> For one example, Caltech has an honor system where the default is for the professors and students to be collaborators and trust each other rather than be adversaries.
What does this mean in practice? Students and staff collaborate in every institution I've ever been part of.
I didn’t go to caltech, but at Harvey Mudd we had a similar vibe. I once had a take home exam that stipulated I had to take a 5 minute break half way through the test. During the break I was not allowed to think about the exam problems. That was probably the most difficult rule I was ever asked to follow during a take-home. I tried to follow it as best I was able.
On one take home math exam I decided to TeX up my answers. This was permitted as long as you stayed within the time limits, but I forgot the command for a specific symbol. I wouldn’t be able to print my exam until after my time had elapsed, and so I wouldn’t even be able to draw the symbol on the printed exam without violating the letter of the law. Naturally using the internet to look up the command would also be a violation of the rules. I chose to just include an apology in my proof that explained the situation and then introduced a replacement symbol that I used instead.
I got the impression that most students were similarly strict about adhering to take home exam rules.
An adversarial system is where, for example, exams are proctored because the students are not trusted. It's where students actually brag about cheating to their peers.
At Caltech, I never heard anyone brag about cheating. I know of one student who willingly took an F because he accidentally went over the time limit for the take-home exam, and reported it. Nobody would have known otherwise if he hadn't reported it.
> An adversarial system is where, for example, exams are proctored because the students are not trusted.
Much is made of unproctored exams, but at least 30 years ago (and I haven't heard of this changing since) students were given master keys which opened almost every part of campus, and had official 24/7 access to almost everything. Also, lockpicking was a widely known and broadly accepted student hobby, and there was apparently a fairly well-known heirarchy of which places to which students did not have official access were merely nominally off limits and would result in token punishment for the sake of form (provided no damage to persons, property, etc., was done) and which were really, seriously off-limits.
That is, the culture went beyond just unproctored exams.
My recollection is that you had to actually have a reasonable justification to be given an official master key, but if you acquired an unofficial master (such as by borrowing someone's official master and copying it) nobody would bother you about it.
When I was there (late 70s, early 80s) the best masters were actually not official masters. The best were Whitehead masters, made by a student named John Whitehead. He hand filed a master with intentional deviations from ideal designed so that when you copied it, the copying errors would make it closer to ideal. Whitehead masters were copies of that hand filed key.
Several people from campus security used Whitehead masters instead of their official masters because the Whitehead ones worked better.
I had an accidental master for a while. My room key happened to function as a master when inserted halfway. I don't remember how I discovered that. I'm assuming that they have long since changed the lock systems, but on the off chance they have not, it was room 21 of Ricketts.
> if you acquired an unofficial master (such as by borrowing someone's official master and copying it) nobody would bother you about it
How do they justify this when the keys may be locking doors that for example protect extremely sensitive personal information? Like for example financial information for support or allegations of misconduct or criminal activity? Don’t they have a legal obligation to protect these things?
> How do they justify this when the keys may be locking doors that for example protect extremely sensitive personal information?
The locks for rooms that had extremely sensitive information, personal or otherwise, did not use the same master as was available to students, and used a different brand of lock that was more resistant to lockpicking. And, perhaps more important in practice than the actual resistance to lockpicking, the brand was widely understood as a signal that picking the lock was not acceptable. Presumably, they also had electronic security.
Personal observation - assuming everyone is out to get everyone else is a cultural thing that wasnt such a concern until quite recently. It's a bit like looking at certain phrases in common use 70 years ago and wondering why anyone would use them.
Because once upon a time you could trust and at the same time people didn't feel like that they had that much to hide. In modern society secrecy is the only new 'experience'.
I don’t know how it is handled now, but when I was there things that needed higher security like that were in rooms that had locks not on the master system.
You had most older buildings on one brand of ordinary locks with a master system, and the newer buildings with better ordinary locks on a different master system, and then a few rooms with Medico high security locks.
As sibling commenters have commented, yeah, the higher-security rooms used Medecos instead -- they had not only up * down for the pins but also directional slant (don't really know how to describe this, but pretty and much harder to copy or pick). But also, think through student motivations: I used my master to get into the steam tunnels, to find cool things, to gain access to the old wind tunnel, to find space to make art, to win at capture the flag. Who wants personal info or allegations of misconduct? And moreover, isn't the computer a much lazier vehicle for finding such info?
Presumably they multiplied the probability of this occurring with the damage caused and decided that it was lower than the benefit of the high-trust society.
> My recollection is that you had to actually have a reasonable justification to be given an official master key
My recollection is that that was strictly correct but that the scope of acceptable justifications (ca. 1990) was broad enough that that was all but a formality.
> That is, the culture went beyond just unproctored exams.
Indeed. Students also left their dorm rooms unlocked. I never heard of a case of one student stealing from another. A friend of mine at another university had his locked dorm room looted within his first week. Ugh.
This reminds me of my time at Virginia Tech (recent grad here). Those of us on upper quad never locked our doors. This had apparently been a thing on upper quad all the way back to the start of the university and that only changed when we moved to the new buildings with electronic locks. I'd say once we moved into the new dorms 75% or more of us were jamming the doors/locks so that they wouldn't lock. This only really started to change after "the adults" started reprimanding people for refusing to lock their doors (There were concerns about ability to compartmentalise/hide in an active shooter situation as well as potential fire safety issues).
It was a really unique and pleasant experience. So much less stressful being able to completely trust the people around you. It's a shame that the tradition has started to die out.
Of course the upper quad is made up of the cadets. That might have something to do with it. I would never leave my door unlocked when I lived on campus. These were the days when Vawter was all-male and before they razed Thomas Hall and got rid of the best breakfast dining hall.
Security almost certainly doesn't patrol the tunnels with any regularity (they're uncomfortable to be in, after all), especially after the recent switch to contracted security. Maybe they'd patrol the entrances on occasion. The majority of doors are silent-alarmed, but plenty of students know which ones :)
For some more context, I've seen many threads on Reddit that typify an adversarial system. The posters would brag about cheating, and would justify it by saying the course material was bullshit and the professors were unreasonable and the degree was just gatekeeping. They'd describe the arms race between students figuring out new ways to cheat and the effort expended by the professors to thwart cheating.
At Caltech, it was effortless to cheat and professors made no attempt to thwart it. (That said, if two exam papers came back with the same mistakes, the students would still have some 'splainin' to do.)
The students all knew each other (being a small university) and the A students were often asked to help out the struggling students (I got a lot of help this way), and so it was pretty obvious to spot an A student who didn't actually master the material. You knew they earned it.
> I know of one student who willingly took an F because he accidentally went over the time limit for the take-home exam, and reported it. Nobody would have known otherwise if he hadn't reported it.
Well done. Somehow I feel that this individual will do very well in life.
I think an adversarial system be one where professors and students have opposing interests like if professors were rewarded for giving out the lowest grades possible. Proctored exams is just keeping people honest and the playing field fair.
The flip side of take-home exams was that they could be really long. Exams were generally four hours apiece, but some of mine were eight hours long. And you needed all the time they gave you! (At least I did anyway....)
I looked it up a while back and apparently the new SAT is only 4-5 hours long, which really put it in perspective for me how nuts[0] Caltech final exams are (especially when a typical finals week for me has several at once) :-P
[0] I mean this humorously, not insultingly—I also don't regret choosing Caltech in the slightest.
Maybe professors leave the room during exams. I think a number of universities do this. Outright "adversaries" sounds insane and toxic though. I don't know how an undergrad institution could even function if students and professors were actively trying to undermine each other.
One example of an adversarial university environment is how fraternities and sororities keep copies of exams and assignments from prior years. Professors know cheating is rampant, so have to change the questions every semester.
Some courses at Caltech had almost identical exams for at least a decade when I went through. The professors knew cheating like the above simply would not be tolerated by undergrads.
I sat on and helped run the Board of Control, which handled academic honor code violations, for several years and professors who had been at other universities would absolutely rave about how much more they could trust Caltech students. And that was while reporting a suspected cheating case to me.
This honestly sounds ridiculous to me. Every course I ever did we had access to years and years of past papers. Doing past papers is one of the best ways to study. Teaching or learning to the test is a good thing if the test is good.
Some professors would provide past exams for study aids or use them as homework problems.
However, the explicit default was that you should not look at solutions from prior years. Professors would announce at the beginning of the course that they reuse questions and looking at prior years solutions was an honor code violation. I think it's pretty clear it's cheating when the expectations are clearly outlined.
If you had inadvertently come across the problem before and independently solved it, you were expected to disclose that as part of your answer. I personally had to do this several times, and never suffered any negative consequences for it, but the expectation for honesty was there.
So why not just provide students with officially sanctioned practice papers that are not past papers and also guaranteed to not share questions with the actual exam?
If you write a new exam paper every year that is also guaranteed not to share questions with the actual exam. From a professor’s point of view many questions that are superficially different are similar enough to practically be the same question. There are many, many questions that ask about what the real cause of the French Revolution was, or test to see if you will recognize that this problem is basically a red black tree.
In college where I was at last year exams were public knowledge and anyone had access to them. No one seen it as cheating to try last year exam before going on this year.
Yes, it means teachers have to vary tests, but then again it gives you repository of exercises to learn from and to train on. It is just win for learning.
This is an explicit rule introduced at the beginning of most Caltech courses, so the norm is that that behavior is cheating due to being warned in advance.
All my exams (but one) were take home with well understand rules of engagement. The one exam that wasn't take hime was a visiting professor who made us take the exam at the same time in our normal meeting room and then the left the room for 3 hours. I don't think any of us cared that it was in that particular room, but it was weird to all take the test at 2pm.
At Caltech, they were normally take-home. Institute policy was they were not proctored. The exams had a time limit from opening the exam to pencils down. The conditions, like open-note or open-book, were specified.
The students were totally on their own with this and nobody would know if they chose to cheat or not. Cheating was so trivial to do there was no cred for bragging about it. If other students found out someone was cheating, that someone would be ostracized by the students, which was much worse than anything the institute could do to them.
Of course, people are people and I'm sure some cheating went on. But I bet it was at a much lower rate than at places with proctored exams.
As for me, it was the first time in my life adults trusted me and treated me like an adult rather than a child. I much prefer that to the extended childhood offered by other universities. I was motivated by simple pride to earn the degree rather than cheat and get a tainted one.
I graduated from Caltech last year, and the exams are all still take-home. You're expected to time yourself and not consult course materials, and basically nobody cheats. It's a rare sort of equilibrium where nobody's cheating, so it's very hard to start -- you won't find any co-conspirators, and if you're found out it's social death.
I'm a bit saddened that other universities have not attempted to emulate this. Maybe it only works because Caltech is such a small place, small enough that you get to know most of the people there, and the social interconnectedness is strong.
10 years after Caltech, I went to law school. I was surprised to find that they did not have take home exams. Law is a profession that actually has ethical requirements, but apparently we can't trust law students to behave ethically?
This annoyed me not only because of the lack of trust, but because law school exam questions are almost always essay questions that take a few pages to answer. No way did I want to try handwriting that much.
Fortunately, they did allow you to at least bring a typewriter to the exam (they set aside a separate room for this so it would not disturb the people who were handwriting).
There were limits, though. The typewriter could not have more than 2 lines of storage. This was around 1992, and already by then microprocessors and LCDs had become cheap enough that even most entry level typewriters exceeded the limit. It took a fair bit of effort to find one that was acceptable.
What does this mean in practice? Students and staff collaborate in every institution I've ever been part of.