If you give take-home exams, you get what you deserve, which is probably some degree of cheating. There’s no “news” in this big news story about Harvard students collaborating on a take-home exam.
Online exams, take-home exams — they’re invitations to cheat.
Professors shouldn’t give these forms of exams unless they don’t give a damn about how some students are going to write them.
August 30th, 2012 at 8:50PM
If you think of a take-home exam as a self-administered in-class test, then yeah. If you think of a take-home exam as an essay assignment, and use reasonable procedures for monitoring performance (i.e., look for cheating), then it’s an entirely reasonable alternative to the terror-filled blue-book exercises that show no real evidence of helping students learn anything.
August 30th, 2012 at 9:40PM
Bigger question: why offer these gigantic lecture courses for the basic purpose of getting athletes through Harvard? This course has received consistently rock-bottom eval scores (ironic in its own right given the students giving those scores), there are “optional sections,” and the lectures involve the prof’s choice video clips of baseball games. The students are equally at fault; I have serious doubts that the exam was “unusually difficult.” I’ve TA-ed for a class just like this, and a quarter of the students could hardly handle a final exam that duplicated questions from the midterm they took just four weeks earlier. The class is a joke, and there are many other such jokes in the department hiding under the Harvard name, so maybe some bad publicity exposing the total lack of standards in the face of pumped up athletic recruiting will do some good.
August 30th, 2012 at 10:09PM
R: Thanks for those details. My own take on the scandal of such huge stupid courses is that Harvard has a roughly 35 billion dollar endowment. What are the mega mega bucks for? Why does an unimaginably, cosmically, rich school have vast, largely worthless lecture classes in the first place?
August 30th, 2012 at 10:22PM
If you look through the comments on the Crimson story, someone does raise this point and gets a series of totally flippant responses: “I will take a class of 250 taught by the best professor over a class of 50 taught by second-rates.” The students I’ve had generally seem to believe the same thing – this is Harvard so my profs are by default AMAZING GENIUSES, therefore it’s no problem that I’ve never actually spoken to them, they couldn’t recognize my face in a crowd as belonging to one of their students, and some grad student is de facto teaching this class to me. Harvard’s grad students are also likely to be AMAZING GENIUSES-in-training, so I’m actually getting the benefit of MULTIPLE AMAZING GENIUSES each time I sign up for a 300-person course. (Sandel’s “Justice” class typically has 800-1000 students. I believe the intro economics sequence is similar, but I’m not sure.) So Harvard’s cynicism meets students’ self-flattering naivete and everyone is happy in their auditorium-sized classes. Plus, these things pay my rent and seminars don’t, so I probably shouldn’t complain.
August 31st, 2012 at 7:11PM
Part of the problem is undoubtedly the incentive system in place. The course was taught by an assistant professor, who, if history is any guide, is highly likely to land a very good tenured job at a prestigious university, possibly one just as prestigious as Harvard, but is highly unlikely to land one at Harvard, which tends not to tenure its own assistant professors. Whatever tenured position he does receive — including one at Harvard — won’t be on the basis of his teaching. In essence, an assistant professorship at Harvard turns out to be, for most faculty members, a very long postdoc, and the smart scholar treats it as such, and focuses on publishing like crazy. Ethically, the professor should have done a good job of what little teaching he has to do (and basing a course grade solely on four take-home exams, which sound like they were poorly designed to boot, doesn’t meet that standard), but the institution also bears some responsibility for providing so little incentive for him to do so.
Big courses with a strong lecturer and discussion sections led by competent TAs — a scenario that is certainly possible at Harvard — can work quite well for all involved. But apparently in this case the discussion sections weren’t even required, even though there were TAs available to lead them, and to do the grading. Perhaps the professor didn’t want to run the one or two sections he would have been expected to take if sections were required, and to do the requisite grading? Or perhaps the department was cutting corners? Despite Harvard’s ginormous endowment, it’s been crying poor lately.
At least the professor reported the problem to the appropriate board once it was discovered — or I wonder whether the fact that TAs noticed it first forced him to? At the very least, somebody in the government department seems to have recalled one lesson that can be learned from the past half-century or so of political scandals: a coverup often causes more problems than the original crime.
September 1st, 2012 at 8:07AM
Harvard students have a possible line of defense:
“Charles Ogletree”
“Laurence Tribe”
“Alan Dershowitz”
“Elena ‘See No Evil’ Kagan”
These students are simply practicing for when they will become big shots themselves, and they are entitled to an understanding enabler like former dean Kagan, herself once a toiler in Professor Tribe’s enterprise.
September 1st, 2012 at 8:21AM
tp: I totally agree. Harvard has created the culture it now enjoys.