<p>Sheating on a test in the introduction to Congress course. LOL Maybe they thought it was a lab exercise.</p>
<p>Dang. ruined my joke with spelling errors on this stupid PDA.</p>
<p>Freudian slip?</p>
<p>Funny using either spelling, bovertine!</p>
<p>You’re still using a PDA?</p>
<p>I’m not coddled :)That’s what I call my Blackberry. I don’t know if that’s technically correct but it’s easier to type…</p>
<p>I hope they nail the cheaters (if they did cheat) and suspend them. I’m sick of students tolerating cheating. I’ve seen it on this site over and over again: someone will cheat, and other posters will jump in to defend the cheater.</p>
<p>This, from the article linked above, surprised me:
I thought honor codes were fairly common.</p>
<p>[125</a> Harvard students suspected of cheating on take-home exam](<a href=“http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012/08/125-harvard-students-suspected-of-cheating-on-take-home-exam/1#.UEATM09jOzM]125”>http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012/08/125-harvard-students-suspected-of-cheating-on-take-home-exam/1#.UEATM09jOzM)</p>
<p>Beyond lame. Who cheats on an intro poly sci take-home test?</p>
<p>Honor codes prevent cheating? Any evidence for that?</p>
<p>if they took as much time as they did organizing this scam then they could have studied and not cheated</p>
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<p>Probably reduces frequency… I think there’s something about signing a statement that says that you did not cheat that isn’t there when it’s just assumed you won’t cheat.</p>
<p>Who cheats during HS to get the 4.7 to get into Harvard?</p>
<p>What’s hard to believe is that it involved 125 kids, half of the class! That’s a lot of coordination.</p>
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<p>It doesn’t take much to be considered “cheating” or “plagiarizing”, and definitely no premeditated organization required. You can, for instance, paraphrase another author’s line in your own words, cite that source at the end of the sentence, and be considered “plagiarizing” if you didn’t paraphrase enough such that someone may claim you were trying to pass off that author’s point as your own.</p>
<p>I normally never defend cheaters, but one can easily imagine how something like this can happen. According to the Crimson, the final exam in that class was take home, “open book, open notes, open internet, etc.” Imagine if someone was struggling with an essay question on the take home final, then a friend in the class lets slip that the answer on a particular source that he can find online. He looks it up, and there’s the answer. It’s open internet, so he givens in to the temptation and derives his answer from the source, not knowing that everyone else in that class also found the same answer through grapevine. All the sudden, that person’s handing in the same answer as everyone else, and worse, he committed major cheating by being involved in collaboration with 124 other students.</p>
<p>Why would anyone need to cheat for a grade at Harvard?</p>
<p>xrCalico23, I agree. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate plan, there could be a quick comment to someone else or something else simple that could cause similar answers to be given. </p>
<p>I was thinking if the exam was take home and open note, wouldn’t they all be spitting back the same information that the professor lectured on or was in the class materials? If they got the answer correct, how could it not be a similar answer? I suppose if it was an open essay, that could have pulled any topic to make a certain point and they all came up with the same or similar ones, that would be suspicious. I would just want to make sure it wasn’t possibly something brought up in a lecture or was discussed in a study group prior to the exam. </p>
<p>On a side note, since it was a class in government, maybe they should have been allowed to collaborate to come up with the best solution. Who knows maybe these are our future politicians and they could use the practice!</p>
<p>Both my sons went to well-known colleges and both frequently had take-home exams. It’s a sign that the university respects the students, by treating them like adults.</p>