Has anyone heard of Ivy schools doing this?

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SiR99

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I talked to someone who attended an Ivy school, and she was telling me how when they had to take their exams, the professors and TA's were not alloud to be in the room.

So basically they would put a bunch of overachieving science students in a big room, close the door, and let them take the test alone without checking on them until the exam time was up.

Is it only me or does that seem ******ed??

how can anyone take their gpa seriously?

... do all the ivy schools do /(use to do) this, or is it only stanford?:thumbdown:
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Well some schools (like Rice) employ an honor code and actually give a large portion of tests as take home tests. I guess the hope is that at a high caliber school, the students are mature enough to not cheat off one another. I'm sure it still happens, but probably not as rampant as you might imagine.
 
no, they aren't left alone, at least at the big H when i went there.

yes, no profs/TAs in the room, this is so they can't give help/hints/answer questions about content on the exam. but there ARE proctors. they hire community members (usually lots of retirees) to watch you like a hawk.
 
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noonday said:
no, they aren't left alone, at least at the big H when i went there.

yes, no profs/TAs in the room, this is so they can't give help/hints/answer questions about content on the exam. but there ARE proctors. they hire community members (usually lots of retirees) to watch you like a hawk.
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wait, wait, wait... So the administration doesn't trust the PROFESSORS not to cheat?????





As far as the OP's concern, some schools may do this. I've taken a number of tests unsupervised. It's really no big deal, we're professionals, right? Do some people cheat? I don't know, maybe. But guess what. They can't cheat their way through Step 1. Class rank doesn't mean much if you fail that bad boy.
 
we had profs and TAs in the room generally. for ochem, profs werent allowed in during exams, so TAs proctored the whole thing
 
At my undergrad (not an Ivy), the professors would pass out the exam and then go to a nearby room so they could get work done (e.g. writing papers) but were still available if someone had questions. For many literature classes, you were allowed to go to the computer lab if you wanted to type your essays instead of writing them in a blue book.

In fact, I don't think I took a proctored exam until the MCAT.
 
At Columbia the professors usually only pass by at the beginning and they leave several TAs watching us while we test. They do stop by and check out any unusual behavior.

Our Bio professor did stick around for the exams and she too would go up to anyone who looked suspicious.
 
SiR99 said:
I talked to someone who attended an Ivy school, and she was telling me how when they had to take their exams, the professors and TA's were not alloud to be in the room.

So basically they would put a bunch of overachieving science students in a big room, close the door, and let them take the test alone without checking on them until the exam time was up.

Is it only me or does that seem ******ed??

how can anyone take their gpa seriously?

... do all the ivy schools do /(use to do) this, or is it only stanford?:thumbdown:
Click to expand...
1st: stanford, while a very good school, is not an ivy
2nd: yes, at my school (princeton), there is a strict honor code. No professors are allowed to be in the room during the exam, they sit outside of it and if we have questions we can go ask them. and yes, our gpa is taken VERY seriously, and people DO NOT cheat. THe honor code is extremely strict, and if convicted of a violation of it you are removed from school from the semester, possibly expelled for good depending on the circumstances. If you notice anyone else cheating, hear anyone talk about cheating, or have any knowledge of this happening you can also be penalized for violating the honor code. We have to write out the code and sign it at the end of every quiz, test, paper, and hw assignment. It is not taken lightly. And I honestly beleive that there is less cheating there than the majority of schools. THe honor code has been in place for over a 100 years, because of a cheating problem in the 1890s, which was erradicated by this process.
 
I've never taken a test without the presence of a TA or professor. I'm not sure why you would think that the ivies have some sort of standardized educational practices, anyway.
 
at Michigan's engineering school, they employ the honor code. And when people get caught, it definitely hits the fan. It's crazy. But for the rest of the school (biology/chemistry/physics/math), there's always a professor in there with us.
 
Some small privates do take-home tests all the time - or you take them in the library at a time of your choosing for as long as you wish.

Some Ivy's also don't let the professors write the exams by themselves.
 
Many of the answers on this thread point to one of my pet peeves: people talking about "Ivy schools" when they mean top schools in general. Schools are "Ivy schools" because they are part of the eight-school Ivy League athletic conference, not because they are top/selective/competitive/best/whatever institutions. Stanford, MIT, and lots of other elite schools are NOT Ivies. And each of the Ivy League schools is a unique institution, with its own strengths, weaknesses, traditions, and policies. Harvard is vastly different from Brown, which is nothing like Dartmouth, etc. Treating them as one mythic, monolithic "THEM" really misses reality.

That said, my undergrad school was an Ivy. We had an Honor Principle that the College took very seriously. Academic honesty was assumed and expected from the students. This meant that tests weren't proctored, although sometimes the professors did stay in the room to be available for answering questions. It also meant that cheating on tests, plagiarizing papers, copying homework, and failing to report other students' dishonesty were all Honor Principle violations.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~reg/regulations/undergrad/acad-honor.html

Consequences for violations were strict - like aaj117's Princeton example, they ranged from removal for the semester to separation (expulsion) from the College. But seriously, I can say that for me the consequences weren't why the Honor Principle was so meaningful and effective. Coming in as a freshman, it was amazing to be treated as a responsible, trustworthy adult - and it was exactly this assumption of honesty that made me want to live up to the faith the institution had in me.

There was some cheating, but in general the Honor Principle worked because students appreciated the respect they were given and bought into the responsibility of their role in the learning community.
 
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no this is not true. it depends on what the professors want to do. they are allowed to stay if they wish..neither the administration nor the students care if they do or don't
 
i'm pretty sure a lot of you who say students abide by the honor code at your schools THINK there is not a lot of cheating. you probably just don't see it.
 
There's obviously some cheating going on at Princeton and other schools w/ honor codes, otherwise we wouldn't bother having an Honor Committee to have the post-cheating hearings. But the idea that you're violating this school-wide system of trust I think makes cheating seem a much bigger offense than it would if you're focused on dodging being caught by a proctor. It's also true that some professors don't hold up their end of the honor code (for example, one prof made everyone leave their backpacks in the hallway before our exam, which I believe is not allowed). Sometimes they make copies of exams to hold onto in case someone changes their answers and claims that they were unfairly graded. Not surprisingly, all the memories I have of such things took place in premed-heavy molecular biology classes... :p
 
One of my profs went to Yale and told us her test weren't proctored and they didn't dare cheat because of the honor code and risk of being expelled. She also said there were usually a couple suicides on campus every finals week but I didn't confirm that through any other source.
 
futuredrcrawfor said:
One of my profs went to Yale and told us her test weren't proctored and they didn't dare cheat because of the honor code and risk of being expelled. She also said there were usually a couple suicides on campus every finals week but I didn't confirm that through any other source.
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I went to Yale and we didn't have an honor code. I'm not aware that there ever was one. Our exams were proctored.
 
Most students at top schools would be too cut throat to give another classmate a leg up by cheating. That probably enforces the honor code more than "a sense of duty".
 
The vast majority of my exams were take-home or taken without the prof in the room, un-proctored (many of my exams were 4+ hours so there was not enough class time). My school has an honor code to prevent cheating but in my opinion it didn't prevent cheating. Often people that were charged with cheating were not punished despite a strong case against them. Perhaps the system is different at other schools and it works better than it did at my college but I think that no matter what some students will find a way to cheat. That being said, I really enjoyed taking my exams after I felt prepared and well-rested. Although it pisses me off that others probably have a higher GPA than I do because of their actions, I know that all of my grades were earned through honorable means. There's always going to be people that take advantage of a good situation so you might as well get used to it.
 
LovelyMD said:
I went to Yale and we didn't have an honor code. I'm not aware that there ever was one. Our exams were proctored.
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Yeah, I'm here too, and all my exams have TAs, professors, or both. There are take-home exams. And I don't think there really is a strict honor code, though the administration takes cheating EXTREMELY seriously.
 
The only proctored exam I took all of college was the MCAT. But I went to a small LAC, so obviously a bit different than your original question.

We had a pretty well-defined honor code. That people would even cheat on an exam is a pretty foreign idea to 99% of my college friends A few people first year got caught blatantly cheating (xeroxing) on physics HW; they were suspended for a year and their academic record will be pretty marred.

It confuses me now that I'm in med school that I can't listen to my ipod while taking an exam. Weird...
 
SiR99 said:
I talked to someone who attended an Ivy school, and she was telling me how when they had to take their exams, the professors and TA's were not alloud to be in the room.

So basically they would put a bunch of overachieving science students in a big room, close the door, and let them take the test alone without checking on them until the exam time was up.

Is it only me or does that seem ******ed??

how can anyone take their gpa seriously?

... do all the ivy schools do /(use to do) this, or is it only stanford?:thumbdown:
Click to expand...

TAs are always in the room during exams at Cornell. Teachers sometimes don't show or roam around between each exam location.
 
SiR99 said:
I talked to someone who attended an Ivy school, and she was telling me how when they had to take their exams, the professors and TA's were not alloud to be in the room.

So basically they would put a bunch of overachieving science students in a big room, close the door, and let them take the test alone without checking on them until the exam time was up.

Is it only me or does that seem ******ed??

how can anyone take their gpa seriously?

... do all the ivy schools do /(use to do) this, or is it only stanford?:thumbdown:
Click to expand...

I did my undergrad at a top school with an honor code, and rarely saw any cheating during exams. The honor code violations I heard about tended to be out of class things, such as not citing properly in a paper. People take the honor code seriously, and it's great to be able to take the exam and concentrate on the material without someone staring me down the whole time.

Conversely, I have also taken classes at 3 other universities (some post bac and a grad degree) and ironically, I've seen more cheating during these proctored exams. Go figure.
 
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GreenShirt said:
Most students at top schools would be too cut throat to give another classmate a leg up by cheating. That probably enforces the honor code more than "a sense of duty".
Click to expand...

What are you basing this on?

My classmates were generally friendly, cooperative, and helpful to each other. Collaboration and teamwork were valued. Cutthroat ambition was not. Sure, we had the occasional hard-core gunner - but those people were the exception, and they were not appreciated.

Give each other "a leg up by cheating"? No thanks. But give each other a leg up by explaining a difficult concept to a classmate, studying together, lending someone notes for a class they missed, etc? Absolutely.

blargh said:
i'm pretty sure a lot of you who say students abide by the honor code at your schools THINK there is not a lot of cheating. you probably just don't see it.
Click to expand...

Maybe Dartmouth was different from any other school with an honor code. Maybe I just got lucky and surrounded myself with the handful of normal people in a college full of "cut throat", dishonest, self-interested freaks. Maybe I'm just a naive Pollyana, looking at the world through my rose-colored glasses and missing all the naked ambition and rampant cheating all around me.

Or maybe I actually have some idea of what I'm talking about. Was there cheating at Dartmouth? Sure. Like TigerSoup says, we wouldn't need an Honor Committee if nobody was cheating. But would there have been more or less cheating with more proctoring and less trust? I don't know. What I do know is that I personally took the Honor Principle seriously not because of the consequences or because of some weird grudge against my classmates, but because of the trust and respect I was given. The majority of my friends and classmates, to the best of my knowledge, felt similarly and behaved similarly.
 
Its really interesting all the assumptions people make about "top schools," especially when it comes to generalizing about some prevailing ivy culture. The major things I think that define the Ivys are a high percentage of wealthy students, something you would find at any private university and possibly more so at ones with less endowments and thus less financial aid availability, and a generally studious environment which I'm sure could be said for many, many universities. Also, some schools with particularly strong programs, like engineering or business might exhibited different characteristics than those without. I don't see how this would be different at Penn with wharton or UT with McCombs, though.
 
There's not much value in a student saying they didn't see any cheating during exams. Wouldn't the student be focused on doing the exam instead of checking out what other students were doing? And you can only see a few people proximate to you anyways.
 
I later found out that Stanford is not an Ivy school.

Cheating is taken Very seriously at all Universities and I dont understand what you guys mean when you say there is an "Honor Code". Are you guys implying that the students at these schools are better/more trustworthy then the students everywhere else?

Cal, UCLA and all the other UC students are students who go to top universities, and if that much precaution is taken for them what makes other students more trustworthy.

Adcoms should take this into account ... I know that if I am ever one, I will
 
SiR99 said:
I dont understand what you guys mean when you say there is an "Honor Code". Are you guys implying that the students at these schools are better/more trustworthy then the students everywhere else?

Cal, UCLA and all the other UC students are students who go to top universities, and if that much precaution is taken for them what makes other students more trustworthy.

Adcoms should take this into account ... I know that if I am ever one, I will
Click to expand...

Students that go to a school with an honor code in place don't consider people that go to other schools more trustworthy. In my college we had to sign a copy of the code at this big ceremony which stated that if we didn't wish to follow it we would be expelled. People are going to cheat in life, it's a fact of life. They just assume that we're adults and we have to make that decision for ourselves. You could cheat on your physics exam but would that help you on the MCAT? Probably not. If you were ever on the admissions board than how could you take this into account? The person might have legitimately done well despite being surrounded by a school of cheaters or found an ingenious way to cheat during a proctored exam.
 
I'm not sure if an Honor Code makes cheating less prevalent or not. That said, I TAed for two years at a top-tier university and personally caught at least ten people cheating per final exam (200-300 people in a lecture hall). People were essentially only caught if they did something totally blatant too (staring at the person in front of them's test, or having notes/cheat sheet/answers etc) so it's likely that only a small percentage of the people that were cheating were actually caught. It was pretty disapointing, to say the least.
 
Monarch Kong said:
Well some schools (like Rice) employ an honor code and actually give a large portion of tests as take home tests. I guess the hope is that at a high caliber school, the students are mature enough to not cheat off one another. I'm sure it still happens, but probably not as rampant as you might imagine.
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yep...Had that experience all four years at Rice...It was annoying when you had to ask the prof a question. Usually the profs would just be in an adjacent room or in their office (depending on whether not the class was in the same building as their office).

We also had self scheduled and take home closed book finals (for some classes)
 
HanginInThere said:
Many of the answers on this thread point to one of my pet peeves: people talking about "Ivy schools" when they mean top schools in general. Schools are "Ivy schools" because they are part of the eight-school Ivy League athletic conference.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this is one of the things I get frustrated with = misinformed people who associate top tier and ivy as the same thing. The Ivy League is a freckin athletic conference. The name has become synonymous with elitism amongst old, traditional american universities, but in no way includes all of them. Schools anywhere from Rice, Stanford, UCLA to Gtown and between are not ivy's althouh I have heard people say each one of them are.

Ivy football isn't even all it's cut out to be. Stanford, if they can beat USC, would DESTROY any ivy leauge football team.
 
Rooter76 said:
Yeah, this is one of the things I get frustrated with = misinformed people who associate top tier and ivy as the same thing. The Ivy League is a freckin athletic conference. The name has become synonymous with elitism amongst old, traditional american universities, but in no way includes all of them. Schools anywhere from Rice, Stanford, UCLA to Gtown and between are not ivy's althouh I have heard people say each one of them are.

Ivy football isn't even all it's cut out to be. Stanford, if they can beat USC, would DESTROY any ivy leauge football team.
Click to expand...

Who ever suggested that any Ivy sport was good, at least any of the mainstream sport? I think the most successful Ivy school in any of the big sports is Penn with their basketball team, and thats not saying a great deal. People are generally ill-informed on things that don't matter very much, such as what an Ivy league school is. In the real world no one spends a lot of time considering these things.
 
Drogba said:
Who ever suggested that any Ivy sport was good, at least any of the mainstream sport? I think the most successful Ivy school in any of the big sports is Penn with their basketball team, and thats not saying a great deal. People are generally ill-informed on things that don't matter very much, such as what an Ivy league school is. In the real world no one spends a lot of time considering these things.
Click to expand...

Fan cheering for a 1-A conference school:
Beat those mother******s! Send their sorry a**es home! The other school can eat my s***!

Fan cheering for an ivy league school:
****** them! Rob them of the contest! Deprive them of honor!
 
Check out Harvard Men's Soccer this year. And check out many of the Ivy League schools and their crew teams. Division One is Division One (except in football where the Ivies are Division Ia, of course.)
 
Yes, to clarify, I meant football in my previous post. And I have actually heard someone yell "****** them" at a D-mouth football game. One of the most funny spur of the monent things I have ever heard.
 
I think it just makes sense, for most classes, to have the professor in the room, and to make the exam difficult and complicated enough that it wouldn't really help to have a little "cheat sheet" anyways. I have almost zero incentive to cheat in med school - I don't have any guarantees that the person next to me knows the answers, and anything I could fit on a "cheat sheet" is something I could memorize in 10 minutes anyways. I'd need the whole damn book if I was going to look something up. Even then, after the exam, I often can't figure out how the instructors came up with the answers for some questions anyways.

If I were to allow students to take an exam at home, I would just tell them it was open-book so that the chance that someone might cheat would be a non-issue. Just make questions that can't be instantly looked up. Having the textbook with me during an organic 2 exam would have been largely pointless, especially with the synthesis or mechanism problems, which were the bulk of some of the exams. You have to rationalize your way through those all on your own.
 
Rooter76 said:
Fan cheering for a 1-A conference school:
Beat those mother******s! Send their sorry a**es home! The other school can eat my s***!

Fan cheering for an ivy league school:
****** them! Rob them of the contest! Deprive them of honor!
Click to expand...

Hahaha! Dartmouth is in the middle of vermont isn't it? You can't compare it to Ivies like Columbia, Harvard and Penn that are in large cities! Obviously a bunch of ivy kids in isolation in the wilderness of vermont are going to get weird after a while.
 
I think the most common thing yelled at ivy games is "safety school" at the other team. Funny semi-related aside, when I was at school, everyone yelled that at Duke, and then they slaughtered our basketball team. Seriously, I agree, the Ivy league is the worst Division 1 athletic league in most sports.

But back to the honor code thing, who cares if there are proctors or not? I thought most med schools had an honor code. I think any aspiring doctor should have some sense of moral decency that would correspond with what an honor code stands for. So, really, am I missing something b/c I don't get what the big deal is if some undergrad schools have strict honor codes. Good for them, I say.
 
Drogba said:
Hahaha! Dartmouth is in the middle of vermont isn't it? You can't compare it to Ivies like Columbia, Harvard and Penn that are in large cities! Obviously a bunch of ivy kids in isolation in the wilderness of vermont are going to get weird after a while.
Click to expand...

Dartmouth is in New Hampshire...
 
Rooter76 said:
Yeah, this is one of the things I get frustrated with = misinformed people who associate top tier and ivy as the same thing. The Ivy League is a freckin athletic conference. The name has become synonymous with elitism amongst old, traditional american universities, but in no way includes all of them. Schools anywhere from Rice, Stanford, UCLA to Gtown and between are not ivy's althouh I have heard people say each one of them are.

Ivy football isn't even all it's cut out to be. Stanford, if they can beat USC, would DESTROY any ivy leauge football team.
Click to expand...

One of the things I get frustrated about is Ivy league students and alums who get extremely defensive and insist that Stanford, etc. aren't Ivy league. You know what, guys? WE KNOW. We are perfectly happy with our level of prestige, trust me. If you would like to tackle reeducating the rest of the world, be my guest... I just get frustrated when it seems like people suspect us of "trying to get away with pretending we're an Ivy." Ugh.

What about that football game, by the way :laugh:.
 
Adradr said:
One of the things I get frustrated about is Ivy league students and alums who get extremely defensive and insist that Stanford, etc. aren't Ivy league. You know what, guys? WE KNOW. We are perfectly happy with our level of prestige, trust me. If you would like to tackle reeducating the rest of the world, be my guest... I just get frustrated when it seems like people suspect us of "trying to get away with pretending we're an Ivy." Ugh.

What about that football game, by the way :laugh:.
Click to expand...

shut up!!!!!!!!!!


Sorry for the childish outbursts...I'm a diehard USC fan
 
I go to William and Mary, home of the first honor code in the country, which we take it really really seriously. I think pretty much all of my exams are unproctored, and I can't think of a time when this was ever a problem. Our honor council has no problem with expelling students who have been found guilty of cheating, and that's a pretty big incentive to not cheat. I think it says a lot that the administration trusts the students to be honest, so no, I don't think it's ******ed, and yes, I take my GPA very seriously.
 
paradisedoc said:
Check out Harvard Men's Soccer this year. And check out many of the Ivy League schools and their crew teams. Division One is Division One (except in football where the Ivies are Division Ia, of course.)
Click to expand...

the fact that you're actually parading crew as a sport to be taken seriously shows that you're a East Coast rich kid not to be taken seriously... :p

...though Akpan is a good player. Probably never a senior national teamer though.
 
you can have an honor code all you want and be the most eilte school ever, but *******es will still cheat. We've already had a problem with it in my medschool class with a few students getting caught taking online tests in groups and trying to copy exams...

...still pissed about people doing that.
 
Our tests are completely unproctored and there is cheating going on. How does the administration find out? Students usually bring it up. Something about the value of their education going down if everyone in their class is cheating or something. One group of freshman was caught so fast, they didn't get to unpack before they were sent home.
 
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