<p>“Let’s say hypothetically …”</p>
<p>Isn’t this pointless?</p>
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<p>Let me highlight this in response to you charlotte…</p>
<p>I mean, to be a little more specific than “difficult/intensive” let me say the questions likely require plenty of worked out details and at least some subtlety. Basically unless you have someone literally spend hours working through it and give you complete solutions, their “hints” don’t help, unless the problems did not require much to do. Realistically, in my classes even the professors of math here cannot consistently answer questions to homeworks without taking a large amount of time, and that too, they’d be limited by the fact they have some knowledge but not the exact stuff from the class. </p>
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<p>Also highlighted, in case the good post by Dauntless isn’t fully read.</p>
<p>Basically, if a fellow like me who isn’t from Caltech can make a pretty good case for this stuff working, I’m sure the professors there know what they’re doing very well.</p>
<p>vossron you are dumb</p>
<p>Your first response means nothing, I ignored it cos I assumed you were 12. So 36% go on to phd? So what? Cheating is possible, I never said it was widespread</p>
<p>Second response - I used the word hypothetically because it would be difficult and unlikely. Not impossible. If it was impossible then it would be pointless, but it is not.</p>
<p>I can only assume you don’t go to tech.</p>
<p>Charlotte, I think at this point we’re all beating the same dead horse. We’ve told you that the honor code works (in our opinion) and we’ve told you why we think that is. We’ve also told you that even if someone decided to cheat it would be almost impossible to do so and gain any significant academic advantage, and we’ve told you why we think THAT is. </p>
<p>At this point, you can either choose to believe us or not.</p>
<p>Charlotte, vossron’s second post actually isn’t as foolish as you’d think (although I understand its concise expression may have made it seem obtuse), whatever his intentions may have been. Unless you legitimately have a reason you think the reasoning people like myself and others have presented is flawed, I want to ask what your intention in the hypothetical question is.</p>
<p>It’s probably possible to use an electronic device and communicate with someone during an exam in a big hall if you sit in a corner and are very discreet. Many exams are multiple choice – it’s so easy to communicate about multiple choice answers. Indeed, people have cheated ETS exams before by using electronic communication to international areas which took the same test earlier – this was reported to us as I took AP examinations back when I was in high school. </p>
<p>The honor code is not about placing maximal immediate restrictions on how people can cheat, it is based on a vision as to how to run a challenging, small and intense environment with the goal that people will become scholarly and not cheat.</p>
<p>In effect, to really make your line of questioning have a point, you have to present significant doubts that this philosophy does not work, and that the possibility of cheating the system is glaring in the face of what it stands for. </p>
<p>We have seen many reasons that cheating seems pretty hard to do, we have heard of the board that tries hard to make sure fishy business is taken care of, we’ve heard of the philosophy of making students respect the code, and we have heard of the lack of latin honors system, in order to make cheating provide little incentive in terms of graduation benefits. Further, as vossron seemed to hint, Caltech students seem to know what they’re doing.</p>
<p>Realistically, is it possible to cheat other university systems? Yes. In particular, one has control in other universities very severely of what courses one signs up for, who writes their essays, who does their projects, and as for exams, well try my multiple choice example – multiple choice is incredibly prone to cheating. Heavens, I only remember what happened in a year above mine in high school.</p>
<p>I happen to believe making things subtle enough that cheating seems a very unappetizing thing and creating a sensation among students that it really should not be done might be one of the best ways to drive the thought out of people’s minds.</p>
<p>charlottew9, you’re right, it’s very easy to hurt trusting people. The honor code means that people leave their bikes and their laptops lying around in common areas. If you wanted to, you could steal them all and make a bunch of money. Exams and problem sets work the same way. You could go to the turn in box, take out the exam of the last person to turn one it, copy it word for word, and then throw out the previous person’s exam so that you won’t get caught. If you’re the sort of person who would do those things, please don’t come here. I like living in a community where I can trust that the people around me won’t take unfair advantage of me.</p>
<p>^^ You guys still haven’t answered my question, are people forced to participate in class discussion thereby meaning it would be obvious is someone was actually not getting the work.</p>
<p>Your arguments so far have been convincing that it would be very difficult to cheat, my post contained a new question, so we’re hardly flaying a dead horse.</p>
<p>And just because I’m questioning the honours system doesn’t mean I intend to find ways of cheating it myself, I’m concerned with other people cheating it.</p>
<p>Dauntless9: ‘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.’</p>
<p>Is it weird that I liked picturing someone doing that so much that I read the post 5 times? :D</p>
<p>No Charlotte. People are not forced to go to class or anything else like this. I think it’s difficult for you to understand exactly what we mean until you take some Tech courses yourself. You’re free to look up some finals (they’re up right now) and see if you can find anyone to pretend cheat on them with.</p>
<p><a href=“http://■■■■■■■.com/caltechexam[/url]”>http://■■■■■■■.com/caltechexam</a></p>
<p>Where can I find copies of the finals?</p>
<p>google “caltech final exam” (no quotes)</p>
<p>“I’m concerned with other people cheating it.”</p>
<p>We keep saying: Don’t be; it’s not an issue. Yes, it’s theoretically possible.</p>
<p>Well then if it’s theoretically possible I don’t think much of the system. I think it’s a joke.</p>
<p>I guess we’re all lucky that what you think doesn’t matter… :)</p>
<p>(And by the way, it’s theoretically possible to cheat your way through any school. By your logic, every system’s a joke!)</p>
<p>I don’t know about the other subjects but you can’t really cheat in this level of math exam because there are so many different ways of proving something. I suppose the closest thing that you can do to cheating would be the use wolfram alpha to do a perticularly nasty integral for you, or to check that you’ve done the nasty integral correctly… (If I had a nickel for every time a proof didn’t come out because I goofed up on a comparitively simple operation…)</p>
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<p>If you [charlotte] believe the goal of a system should be to place as many restrictions on cheating as possible rather than to have a school where cheating is not a problem, then sure this is illogical to you. Do you really believe that? I don’t think so.</p>
<p>The real question is whether you have a reason to believe it’s a problem at Caltech…</p>
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<p>Were you planning on being a scientist or an engineer here?</p>
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<p>Therefore what? You won’t apply?</p>
<p>Take home exams are one of the many jokes of the honor system. The entire system is fatally flawed but the administration has become ossified to the point where things will never change and ridiculously opts to take a foolish pride in it. The honor code is routinely bent by a sizable percentage of the populace to conform with personal morality. You sign a sheet of paper once and hear a lot of hoopla from the administration when you first arrive about how great the system is - beyond that the system is never reinforced - and it shows since the BOC is always swamped with cases (and to be completely frank the idea of trial by peers is fatuous).</p>
<p>People here are on average of no higher moral standing than students anywhere else, although the admin would like you to believe everyone here has the utmost integrity and deference for the system. It’s continually touted as one of the great things about Caltech when the reality of it is that it is the school’s most glaring and egregious blemish.</p>