Cheating at Harvard?
Posted on August 30th, 2012 in Uncategorized | 67 Comments »
In the Times, Richard Perez-Pena writes that Harvard officials are investigating whether 125 students cheated in an intro political science class cheated by sharing answers on a take-home exam.
The accusations, related to a single undergraduate class in the spring semester, deal with “academic dishonesty, ranging from inappropriate collaboration to outright plagiarism,” the administration said in a note sent to students.
Perez-Pena, you’ll remember, is the guy who so badly bungled the Patrick Witt story at Yale, so everything he writes must be read with skepticism, but it sounds like there is a genuine issue here. (The Crimson is reporting it, and the Harvard administration is acknowledging it.)
The Crimson’s story suggests that there may be more involved than Perez-Pena seems to realize…
It will be interesting to see if this cheating scandal, which I’m sure will get a huge amount of attention, forces a renewed debate about the values of Harvard—and its students…
67 Responses
8/30/2012 11:51 pm
Anyone brave enough to ask if the students involved are more likely to be international students-my daughter’s friends claim that students from-for example, Korea, display cavalier disregard for “no collaboration” instructions.
And perhaps the much-maligned student pledge for freshmen will resurface now.
8/31/2012 6:13 am
Bring back final exams!
8/31/2012 6:49 am
Harry’s right - it’s amazing how few Harvard courses now give a sit-down final exam. In today’s culture, a take-home exam is a form of entrapment.
8/31/2012 7:39 am
A form of entrapment, Benjamin? How so?
8/31/2012 8:10 am
As Harry knows, for my undergraduate class (on algorithms and data structures), I have an in-class midterm and in-class final exam. The students consistently complain that the tests are unfair: they are not like the homework sets (where the students have more time — and work together), they don’t test what you know but how you do in test situations, they test speed over knowledge, etc. And, to some extent, these complaints all have some level of truth to them — I am clear that in-class exams test different things than the homework, although I imagine they’re more correlated than the students believe. But I do know that students work together and use the Internet and such on their homework, and I have always (unfortunately) been convinced that a (small?) fraction of students would not follow the guidelines I would set for a take home exam if I gave one.
While the facts are still being determined, and I don’t know if any students have actually been found to have violated Harvard’s policies, I’m afraid I’m not surprised at all that this situation has arisen.
8/31/2012 8:14 am
Also, for those of you who read this but who don’t read my blog (mybiasedcoin, mybiasedcoin.blogspot.com) I’ll be discussing this situation there this week, with the perspective of someone who has served on the Ad Board and has been their “consultant” since then on cases related to computer science.
8/31/2012 9:47 am
Incidentally, I think we can assume that the timing of Drew Faust’s announcement and the beginning of Labor Day weekend were not coincidental; fascinating to see how the media techniques of the political world have endured at Harvard since the Summers era. The Harvard folks knew that this was going to get out and wanted to bury it as much as possible at a time when few people are paying attention to the news, and to the extent that they are, they’re probably talking about Clint Eastwood.
8/31/2012 10:20 am
I agree with Harry: bring back final exams! It used to be that if you wanted to give a take-home exam in a course, you had to request an exception to the general rule that courses had final exams, and you had to explain why a take-home exam would be better in your course. Now, the rule has been flipped. If you want to give a supervised, timed final exam, you have to “opt in” by lodging a formal request.
I’ve never fully understood the rationale behind take-home exams. I understand assigned homework, final papers, final oral exams, and so forth, but take-home exams seem to me to be a strange hybrid. I’m prepared to learn how they can be useful, though, if anyone wants to step up and explain.
8/31/2012 10:25 am
Someone should do a survey of the Gen Ed and other large classes and see what has happened to enrollments since they abandoned exam period exams. Harry’s right: bring back final exams.
8/31/2012 10:38 am
Interesting consensus here, given that the rule was changed (as I understand it) because lots of professors wanted exceptions. I think what is going on here is basically a shift in the social contract — once professors actually had to show up to proctor their exams, it became harder for them to get away to conferences or the Vineyard and leave grad students behind to do the grading. Students responded to the increasing impersonality of the course-taking protocol (we are cautioned to be very clear about our “requirements,”and god save us if we assign grades by using any other form of judgment) by responding in an equally transactional spirit (as though fulfilling the requirements is what constitutes an education). (Of course all this is just general philosophical rambling. I don’t know anything about the course or professor involved in this case.)
Final exams are transactional too. But you actually may learn something when you study for them if you haven’t already!
8/31/2012 10:50 am
How about an honor code as well — seriously!
8/31/2012 3:51 pm
While I agree with everyone above that take-home exams are usually pedagogically inferior to in-class exams, there are still better and worse ways to construct a take-home exam and, from the Crimson article, it certainly sounds like this was a very poorly constructed exam. This doesn’t in any way excuse the behavior of these students, but the professor and perhaps the TFs may also bear some responsibility for this situation.
8/31/2012 4:25 pm
One of the undesirable outcomes of the take-home exam (which at Harvard is not supposed to be assigned after the end of classes), is that the learning process associated with the course can be curtailed by up to three weeks.
8/31/2012 9:03 pm
I still plan to give a final exam in my Gen Ed course this spring. It would be a great shame if the enrollment went down for that reason, but maybe I’ll get more serious students that way.
9/1/2024 7:46 am
The press today is pointing the finger at the Professor and certainly he and his TF staff deserve criticism. But from what I understand, students (from athletic teams) were told by a coach to take this course because it is a ‘gut’ (or was!); they organized attendance, studying and test submission; and some submitted tests were identical because the TFs were different and the students thought that they could get away with it. Just what one would expect at an athletically-oriented state university, not what I’d expect at an elite college or university. Anyway, unless the Harvard administrative board sweeps the facts under the rug, we’ll eventually get to the bottom of this sad situation. I hope that fear of lawsuits from wealthy parents does not derail the process. Here is what I wrote in the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-ambition-trumps-ethics/2012/08/31/495c694a-f384-11e1-892d-bc92fee603a7_story.html
9/1/2024 8:46 am
I don’t remember the exact number, but somewhere between 20 and 30% of finals were given in-class, and the rest were replaced with take-home exams or (more often, I think) some kind of final project. It’s not hard to understand why the rule was flipped; it’s hard to say that 70% of courses are the exception while 30% are following the normal procedure.
I don’t think the timing of the announcement was chosen entirely because of the Labor Day weekend. I assume they decided to make a public statement because they felt that with this many students involved the story would leak at some point anyway. Making a statement over the summer would have been much worse than waiting for the fall. I’d guess they felt like they had to make a statement as soon as possible after most people were back on campus, since leaks were much more likely the longer they waited.
If they’d really wanted to bury it on Labor Day weekend, they would have made the announcement on Friday afternoon. Or, they could have waited until the Democratic Convention was underway, in the hopes that it would overshadow this story. I’m not saying that taking advantage of Labor Day wasn’t part of the decision on when to release the statement, but if it had been driving the decision they would have done it differently.
9/1/2024 12:45 pm
It’s interesting to see some reactions from Harvard faculty. If you look carefully, though, the truth isn’t in the middle. Every scandal has a fundamental basis, and in this case, it keeps coming back to the instructor of the course. It seems like he did everything wrong when he taught this course. Yes, the students heard that the course was a gut — among other sources, they heard it directly from the instructor. Then too, isn’t it a radical step to report 100+ students for cheating in one class? If it were my class and it were that many students, then I would question the framework of my course, and I would view the evidence against them as compromised.
I am sympathetic to Harry Lewis’ point about take-home exams. I teach at a state university, not Harvard, so I’m not really part of the debate. Here I do usually have the option of having TAs proctor the exams, but I usually feel very involved and I proctor the tests myself anyway.
9/1/2024 1:21 pm
My TAs and I also proctor my exams. As Harry notes you have to be in town to do that.
When the economy and Harvard’s endowment tanked the exam office was radically downsized, the local seniors who used to proctor exams (with a strictness that seems less amusing given the recent news) disappeared, and faculty became responsible not only for proctoring but for signing up for a regular final-by next Friday.
Obviously the path of least resistance was also the welcome path in many (most, I believe) cases. Prior to this situation it was exactly the other way around. One had to petition to have an alternative to a regularly-scheduled final exam (small-size, graduate student class, etc.). An undergraduate class with 250 students would not, I believe, have been permitted to opt out.
It might not be a bad idea to reverse things before next Friday. I may be wrong, but don’t recall the faculty voting for the change. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong on this point.
Last term I forgot to schedule a final, so had an oral for each of the students There were only twelve of them, so easy enough, and an extra six hours’ work for me. I did it in reading period, not strictly by the book, but didn’t want to do it before the end of classes.
Seems to me you either return to the status quo ante or have an honor code. Otherwise this sort of thing will continue, and I’m sure there are other, slightly less spectacular instances that have escaped notice.
9/1/2024 1:38 pm
Greg,
Just so we have the facts clear, from what I have read, the instructor did not report 100+ students. If you look at the Harvard Crimson story, it states:
“The professor of the course brought the case to the Administrative Board in May after noticing similarities in 10 to 20 exams, Harris said. During the summer, the Ad Board conducted a review of all final exams submitted for the course and found about 125 of them to be suspicious.”
So the professor reported some students, and then the Ad Board felt (for reasons the article does not say) it felt it necessary to review all the final exams.
While I appreciate that one should in such extreme cases see if there was confusion caused by the instructor regarding the instructions, I think you go overboard in suggesting or presuming that the professor seems to be at fault. Based on what I have seen — specifically, the instructions as given on the exam — my presumption would be that students were given clear instructions and some, apparently, chose not to follow them. Of course, I’m not privy to the information the Ad Board is examining, and more information may come to light. But I’m unconvinced as a starting point that the argument “Either X students did something against the stated rules/policy of the exam or the professor was sufficiently unclear; the prior odds suggest the fault is with the professor” is legitimate, based on my experience. Unless I’m wrong, this seems to be your only argument, and I believe that’s unfair to the faculty member without additional evidence or motivation.
9/1/2024 2:49 pm
Michael - There is now a hot potato of blame that I don’t think can be buried. It will land in the laps of either up to 120 students, or the instructor, or the Ad Board. I would rather not blame anyone, but if someone has to be blamed, I would rather blame fewer people than more. It seems valid to me in this case to use a Bayesian prior (aren’t you a Bayesian too?), but there is more to it than that. There is already evidence published in the Crimson.
I am skeptical of an axiomatic reading of the test instructions. Many of the students didn’t think that the instructions were viable if read literally. That’s not perfect behavior, but it shouldn’t rise to a cheating scandal.
But you are right that I misread, and I also don’t know much about, the dealings between the instructor and the ad board. I can believe that the Ad Board robotically overreacted to what was, by published accounts, a disorganized class. It shouldn’t be a hanging offense just to teach one strange course. Still, I’m more inclined to believe that there were two failure points rather than 100 of them or even as few as 20.
9/1/2024 3:16 pm
Greg,
I’m happy to go with a Bayesian framework. I just think that your prior is wrong (your assumption of initial likelihoods of “student failure” vs. “faculty failure”), you’re not updating according to observed evidence appropriately, and that you’re mistakenly assuming that student failure points are independent instead of correlated events.
Also, of course, we don’t know the outcomes. Just because the Ad Board is investigating a large number of cases does not mean that a large number of, for lack of a better phrasing, “guilty verdicts” will be found. Indeed, perhaps the outcome will be according to your expectation, that the students are not to blame and the issue was one of incomplete or improper information from the teaching staff.
I therefore think your characterization of the Ad Board as robotically overreacting by investigating the matter once it came to their attention is again, unfair; that’s their role, and neither you (nor I) are aware of what evidence led them to believe they should perform a wider investigation. I am doubtful (or perhaps hopeful) that of the cases that they are examining all, or even a majority, of them will end in punishments. Perhaps then at the end both of us will be able to claim our priors were appropriate.
9/1/2024 3:17 pm
To be clear, I’m doubtful that there will be a large number of guilty verdicts just because they’re investigating a large number of cases; I’m hopeful the final outcome will be a small number of punishments, compared to the number of students involved.
9/1/2024 3:33 pm
I’m interested in what is meant by an honor code, as proposed by Prof Thomas and others, and how it would help. I’ve always understood an honor code to mean a statement signed by students that makes them collectively responsible for the conduct of the entire student body — such that students observing inappropriate conduct and not reporting it are held responsible.
This would obviously cause an uptick in reported cheating, but I’m dubious that it could reduce cheating at Harvard, or could ever allow unproctored exams of this sort to work. I’m aware that many institutions with honor codes have much less cheating — a friend who graduated from Mt Holyoke said that students can take their final exams wherever they please, and few if any think of cheating. But it seems to me that these institutions also have a different culture than Harvard. I don’t see how an honor code could change that culture; I expect that the culture would need to change first.
What is that culture? I have a hard time putting my finger on it. In some ways, ironically, I think it may derive from the independent-mindedness that I always thought was the hallmark of a Harvard student during my time here. We all thought that we could make our own reality, and we pushed against any rules in our way. In many (I’d say most) ways, this was healthy; we achieved great things on our own, not only without the College’s help but sometimes in direct opposition to the College. That major activities were student-run, not administration-run, was a given and a point of pride. But it also meant that we looked for a way around any rule, and I, at least, didn’t have much interest in standing in the way of others who did the same. Some of us abused this — perhaps I did, too, at times. But we lived and let live. And when I hear an honor code in the context of Harvard, I think of a collective mechanism and collective punishment, going against the grain of what Harvard is. And ineffective unless you can get students to report on each other; I’m not sure Harvard students will, or necessarily should.
The ironic part of this is that Harvard today (and to some extent when I was a student) is also a place where students work together, perhaps to a fault. They organize study groups and clubs and trips and conferences and on and on. It doesn’t surprise me much that they also collaborate on papers and test answers. But I don’t see an honor code changing those collective goals from the status quo (let’s show results as quickly and efficiently as possible) to something more focused on behaving honorably. Come to think of it, a more effective line of attack might be the message that Admissions sent out some years ago urging students to slow down and focus more about the quality of activities than the quantity. But that message seems to have fizzled.
Something else about this particular case: I do think that most students at Harvard (and me in my student days) do want to learn, perhaps even some of those who cheated. But I also think we have a keen sense of the difference between learning and passing a test. When they’re not interested in the subject, or when the test seems a poor proxy for learning, many students will cut corners — I probably did, too — because cutting corners in those cases doesn’t affect what we’re trying to learn. And if you look at this class, (a) it was a large Gov class known as a “gut”, so a lot of students took the class for an easy A rather than any interest in the subject, and (b) by accounts in the Crimson, there wasn’t a clear relationship between the tests and the substantive material in the course. It doesn’t surprise me at all that this particular course would be the one to have a cheating scandal. That’s not to excuse the students; it’s only to say that this course is a good test of the hypothesis that Harvard students are more interested in what they learn than in what the professor wants them to learn. Would an honor code change that?
9/1/2024 4:24 pm
Michael - Again, it’s not my fight anyway, but we could certainly simply agree to disagree until the final outcome of the Ad Board investigation. That’s fair.
However, if you take that viewpoint, then the Harvard administration stirred the waters way too much and way too soon by announcing such a huge case at an early stage. (And yet, after a delay of months.) In particular, they’re already talking as if student misconduct looms over Harvard.
“Harris said the College’s unusual step of announcing the investigation was intended in part to launch a broader conversation about academic integrity,” wrote the Crimson. But what kind of conversation can it be before people know what went wrong?
“The only folks that may want to really consider [a leave of absence] are those students who know that they cheated”, the Ad Board Secretary was quoted in the Crimson. He alludes to a Scalia-style Doctrine of Plain Meaning. He implies that the instructions were entirely obvious, and there are just two kinds of students, those who know what they did wrong, and those who know that they did nothing wrong. But there is already significant evidence that it wasn’t that simple.
Ordinarily, when students are accused of cheating but acquit themselves, the institution suffers no harm. In this case, Harvard has raised the stakes sky-high: if the students win, then either the Ad Board or the instructor or lose. Even if some of the students are convicted, the instructor already looks radioactive. I think that Richard Bradley is reading too much between the lines in his comments about media strategy, because as public relations go, this already looks inept.
9/1/2024 4:47 pm
Just a few quick comments. (Hi, Greg!)
1) @ Joe Levy — I think you are right. One can hypothesize that the incident would not have happened if we had an honor code. I doubt that. But if the events had unfolded as they did, the result could have been twice as many guilty parties — the half that cheated, and the half that didn’t but failed to turn in the first half. Seems like landing the hammer in the wrong place. Let’s do something to support the students who did the right thing, not put an extra burden on them.
2) Having read the Globe and NYT reports from the students, I am inclined to wonder if Greg might not be right. Apparently the professor turned in a few students, and the College took over, hauling in a bunch of students who might not have been implicated at all by the folks who first read their exams. With the weirdness of the instructions (“etc.” is not a very precise phrase to use for what is allowed, in exam instructions), seems to me there may have been an overreaction, given the poor course protocol.
3) Every major cheating case of which I am aware has resulted from a loss of faith in the fairness of the course — a sense that the students were working harder than the professor, that they were being entrapped, that the course staff was sloppy or undertrained, etc. When one person does something, others will not follow ordinarily, but the combined feeling of unfairness by the professor and unfair advantage accruing to the dishonest is what leads to large numbers of students wandering over the edge. The Globe and TImes reports certainly suggest this pattern.
4) @ Howard Gardner: Please, even if there were a bunch of guilty athletes, let’s not go after the athletic coach as the bad guy here, when (if) the professor announced on day one that the course was going to be a gut and half the students were going to get As. What this illustrates is not that Harvard is turning into an athletic State U, but that the system of rewarding junior faculty for enrollments is evil. If you are going to go after the coach, you will also have to go after the Women, Gender, Sexuality lecturer who promoted her course to athletes (had something to do with movement) — hey, she probably wouldn’t get re-hired if her numbers dropped too low. And the Psych TFs a few years ago who banded together to rent a plane advertising a course to fly over the Yard at the beginning of term — they were not going to get hired unless the enrollment justified it. And you’d also go after the Black Students Association, which has been known to provide helpful hints for incoming freshmen about easy courses and sympathetic professors. These kinds of things are as old as the hills here; please let’s not act shocked that they happen. They are all artifacts of a system with misplaced incentives, making instructors love big enrollments, until they don’t and a few innocent students get screwed (yes, they have been screwed already, even if the Board subsequently scratches their cases). This in turn gets us back to my old hobby horse of including Q Guide numbers in tenure dossiers. And the ball of string unravels …
5) Also @ Howard. Of course I don’t want Harvard to fail to do the right thing because of pressure from donors. But there is another way to look at that scenario. Alumni rarely get an unfiltered glimpse at what goes on in undergraduate education. Even the Overseers tend to be given dog and pony shows (I put some on myself, though I tended to be rather more honest than my superiors appreciated). It would not be so terrible, IMHO, if some alumni raised questions about the incentive and reward system that may have led to this catastrophe.
6) A question for the Harvard folks: Should this case go to the Student Faculty Judicial Board? This alternate disciplinary body is reserved for unprecedented cases, and I guess we know this is one. (The SFJB has never met, so it would be a big gamble to use it for this, but it is about half faculty and half students.)
9/1/2024 6:21 pm
I don’t agree that Harvard intended-at least, originally intended-to announce this case before Labor Day. On Monday August 27, Directors of Undergraduate Studies (DUSs) received a message from Dean Harris calling a meeting of DUSs for 9 am on Tuesday, Sept. 4, in the Faculty Room. My colleagues asked me why no topic had been given, and after some discussion back and forth, I suggested that perhaps an undergraduate was going to be dismissed for some kind of malfeasance. Little did I know that this was not a case of a single student. If the Crimson hadn’t found out and reported the name of the instructor and the title of the course, I suspect that the DUSs would have been told to keep this confidential, but to make sure that all course syllabi had very clear instructions. Once the instructor and course names had been leaked, Dean Harris sent out another message to the DUSs apologizing for the lack of an announced agenda for the Tuesday meeting.
Thus, I don’t believe that the administrative intention was to let this incident get “buried” in the lead-up to the Labor Day weekend. I think it’s extremely unfortunate that the name of the instructor has become known. We see from the posts on this blog how easy it is to leap to conclusions that may or may not be justified.
9/1/2024 8:24 pm
I don’t understand how the Ad Board could possibly have thought that the name of the instructor could be kept secret for more than a few hours, nor why that is such a pivotal piece of information. If you accuse 40% of a large class of cheating, then to a large extent you’re casting doubt on the integrity of Harvard students in general. I don’t see how the 100+ students that have been directly accused have any particular obligation or incentive not to leak information. It feels like common sense has left the room, and the scandal is going to grow until it comes back.
9/1/2024 10:12 pm
Greg —
You say, “If you accuse 40% of a large class of cheating…”
First, it’s not clear what you think the antecedent of “you” is in that sentence, but to be clear again, if you mean “the instructor”, there’s no evidence I’ve heard of that he suggested the Ad Board investigate 40% of the class, and the Crimson article states the opposite. So I’m assuming that you mean “the Ad Board” by that “you”.
Second, to be clear, it’s not clear how many people the Ad Board has “accused” (or will accuse) of cheating. At the moment the Ad Board is investigating. Please, for example, read the Crimson articles and note their consistent word choice, which is actually accurate. The Ad Board investigates first, and then lets students know their finding, which would correspond to what I assume you are calling an accusation — at which point students have opportunities to respond.
While it may seem semantics to you, your comment mischaracterizes the process in ways that I find unfortunate and inflammatory.
To the point of your post, I doubt the Ad Board thought the instructor name would be kept secret once the investigation letters went out. They’re not naive. Why do you suggest they thought that? However, it’s their duty to keep such information confidential, and as is their practice, they are themselves not naming the course in any statements. They can’t control what the students do or what the Crimson does.
9/1/2024 11:57 pm
I was responding to Judith Ryan’s statement that it’s extremely unfortunate that the name of the instructor leaked out. I was trying to say that that’s incongruous regret, because it’s a fairly immediate consequence of a cheating investigation of so many students in the same course.
I grant that some of my comments have been a bit hot-headed. Even so, I do have some sense of catastrophe (as Harry called it). I also maintain that a disciplinary investigation does carry some degree of accusation. Sure, it’s hyperbole to say that all of these students are being accused, but there is some truth to it.
Anyway, I should say hello back to Harry. Also you, Michael, I’m not sure if we have ever met, but I understand that you have met both my wife and her brother.
9/2/2024 12:17 am
Hi Greg! I didn’t even know that you were married to Rena (though Wikipedia told me)! I haven’t seen her in many years — or Michael for that matter, though I’ve seen him more recently. Say hi to both of them for me.
I definitely think that, regardless of how this turns out, catastrophic is a suitable description, with a lot of unhappy people. Again, I am remaining cautiously optimistic that many students will have been found to have done nothing wrong, or to have engaged in activity that merits just a warning, rather than probation or a requirement to withdraw. But (some months from now) we’ll have a better idea.
9/2/2024 6:37 am
Many of the entries in this blog point to a rampant moral degradation at Harvard. ‘Dog and pony shows’ for the overseers? is Professor Lewis saying that faculty and deans deliberately conspire to LIE to and DECEIVE this governing board? and if this is what he meant, and faculty and deans LIE and DECEIVE, then what is so surprising about a group of 100 smart students deciding that they have learned how one gets ahead at Harvard.
Let’s not be hypocritical here. This book, from a Harvard graduate, is currently prominently displayed in the bookstores of most Ivy League schools -except The Coop. Perhaps in an attempt to educate prospective students who are visiting.
http://www.amazon.com/That-Book-about-Harvard-Embarrassment/dp/1402267509/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346585595&sr=8-1&keywords=the+book+about+harvard
While it is not clear that we have yet reached the point when Romulus Augustus will be deposed by Odoacer, the decline is evidently under way… and has been for some time.
9/2/2024 6:55 am
Professor Gardner’s article on the post is excellent. The recommendations in his final paragraph unrealistic. When was the last time a student at Harvard was expelled for plagiarism? And, of those caught and sanctioned, what proportion do they represent of the total who cheat? One could ask the same of faculty, and Professor Gardner implies that there is much wrong in the example faculty at Harvard provides:
“As for those students who do have the scholarly bent, all too often they see professors cut corners — in their class attendance, their attention to student work and, most flagrantly, their use of others to do research. Most embarrassingly, when professors are caught — whether in financial misdealings or even plagiarizing others’ work — there are frequently frequently no clear punishments. If punishments ensue, they are kept quiet, and no one learns the lessons that need to be learned.”
But one of the reasons these practices have been going on for some time is the same reason Professors like Howard Gardner fail to do anything when they are aware of them. People are just too busy minding their own business and advancing their own interests and it does not pay to take on powerful interests or make unnecessary enemies.
Yes, faculty may go after one student, or a hundred, from time to time. But these are the least powerful members of the institution. Note that it is undergraduates that the institution goes after, in an intro course.
What faculty have stepped up to take on more powerful interests on corrupt practices in recent years at Harvard? some of them vent on this blog. How many have actually raised the same issues they raise here at faculty meetings?
The Harvard faculty is responsible for the students in the University, and what these students have done is simply a reflection of what they have learned from their teachers, and not just the teacher of this one course.
This episode will most likely go under the carpet, or perhaps the students will be made a scapegoat for the serious moral decline of the institution. But one thing is certain, the larger fundamental decay of which this episode is just a tip of the iceberg, that will remain unchanged.
9/2/2024 7:44 am
To Greg Kuperberg: You’re right when you say that the name of the instructor would inevitably have become known, given the size of this investigation. I was just trying to put myself in the shoes of this untenured colleague. From what we have read in this blog and elsewhere, he seems at the least not to have given very clear instructions; and if he told the class at the outset that half of them would receive an A for the course, that was surely not the finest moment in the history of pedagogy. Still, the rampant speculation about his role might best wait until the Ad Board has completed its investigation.
I was not suggesting that the university was trying to hide this matter: on the contrary. By calling a meeting of DUSs for Tuesday morning, Sept. 4, at 9 am (the very beginning of the first day of classes), Dean Harris doubtless intended to inform key advisers about the situation and to explain how the Ad Board functions in cases of this sort.
9/2/2024 10:34 am
Judith - The newspaper articles suggest to me that unclear instructions is a polite sidestep of the real problems: an unrealistic final exam on the heels of loose class standards. Michael, and some of the Ad Board people, have discussed the investigation in terms of uncovering student conduct. However, it could be a matter of interpreting student conduct that is sort-of already known. I would not be surprised if interpretation is already the real issue.
You can see from the anonymous comments here that a lot of outsiders have gleefully leaped to an interpretation that I don’t believe at all, that Harvard’s ethics in general are in the gutter.
I don’t think that Harvard is truly trying to hide anything either. Rather, every administration (of course not just Harvard) usually talks around certain realities. Confidentiality is both a good reason for that and a thin excuse. But the !@#$ has hit the fan now and it will be impossible to play it down. There are stories in dozens of media outlets. Most of them tacitly assume that 100+ Harvard students fell off the wagon, either because they are dishonest, or at best because they were under too much pressure.
9/2/2024 10:55 am
Greg,
“Michael, and some of the Ad Board people, have discussed the investigation in terms of uncovering student conduct. However, it could be a matter of interpreting student conduct that is sort-of already known. I would not be surprised if interpretation is already the real issue.”
To be clear, I agree with you in sentiment here. Certainly as part of the investigation I am sure that the Ad Board is considering student conduct in light of the instructions they were given and how they understood those instructions in light of how the course was run. Unfortunately, if that’s the case, I imagine it will tend to slow the process down, in that there may have to be some global decision-making regarding a large number of cases instead of providing decisions sequentially as cases are handled.
9/2/2024 10:56 am
Just to add to Greg’s comments and to respond @ Anon above, no, a dog and pony show is not a lie, it is a performance putting one’s best foot and biggest hopes forward to a passive and enthralled audience. I have written elsewhere about the problems of Harvard’s governance structure. My point is that Howard is wrong when he suggests it would be terrible if alums got involved in questioning the big picture. With all the publicity we have had over the past year about pedagogy (Conversations @ Harvard and so on), I just don’t think it would be a terrible thing if some alums asked some questions about how it came to pass that a big course could be run the way the news stories report, with serious consequences (yes, even if many of the cases are scratched) for individual students and for the university. Acting shocked about the ethics of undergrads is the easy way out.
9/2/2024 11:42 am
Greg,
You may very well turn out to be right when you say that more was at work than just unclear instructions (“at the least,” was how I characterized that aspect of the exam). The class does seem to have been loosely organized (again, to say the least). But when we say this, we’re going on newspaper and other reports. The Ad Board must first get to the bottom of this. They will listen to what the students say, they will look at the take-home exam and other assignments in the course, and explore any other avenues that seem appropriate. I’m trying to do what you yourself say is the correct thing: not to leap to conclusions.
I understand that you see some reporters and also some posters on this blog as placing the major blame on the students, while you yourself appear to place more blame on the professor. In the end, it will probably turn out to have been a bit of both. Until the investigation has run its course and more facts have come to light, we just can’t say for sure precisely what happened.
It’s clearly a signal, though, that Harvard needs to do some hard thinking.
9/2/2024 1:05 pm
I admit it, I have trouble believing that the instructor and the ad board between them didn’t cause a fiasco. That’s not a neutral position, but on the other hand I’m not intervening in Harvard’s business from my home in California.
I also argue that the ad board and the Crimson between them managed to vaporize neutral ground. One of those two parties has an obligation not to do that; the other has no such obligation. Now to be fair, if an obvious crime has been committed, neutrality becomes untenable. The problem in this case is that it’s not obvious.
There is a third article in the Crimson today that quotes faculty in the government department. Just like the ad board, the government faculty have nothing to say about how this government course was governed. Instead, like many of the articles in the outside press, they talk as if most or all of the suspected students are guilty of something. “For 125 students to do this, I think it raises big questions that the University needs to deal with,” one government professor said. They want to be nice to students, but they have reduced the case to a morality tale.
For the moment, let’s suppose that there was nothing strange about the course lectures, nor the exam instructions or questions, nor any indulgent promises about grades, nor indulgent help from the TFs. Let’s suppose that it was as simple as a one-week take-home undergraduate final and that the students simply talked to each other too much during that period. Even then, would it make sense to ask questions like, “What’s going to happen in chemistry when you can’t take in some study guides that help you remember the periodic table?”
Not to my knowledge. I teach at a state university, where the main discussion is security, not ethics. The students aren’t amoral, but it’s a factory education and we don’t think that we can change their ethics.
*Of course* students can share study guides to learn the periodic table. In fact, sometimes we bend over backwards to encourage study groups. At the same time, *of course* I’d expect cheating if I gave a take-home final, in any undergraduate class other than a relaxed topics course, much less, a 7-day take home final. It can even be a problem in first-year graduate courses. So those courses don’t have take-home finals, end of story. Granted, math and hard science faculty may have a different teaching philosophy than humanities faculty do. Still, I’m sure that there are strong minds in the Harvard government department and I think that they are just being silly.
9/2/2024 2:33 pm
On the other hand, if we don’t set aside the way that the course was taught, then there is this interesting account in Salon:
http://www.salon.com/2012/09/02/accused_student_harvard_out_for_blood/singleton/
It sounds like the course truly was an introduction to Congress, just not the kind indicated by the course syllabus.
9/2/2024 2:36 pm
There’s quite a bit of discussion in the Crimson articles about the possibility that groups of students created study guides. I’ve discovered over the years that it’s not a good idea to include a section in a final exam that asks students to define concepts relevant to the course. I used to do this, and it makes creating the exam easier, but it doesn’t encourage genuine learning. It’s more effective to ask students to identify concepts in action. Thus the question should not be “define ‘metonymy'” but “what figure of speech is at work in the following passage? Explain the reasons behind your identification.” With complicated concepts like my favorite term (it will be in my obituary!), “free indirect discourse,” the instructions need to read: “Underline the parts of the following passage that are in free indirect discourse. If you observe any problems concerning where free indirect discourse starts or stops in this passage, please note them and explain why you think these transitions are problematic.” This way, you won’t be encouraging students simply to regurgitate definitions they’ve learned from a published or student-created study guide.
I apologize to students from the early years in one of my Core courses in which I did require such definitions. I’ve learned my lesson!
9/2/2024 2:56 pm
Yeah, part of the reason that I proctor my exams is that it’s my policy not only to never test definitions, but also to grant any definition requested by any student during the exam. I make no apologies if I ever did test for definitions (I don’t remember one way or the other), but I like it better this way.
I also write every test question and roughly half of the homework problems from scratch; the other half of the homework is book problems. (I also don’t show tests to the TAs ahead of time and I let them second-guess me in review sessions and practice tests, if they want to write practice tests.) Last year a student was overheard to say that my course was hard because it’s impossible to find my homework questions on the Internet. “And people have tried!”
9/3/2024 12:32 am
OK, perhaps this line of discussion is not welcome on this thread, but here it is. Matthew Platt is a black assistant professor. In a large department that is not really known for its racial diversity. Teaching a large lecture class (by Harvard standards). And his students have decided that it is OK to threaten him lawsuits, etc.
Coincidence? Sort of doubt it. Sort of also doubt that the reason for the take-home exam was Prof. Platt’s pressing need to visit the family on the Cape.
Students, even enlightened Harvard undergrads, have images of what sitting in a lecture at Harvard should be like. Perhaps Prof. Platt doesn’t fit that picture. And the students then go way off map. I don’t think that Harvard’s decision not to pay gramps to proctor finals has much of anything to do with all this.
Just saying.
9/3/2024 2:31 am
Yes, I’m seeing lots opining here with little factual underpinning.I would not be so quick to take the anonymous statements of the accused students at face value. Have any of you looked at the exam questions themselves? Looked at the syllabus?
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/specials/harvard-final-exam
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/specials/harvard-syllabus
I do not know what went on in this class either, but the exam questions make it clear to me at least that many of the student claims about undefined terms, collaborative study guides, etc., do not hold water. It’s simply not that kind of test. Part I relies heavily on reasoning and problem-solving based on readings from the course, and Part II on the ability to pull together a wide-range of concepts, theories, and evidence from the course together into a coherent argument.
9/3/2024 4:51 am
@ former gov:
I hope I’m misunderstanding you, but are you in fact saying the students cheated because they disrespected the black instructor? If so, does this require all cheaters to have been non-black, or are you prepared to postulate inter-black racism?
This seems going a bit far to pin the blame on the students. One thing is clear: if TFs gave test answers to students, this will emerge clearly from emails (the preferred mode of instructor interrogation for students these days). And if they did, it may be a case of course staff collaborating in cheating, which should prove interesting for the Ad Board (though of course the exam instructions are vague: writing centers and resident tutors are mentioned, not course TFs. Why writing centers? Do they ever help people with exams?)
I have read on the thread some hard words about honor codes, e.g. they would turn honest students into informers, or worse, cheaters if they failed to report any. I’d like to share some personal experiences as an honor code undergraduate at Stanford: classroom exams were unproctored, students brought beer, etc., on the whole there was a sense of pride that the TAs and professors trusted us to do our work; they did show up, however, and waited outside to take our questions. I experienced one major cheating event, in a logic class for computer science majors (that is, a fairly difficult subject that was a requirement for uninterested students) with take-home exams. We of course discussed at least our progress on the exam. I recall the frustrating feeling when I (or someone else) managed to answer a hard question and the others had not. After one such midterm (there were three) the professor angrily chastised the course for suspected (or was it reported?) cheating and made the next midterm to in-class.
9/3/2024 7:50 am
This episode is shaping into a serious embarrassment for Harvard. The most difficult challenge for Dean Hammonds will be to ‘do something’ so that it communicates that she stands for basic academic principles, while the sanction is light enough so that no lawyers get involved, representing the students, and sue Harvard.
There are numerous possible grounds for legal action. Most obviously, if these students cheated, Harvard bears responsibililty for failing to teach them better. This is not just about what they should have learned in this particular course and from the particular professor, but about what they should have learned in other courses, from advisors, from proctors, from all administrators responsible for their education. Regardless of the outcome of this trial, which would undoubtedly be a protracted process, the publicity is something that would cause serious damage to the institution.
Given that the number of students is so large, and that it includes students from some prominent families, this is the kind of case that ambitious lawyers and law firms would be delighted to take.
A serious wrinkle in all of this is the collateral damage this will create, and how high the chain of command this will extend. It would certainly reach at least to the level of Dean Hammonds, undermining severely her viability as a future college president or provost somewhere.
The press is currently focused on the students and the professor, but the frenzy of phone calls and negotiations is at a much higher level. It is not just these students that will fall. And what is being negotiated in not primarily how this episode impacts the education of these undergraduates or the career of their young assistant professor.
9/3/2024 7:57 am
the comments from former gov and former gov 2 -who seem to be losing some sleep over this blog, given the time stamps on their posts- seem to suggest that if the students engage legal counsel and legal action they are potentially racist.
You can sleep at peace former gov, no legal action would stop with Professor Platt. There are much deeper pockets, and much more interesting targets for legal action, much higher than him. The kind of target that makes Universities to spend millions of dollars in a quiet settlement. Harvard would not do this kind of thing for a mere Assistant Professor.
9/3/2024 8:48 am
These most recent posts (beginning with formergov) bring new aspects to bear on the case. Somehow I missed the complete copy of the course exam in the Boston Globe Metro section. The exam clearly demands thoughtful analysis and doesn’t ask for anything as simplistic as definitions.
The syllabus is precise, detailed, and very clear about expectations-including the function of sections (run by TFs) and the understanding that students will attend sections.
So let me reiterate that we shouldn’t speculate about matters of blame until the Ad Board has completed its investigation. I’m sorry that I let myself engage in some speculation during my exchange with Greg Kuperberg.
9/3/2024 2:11 pm
As a former Board member (hired by Harry Lewis, served with Michael Mitzenmacher), I want to toss some thoughts and my blog post (“Confessions of a Handbook Thumper”) into the mix: http://bzeducon.com/1/post/2012/09/confessions-of-a-handbook-thumper.html
Having worked on academic integrity in two systems (Harvard and Northwestern) and learned a great deal about high school policies, what I know for sure is that faculty are long overdue for an adult conversation about this topic-and many administrators would be eager to participate. My own opinion is that this should happen campus to campus because Harvard isn’t Haverford and Northwestern isn’t Northeastern.
Also, few policies or codes are truly written for their vital audiences of 18-22 year olds. Gerald Graff describes in Clueless in Academe how faculty use of language can obscure fundamentals of the academic enterprise from students. As the rules of engagement for grading change from course to course, student disengagement grows. The same principle applies to academic integrity. While the current Harvard case may be exceptional in many ways, it is representative of a larger phenomenon.
9/3/2024 4:17 pm
BZ, are you trying to exemplify the kind of obscure writing that you are describing? what are you saying?
9/3/2024 4:18 pm
Sorry professor Ryan, your writings now make you a perfect witness for the defense making a case that the professor is to blame. You are now on public record questioning the clarity of the instructions in this course and suggesting the plausible culpability of the professor.
9/3/2024 5:05 pm
@clueless: Fair enough. If you read some policies (including Harvard’s), you see lots of language that’s highfalutin (“open exchange of ideas,” “discussions and debates in some ways represent the essence of life in an academic community”) accompanied by commands without much guidance (“responsibility for learning the proper forms of citation lies with the individual student,” “when collaboration is permitted within a course students must acknowledge any collaboration and its extent in all submitted work”). Some faculty-but not enough-devote time and energy to teaching students what that means in terms of do’s and don’ts. Those faculty are also likely to give extensive guidelines for assignments, perhaps including grading rubrics, so students can understand the various considerations that go into grading a paper. Graff and Cathy Birkenstein (his wife) took the premise of Clueless in Academe and wrote They Say/I Say, which uses templates to introduce students to the basic moves in academic argumentation. They believe the fundamentals aren’t all that tricky once you strip away the complexities and subtleties that come with advanced learning. I agree with them, and I think the same can be done with issues like working with sources, collaboration, and test taking-if faculty are willing to do it.
9/3/2024 6:02 pm
To Anonymous 4:18pm: Now that I’ve read the complete text of the final take-home exam and the complete text of the syllabus (both supplied by former gov 2), I find I must dismiss the ideas I expressed in my exchange with Greg Kuperberg. The exam gives impeccably clear instructions; and the questions it sets cannot be answered by repeating information from any kind of study guide. The syllabus is thoughtfully set forth and challenging in nature; it presents very clearly the groundrules for work in the course.
Having seen these documents, I can’t understand why some students thought that collaboration was permitted. Claims about the “culture” of the course or about the communal preparation of study guides are at odds with the professor’s very clear instructions in the syllabus and the final take-home. So I return to my original-and constantly reiterated-position that we must wait until the investigation is completed.
9/3/2024 6:16 pm
In my second paragraph above, “collaboration” means collaboration on the final take-home exam.
9/3/2024 6:37 pm
I wouldn’t have bothered with that Anon, Judith. Just a little stirring going on there I would say. The new voices on this post are sort of interesting.
9/3/2024 7:16 pm
Thanks, RT.
9/3/2024 7:22 pm
Dean Quinlan at Yale was talking this afternoon to Margit about how all guides of campus tours should emphasize that, at Yale, the ethical development of the students is paramount. I would not be surprised if other Ivies followed.
This will be a hard season for W.F. at the college… who knows how these things will play up with early action and how they will impact yield. It would be helpful for admissions if this sad affair could be over very soon and not linger til november.
9/3/2024 7:32 pm
sssshhhhhhhh
9/3/2024 7:39 pm
quid Romae faciam? mentiri nescio; librum, si malus est, nequeo laudare et poscere; motus astrorum ignoro; funus promittere patris nec uolo nec possum; ranarum uiscera numquam inspexi; ferre ad nuptam quae mittit adulter, quae mandat, norunt alii; me nemo ministro fur erit, atque ideo nulli comes exeo tamquam mancus et extinctae corpus non utile dextrae. (3.41-48)
9/3/2024 7:46 pm
Maori Ki Tamaki Makaurau
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9/3/2024 8:12 pm
Judith - But the real concern was never that the instructions weren’t precise, it’s that they weren’t credible. In published accounts, the TFs themselves set aside the rules. They felt obliged, because of an impression that the instructor did not prepare the students for the tests. If these accounts are true, that’s a pretty strong argument. Are the TFs under investigation for helping students cheat?
Yes, it’s a very interesting test. According to accounts, it was too interesting. Do you know what a “wave election” is? I don’t. If the instructor explained the material that was in the test, that’s great. If not, then he created a problem.
I would not be surprised if the Ad Board never uncovered any organizing principle for why so many students cheated in one class, other than the class itself. It’s true that I wasn’t there and they should do their investigation. But the cat is out of the bag and waiting until November will be extremely painful.
9/3/2024 9:03 pm
Having now read the exam and syllabus, I am total agreement that with Judith that the exam instructions are quite clear about what is allowed.
I would highly recommend to all that you read Max Bazerman’s (HBS) and Ann Tenbrunsel’s book Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to do about it. Max is a (the?) founder of the hot, new emerging field of the psychology of ethical bias, a critical extension of the work done by Kahenman and others on cognitive bias. I think there are two key points in the book relevant to the discussion here. First, people are much more willing to cheat than we might ever imagine. In some experiments it is in excess of 50%. Second, people are extremely good at deluding themselves that they are being dishonest. At best we try to rationalize our dishonesty. At worst, we do not even recognize that we are being dishonest. We are not nearly as honest as we think we are.
In terms of how we should respond to the present situation, I think there are two distinct issues: (1) who should be held accountable for what occurred; (2) quite, separately, a determination of the factors, surely multiple, that caused so many students to cheat.
With respect to accountability, clearly the students who cheated need to be held accountable for their behavior; if the professor sent mixed or vague messages about what was allowed (which, at least in his written materials, I can’t see that he did), he should be held accountable; if the TF’s in the course gave highly inappropriate advice, they should be held accountable; the same if this was done by one or more athletic coaches. From what I read about this case, it may well be that multiple parties behaved quite inappropriately, but that is for the Ad Board and others to decide.
It is important to distinguish between the issue of accountability versus causality. If one reads Bazerman’s book, it is clear that what happened here at Harvard was hardly surprising. Under a variety of circumstances, individuals are quite likely to cheat. There are two questions then: (1) how can things be institutionalized to minimize the incentives to cheat? (2) how can we support the moral development of our students so that they have far greater immunity to the temptations of cheating?
Answering either of these questions involves understanding why people cheat. There are multiple possibilities and more than one is likely important in the present case:
1. An individual sees nothing wrong with cheating under any circumstance. Basically, they are socio-paths. Best if we can find a way to have them leave Harvard. Hopefully, there are very few of these.
2. An individual believes that are others are cheating, and since they are, it is okay for them to cheat. If they are wrong about this, then they are paranoid and delusional and there is a mental health issue. If they are correct, then we have a feedback loop where the more students cheat, the more additional students will cheat. Cheating has become contagious.
3. Relatedly, the environment an individual is part of may be seen as tolerant of cheating. Students may feel that they have no obligation to criticize, much less turn in fellow students that cheat. The same may be true for teaching fellows. An individual may well that cheating is okay in a particular circumstance, if no one will overtly disapprove.
4. Students may not feel that faculty are being responsible instructors, putting in an appropriate amount of work, etc. As result, since the professor is “cheating”, they feel justified in cheating. There is host of research (see Bazerman), showing that employees feel justified in pilfering from their employees when they feel that they are paid or more generally treated unfairly. (Some of you may be interested in an article I published last spring “The Faculty Student Low-low Contract,” Society, 2011, 48:232-235.)
5. More generally students may question the integrity of Harvard’s policies in the areas of investments, faculty promotion, admissions, etc. If Harvard “cheats”, why shouldn’t they?
6. Individuals may feel so many demands that they believe that the only way they can succeed is by cheating. They rationalize this as “being only this time” or simply define what they are doing as not cheating. It may well be time to examine the demands put on our students by athletics and other extracurricular activities.
7. A contributing factor may be that the context is such that students believe that if they do cheat they will not get caught. Take home exams would seem to be particularly problematic in this respect.
8. Students may fail to recognize that their cheating undermines the moral fabric of the overall community or more simply believe that the effect of their cheating is sufficiently minimal not to be of consequence. This is essentially a negative form of the free-rider problem.
9. More generally, students may simply not have thought very much about why it is wrong to cheat. One could say they are morally underdeveloped. We do require our students to take a moral/ethical reasoning course, but what is the evidence that this is even remotely sufficient?
Each of these may be contributing factors to the Harvard cheating scandal with some being of greater importance to some students than to others. The reason I list them out is that dealing with each factor involves a different type of change in institutional policy. I will not go on at this point and describe all the different possible responses. The point is that we need to understand the whys of cheating at Harvard, and there is certainly more than one, if we are to effectively deal with the problem.
My apologies for such a long comment.. A former student of mine and now Harvard College Fellow, Josh Wakeman and I are developing a new Gen Ed course tentatively called “just Institutions and Moral Communities.” With the cheating scandal, there will be a lot to talk about with students in class this fall.
9/4/2024 6:58 am
Chris,
I was with you until, and after, the part where you say, “With respect to accountability, clearly the students who cheated need to be held accountable for their behavior; if the professor sent mixed or vague messages about what was allowed (which, at least in his written materials, I can’t see that he did), he should be held accountable; if the TF’s in the course gave highly inappropriate advice, they should be held accountable; the same if this was done by one or more athletic coaches. From what I read about this case, it may well be that multiple parties behaved quite inappropriately, but that is for the Ad Board and others to decide.”
Now I am the first to caution against analogies between the criminal justice system and the Ad Board, but it is worth pointing out that the suggestion that all of the above should be “held accountable” is (as you know) very different from the way the justice system works in the real world. If the government screws up in certain ways, the accused party may not be held accountable at all.
In any case, the Ad Board is not the place where faculty and TFs are held accountable for the way they run their courses. It does sometimes consider the way a course was run to be an extenuating circumstance for a student, but any changes to faculty behavior have to come through a different mechanism.
9/5/2024 4:18 pm
The journalist called me up last Friday. I told him that this was a serious matter and that there were lots of signs of organized cheating, despite clear instructions about what was and was not allowed. He told me, and I quote, that he was writing ‘the counter story’ (a phrase I’d never heard) and, sure enough, the story in Saturday’s New York Times made it seem like it was largely, if not entirely, the professors and TF’s fault and that the students should probably be absolved of guilt. So much for quality journalism- I am not surprised that, according to Richard B, he screwed up an earlier story.
9/5/2024 4:18 pm
sorry, I did not mean to Anonymous at 4:18, just a bit tired. hg
9/5/2024 4:25 pm
The counter-story? That makes me laugh, though not in an amused way. I’ve never heard that phrase either, and I wouldn’t recommend that anyone who writes for me use it. Maybe if I were writing for an opinion journal and wanted some counter-intuitive take, just to stir debate…. But in a newspaper that’s supposed to try to write what happened, I think just “the story” is the place to start.
10/13/2013 6:18 pm
but recent figures from market research firm IDC suggest Windows Phone hasn’t even captured 5% of the global smartphone market.result is a design that? I mean I did an interview with a mexican newspaper. A MEXICAN NEWSPAPER!! And I’ve also learned that contrary to everything I’ve ever thought about myself I’m actually pretty good at PR I think i may know what I want to do when I grow up This shit has been bananas But we also all have fulltime jobs and would like nothing more than for MS and Sony to say “We heard you guys no DRM on physical media” and have that end this entire thing Put us out of business pleaseSo again thank you NeoGAF Thank you people who were in that thread helping every step of the way Thank you to the lurkers who joined in and spread it to other sites like Reddit and Facebook and other major videogame boards Thank you thank you thank you Maybe we just saved consumer rights. maybe we didn’t do a damn thing Either way I’m sitting here extremely proud of this community and I’m proud of how this all was conducted You guys are amazing-pete ‘famousmortimer’ doddPhase Two Starts on Wednesday June 5th at 8AM eastern (1pm GMT) Spread the word! It will be running all day long UPDATED PLAN:We have successfully made it very very clear to Sony how we feel It’s our view that it would be best to back off tweeting directly at Sony employees for a bit but we do implore people to keep the hashtag #PS4NoDRM going We know that this movement is bigger than just this forum and that people will continue to go on however they chose and that’s totally cool We are not trying to put the kabosh on people expressing themselves but we did want to clarify our own planAfter several days with just the hashtag simmering we will make one last push on Wednesday June 5th and try to keep the momentum up on it into that weekend when everyone starts traveling to LA for E3 We will also try to build up a media presence by letting them know that this is coming so maybe we can get some press and the twitter thing happening at once again As for third parties and Microsoft keep tweeting them Microsoft has said they are listening The third parties will ignore us but we’ll make sure that’s impossible Also make sure you check out the last few pages of the thread we may at any time during this lull be doing some more targeted or fun things Never rude Always polite But things like tweeting a link to people at Sony with the list of the 150+ links of stories about the movement may be happening so go have a look h ______________old op______________The gist of it is that Sony is listening to the backlash that Microsoft is getting and they are basing decisions off of this I would assume MS is also but I don’t know that for sure But I can say for sure that the past week’s PR nightmare for MS has not been lost on Sony and they in fact do have a used game ‘solution’ working and have been going back and forth for months on whether to use it This past week is pushing them strongly into “Yeah let’s not use that” Do you want to give them an extra push It can’t hurt I’ve been told by lower level people in the company that tweeting to yosp specifically is quite effective as he likes to gauge what people are thinking Will a couple hundred posts from neogaf change the entire industry No Can it help give a little more momentum to something sony seems to be leaning towards already I would think so If any lurkers or members of the press or Sony’s goons hired to break my kneecaps want to contact me: @ForYourPeteDodd or PM me here My biggest piece of advice is be respectful They aren’t likely to finish a tweet in all caps threatening them Shuhei Yoshida (president of worldwide studios) @yosp (easily the highest level person on twitter and quite accessible)John Koller (head of hardware marketing) @jpkoller (dude has like 150 followers - heh)Guy Longworth (senior vice president PlayStation Brand Marketing) @luckylongworthScott Rohde (PlayStation Software Product Development Head for Sony Worldwide Studios America) @rohdescottAdam Boyes (Publisher and developer relations at Sony) @amboyesShahid Kamal Ahmad (third party relations europe) @shahidkamal Nick Accordino (SCEA ISD A Producer) @nikoroPhil Rosenberg (SCEA - reports directly to Tretton thanks GoFreak) @philrosenberg #PS4NoDRM #PS4USEDGAMES are the hashtags being used Also couldn’t hurt to let the ex-journos that work there like @nsuttner and @shanewatch and @morganharo and @sidshuman know what you are thinking But again remember respectful I would assume any of these guys are used to getting flamed and just instantly disregard tweets that seem pissed offUse the hashtags #XboxOneUSEDGAMES #XboxOneNoDRM as wellPhil Spencer the head of Microsoft StudiosAaron Greenberg chief of staff for IEB Phil Harrison man in charge of MS EuropeMike Ybarra manager of games developed by external studios published by MSYusuf Mehdi marketing for XboxMajor Nelson just becauseRemember use #XboxOneUSEDGAMES #XboxOneNoDRM and share your thoughtsEAActivisionHere’s one of Activisions Board of Directors Christian GuillemotCo-founder of Ubi SoftPATRICK SDERLUND - EA Vice President: @PatrickSderlund Social media teams. probably a waste of timeUbisoftEA // EA UK MarketingActivision // Activision Community managerI would caution not to expect too much They aren’t going to reply to a tweet with their used game philosophy Just them taking notice publically of the movement is all we can reasonably hope for at this juncture Scott Rohde ?@RohdeScott I love passionate #PlayStation Fans! such as iTunes or Adobe Photoshop, and you want to make sure that you delete all that information, some items are not included with the Zoom. but again,840,087.
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10/13/2013 6:19 pm
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