What’s Behind the Harvard Cheating Scandal?
Harvard University announced yesterday that it is investigating more than a hundred students in a single section of an introductory Poli Sci course on suspicion of cheating on an open-book final exam. When the news broke I tweeted my suspicion that the structure of the final might have contributed to the temptation to cheat, and a new article in the Harvard Crimson appears to confirm my suspicion.
The final exam in professor Matthew Platt’s “Introduction to Congress” course was designated as “completely open-book, open-notes, open internet,” but students were warned “not [to] discuss the exam with others,” including their fellow students, tutors or anybody else.
The test included what the Crimson describes as “three multi-part short answer questions,” questions that one anonymous student — who is not suspected of cheating — described as “find the answer and basically say why
The final exam in professor Matthew Platt’s “Introduction to Congress” course was designated as “completely open-book, open-notes, open internet,” but students were warned “not [to] discuss the exam with others,” including their fellow students, tutors or anybody else.
The test included what the Crimson describes as “three multi-part short answer questions,” questions that one anonymous student — who is not suspected of cheating — described as “find the answer and basically say why