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Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly.

I have a friend who in college had another student take his test from the "complete" pile, erase my friend's name, and put on his own instead. It was only through blind luck that my friend figured it out. He, the TA, and the professor reported it – with smoking gun proof – but nothing happened.

The same laxness applies to academic research integrity. Universities rarely punish academics who are discovered to falsify data.

It's a very different world from the exams I had in Denmark, both uni and high school:

* all exams were proctored

* the proctoring were done by external people hired to do this.

* you could not leave exam for the toilet without asking first and then being followed out by a watcher, which then would follow you back and check the toilet afterwards for notes.

* you were never handed back the papers you handed in.

* responses were judged both by your own teacher and by an independent teacher from another institution.

* you must use ballpoint pen (permanent) and not pencil. Pencil responses were ignored.

Today the studens are even handed Faraday-bags that their phones and smart watches must be kept in during the exam. Full instructions for exam watchers for a business school: https://www.nielsbrock.dk/da/om-niels-brock/til-eksamensvagt...

I had a similar experience when I was a TA at UT Austin that I wrote about on HN years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23163472

If you want rage bait, read the proceedings of honor code committees at your school. At least at Northwestern they were public record (sometimes with redaction of identities). The number of people who got off with obviously bullshit excuses was maddening even to read about.

That student was shameless for success. I’m sure she has navigated her way through plenty of institutions by now, confusing getting away with it for being clever.

She’s probably a banker or VC pulling in $10M a year now

Great story.

I don't think you need to feel like a piece of shit for your brief defense of the student. Erasing and replacing the answer is unusual. As is photocopying all the tests.

Asking someone for an explanation of an unusual circumstance is perfectly natural. Perhaps TA#2 should feel like a piece of shit for her lousy explanation!

Honestly - the first thing that came to my mind is that the papers got stapled back together wrong, and her original correct answer was swapped with someone else's incorrect one. And instead of simply explaining that, she decided to just erase what was there and re-submit. But who knows?

I'm not defending the honor code or anything, but photocopying students' exams seems like an end-run around the policy.

I wish I as a student had this power. I took an exam once for a class I had taken before (transfer student woes). I went into the hall, took the easy exam, turned it in, and left. They lost my test.

I had no idea until 3 weeks later when exam scores were finally uploaded and mine was missing. The quarter was over and what the hell could I possibly do at that point? I had no possible evidence to give to show that I not only took the test but definitely passed because I've already taken the class

There is an easy solution to Princeton’s problem, and it’s to have an honor system with a backbone. The way honor historically worked.

At my private high school, and at my university (although they later gutted it), we had a “single sanction” honor code.

That is, if you were caught lying, cheating, or stealing - in any way, and in or out of school, though usually it was in - you were immediately expelled. No mitigating circumstances. No negotiation.

To many of my peers this sounded very harsh, especially since these were very good schools you worked hard to get to and succeed in. But part of why they were good schools was because of this.

We do zero tolerance for so many things but integrity is the one thing that misses it for some reason.

I used to proctor accounting exams. It's insane to me that people would just leave the room to students. At the very least they might have questions and then they ask the class instead of calling the proctor

So, they didn't face any consequences. Did they at least keep the original grade or was this so well explained they also got the re-grade?

I mean I get that the student broke the rules, at least per this anecdote. And what was done is dishonorable and the student deserves what is coming to the student.

But, I think it gets to a deeper issue with education.

Like, the cynic in me will say that the student learned a new tactic, one that got rewarded, and they are likely to repeat it over and over.

But the teacher, the hopeful part of me, the one that wants growth and striving, that part of me says that the student learned a lesson and is unlikely to repeat that hack. That they got dragged about, told a lot of very tough stories, saw the consequences, and then saw the light, and they will never do it again. And that experience taught them more than the class ever could about life - a much more valuable lesson in the end.

I hope that is what occurred. I think that's probably what the many admins told themself what would happen. I have worked with Princeton grads though, and it is much more likely that nothing of the sort occurred.

Most 'elite' grads think they pulled it over on the school, like they always have, that they were cleverer, somehow. That they 'won', when they really lost and learned worse than nothing, they learned the wrong thing. And then they get out into the real world and they get a successful bigjob and a nice little manageable coke habit and a not as manageable addiction or two. Then a spouse when that time comes and that other line says something no-one really wants, but not with a person they respect or that respects them. And by the time the second kid is done teething, the divorce is done and they think they are 'free' again. So they dive off a cliff in some azure water as the grandkids aren't well taken care of by expensive as hell help.

The ayahuasca vomit dries on the corner of their mouth as they check their actually-personal account for the half dozen 39th birthday wishes, they wonder where it all went wrong. They decide that it was others, not themselves, surely, that can't be true, because Dad was an asshole and Mom really wasn't ever 'there'-there when you think about it.

Because they are still trying to pull one over, to be cleverer, to be the 'good' one at whatever life is in their mind: A long fucking ladder covered in degrees and accolades and tears and jackasses. They live in the derivative.

So, look, don't be butthurt about a jackass undergrad that is too blind and treadmilled to ruin their own life.

But do be butthurt that the system is too fucking tired and old to really deeply care anymore about the young and not just hurting their 'future' - as if that could ever be measured by only a GPA.

"There is no honor among elites"

Maybe a bit that - but it's far more the change of elite 'class' institutions - to elite 'competitive' institutions.

'Grades Did Not Matter' 100 years ago so much.

It was where 'the only educated people sent their kids to be educated'.

Or maybe the nouveau riche bourgois did.

Now it's a 'Giant International Competition'.

You can see this where students are competitive with grades elsewhere in the world.

They're competing for jobs at OpenAI among a million others.

I'm shamed to admit I can't remember the quote from someone who lamented the fact that traditionally people 'knew their place' and there was on some level a quietude in that, a zen - but when 'anyone can be anything' it creates hyper competition, anxiety, sense of failure for most people who can never live up to being the 'most exceptional at whatever', and the constant stress of 'keeping up with the Jones's'.

See: Instagram - it's not pictures of family and friends - it's almost entirely 'social competition through lifestyle narration' ... which that includes University's as 'brand'.

Hence the competition.

Did you get that idea from here? https://www.persuasion.community/p/getting-to-denmark

Francis Fukuyama wrote in a recent blog post: "The United States is no longer a high-trust country. We must regain what’s been lost."

I object to these "wide brush" social commentaries. Normally, they are written by powerful/famous men and frequently negative. I call it "Packaged Doomerism". The US is so huge that is hard to generalise about its culture. There are at least six distinctive cultural regions. Take California as an example: There is a surprisingly large cultural gap between the north (Bay Area) and south (LA/Orange/San Diego). That is just one state. In the same way that the US is huge, so is Europe -- about 50 countries. I cringe when I see the phrase, "In Europe, ..."

I mean, I find myself saying this all the time. It explains so, so much about American culture. We're transitioning from an honor culture to a "don't be a sucker" culture.

The example I always point to is golf. I'm a huge golf nerd, and if there's one thing I hate it's professional golf. They sit there and pretend it's a "gentleman's game" and then let people like Patrick Reed openly and obviously cheat... repeatedly. They even got rid of the ability for fans to call in rules violations. Why? Because it's no fun, boo. Players used to want to not win when they broke the rules.

Gambling in college and pro sports? We went from the Black Sox shame and a Pete Rose being banned, to now players getting slaps on the wrist. Our society does not reward honor, so most people will not be honorable, plain and simple. Yes, there are plenty of us who will care more about integrity, but the vast majority of us won't care.

> it's more about America transitioning from a high-trust society to a low-trust one.

We're talking about Princeton, here. Trust among elites remains persistently high. In fact, it's likely higher than ever due to assortative mating & geographic sorting. Elites, even students in the Ivies, still have trust of government and elite institutions, which the elite stratum itself runs. Trust between elites and lower strata has declined, where elites and middle- and lower-classes have significant mistrust between each other, and the latter have lower trust within their own strata than in the past.

What's more likely IMO is that 1) the cost of cheating (i.e. the cost of assembling a ripped off assignment multiplied by the risk of being caught) has declined precipitously due to LLMs and 2) elite institutions remain the most ruthlessly competitive in the country and even the world.

When was the USA a high trust society?

cheating in school has always existed though-- the article mentions that. AI has made it easier.

everyone knows what the cause of that transition was.

hint: look at canada.

I'm very interested in how this cheating is perceived by other students.

There is no peer pressure not to cheat?

Students aren't considered sketchy or jerky for cheating?

Being seen cheating has no adverse affect on their ability to date, to join group projects, to join student startups, etc.?

My son is taking an AP chem class - he's doing really well, super interested in the subject. It's a difficult class, to be sure. Many of his peers are just goofing off and don't understand things. My son regularly tells me about people in his lab group that are cheating off his papers (and, I think, even his test). He tries to cover up answers, but it's not always possible to do.

What is even more frustrating is that the teacher knows this and does nothing about it. Maybe one could argue that, in the end, these students fail to learn and will get their just rewards. But it seems to me that the lack of immediate corrective action (eg, an F on an assignment) is a failing of the system.

Have a phones-free classroom. Problem solved.

That’s pretty sad. Even sadder is that those people will hardly even feel it to be cheating because they’re now using AI for absolutely everything and so suddenly contented with a situation where it can’t be used they still can’t help but use it. Not a good sign.

> What on earth could be the objection to proctoring?

There is a unique pride in being part of a community built around honor. You see this on the Swiss metro and in small-town vegetable stalls. Unproctored exams force every student to weigh the value of their honor against a better grade. That's a personal moral reckoning that might be worth the entire degree.

Right, but there’s really only two directions you can go.

1. Install a culture of honour/virtue/accountability. Rely on duty and moral justice to keep the majority in-line.

2. An arms race to prevent ever more sophisticated methods of cheating, and the reduction in human dignity this implies. (E.g. the proctor must follow you into the toilet).

We all want the systems to be fair and just; but we also all want to be treated with dignity. No easy answers.

As someone who has attended this kind of program, it's because some students will cheat and view proctoring as an annoyance.

Imo it's both on the students (plenty of students are optimizing just to get a class out of the way to do more interesting stuff) and the programs (some classes just aren't up-to-date or are rightfully viewed as busywork).

Personally, I found courses that were output heavy and regurgitation light tended to be the most successful from an honor code perspective - you can't cheat your way out of "learning by doing" when you are held accountable for the output (eg. A research grade paper or implementing a fully functional Linux kernel).

Sadly, even at Ivies most lower div classes are just rote memorization because class sizes would be massive for plenty of core classes (100-500 students for some classes).

Stanford has this policy too. Students get livid when proctoring is proposed, even though cheating is rampant (afaict)

Some schools love to pride themselves on their students' integrity. They don't proctor because they think their students don't cheat and can be trusted. I don't know about Princeton but a college my family attended had stats showing no difference between test scores in proctored vs. unproctored exams. That was before LLMs would have made it so easy to cheat. Maybe that school has changed its policy as well.

I would never NARC on someone shoplifting or dealing drugs but cheating on exams? Yeah no fuck you we're not India here.

That's your future cardiologist.

A couple of my friends teach university classes. Mostly undergrad. I get to hear some of their interesting stories when we game together.

My impression is that there was a sharp shift around COVID. Doing classes over Zoom with a talking head broke the connection they had with their professors and other students. College felt closer to a video game operated through your screen than a community.

When I was in college not all that long ago, cheating was a scandalous thing. I knew a friend of a friend who cheated on an exam with some tricks and it resulted in suspension for a semester. There were rumors of someone hiring a service to write their papers for them and it was a wild story.

Now students have ChatGPT to write their papers and they've been practicing how to use cell phones without the teacher noticing for 10 years before getting to college. Combine that with social media grumblings about how college is "just a piece of paper" and doomerism about how they're never going to get a job or buy a house and cheating starts to look the only rational option to some.

The pattern is not contained to college. Every time the topic of cheating comes up on Hacker News there are more comments defending cheating than I would expect from this crowd. The usual justification is that the system is broken in a hand-wavey way and therefore nobody can be blamed for cheating.

As someone who went there (albeit many decades ago) I can tell you FWIW when I was there folks took it seriously. I literally knew of no one who ever cheated on an exam. And I'm pretty sure that anyone I knew who observed cheating would have taken it seriously enough to bring it to the process. It was pretty much a fixture of how students thought about things. So it worked (near as I could tell) back then.

But institutions take awhile to adjust to new realities, and it while looks like Princeton may have been a bit behind the curve on this one, I can understand why they were reluctant to abandon this practice. Living in an honest community cuts a lot of extra effort out - crap that you don't even have to think about. Princeton will be a less productive place to learn going forward.

The history of the Honor Code system might be instructive: https://universityarchives.princeton.edu/2015/01/i-pledge-my...

Exames were previously proctored, and it led to a "us vs them" mentality that meant students banded together to

The Honor Code system, and removing proctors was a way to route around that—it made all of the students responsible for catching cheaters and turned the "Students vs Faculty" mentality into a "Honor vs Cheaters" mentality among the students.

Unfortunately, it seems like the "Students vs Faculty" mentality has seen too much of a resurgence due to outside factors, and the Honor Code is no longer a match for the current climate. That's what the article is about

Even more astounding is the reporting number.

If 44.6% of students saw an honor code violation and didn't report it, and 0.4% of students saw an honor code violation and did report it, that means that 99.2% of Princeton students that pledge to report honor code violations break that pledge. And that's only counting the voluntary reporters, meaning that the actual rate is presumably even worse!

But also, how would reporting a suspected honor code violation even work? There's intentionally no staff witnessing the exam, and you aren't likely to know the names and faces of your whole class, so what would the professor even do with that information? "Professor, I saw someone take his phone out, I think maybe he was cheating, I don't know his name." Okay, thanks Captain Non-Actionable. We'll file that in the circular academic integrity investigation bin.

The burning question for me is how does this compare to previous years?

Looks like they started doing this senior survey in 2022, so unfortunately there's no pre-COVID info.

2022 20.9% cheating, 31.5% non-reporting

2023 25.4% cheating, 33.6% non-reporting

2024 28.8% cheating, 42.0% non-reporting

2025 29.9% cheating, 44.6% non-reporting

So from this it seems like cheating has been increasing significantly over just the last few years

> 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report

What is it at other universities? I went to a big public school, and remember cheating being halfway rampant. The penalty, moreover, was never expulsion.

When I was at Rice a quarter century ago, I can honestly say everyone I knew took the honor system seriously.

Ivy League has always been like this. Everyone gets goods grades. It’s a legacy of the good old boy network.

It’s good for the brand in general. It’s pretty easy to find a 3.8 GPA kid from Harvard. There’s no C students to dirty up the alumni network.

You’re mostly buying into a tribe. Other tribes do well too.

My guess is that the vast majority of those self-reported cases where relating to a take-home assignment (e.g., copying off a classmate's solution). Even without proctoring, you need to be a lot more brazen to cheat on an in-person exam.

Not just Princeton, my uni had a similar honor code and changed it a couple years ago to have proctors after a bunch of cheating events. I don't really get it either. Cheating has been going up exponentially since 2020 but it existed before then. I don't think it's COVID related strictly. Things moved online so cheating became easier and then LLMs became popular and from what I hear that's the most common way of cheating now. I have tested LLMs on undergrad level algorithms problems and was surprised it easily solved them so I think their use goes well beyond just coding assignments.

I've heard that it's the same at <other elite private university I don't want to name>, and people cheat, to the point where non-cheaters are suspicious that it's just a method of grade inflation

The honor systems is the correct system for an institution where learning is the goal as the tests are there to help you internalize the material and know how well you've absorbed it. Instead we've turned universities into vocational schools where the goal is the degree and testing is seen as a hurdle to overcome to attain it.

It's nothing crazy about it. Why do you study? To learn. The exams are there to benchmark your progress. If you cheat, everything falls apart for you.

It is possible that when the metric becomes the target(AKA Goodhart's law) cheating can be beneficial but this is failure of the institution because it means you are no longer there to learn.

It's interesting that people can anonymously admit to cheating. It's a way of saying "don't hate the player, hate the game."

Note, "cheating on assignment or exam during your time at the institution" is a ridiculously broad net to cast. It includes everything from "merely asking one friend on one random night if they got the same numerical answer on the first freshman-year homework (despite both of you working independently and figuring out the entire derivations onto your own)" to "blatantly copying every answer on your final exams every single semester." The fact that they don't distinguish radically different things makes their 30% figure suspect.

AIUI, these schools see their mission as training the next generation of leaders and elites. They aim for people with strong abilities, and moral character.

And, the way you guide youth to act in a certain way is by treating them that way. If you want them to be trustworthy, you trust them. This is not a totally fringe idea.

Here in Canada, a housemate of mine used ChatGPT to cheat in all his courses. He got caught on only a single one because he scored 100%. Then he did it again and got caught again in the same course. For some reason, the professor never reported him to the dean or whoever is supposed to deal with this kind of stuff. He graduated but his degree is basically a degree in cheating.

The interesting thing is that cheating is much easier when done online. When I was a TA and we were in the process of moving quite a bit of the classes to online, we still mandated in person testing.

It was eye opening to find cheat sheets and other cheating materials obviously left behind by students. The majority of the stuff we'd find we either inaccurate and completely wrong. Like a half awake student copied something they thought was the right equation or solution, when in fact, it was for something completely different that wasn't on the test.

So I agree with your notion, but its one thing to try and cheat. Its a completely different one to do so successfully.

I think it really depends on how you view our high education system. As a middle-aged man returning to school to switch careers, my entire reason for going to school is to learn, and I'd never cheat because that would undermine my own goals. To me the purpose of school isn't the degree--I made an entire career already without one--it's to learn.

Students are at school for a lot of poorly-thought-out reasons: inertia, not knowing what else to do, because their parents made them go, etc. If they're not there to learn, you can't make them learn. No, not even by proctoring exams. The only purpose that achieves is to gatekeep.

And, gatekeeping for doctors and pilots is a good thing. We don't want to let just anyone become a doctor or pilot. But frankly, I don't give any shits about whether an AI programmer has made it through a gatekept degree. That stuff can be gatekept at other points--if they show up to work pretending and don't know anything, that will become obvious, and degrees maybe aren't the only or even best way to obtain that knowledge anyway.

All that's to say: if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options (i.e. a career) then proctored exams make sense. But if higher education is just for learning, it's stupid to put all this gatekeeping around it--that simply closes doors to interested learners, while allowing people who can "college" well to thrive without really learning. Let the cheaters cheat--they're only hurting their own learning--and I think it's often because you're forcing them to take some gen-ed thing that isn't useful knowledge to them (I'm looking at you, calculus--why was I forced to take 4 semesters of calc, when I always knew that the prob and stat classes I took as electives were more useful?).

are feelings more strongly felt more valid? the same things are happening at caltech - that is, just as much cheating - and they have an honor code. but they feel much stronger about their honor code, so it is more valid.

To people who have not grown up in extremely honor-bound societies and communities the idea sounds strange, yes. To those of us who did, however, events like this remind us of how fragile those systems are and that entry should be severely restricted.

Hm, this answers something I was wondering, how do accusations work with no proctors or other evidence

> exams are designed so that cheating is not a viable strategy to obtain high grades

That's interesting. How do they do that?

Stanford is also unproctored by charter.

It's weird, right? The US is just hands down strange in some regards to little procedural things that are important but also easy to implement, and yet for whatever reason don't do and make a big deal over it when it's a complete non-affaire in other countries.

Like voter ID. It's not some partisan issue. None of the political parties are fighting Elections Canada over it and its been around my whole life. Its just not a thing(tm). You go to vote, show your ID and and voilà, done. And yet somehow, this is a "big deal" down south?

Ivy league schools , imho, tend to operate differently--more hands-off approach. The assumption is if you're smart and determined enough to get in, that you will not cheat. The filtering to get in is intense, so this presumably filters out less honest people.

well yes, you were in Toronto, where there is a very very veeerry high cheating ratio compared to other areas.

Yes, this is really depressing. I don't want to have to ban devices from exams, but it is something I might have to think about.

I mean, so many graded assignments are online now that very little technology is needed to cheat. I would guess that is the largest driver in increased cheating at universities.

This can easily be stopped. I don’t see how you would copy whole paragraphs or the working of a physics this way without easily being caught but this can mitigated against.

That's not really the assumption they were making. It used to be that going to an elite university was good enough without also having top grades. Now there's more pressure, and cheating is way easier than before. In a similar vein, higher-tier schools tend to put less effort into weeding students out, because they assume everyone who got admitted there has already proven themselves enough. Wonder if that will last.

The elite have ALWAYS had special rules.

Whereas the rest of us were always assumed to be cheaters until absolutely cleared otherwise.

Just look at how people are treated by the dalits who run Proctorio. We were teated as less than human.

You might be interested in the history. That was definitely not the case 133 years ago. Since at least the Middle Ages education has had a big impact on profession and station wasn’t just like a pastime for curiosity.

I honestly think it's that. I've seen it before at other private schools, where someone is caught cheating and let off with very minor consequences. Private high schools were hiding it from colleges too.

> Everyone is a cheater if they think they can get away with it. I don't mean 50% I mean more like 95-100%.

Not convinced of this. I would imagine the majority of people are more likely to cheat if they see the a lot of people getting away with it, not merely if they think they themselves can get away with it.

Similar in Finland. If it is not proctored it is either "homework" or "project". Not an exam.

The numbers don't play out because international chinese students only make up 5-7% (maybe less) of the undergraduate student body. Self-reported cheating frequencies are much higher.

Yeah seems low to me.

> so the rich kids that have parents who pay for parts of the school can still get a pass?

It's Princeton. They're given due process, not administrative fiat. Also, on what planet does having "parents who pay for parts of the school" swing a student (versus administrator) run process?

Princeton has so much money that they could make it free for all undergrads and literally never run out of money.

Taking the ‘generally honest and honorable’ point without challenge, corruption is unavoidable at a level of 1500 students per year despite students generally being honorable. As the article shows 2/3 students never cheated (or would never admit it) but that doesn’t do much to soften the blow that 1/3 did cheat and got away with it.

As a result, we still have 1/3 of the future leaders of American business/politics cheating and not facing any consequences. Princeton appears to be an unprincipled institution and is shown to lack any useful standard to evaluate the quality of its graduates. When you see a Princeton graduate with high marks you should always consider that they may have cheated to finish their degree.

Nah, it's just that I went to college and saw cheating. When an assignment was take-home, people were forming cheating rings, but because they wanted an upper hand but because they were afraid others were doing the same. I saw even some top-notch students cheat a little bit, cause they wanted 4.00 not 3.95.

As a non-cheater, I didn't want draconian measures to catch cheating, just wanted there to be real consequences when someone was caught. I didn't need 4.00, but what if I did?

Chegg was a $15B company before AI came out. I promise that wasn't because it was the best platform to learn the material.

I agree that humans are generally honorable for things with low stakes. Consider our cultural view of politicians for a non-SV example of where we fully expect high stakes to lead to selfish and dishonorable actions.

> Despite HN trendiness, SV and business world advocacy of 'animal instincts', and current cultural trends, humans are generally honest and honorable

I personally believe this (that people are generally honest and good). BUT, the numbers don't lie: 30% of Princeton students admit to having cheated on an exam. This is a "your house is on fire" moment. An honor code has has to be enforced, and that is apparently not happening at Princeton. Frankly, as someone working at a school that also has an honor code (most do, in my experience), that is where the problem lies: if you turn a blind eye to violators, it sends the message to everyone that the honor code is just words, it doesn't mean anything.

The fish rots from the head. It's a sucker's game to aspire to selflessly serve the greater good when the most powerful people in the land are brazenly corrupt pedophiles. In other words: monkey see, monkey do.

I've known a lot of people who justify crimes like shoplifting by the fact that these corporations have stolen from them (and not in some abstract way, often literal wage theft) and felt like the social contract was already broken. And it's not like the leaders at the large corporations I've worked at generally seem to care about their employees or customers (I would describe most places I worked at as, at best, amoral. I've heard "well, if we didn't do it some other less ethical company would" too many times).

Edit: not that I'm pro-shoplifting, it's that the article talks about them breaking the "social contract" (though the article is more of a reality show-esque piece as it's a opinions writer beefing with Twitch streamers and doesn't talk to any people actually shoplifting).

This doesn't seem particularly related?

> Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting [1]

Hasan Piker (one of the people in that link) is a streamer who got popular for extremist takes and controversy. He's just doing what he does to stay famous in that interview. The other person is a writer for The New Yorker who apparently enjoys controversy too.

This interview isn't representative of anything other than two people trying to be edgy because they want their interview to go viral.

> it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.

Are unsupervised examinations common in the US? Or is this, in fact, simply one institution coming in to line with common US national and international practice?

People can still behave honorably despite all this. It's easy (and wrong) to justify someone's dishonorable behavior by pointing to the leaders.

  “But what about the argument that if everyone just starts stealing wantonly,” Spiegelman replies, “Whole Foods will eventually raise the prices?”

  “Yeah, chaos,” Piker says. “Full chaos. Let’s go.”

  “I kind of am inclined toward this,” Tolentino adds. “Everyone, try it. See what happens.”

Source: gas station snack acquisition after 10pm in some USA urban areas, plus stories from abroad

> [...] it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture.

Turning into what from where is the interesting part.

Idk about corruption, but the shoplifting trend has come from corporate america's wholesale looting of the country. The social contract was abandoned many decades ago.

You ever seen a man over 40 pull a building permit for work wholly within his own home? Yeah me either.

These days college kids are just as jaded. Of course they cheat the instant they think they can get away with it.

The college is there to serve the college, not them and these days the kids know it. Even if everyone cheating degrades the value of the degree there's no guarantee the college won't do that itself if everyone is honest so might as well get away with what you can while you can. Nobody likes this, it's just a rational adaptation to the perceived state of affairs.

> Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting

It's the K-shaped economy. Those not participating in the upsides are electing to either not participate in the system at all or to destroy it. Most people think Luigi Mangione is a hero.

We had a good post-WWII run. We had factories, then globalization. Massive growth for all economic backgrounds for several generations. But the world caught up. Now the average worker has to compete against their increasingly competent and economically enabled peers around the globe. Costs for everything are rising.

We used to have a super sized Big Mac economy propped up by the fact that America was (relatively) peerless. The worker saw so much upside. Now they don't even get free refills, so to speak.

I'm hoping the AI boom helps bring down the cost of goods without putting people out of work. If it goes the other way, I think we might be heading for 1790's France.

Moral acceptance of petty theft always increases with inequality. When the poor take from the rich, people don't care as much. The poorer the thief and the richer the victim, the less people care. Go far enough, and people view the thief as a Robin Hood-style hero.

Given that we're at a point in American history where inequality is quite extreme, I don't think it's fair to compare shoplifting to the corruption of the ruling class that is largely responsible for the current levels of inequality in the first place.

To be quite frank, under current conditions, it is a moral failure to see fault with impoverished people for stealing what they need to survive, not the other way around.

Moral code is downstream from culture and not every culture sees cheating as a moral failing.

As Princeton's demo skewed hard into a more international student body, the underlying cultural assumptions have shifted.

The Christian extension of the Ninth Commandment from not bearing false witness to a blanket ban on lying is unique. Islam has explicit exceptions through Taqiyya, Hinduism gets nuanced with dharma and adharma, Buddhism sees it as one of the ten unwholesome actions, ...

WASPs built and defined Princeton, but that is long over.

> in some left-wing corners of the commentariat, is out; flagrant disregard of the social contract is in.

Interesting that this is posed as the American left disregarding the social contract. I think you could make a pretty good case that the American right disregarded the social contract first in electing an extremely destructive pedophile who starts wars for reasons that can't even be articulated, pardons war criminals, engages in blatant nepotism enriching his family to the tune of billions at taxpayer's expense, large-scale fraud including being convicted of felony, adjudicated rapist, and a list of social contract violations going on for about 300 more pages that I'd be here all day typing out. And once the social contract is gone, it would be pretty weird to expect the other side to continue abiding by the terms. I don't personally make a habit of binding myself to one-sided contracts that impose no obligations on the other party.

This class form of racism always gets a chuckle out of me. Want to trade skull calipers?

A "WASP ethical framework" is barely a thing, if at all. The Princeton founders were motivated by moral obligations derived from a particular subset of Protestant Christianity. They were dissenters from the Anglican establishment, so it feels weird to try to bunch them in under the "WASP" umbrella. I have no idea if people who wrote the honor code were Calvinists too, but that was the seed ideology. It's not something that generic "WASP culture" gets to claim absent from the foundational theology. I'd wager that most WASPs at Princeton today do not share genuine belief in those foundations, if they don't cheat it's only because of social pressure, which tends not to hold up as well under pressure.

WASPs in this day and age are no more immune to "high stakes mandarin style death struggles".

Sorry, can you state your hypothesis clearly here? You are saying Princeton would not need to make this change if it admitted only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants?

What?