<p>I find the whole concept of having your GPA and therefore degree classification measured by 'take home exams' very strange.</p>
<p>I can understand them for mid-terms or whatever, but for finals??</p>
<p>What if you have a parent/lover/spouse/sibling/godparent/friend who has done the degree, or is an academic in the subject?</p>
<p>I think the honor system sounds like it generally works because it's enforced by students, so it would be difficult to find a fellow student to collaborate with, but what if you do know someone well who is well-versed in your subject but isn't a Caltech student or academic. You could in theory graduate summa cum laude, despite doing almost none of it yourself, and who would know?</p>
<p>Seems like a bit of a joke to me. Be interested to hear the opinions of others.</p>
<p>So, first off, I don’t think most Techers cheat precisely because they do respect the trust given to them. </p>
<p>Second off, your claim that “You could in theory graduate summa cum laude, despite doing almost none of it yourself” is ridiculous. This isn’t high school, exams here are difficult. I would imagine even alums or academics would have trouble with a lot of exams without studying beforehand. Even then, since each topic is taught differently at any particular time or school, it might be hard to do well on such an exam. Even if you did find someone to do this, you don’t think it would be eventually noticed? </p>
<p>If you can find an academic to study and cheat for you, by that logic it’s probably easier to just bribe someone to give you a degree… hehehe. That would work at any school, too, not just Caltech.</p>
<p>And by the way, Caltech students don’t graduate with latin honors. It’s either “with honor” or without.</p>
<p>Oh I’m sure most don’t. The point is that some can.</p>
<p>You do have a point though that most people will forget what they’ve learned after they leave college, so perhaps finding someone who can do most of your work for you would be difficult. If you do have a partner/parent though who majored in or works in your field your life could be considerably easier, they’d be able to help you with a significant amount of work, though like you say probably not all.</p>
<p>Still, I find the whole thing crazy. IMO for finals people should be sat in an exam hall, unproctored is fine because the other students wouldn’t want you cheating, but this whole you can go anywhere you like and talk to anyone you like for an exam is really weird to me. It doesn’t matter that most people won’t cheat it’s that some people can cheat, easily.</p>
<p>Cheating on exams isn’t going to get you anywhere in life. In the end things like interviews and references are going to mean more than your GPA.</p>
<p>In my experience as a grad student, it’s fairly obvious which students cheat on homeworks/tests when you start grading them. I’d say I knew about the same number of people in undergrad that cheated even though we had a more traditional system for tests/finals.</p>
<p>Anyway, it’s pretty hard to cheat on a test that’s unlimited time, open book, and open internet.</p>
<p>oh gosh guys, charlotte’s right, there are massive cheating rings in caltech, that’s why caltech pumps out undeserving, uneducated, overrated graduates who never make anything of themselves every year</p>
<p>i’m going to go draft a letter to the deans urging them to throw out this whole “honor system” nonsense, it’s so obvious that it would never work</p>
<p>to the op, thanks for letting us know about this, we had never thought of it before, hopefully it’ll all be fixed soon</p>
<p>I guess the point is that a) most people don’t cheat at all, b) even if someone were motivated to cheat as much as possible it wouldn’t be that helpful, especially over multiple classes (and even more especially over a caltech career). Therefore, it’s not really an issue.</p>
<p>When you get off Core, your classes become smaller and you get to know pretty much everyone in your major. You get to know how they are doing in the class, especially those who are doing really well (which is not that many). So, if you know someone who doesn’t know chain rule, but gets nearly perfect grades, you know something might be up. But such occurrences are extremely rare and do not really affect the curve.</p>
<p>Now, it is true that there are many ways to cheat on a take home exam - you can ask an outside academic, take more time than is allowed on the test, use materials that are not allowed (such as other textbooks, the internet, etc), copy the test from your fellow student (without him knowing), etc. The good thing, however, is that none of the above is viable. For instance, tests at Caltech very rarely are time pressing. Nine times out of ten, you are limited by your inadequate understanding of the concepts, so taking extra time will not help you. Now, you can try using prohibited material, but the odds will be against you to find what you need once you are in advanced classes - you’ll need to be reading technical papers and you will likely need a couple of days to understand what the authors are saying - you simply don’t have that much time. You can also try to recruit your academic parents into helping you out. But chances are, if your parents/relatives are like that, you won’t need help on the exams. Finally, you can try cheating off your fellow student. In that case, you will be having exactly the same mistakes as him and it will be extremely obvious to the grades that copying was going on. You’ll be caught and very likely exposed. Caltech has its Board of Control, which deals with Honor Code violations. If you are suspected of cheating, you might be required to demonstrate the knowledge of the material, and if you can’t…well, it would suck to be you.</p>
<p>At first, I was also skeptical about the Honor Code. I spent a lot of time thinking about it (as you can probably tell), but by the end, it’s pretty obvious that it works. On the rare occasions that violations do happen, it does not affect the final curve. And, as was mentioned before, if everyone here was cheating, it wouldn’t be Caltech.</p>
<p>My issue is not with open book nor with lack of time constraints - it is with getting people to help</p>
<p>I agree the chances of a fellow student helping is very very slim because a fellow student is unlikely to want to help you cheat</p>
<p>Your reasoning that asking a family member to help won’t occur because if you are related to academics you are automatically clever is ridiculous</p>
<p>Plus it might not be your parents it might be a partner, friend or family friend.</p>
<p>I imagine parents who are professors won’t support their child’s attempts to cheat.</p>
<p>The only people that could really help you are those with pretty extensive education in the subject, and I imagine those people would also be resistant to assist in cheating.</p>
<p>The majority of cheating I’m aware of here has been related to taking extra time and using unauthorized outside sources (often in the form of <em>cough</em>non-English<em>cough</em> worked solution books).</p>
<p>Let me expand a little bit more on what I was trying to say. If your parents are in academia, it is very likely that you were raised smart and honest enough to understand the concept behind the Honor Code. If you weren’t, as RacinReaver pointed out correctly, it is extremely unlikely they will support your efforts to cheat. The reasoning is the same if you have relatives/friends who are professors - I highly doubt that they will be willing to help you. </p>
<p>What if you have a friend that is a graduate/undergraduate student at another school who agreed to help you cheat? Well, first of all, there is no guarantee the answer you will get is going to be right. But even assuming you can, how long do you think you’d be able to pull this sort of thing off? You will have to take many classes on different subjects and you can’t expect your friend to be following the same curriculum as you do at the same time. He might be able to help you on a problem on the midterm, maybe even on the final, but after that, you will have to be looking for other friends. So, think about it - what are the chances that a student has a dozen of really good and extremely smart friends who will be willing to help him cheat his way through Caltech? This number is likely measured in single digits and so will not have influence on other students. This brings me to the point I tried to make in my previous post: cheating here at Caltech does occur, but it is so rare that it has very little to no effect on your grade.</p>
<p>Finally, and this is really important, nobody is forcing you to come here if you don’t like the idea of the Honor Code.</p>
<p>It might be theoretically possible to cheat at Caltech, but it’s obviously not a problem: 36% of all Caltech undergrads go on to earn a PhD. This couldn’t be accomplished if there were cheating.</p>
<p>I come from a different school, and I have a comment on this. I have taken several courses where there are no exams whatsoever. Do students collaborate? Yes, plenty. Is this discouraged? Nope. Can someone realistically consistently succeed without knowing what they’re doing? Not really, because the solutions involve such subtlety in writeups that you can’t even do it if someone told you if you’re not incredibly on top of the stuff. Sure, there may be some who most often need no conversation with other students in order to come up with answers. That’s relegated to a matter of taste. </p>
<p>In the Caltech system, the one distinction from what I’ve written above is that collaboration need not be allowed on certain things like exams. My experience, however, is that it would just be much harder to get help when it’s forbidden, because I’ll bet people really wouldn’t take kindly to your attitude if you disrespected the honor system. I do believe time limits should not exist for take-home things though, just my humble feeling.</p>
<p>People try to cheat under any system, and I’m sure the nature of Caltech work (perhaps plus the lack of latin honors) is that people are encouraged to work at challenging stuff very hard without expectation of much reward if they try to break the rules, and honestly this seems to be logical. It is not easy to cheat consistently when the problems for exams are probably usually written by professors themselves or chosen specifically. </p>
<p>As for graduate admissions and things like that, we have professor recommendations as one of the most important factors, and if you don’t know you’re stuff, you’re pretty screwed.</p>
<p>And definitively, finding a parent or partner outside of Caltech to help you on your specialized track is a little ridiculous. They would need to have taken exactly the same classes. </p>
<p>Trust me, I have asked math professors at my school questions about my classes when they weren’t teaching, and often even they couldn’t answer instantly. This is * within the same field, sometimes in a related subfield*. Cheating is easy when it’s trivial work. Very, very hard and actually unrealistic when it’s the real stuff and you’re asked to turn in your work in a reasonable amount of time.</p>
<p>Could you be innovative and sometimes cheat? Probably, if you’re brilliant at cheating. But it’s considerably harder to under the system than it’s being made to seem. The claim that it’s easy for some to cheat seems wrong. Unless Caltech courses are much more trivial and very streamlined as compared to what I am guessing.</p>
<p>I see what you guys are saying, it would be difficult to find someone who had taken the exact classes as you.</p>
<p>Let’s say hypothetically you chose your classes based on what the people in your life could help you with though, would you still get away with it? Or is everyone forced to participate in class discussions (and so therefore it would be obvious if they didn’t really understand it).</p>
<p>Everyone at Tech is required to take Core, which is 5 terms of math and physics. Many majors further require ACM 95, a year long math course. I have a hard time believing that your friends and family could cheat you through the massive walls of algebra necessary to solve problems in those classes without seriously impacting their own lives. People don’t seem to realize that Caltech is HARD. These aren’t problems that you call up your dad and he instantly tells you the answer and you can go to bed now. Many of the problems I do even already tell you the answer; the point is to prove them to be true. And it’s pretty hard to fake the pages upon pages of algebra necessary to solve these types of problems. </p>
<p>I just finished a problem on 2D natural convection in a box with a fluid with temperature dependent density (approximated as a first order Taylor expansion), with the ends of the box held at different temperatures. It’d be absurd to call up my dad and have him cheat me through the 5 pages of algebra it took to derive the temperature, pressure, and velocity gradients, and do the scaling analysis of the terms in the Navier-Stokes equations and assumption justification for lubrication flow. And there were 2 other problems on that problem set. Even if he were an expert in fluid mechanics, it would take hours simply to chug through all the math for the set (and I used mathematica pretty liberally).</p>
<p>I’ve had friends call me up to help me with their math and physics homework, and helped them with such problems as “why are square numbers always non-negative” and “how to find acceleration when given a function for position as a function of time”. I can’t exactly call them back and ask them to show me how to solve a system of PDE’s using similarity solutions and expect a short, simple answer that saves me hours of work.</p>
<p>I can understand that as an outsider to the Caltech community, you probably view the honor code with quite a bit of skepticism and disbelief. My point is that the work at Caltech is too difficult and time intensive just to call someone up and have them cheat you through it all quickly. I’ve had too many exams where the grad student who graded the exam remarks “oh wow, I was given one of these problems for my qualifying exams”.</p>