Comment by bluegatty

"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.