I guess it's worth noting here that you can sign your commits with GPG: https://git-scm.com/book/tr/v2/Git-Tools-Signing-Your-Work
For that reason, I jokingly created `git-upstage`, which streamlines the process of abusing commit edits and plagiarizing code! It squashes a branch, backdates it 5 minutes, and claims you wrote it.
https://github.com/SilasX/git-upstage
Edit: Looks like my last commit left the important stuff commented out and can't fix it at the moment. Ah well, you're going to use the tool to rip it off anyway ;-)
I was told of severe disciplinary actions for accusations that were ridiculous when students would not confess, and an administration that stood behind the decisions of students who judged other students more on their opinions than anything else. One student, for example, was apparently expelled for an instance of claimed cheating that would have involved him running back and forth on campus at the speed of a competitive athlete. He quietly returned a short time later, and was also admitted here as a graduate student; there were rumors of legal threats and a settlement.
At least when I was hearing more about such things, essentially, Caltech placed tremendous trust in students who were well-liked by particular people, and treated those who were disliked very poorly.
Because Caltech faculty (and, for undergraduate student exams, grad students) have better things to do with their time than proctor exams (and, perhaps more to the point, because Caltech wants to attract faculty and grad students that feel that they have better uses for their time that baby-sitting exams.)
And, frankly, like many aspects of the trust extended to Caltech students, its a recruitment policy -- Caltech is an extremely selective, extremely small school that is competing with other elite institutions to attract the best students.
It's just nicer to live that way.
A friend of mine at UT had his room sacked the first week.
> Honor codes and not proctoring exams (rather, the students doing it themselves) are a fairly common feature of engineering colleges, it isn't really something that contributes to Caltech standing out.
I'm not saying Caltech is unique in doing that, I'm saying that in the universe Caltech operates in it would conflict with their recruiting interests -- both for faculty and students -- to operate in a different way.
Most of the exams were take-home anyway, and included instructions giving a time limit and what reference material was allowed to be used.
http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/02/17/cheating-at-caltech/
https://www.quora.com/Are-all-exams-at-Caltech-take-home-exa...
I don't know what Caltech is like today. I attended in 70's, and the honor system was considered sacred by the students. If there were cheaters, they never bragged about it, and I don't know of any. I know one who fell asleep during his takehome exam, woke up and finished it, and so exceeded the time limit. He noted this on the exam. The professor replied back that he was very sorry and was forced to give him an F. The student repeated the (required) class next year.
The number of students who did poorly on exams argues that cheating was not widespread.
If the culture has changed in the intervening years, that makes me very sad.
Wow, way to prize process over people. Why not let the student drop the class and just re-take the test next time around?
Is Caltech designed to teach science, or train paper-pushers?
But also consider that the midterm and the final were the entire grade. No credit was given for homework, showing up for class, etc. The rules about the exams were pretty clear.
However, if you had a borderline exam grade, but had done the homework diligently, the prof would use that as a tie breaker.
His fellow students thought the F was a bit harsh, but he conceded that it was fair and took his lumps with equanimity. I quite admired him for it. In the end, it didn't hurt him because he graduated and went on to a very successful career.
I (briefly) attended in the early 1990s, and it was the same.
Individual students certainly can have this integrity, but the demographic as a whole is demonstrably susceptible to cheating.
It also offends basic scientific process, in that it suggests that you don't need to bother with trying to make sure your results are robust; instead it relies on someone's word. Why bother having exams, then? Just ask "Do you think you understand the course material properly"?
Think of it like running a marathon. Is there any satisfaction from thinking "I honestly believe I can complete a marathon!" ? I don't think so, but there's a heluva lot from actually completing one. Same for a tough degree program.
Regarding marathons, some people do cheat them - they're more interested in the social rewards than the personal growth. Some people flat-out lie about doing them at all. Different folks have different motivations.
Certainly demonstrably true of a significant portion of the demographic of "college students".
Caltech would probably argue that Caltech students are not a representative sample of college students, and that generalization from the more general class to the more specific here is a textbook example of the fallacy of division.
Even if we all agree that Caltech students are not representative of college students in general, it doesn't automatically follow that there is no significant degree of cheating.
No, its not. Rejecting the validity of an argument for p is not the same as making an argument for not-p.
Not being representative of a population doesn't give any information about the makeup of the subsample, unless you have more information to add.
No, its not, which is why you had to present a "quote" that isn't to advance that story.
I presented how they would reject an argument from the general population, not positive argument for the absence of cheating at Caltech.
Yes, if you strip away the context of the literal words you said, you're correct. But in context, you're not.
I also suspect that a university with strong anti-cheating measures is expecting students to cheat, and students will naturally fulfill that expectation.
I think the latter is definitely true, the former is probably true, and perhaps more importantly, Caltech's admissions process selects for people who are likely to view a system where rules are enforced primarily by monitoring as a challenge, making the alternative to trust being an arms race that consumes resources on both sides that could be more productively employed.
Edit: An example: the US homicide rate has fallen in recent years. That's good news. But the US still has a serious problem with homicide, as its homicide rate is an outlier at 4-5 times that of all other first-world nations. Americans are getting less murderous, but murder is still a serious problem there.
Much of my education is self taught, and hour-for-hour knowledge-wise I believe my time could be better spent in self-directed learning, but that degree does have value and people who cheat make it worth less to employers and myself. I think it makes sense to try and catch people who abuse that.
I definitely agree with what you're saying, especially in startups it really isn't that relevant (part of why I like the startup community so much). But I do spend a lot of time outside startups as well, and that glass ceiling is definitely present in large companies and academia (especially academia).
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"I discovered that if you rip the tags out of a library book, you can just walk out with it and the alarm won't go off!"
For some people, that would be a significant "a-ha!" moment. That doesn't mean they should go around stealing library books.
I recently went on a tour of my former university's new library building.
One thing that surprised me was that all the upper floors are set about six feet back from the exterior windows ( leaving an internal building-height vertical gap all the way around, so you can look over the railing down to the ground floor ).
When I enquired about this, the response was that it was to prevent the throw-book-out-of-window-and-collect-it-later trick that was apparently common with the old building!
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None of this is a large effect when a single person does it, but the same is true of taking notes into exams. Would you do that?
Zooming out slightly: if you think cheating doesn't hurt anyone, why do you think there are rules against it?
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Cheating is (b), driving is (a). (You seem to be arguing that driving is (b) - I disagree, but it's beside the point.) Capitalism mostly tries to encourage (c). We put some selfishness to work, yes; but we harness the selfishness of Henry Ford, and we punish the selfishness of Bernie Madoff.
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> I never said my actions were capitalistic at all.
I got that impression from one of your deleted comments. Perhaps it wasn't intentional.
> If that makes me into an asshole and the world into a shithole, so be it.
That's not a "so be it" outcome, that's an "oh crap, let's try to avoid that" outcome. As a society, we try to avoid that by punishing (a). You can do your part by not doing (a) even if you think you can get away with it.
It's bedtime, so I'm tapping out now.
That is a pity. I have already prepared a README.md claiming that I have created the internet, but then I failed while trying to backdate it to 1969 (PDT). I was this close to becoming very rich and very evil. Oh well.
EDIT: This gets even more disturbing when you realize that GitHub is a site many people list on their resumes and if this association applies from their user page too this could get very bad.
The criteria not fulfilled for this one are that you have to have interacted with the repository on Github in some way. Any one of these criteria would suffice: you're a "collaborator" on the repository, you're a "member" of the organization the owns the repository, you have forked or starred the repository, you have opened a pull request or issue in the repository.