Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

hcurtiss

Princeton is a strange place. What on earth could be the objection to proctoring? I'd much rather have a proctor than have to narc on a classmate. And even then, the proctor just reports the matter to a student-run body? Wild.

dbvn

Crazy it took them 133 years to do the obvious. Assuming your *entire* student-base is morally superior to the general population

john_strinlai

huh, i had no idea princeton specifically disallowed proctors, and instead relied on an honor system. seems... like a poorly thought out system, especially given: " 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. " crazier is the people protesting by saying: “students should behave honorably, and that faculty and students should trust each other given the 1893 Honor Code compact.” . obviously that isnt happening if 1/3rd of the student body has admitted to cheating (meaning that the real percent of cheating is even higher).

analogpixel

> If a suspected Honor Code violation occurs, proctors will document their observations and submit a report to the student-run Honor Committee, where they may later testify under the same standards used for other witnesses. is this so the rich kids that have parents who pay for parts of the school can still get a pass?

JumpCrisscross

Combined with the increasing acceptance of shoplifting [1] and unprecedented corruption and criminality among our national leaders, it's hard not to read this as a moral page turning on American culture. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/hasan-piker-jia-to...

ngruhn

So after 133 they learned to not leave dogs alone with sausages.

mmooss

Comments express surprise that this honor code has been in place. Many schools have similar honor codes. Despite HN trendiness, SV and business world advocacy of 'animal instincts', and current cultural trends, humans are generally honest and honorable - obviously people in many places have thought that. It's good news, though many will resist it because, I think, it violates the anarcho-libertarian norms that are fundamental to these cultural trends (i.e., arguing that corruption is inevitable, human nature, etc.).

wps

I've sat in classes where people at my table genuinely took pictures of the exam while the professor's back was turned (being kind to us and giving us useful information on the board) and uploaded the entire exam to the Gemini app. Cheating is all around disheartening and is now incredibly easy with all the free multi-modal models around. Real active proctoring is needed and devices need to be confiscated during exams. This is common practice in many other countries.

i_am_proteus

The technical ability for the student to cheat in the present day is unprecedented. For exams in most subjects, the cellular phone is held in the lap. The student needs only briefly expose the exam page to the camera of the phone: immediate photograph of the page, ingestion of the page by an artificial intelligence, and then: the student flips the page to view the side exposed to the camera, and glances down to see the answer on the telephone.

fegu

Could it be non-proctoring has served Princeton by inflating grades due to some cheating, but only now have cheating become rampant enough that it must be curtailed to destroy the reputation entirely?

poplarsol

A WASP ethical framework cannot survive either the extirpation of WASPs from the student body or the transformation of the education system into a high stakes mandarin style death struggle.

ronburgandy28

I would argue that the student behavior - ~30% admitting to cheating on academic work - reflects the value system shown by those holding positions/stature the students aspire to. It is a combination of FOMO (everyone else is doing it, I must also to not fall behind) similar to that which drives hype adoption, combined with a perception that moral behavior grows optional in proportion with wealth or power. The latter is empirically evident in how American society has addressed moral failures of wealthy/powerful leaders (i.e. crimes without punishment)

bawolff

I wonder to what extent this is due to the changing roles of university. I would guess 133 years ago university was mostly upper class folks trying to better their minds, and less people wanting a degree to open up a job. Much more incentive to cheat if you just care about the piece of paper at the end.

nashashmi

Difficult to imagine that people were not using phones to search for stuff while taking an exam. I can understand this being the case 18 years ago. But since the iPhone, how was honor still a thing?

rosstex

I was a TA at Princeton ~5 years ago, and I had forgotten about the honor code until reading this. Yes it's true, we did not proctor exams, and students seemed to take pride in it. On every test, you got the names/signatures of those sitting next to you. But also, I had a student who was accused of not putting his pencil down when the test had concluded, and the bureaucratic process to fight the accusation was so crippling that they had to take a semester of leave anyway. So I don't see harm in tearing it down.

Al-Khwarizmi

So now I finally understand why Americans use the expression "proctored exams". Because not all exams are proctored. Here in Spain, we don't have an equivalent expression because there is no such thing as an unproctored exam. The idea of being proctored is already included in the word "exam".

moralestapia

Very curious to see if/how the admissions distribution changes after this.

godsinhisheaven

Maybe I haven't scrolled down far enough, but gut feeling is telling me that a lot of the rise in cheating is coming from international (read: chinese) students. Plenty of stories and personal experience of cheating rings. I tried to get into one just to see what was going on, but even though I looked the part I couldn't talk the talk.

pcrh

With reference to the "cultural" allusions of many posts in this thread, I can assure you that in the WASP UK universities of Oxford and Cambridge, all exams are "proctored". It is assumed that students will attempt to cheat, so exams are designed so that cheating is not a viable strategy to obtain high grades. So-called invigilators also patrol the exam room and will report any violations.

travelalberta

I’ve never heard of a non-proctored exam. Every exam I took in university was proctored. If you got caught (happened every once in a while and made everything very awkward) you failed the exam immediately, got kicked out, and had a department hearing. I have a vivid memory of two girls almost killing each other as a result of one such failed scheme during a CS Logic exam of all things. I had the Naruto Chunnin Exam episodes where they write the written test on dvd as a kid and watched it all the time so it might have altered my philosophy but I’ve always viewed proctored tests as a mini game. The ability to gather information under stress, maintain composure, and evaluate the likelihood the person you were borrowing answers from knew what they were doing was always fun to me. Even on tests where I was going to get 90% guaranteed I liked seeing how much information I could parse from other people. I remember one exam I could make out another girls scantron and knew she was going to fail. She was the first person to hand in her answers and the proctor joked “wow that was quick, we’ll have to make the next one harder”. When I was a proctor I loved trying to catch people cheating. Lots of wandering eyes but never a phone. I’d have thrown someone out so quick if the pulled out a phone and that’s before ChatGPT. I can’t imagine not having proctors. Honour systems sound great and all but not in an evaluation. Tribe mentality prevents most people from ratting on others (except for those with limited social status to lose from the jump), especially when you are 19. I saw someone mention that having proctors “punished” students who followed the honour code which is insane. If you know what you are doing in an exam you’ll forget all about the proctors being there. The only people who will notice them are those trying to cheat…