Comment by hcurtiss

I went to Rice which had a similarly strong honor code, and it absolutely inspired pride. In me, and from what I could tell in many of my classmates.

Is it propaganda? In some sense, yes, the only way to maintain such a culture is to repeatedly insist on its importance to prospective and current students. But if so, then it is self-fulfilling propaganda, and in my opinion the honor code made my experience richer.

Im surprised to hear that. I went to Caltech for my postgrad and never collaborated on an test, and it would have never ocurre me to do so (and no, the professor didn’t have to explicitly say they collaboration was not allowed. It was just the standard honor code).

We all suspected of people that didn’t adhere to the honor code and it was frowned upon, and they could have faced repercussions if anyone had reported them.

> every exam was take home

When I was at MIT, most exams were in-class, but open book, open notes, open whatever you wanted to bring with you. And of course that just meant the exams were much harder, because they could assume you had all the necessary reference materials at hand and didn't have to conjure things up from memory. "Cheating" was pointless, because everyone else in the room was struggling just as hard as you were.

> That’s just the propaganda they sell during college visits

I'm speaking generally, not just about colleges. If you've never been in a high-trust commuity, I strongly recommend travelling to find one. It's about as mind blowing as transiting from one such community to a low-trust, high-cynicism one.

Things may have changed, but I don't recall any group exams during my time at Caltech, and conversely I do recall a strong sense of pride in the Honor Code. Also, if your professor allows collaboration, then it's definitionally not cheating: There is a vast moral difference between "the professor made the assignments difficult with the specific expectation that people will collaborate" and "the professor doesn't want collaboration but people did it anyway".

Frankly, this comment feels almost entirely foreign to my experience—I suppose things could've changed over the years (although my impression is that things have gotten much worse recently, not better), or it could be major-specific, or I just got lucky with the specific people I happened to hang out with?

"An honor code is an admission that your curriculum is so sadistic,

No, that's completely wrong and far too cynical.

It's not even an 'honour code' - it's an expectation that people are not cheaters - and that is not only reasonable, it's a very lower bar.

Tech schools is not representative of most places of higher learning - precisely because they tend to have 'sadistic course loads' which distorts things a bit.

As an Engineer, I was always 'overloaded' - and shocked at how relatively little the Arts Majors had to do in comparison and how vague it was.

'University' - is traditionally centred around those Liberal Arts people, or at least not Engineering.

It was never supposed to be 'sadistically' intense - that's just what some of the very technical majors turned it into - and usually not on purpose.

Mostly due to the fact that certain people think that everyone 'must' have a background in such-and-such to be considered 'well rounded'.

And it's not fair to suggest that people 'have to cheat' to get through, maybe more reasonably, the course load is so crazy, that people have to share / work together to fight hard to make it through the course load.

Purely technical schools often don't represent what institutions of higher learning are in the traditional sense, and do get caught up 'in the course knowledge' as opposed to the higher order premise.

I think this 'too much intensity' is a side effect of culture and a few other things, that just makes more civil things difficult to process.

There's no reason to 'cheat' 100 years ago if you're from a wealthy family just getting your education, whereas the competition is fierce now.

And a meta-point on top of the objectively better revenue argument swinging back to the other point about honor: if some or even most of the people involved in the honor system believe it works for the purpose of maintaining honor between each other, then it will encourage honorable behavior, even when there's significant dishonorable behavior.

The fact that most people don't know that the honor system is about money not honor is part of what makes the money part of the honor system work.

This is the standard across Europe outside of a few metropoles (really is there anywhere else in Europe outside Paris & London that does this?)

I assume they are referring to systems like TPG in Geneva. Basically you buy a pass and when you get on an off a bus or street car there is no checking of payment it is just assumed everyone is "honoring" the agreement to pay. Every once and a while transit cops will board and check that everyone has a pass/has paid somehow and if you get caught not paying it can affect your ability to rent housing etc.

It's incredibly common all over Europe, not just Switzerland. Not only the metros but the trams and even buses often rely on this system where there's no turnstile or barrier, you just walk in.

Not sure it's about being a high trust society or not, there's frequent inspections where they block the doors, and you get a hefty fine if you're caught without a valid ticket. I certainly wouldn't call Prague or Rome or Dublin high trust societies on par with a Swiss city.

In Vienna, where there is not a single automated check for public transport tickets (annual passes are analog plastic cards, one-way tickets are paper), there is consistently a less than ~2% fraud rate. So over 98% of users have a valid ticket at any time.

The City of Vienna has concluded that the cost of building such checkpoints combined with the reduced quality of service and the destruction of the city image could never be worth it. I wonder how other cities justify this without implicitly calling their denizens morally inferior to ours.

Could be https://www.myswitzerland.com/en-ch/experiences/metro-lausan...

I definitely still see honor system pay boxes in the USA. Maybe not in big cities, but outside of them.

Disc golf courses, fire wood piles, that day’s chicken eggs in a wooden box on the side of the road.

Princeton was that way in my lifetime (and I'm not that old : ) - corruption is not inevitable nor should honor be considered some sort of utopian dream.

In this case yes. In general, the point of an honor system is supposed to be honor. It's great when it works, but unfortunately it's not working at Princeton.

If one is honorable only for the reward, is one really honorable though?

Either it is a principle or it is a strategy, can't be both.

As I understand it Americans pay tens of thousands of dollars for university.

In my country if you can't hack it you just transfer to something else. Much less pressure. And let's face it if you can't even pass the exams maybe it is not your career? Don't live in a lie and go do something you'll enjoy.

> humans are humans - even if they attend an Ivy

I specifically called out two non-Ivy examples. Humans are humans. And one of those capacities is for behaving with honor. The enemy of honor, it turns out, isn't dishonor, but cynicism. (It isn't surprising that the dominant emotion on a Silicon Valley board towards an honor system is scorn.)

In a truly honorable community anyone who thinks that it's a backdoor will find out that it's not.

don't know about the phone era, but previously schools were widely separated by reputation and practice. "lazy or too slow son of a wealthy family" went to certain schools that had that element. The really competitive and state-of-the-art schools really did not do that "directly". There were approaches for example sports, and niche majors that were easier for sure. Another observation is that some advanced students were into specific and dedicated cheating in order to win. Others had a "party" orientation and just did not do as much schoolwork. A criticism based on "rich kid" also does not ring true as a general statement about University in the USA to me.

Can confirm. I had to make an effort NOT to cheat. It's so incredibly easy on exams with MCQs.