Not enough students take the responsibility of learning seriously -- the comment from the student at the end of the article is indicative of an expectation to be spoonfed "the right answers."
