I went to West Point two decades ago, before the apparent change to the honor code in 2015 that allowed for second chances.
It does take a little time to adjust to the honor code, but among all the things learned at WP, this one stuck with me the most. I (and many of my friends) came to literally hate lying/cheating, and to disdain those who do. But there’s another route that is taken too — the opposite, where some cadets become very good at lying/cheating. What starts out as a trivial lie must be covered up with larger more intricate lies, moving from something accidental or thoughtless to something intentional and deliberate. The cover-up and defense, often bringing friends into the mix, turns toxic really quickly. This is what happens when a perceived innocuous lie is seen a a life-ruiner.
My father also went to a service academy, and often after catching me in a lie would say, “I’m mad at you about lying, but I’m ever madder you were dumb enough to get caught!” My dad is one of the most moral men I’ve ever met, and I only just now connected the dots here with regard to a zero-toleration honor code.
I suspect the 2015 change was a practical rather than principled change: to make it easier to catch and correct violations instead of letting them fester and spread.
In some ways the service academies are a giant experiment in human character. Humans naturally lie, cheat, and steal in order to survive and protect their own tribe (i.e., go to war). Can you change that? Not really. But you can create a culture like that. The change, as ironic as it may seem, may do a better job of creating that kind of culture by attacking the tendency to dig deeper holes.
I've been through the Canadian equivalent of West Point and have done a week exchange at West Point. You're totally right about the experiment in human nature.
Depending on which degree you were working on, there was often just way too much to do with the time given. The "academic wing" wouldn't coordinate with the "military wing" and we'd end up having a slew of inspections alongside midterms. I remember getting caught skipping out on military training on a Saturday (which was just a day of lectures, easy to slip out after attendance) to catch up on homework. At the same time, an officer went through the dorms to ensure nobody was skipping. I was caught in my room and spent the next two weeks having to wear an uncomfortable uniform all day and reporting to do drill every morning.
Obviously, choosing to cheat academically is way worse than skipping a Saturday of lectures, but if the system is designed to break you, it shouldn't be impossible to recover from.
I had a similar thought when I saw this that there may just be way too much to be working on. The two instances of widespread cheating that I have seen going through school were the results of:
1. There was absolutely way too much to do. Classes within a major did not coordinate large projects/tests and students tried to find a way to cope.
2. The teacher was so terrible that they felt vastly underprepared for an upcoming test.
Giving students more work than they can reasonably accomplish is a good object lesson in ruthless prioritization and time management. In the real world you have to decide which tasks to do well and which to half-ass or just drop entirely.
I didn't attend a military academy, but did go to an academically demanding college (with an honor code). Some of my fellow students were ridiculous in that they didn't know when to quit and tried to do all assignments perfectly even at the expense of having a social life or getting some exercise.
Devil's Advocate - to carry the parent's analogy of ruthless lessons being taught to the grandparent's comment on don't get caught, Sun Tzu clammed that most military success is due to surprising the enemy with deception and tricks. It seems like it would be good to have a very strict honor code but also require impossible tasks to be done, thus forcing cadets to learn to be deceptive in the most effective way possible.
I remember listening to a Joe Rogan episode where he said that top fighters had a problem - if they kept trying to prepare they would overtrain and set themselves back. I can see how figuring out the difference between enough and too much is hard especially when your need to excel and maybe your identity is tied up in everything.
I enjoyed the parties, but most colleges have a lot of other social opportunities. I was in a theater group, sailing club, fragged my friends in online video games, etc.
It's almost expected you don't have enough time. When I was at West Point they'd explicitly state that.
Additionally, there was a hard lights off policy at midnight to ensure cadets got enough sleep, yet people invariably would be up with a flashlight underneath their covers trying to get work done until 2am.
Plebes in particular got less time as well, as they'd be subject to additional tasks/hazing until a given time when they couldn't be disturbed (I believe 7pm).
I don't know why the military academies in the US and Canada combine military and education at the same time. In the UK you focus on one at a time - education in a conventional civilian university like anyone else, and then military in a military academy afterwards. Why do you need the military to provide the education part? Seems like not their core competency.
I am an '04 grad, and there has been some system of second chances for a while. I have a friend that started a year ahead of me who was a "turn back" for an honor violation. The violation was in her first year and they decided she was still adapting to the honor code when it happened. The result was 5 years at West Point where she had an in between rank of Cadet PFC for her second year.
The idea of zero tolerance is a little crazy. Have you ever violated a software license, or streamed something with someone else's account? Those should technically be honor violations, but they aren't prosecuting those. It isn't 100% clear to me where to draw the line.
When laws are BS, ZT is not a little crazy: it's inhumane.
> It isn't 100% clear to me where to draw the line.
I feel that's the idea with BS laws: everyone is a criminal, so you can just dig for dirt on anyone and make them go away as law enforcement.
What BS laws? Well all victimless crime for one. I dont mind some victimless behaviours are offenses (punishable with a fine), but a crime (punishable with jail time)?! That's IMHO a big part of why the law system is broken. We need the constitutional right not to be punished for victimless crime.
>Reckless driving and child pornography comes to mind. It is crimes against the state atleast where I live.
Because teenagers getting air off the train track berm in their shitbox cars and sending nudes to each other definitely needs to be prosecuted like criminals <rolls eyes>.
It's easy to call for zero tolerance in the abstract.
> Have you ever violated a software license, or streamed something with someone else's account? Those should technically be honor violations
They make a HUGE deal about this in lifestyle polygraphs. It's completely asinine and drives significant attrition of strong candidates for selective jobs in the IC/SOF world.
We need a complete overhaul of the puritanical mindset with which the powers-that-be judge prior behavior. Downloading porn from Limewire when you were a 19-year-old college sophomore should not be stopping people from advancing in selective processes; nor should a history of having used hard drugs, hallucinogens, or marijuana >10x (on the latter I gather they're evolving given current state laws).
Downloading porn on lime wire doesn't stop you from advancing in the process with a polygraph.
Doing hard drugs doesn't stop you in advancing with the selection process, or even prevent you from getting a clearance.
LYING about it, hiding it, or attempting to cover it up or show ANY KIND of dishonesty is what prevents you from continuing in the process.
Nobody has ever been denied a clearance because they downloaded porn on limewire, or pirated movies or videos, assuming they admit to such, and do not indicate a desire or intent to continue in the behavior.
> Downloading porn on lime wire doesn't stop you from advancing in the process with a polygraph.
This is factually incorrect. I personally know two people who, already holding a TS/SCI, were denied further career opportunities due to the volume and duration of their downloading of pirated material while in college (which they were honest about due to thinking, as you erroneously assert, that it wasn't a big deal).
The "digital piracy" was specifically cited as the reason for not advancing in the process. Two different former colleagues, both proven performers.
Also, prior drug use ABSOLUTELY does disqualify you if there's enough of it, even if you've never been addicted to anything or if it's years in the past. They're especially tough on hallucinogens for some reason which is hilariously ironic because LSD...I mean....
It's not factually incorrect. The adjudication guidelines are pretty clear, and, baring continual ongoing mis-use, under Guideline M under EO 10865 and it's implementation by DOD Directive 5220.6p [1], it is considered a mitigation if the misuse of systems was 'not recent' and 'not ongoing'.
Same with drug use. It explicitly says under Guideline H that if it was not recent, not ongoing, if you seeked treatment, etc. that it is a mitigation to the security concern raised by use of illicit drugs.
If your contacts were denied based on those reasons, they either didn't tell you the whole story (other, unmitigated risks that compounded the total risk of their position), or they had substantive grounds for an appeal of the decision. You can see the evidence yourself of the appeals process, as every appeal record is public, and the govt has no problem with former drug addicts, etc. getting clearances.
[2] https://ogc.osd.mil/doha/industrial/2020.html for this years decisions, an example:
"Applicant mitigated Guideline H (drug involvement and substance misuse) security concerns because his most recent marijuana use was in 2014".
I think we're talking past each other. I appreciate you taking the time to source citations to the chapter and verse regulations.
This isn't the right setting to discuss the details of individuals' past clearance adjudication processes but at a high level I can tell you that curating and trading a massive library of illegally downloaded music over a period of multiple years was sufficient to get two separate SAP clearances denied.
Without getting hung up on the technical details, would you agree that the national security community is far too puritanical in how it evaluates details of one's past personal life?
SAPs are not a clearance, and that changes things. :). The rules for specific SAPs are highly varied, so who knows.
The original posit was that it won't stop you from proceeding with a polygraph. But sure.
And I mean, no, I wouldn't. I think standards have gotten way too relaxed as they've pushed to over classify a ton of shit that wouldn't have been so crazily classified 40 years ago.
When you relax standards, as has been done over the past few years, you end up with Reality Winner, Edward Snowden, Harold Martin, etc.
Your friends, and I'm not joking. Polygraphs themselves are poor indicators, but that's just one of many tools adjudicators use when judging people for clearances. The primary tool is documentation (you'd be amazed how many people lie about criminal offenses when it's a quick search away), and second is friends (2nd order ones especially), acquaintances, and neighbors.
If something is so problematic as to be worth lying about in the first place, why tell your friends? People generally don’t go around bragging about how much porn they’ve pirated.
I suppose I’m just reinforcing the “don’t get caught” mantra, but that’s really not a trait I like to see in people who are supposed to be cracking down on fraud.
As SteveNuts said, you're too focused on the infraction. It's the lying part that's the problem because it shows lack of judgement. Which really just means it's something that can be used to blackmail you later.
No one cares if you like porn or had a DUI when you were younger, unless you're lying about it.
I think you're focusing too much on the supposed infraction (they don't actually care whatsoever if you've smoked weed or downloaded something illegally). They're selecting for character judgement traits.
Without judging the validity of the poly itself (I concur, it's garbage), it's also not the sole basis of any decision, and the actual people doing the investigation build a case to show that you have lied about something, because you an appeal their decisions to a judge. It's not just 'meh, the line wiggled so no clearance for you'.
You'll forgive me if I have no faith in a system that uses polygraphs as input, has inspired leakers like Snowden, and has come up "courts" like the FISA "court".
Being told by the IC it will be reviewed by a judge is not reassuring.
Regardless of the argument that has long been going on over how accurate polygraphs are, that's kind of irrelevant. Dishonesty is what is prohibited. If you have some minor blemish, the government is typically okay with that as long as you admit it. You may not trust how they detect lying, but that's still what they're trying to find to base their decision on.
There isn't an argument. We know for a fact that polygraphs are not accurate at detecting lies.
They cannot effectively prohibit something they cannot detect. The polygraph being inaccurate pseudoscience means that they can't exercise the control that they pretend and purport to, as they simply cannot reliably determine if someone is being truthful or not.
Additionally, due to its inaccuracy, it makes the whole process wickedly unfair.
Who would want to work for an employer that gates your success as a team member on pseudoscientific nonsense?
This is a bit of a non sequitor. Parent didn't mention polygraphs, and the lying is which prevents you from moving forward. At the same time, I concur that polygraphs are not fully accurate measures of lying.
Of course it doesn't actually detect lies, there's no way it could.
What they do is use it as a tool against you to try to force a confession. It's absolutely a bluff on the part of the interviewer, and they know it.
What they'll do is sit you down after the "results" come in and say: "hey, we both know you weren't 100% truthful during the test, the results clearly indicate you lied during key parts of the interview. Is there anything you'd like to tell us?"
I cannot stress enough that the actual results of what the polygraph say are not factored in whatsoever.
Is it thought up by people who have just "decided to be honest" in their life and think that should be the way to do things?
And then later, these policies cove more ground, so you get something like one kid picking on another and both get in trouble for fighting, or "a leatherman tool is a weapon, so you're out".
Zero tolerance makes sense in certain circumstances. Manned space missions, nuclear power, and the military has many zero tolerance policies and rules.
It is also a more general behavior, observed when people are raised in extremely strict households. They can become very shy of conflicts, and start lying about the smallest things - stuff that regular people wouldn't think twice about lying.
Basically - anything that could lead to some sort of conflict, they can lie about, just to avoid.
Which is kind of ironic - as people often cite or view strict upbringing as something which will build character and "mature" kids for adult life. But then you see a lot of these kids end up becoming master liars.
> It does take a little time to adjust to the honor code, but among all the things learned at WP, this one stuck with me the most. I (and many of my friends) came to literally hate lying/cheating, and to disdain those who do. But there’s another route that is taken too — the opposite, where some cadets become very good at lying/cheating.
Honest question: Don't you think that is systemic within the Military itself and is one of the trademarks of its so called culture? Which is why the State will go the lengths it will when things are leaked and given how Assange and Snowden are treated when they prove Intelligence agencies lied (supposedly crimes punishable with long term sentences) to Congress and the US Citizens?
I come from a military family and the hypocrisy is suffocating, any time you even suggest what it really is (Empire) its like the scars from the kool-aid levels of indoctrination re-open and they leap to extremes about fictional forms of 'terrorism' to rationalize their existence with even more lies.
I stopped talking about illegal interventionism by Imperial decree that violates the US Constitution (and their supposed sacred oath) long ago, as every conflict since WWII has not been declared by Congress. And most are Intelleence Agency led conflicts, that now last decades with no end in sigh based on lies to make private contractors incredibly wealthy. Let alone that that their is no (intentionally so) provision in the US Constitution for a standing Army (and defined limitations of conflicts) but only a domestic Navy to protect trade routes from pirates and states nothing about protecting 'freedom' abroad all while the US systematically becomes more an more of a surveillance-police State with ever more eroded Civil Rights and Liberties that are only rivaled in scope by the CCP, which is now he US' supposed Enemy #1 after all the pro-China rhetoric from the Obama/Biden administration years prior to now?
You say you hate lies, and talk about principals but how do you contend with this very blatant contradiction that is clear to anyone who cares enough to pay attention within it and not want to hurl yourself out of a building? In my lifetime alone, the US went from a place where people took massive risks just to have a chance to be to a place where its own Citizen's will pay an exhorbarnt amount of money if they have it to leave because of this Imperial interventionism and the degrading quality of Life due to an over-inflated currency to finance these Corporate-led headlong excursions that lead no where but death and misery have made it not worth it.
Does it really take that much imagination to understand how it could seem that way to someone who has, realistically, been organizing their life around getting into a service academy since they were 15ish years old?
My dad worked at USMA from ‘93 to ‘98 and I grew up around the Academy in high school. I always thought it was so cool how if say you left your calculator on the desk it would just sit there and people would work around it. I worked at Victor Constant as a patroller and had lots of fun hanging out with some of the Cadets that were in Ski Patrol as well.
If they all made the same error on the test, in the same way, they're almost certainly all guilty - except apparently for two of them.
Every single one of these people should be dismissed or resign. They are simply not officer material. The Honor Code is very clear. You lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do and you're not military material.
There simply cannot be second chances. Second chances here are what result in subpar military officers. The last time this happened, everyone involved was dismissed or resigned.
Given the sheer number of instances where the higher ups in the military have lied, especially claiming they had no involvement in a problem; letting the shit roll downhill (as the expression goes) until it finds someone so low they can't blame anyone below them.... I find it ironic that being caught lying once is considered something that proves you're not officer material. That is, of course, it's the "caught" part, because it seems rare that anyone higher up is ever actually caught for anything; that's what the scapegoats are for.
To be very clear, I appreciate the military and all those men and women that serve in it. I just think it's ridiculous to think that they are of a higher moral caliber than the rest of the population. They're people, just like you and me. And learning from your mistakes is part of being human. You can't learn from a mistake if there's never second chances.
The only lesson that will be learned is that the honor code is bullshit, and that despite swearing to neither lie, cheat nor steal, the consequences will be minimal if they do. The lesson for those who did not cheat is that the honor code is just empty words.
Their second chance is the rest of their lives. They were given a privilege and they abused it and it should rightfully be taken away.
> I find it ironic that being caught lying once is considered something that proves you're not officer material.
There seems no controversy that the middle management era of staff duty seems designed to filter out good officers and keep the worst or at least keep the folks unable to escape. Their point of view is if you start with a better pool of O-1 then as the good officers are eliminated on the march upward in rank, forcing the worst O-1 to none the less be better officers at the start will result in better O-4 range officers which eventually, in theory, will someday result in better O-9 officers.
Remember unlike corporations, the military promotes from within, so todays 2nd Lts will literally be the commanding generals in about 25 years. Most corporations do not promote from within, or rarely do, and life long careers are dead in corporate world, so there's no ethical or moral argument in trying to make superior paper filing clerks today so as to get a better CEO in forty years.
Its also worth considering that there's a peculiar form of hazing or abuse of junior military personnel where "caught" is really a combo of intelligence testing and social skills testing where at least one is required to pass. The reason for a baroquely complex process to take leave is to select for personnel who are some mixture of extremely smart able to outthink the opposition or good at social skills to schmooze successfully (which is a military intel or military police or green beret skill...). There's a power law distribution of importance where almost all decisions are not "newsworthy". Technically its an honor violation to fill out the wrong leave form and obtain the wrong signature in the wrong box and put it in the wrong mailbox, its an IQ and/or social skills test or hazing for juniors to avoid situations like that. In theory the kids are supposed to be selected via that process to be smart enough and observant enough to avoid making dumb mistakes when it actually counts. In practice once in a long while psychopaths get thru the process and bend the hazing to more self serving purposes, LOL, and THEN that stuff makes the news, not unlike a lot of corporate internal politics.
Or more explicitly, you're supposed to not "get caught" technically AWOL because you're supposed to be smart enough to read the policy book and/or friendly enough with the "old timer" O-2 who's been there an entire year before you, such that you file your paperwork properly and avoid being technically AWOL. With the hope that someday if you make it to O-9 rank, or perhaps earlier, you'll have absorbed via osmosis enough written regs and adopted a hopefully moral culture that when you have to make an important decision you won't screw up.
This is entirely branch and service dependent. You'll find plenty of 0-1s essentially filing paperwork in HHC, who have no subordinates reporting to them, across the Army. The overwhelming majority of 0-1s who are "line managers" will be in the Combat Arms branches (Infantry, Armor, Field Artillery, etc), and you'll still find 0-1s making slide decks for the Battalion Commander while they wait until it's their time for a Platoon.
Not OP but my guess is that he is referring to what happens after you finish your platoon leader time and basically wait around to go to the career course. You spend a lot of time pulling "staff duty" (think "Officer of the Watch" or something if a Naval reference is more familiar), where you're the representative of the Commander during off-duty hours. It's a time of extreme boredom, and a lot of lieutenants start experiencing FOMO for the first time since the "exciting" part of your career (being a PL in combat) is over.
Is the implication that those who have other good non-military options choose not to wait out the staff duties? Or that having the qualities that make you a good officer in combat hinder you in the staff roles?
If everyone has to rotate through, I’m trying to make the connection on why it’s “designed” to filter out the good officers while the less-good stick around.
Some jargon isn't translating well here, and designed is probably the wrong word to use. "Staff Duty" (a singular "duty" as opposed to the myriad of official staff officer positions) consists of sitting at a desk and monitoring the company or battalion area for 24 hours straight. You end up dealing with things like privates coming back to the barracks drunk and getting into fights, etc. There are other semi-permanent staff roles you can get on Battalion/Brigade staff, but a lot of times lieutenants who finish platoon leader time just end up waiting for the next training assignment and you get put in the duty roster rotation. This happened to about half of my PL cohort when we re-deployed from Afghanistan. Mind you everyone has to do staff duty, but younger officers will do it more often because, well, they're younger and there's more of them.
>Or that having the qualities that make you a good officer in combat hinder you in the staff roles?
Some people claim this and I've definitely seen it as a phenomenon, but I don't think it's necessarily a truism. Plenty of folks can do both. I think a lot of good officers just don't want to do staff officer time is all. It's not really sexy, it can be really boring, and you spend a lot of time getting exposed to the bureaucracy and politics of the military (yes the army still has politics). A lot of younger officers (so lieutenants and captains) see that for the first time and balk and get out (I was one of them). So the folks who end up staying are a) fully committed to the military as a career, b) don't think they have any better options so they just deal with it and stay in, or c) are the kind of officer who isn't smart enough to place themselves in category (a) or (b). You can imagine the filter effect this has, but it's not unique to the military imo.
> Second chances here are what result in subpar military officers.
How did you come to this conclusion?
I believe in consequences, but I am neither a professional educator nor a veteran of any armed forces. I would defer to the head of this institution to arrive at an appropriate decision.
In my opinion this should probably result in dismissal (depending on exact circumstance which I'm not privy to).
The main issue here is demonstration of a lack of character. You give in to temptation to take the easy way out. That might be not doing the proper maintenance on a vehicle, or maybe not going exactly through the checklist before you take off for a flight, or maybe you take a shortcut and think "you got it" before that recon mission, or maybe you don't quite make sure someone's gear is up to standard and it fails on them and kills them.
Once you start taking shortcuts, you tend to keep taking them until it results in a colossal screw-up.
When I got out of the army it actually took me a few years to get away from the "triple-checking" anxiety. Do I have my car keys? Ok. Wait do I have my keys? Ok good.
"walking to my car"
Do I have my keys? Ok hand is on the keys and I can feel them.
Etc.
Cheating means you'll eventually screw that up and forget your keys. Then you or someone else dies.
I'm also a veteran. I'd be more inclined to give them a second chance. There are likely more factors involved than lack of character here. I would at least try and see what the bigger picture was. If 70 were caught out in a very obvious way, there's probably a much bigger number cheating. And perhaps something about the environment that encourages the behavior.
For example, watching yourself slip down the class ranking while knowing those ahead of you are cheating can be discouraging. Especially if you think it's being ignored. A few months of that might test your character pretty hard.
Also a Vet - I'd be fine with giving them a second chance - as enlisted men. Once they've proven they can be soldiers, they're welcome to re-attempt becoming officers.
The lack of quality officers was, and still is, one of the most egregious failings I encountered throughout my service.
>Also a Vet - I'd be fine with giving them a second chance - as enlisted men. Once they've proven they can be soldiers, they're welcome to re-attempt becoming officers.
The Army tried this, a cadet was killed, and the program ended (as far as I'm aware) [1].
>The lack of quality officers was, and still is, one of the most egregious failings I encountered throughout my service.
Speaking as a (former) officer, I can't disagree, it was the reason I left. My personal opinion is that USMA/USNA/USAFA spend way, way too much time trying to pretend that they're "just another University", and not an institution that explicitly exists to do one thing: produce leaders for war.
I'm a veteran as well, and it fits perfectly that officers get a slap on the wrist, while if a junior enlisted solider did something like this, they'd get fucked up big time.
> if a junior enlisted solider did something like this
Exactly like this, I donno.
But in spirit isn't the academy kind of officers basic training? And anyone who went thru basic knows that the recruits do the dumbest imaginable things and the drill sgts slowly and laboriously socialize them into being competent military personnel.
Fresh off the bus recruits at basic can get away with the dumbest things imaginable, things that would instantly chapter a MOSQ soldier out of a line unit. Think of the stupidest thing you ever saw a recruit do with a rifle WRT common sense safety or maintenance requirements. Dumb lapses of discipline, incredible lack of foresight, etc.
Frankly not much is expected of new 2nd LTs other than shut up, stay out of the way, and listen carefully to your platoon Sgt. Officers have a VERY slow and long maturation period compared to enlisted. Enlisted experience is here's a couple months to get MOSQ and then sink or swim.
Not that basic trainees get away with being dumb, that's kinda the point. The officer cadets have just earned the most epic extra duty imaginable for a long time.
Ah, yes, I was enlisted, so I get your drift. But I wasn't suggesting anything in that space. Just that focusing on the group that happened to get caught isn't really fixing the problem.
There’s a lot of cheating in college. When I was a TA I knew of a situation where about half of a large class cheated, and I felt very bad because I gave the honest half bad grades. I expect this for any large class, so if you wish to embrace humanity broadly you may have to do more than 2nd or 20th chance.
If what you say is a character test, then one should expect almost everyone in college to be dirty somehow.
I studied and worked in academia in the UK for around 15 years, from undergrad to postdoc and then as a scientific software developer. I'm afraid to say I have little trust in current academic standards. The number of first-class honours degrees continues to rise while the academic rigour and teaching standards of courses continue to slide, and a big part of that is in tolerance of dishonesty. It's long past time that colleges and universities had a zero tolerance policy for this stuff; their reputations will suffer irreparably if they don't. If they haven't already.
As someone who worked their ass off, graduated with first class honours and never cheated, rewarding cheating devalues the grades of honest students. It's absolutely unfair, and it needs properly policing. Good academics don't need to cheat.
There is huge pressure not to fail people, and it is incredibly difficult to actually fail--I know only of a small handful of instances. In one case, they basically didn't show up for six months on a 1 year masters and did zero work, and even then it took months of handwringing to actually kick them out. But it shouldn't require months of agonising if the rules are clear and consistently and fairly enforced. The problem is that they are in a thrall to rich overseas students' cash, and they don't want to rock the boat. They even have special dumbed down Masters courses which are strictly for overseas students only. An academic friend of mine who was a fellow PhD student teaches on one, and he wasn't happy at the standard of the course or the academic conduct of the students. If they were on a regular course they should mostly have failed. And there's also the issue of league tables--being lax in grading and punishing cheating gets you a higher ranking in the league tables, so there's a strong disincentive to have high standards.
At this point, I do think that universities need some sort of external intervention. If standards are to be upheld, academic misconduct must result in real consequences, i.e. being kicked out. Most universities have a session on academic misconduct for all new students, and they have to sign a statement saying they understand what academic misconduct is and that they understand that it is not permitted. That needs enforcing properly, no second chances. As for cheating on coursework, there's a simple answer to that: go back to closed examinations for all courses, and make the coursework component a minor part or remove it entirely. And structure the coursework to minimise cheating. For example, make every student's work unique so there is no possibility of using anyone else's work. As a scientist, lab work and written work were usually your own experiments and essays, so little chance for cheating.
The real test for the cheaters is when they later have to perform in the real world. There is usually a clear difference between motivated and competent people who are independent thinkers and doers and lazy chancers who struggle, and it's quickly apparent which category people fall into despite their paper qualifications and CVs. Whether you're in a university or a company, there are people you can rely on who know their stuff and can deliver, and the people who can't.
should the university system really just be an organized academic competition for undergraduates?
I think the solution is as you say -- make assignments that are hard to cheat on -- but also reduce the incentive to cheat. Just make it less important. High-stakes closed exams and emphasis on ranking students will certainly make cheating worse.
I've experienced several different universities which used different teaching styles both as an undergraduate and an employee.
In one university, absolutely everything was assessed, every bit of lab work, every tutorial, the lot. Unfortunately, this means you're being assessed on lab work which might fail due to your inexperience, and it makes it unnecessarily stressful.
In another, the lab work and tutorials were almost never assessed. They were learning exercises, which you could try and fail at without any consequences. I found that you learned a lot more here, because you could try stuff out and fail without it affecting anything, and it was much less stressful.
In the latter university, you did three modules per term (~10 weeks) and you had a closed exam for each every term. New paper set every year. No coursework. No chance for cheating.
The exams were also not "high-stakes". Each one made up a small percentage of the course total, which increased through the three years of the course, so there was no problem with doing badly on one or more. It meant the term time was pretty much all about learning, with assessment right at the end. I'm very much in favour of this simplicity, and it makes academic misconduct almost impossible.
Just because there are positive incentives to participate in bad behavior, doesn't mean the people engaging in that behavior are absolved of responsibility for their actions. Just because you suffer personal costs if you do not engage in bad actions, doesn't mean you get a free pass to do them.
The fact that the cheating isn't literally universal does suggest that specific people are knowingly making bad choices while others decide to rise above temptation and make the right choices. That is on them, and they should accept the consequences. Full stop.
I can see your point, but it sounds like you believe in character as of something inborn, not acquired. To give no second chances means to filter people selecting for a proper character. From the other hand second chances might nurture a character.
> Once you start taking shortcuts, you tend to keep taking them until it results in a colossal screw-up.
So maybe for educational purposes academy needs to provoke cadets to take shortcuts and to make them into a colossal screw-ups?
Educational environment is not a "real life". Their goal was to pass exam on calculus. They did everything they were able to do, including the cheating. It is the cheating in educational environment, in real life it would not be the cheating, it would be a healthy cooperation. Or maybe not so healthy, because they screwed it up, by sharing not right answers, but mistakes. It is hard to judge, because there is such thing as a psychological narrative, there is a psychological context for all this. Each cheated cadet had his own context, his own story that came to a cheating.
In a high school I was ready to share my homework with my friends, and sometimes I got unacceptable marks because a teacher was able to see cheating and marked all with low grades. I got low marks not because I cheated, because I helped others to cheat. Was I demonstrating a lack of character, or a high morale character, who was ready to take additional risks to help his friends? It depends on my own narrative. From the one hand, it might be a lack of character, due to inability to say "no" to my friends. From the other hand, my friends might be more important for me than my grades. (Really I don't know what it was, because I know that I have troubles with saying "no", and at the same time I never bothered with grades, I knew that I would manage something acceptable, especially in math, I was good at it).
This anecdote here is an attempt to demonstrate that it is hard sometimes to judge character by assessing behavior only. It is even more hard on artificial educational environment where rules could arbitrarily diverge from real life.
I very much agree with this point. I think the messaging that is being handed to students is very different than what happens in professional settings. Students are often given the message that they are on their own and if something is not achievable it is their own fault, with consequences being their own. There are very little outlets for students to ask for help, or changes in school workload. I have seen the cause of too much work to do and too little time with no feedback from professors as causing this kind of widespread cheating.
Once you reach a professional environment with high risk (note, I have not been in the military but have worked on national defense aerospace programs) the messaging becomes if you are unsure of something or feel pressured to let something give you MUST ask for help or changes because the consequences are not your own and can be very widespread.
> > Second chances here are what result in subpar military officers.
[...]
> I would defer to the head of this institution to arrive at an appropriate decision.
Blind faith in institutions here (and anywhere) is what enables mass institutional failure. Whether it's producing subpart military officers and the all the negative consequences that has, or the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, or a slide toward tyranny in representative political institutions.
I'd prefer to not give second chances to the servicepeople being afforded a $400k education on our dime to cheat and lie only to control the most advanced weapon systems on the planet. But that's just me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Every single one of these people should be dismissed or resign. They are simply not officer material. The Honor Code is very clear. You lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do and you're not military material.
Yeah but since 2015 the rules have stated you can get a second chance. So it would not be fair or ethical to retroactively change the punishment now.
As an honor code, it's implied that you not commit a willful infraction with the second chance in mind.
Intent to follow the spirit of an honor code is as important as following it. Abusing the system because you know you get one free pass is an invitation to cheat until caught, which is unfair to everyone else.
In reality, needing to use your second chance is already failure. If you can't internalize that, admit to it, and volunteer to step down, then you aren't the type of person who deserved a second chance.
Is honesty the biggest factor in having competent officers, or is it courage/tactical understanding/craftiness/resistance to stress etc.? (Honestly asking)
The notion of honesty and moral character seems at odds with empire building
The really concerning bit is that the cadets tried to cheat on a core course. I mean, West Point is an engineering school, where fluency in math is an absolute requirement. Did they really think they could get away with no math in the followup courses? How stupid can you be, trying to subvert the teaching?
Because a moral man forced into an immoral situation will try to make the choice that causes the minimal amount of suffering to achieve the goal.
All war is immoral. Always, all the time. You're depriving someone of their life - their future. I'd rather someone with a conscious be required to make those decisions than someone without.
> The last time this happened, everyone involved was dismissed or resigned.
That would be 1976, when all 153 fourth-year cadets were expelled. I guess we're all enlightened now. From the article: "Nearly all of those who admitted guilt have been allowed to remain at the academy on the condition that they complete a rehabilitation program that includes meeting with a mentor and after-hours classes about the honor system and the importance of being a better leader..."
A "rehabilitation program". Not only should these cadets be expelled, but so should the clowns running this program.
> That would be 1976, when all 153 fourth-year cadets were expelled. I guess we're all enlightened now
Actually, the majority if the 1976 participants were allowed to return to West Point:
> Ninety-two of those involved in the scandal were later readmitted as cadets and allowed to graduate after accepting a Pentagon amnesty that required them to complete a year of “useful service” away from the academy.
For whatever reason, the stance toward academic dishonesty has changed everywhere in higher education for reasons that aren't clear to me.
The two other institutions I taught at used to have very strict policies about it and then at some point they became laxer in a similar way. It used to be a no warnings policy, and then became more wishy washy.
I always assumed it was to be more realistic, in that many students were being granted exceptions of sorts. There also can be a lot of grey area with cheating. Overall my impression was that some lawyers recommended the change to avoid liability. But I really don't know.
Its completely clear to me. If you kick out a first-year student, you've deprived the university of the next three years of income from that student.
We've allowed money to become the guiding principle of higher education, rather than ability.
The sad truth no one wants to admit to, is that most people don't need to go to college, and frankly, if we were go to back just 60 years to the rigor of those curriculums, most people couldn't hack it, either.
A zero tolerance policy often has unwanted outcomes. Because the punishment is so extreme even for minor problems it isn't enforced that way in practice, unwritten policies are used. It means that problems cannot be corrected, you can't learn from mistakes
Individuals cheating and lying is to be expected. Trust in institutions is damaged when they get away with it. The most damaging aspect of this story is that the cheats are being allowed to continue on the course.
It's important to remember that almost every cadet here was a plebe (1st year student). Plebes are under enormous pressure, and they are only just beginning the inculcation of the honor code (they've all only been there about 6 months now).
Traditionally, they are given by far the most leeway. The expectation is that going through this process will only hasten and harden their understanding of the importance of the honor code.
I recall reading stories in the news about happenings when I was cadet, and there's always invariably some nuances and details that are either incorrect, missing, or misunderstood by people not familiar with West Point.
Some cadets are also still going to go before an honor board, which may very well lead to their separation.
Without knowing more details, I trust the administration (including cadet-led) to take actions in the best interest of our country, the institution, and the Corps.
Ironically, that knowledge leads to a crisis of trust in military institutions among enlisteds.
The trust problem is critical and far ranging, but also multifaceted. It permeates not only the military but all of US society at this point. I'm honestly unsure as to the best solutions? We may only be able to restore trust with glacial change rather than sea change.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I lost my trust in educational institutions when I realized how disconnected grades are from learning. Learning about people cheating didn't do anything to change my opinion. If anything, it made me hopeful to know that people seem to naturally resist participating in poorly designed institutions even if they don't share my bigger picture view of them.
This isn't just any educational institution. It's the training ground for army officers, and one with a very high reputation. This isn't just someone with an easy degree getting all A's based on dubiously challenging coursework. These are officers who are supposed to be entrusted with command and people's lives.
Ok, but do you go to school for the grades or to learn? Grades are like performance reviews. They might matter to your teacher/manager/school/employer, but they sure as hell don’t matter to me because I’m the judge of my own success.
I share your view. My strategy in university was to memorize as much as I could going into the exam and then garbage collect 1 day later and be left with nothing.
This was an arrogant waste of time, but my priorities at that time were to simultaneously max(grades) and min(effort), with the end goal being a job, and my strategy optimally satisfied those goals. In hindsight I wish that things had been designed differently to prevent gaming the system in such a way, to save me from myself, but alas they were not (and still aren't).
The obvious example of cheating resulting in higher grades independent of effort or learning is kind of besides the point.
Picking different professors will also result in better grades independent of effort or knowledge. One of my math teachers literally gave everyone that showed up to an upper level class an A, and said he wanted to cover more material rather than have a final.
The most clear cut example of grades independent of learning is someone that knows the subject and is unable to test out of the class. In such cases they can get top scores without learning anything.
If you’re arguing that they reflect having learned the material at some time. I knew people with significant time pressure like a full time job that knew the material very well, but simply aimed for a lower grade on assignments as a means of managing their time. Grading on a curve means you need to find something that separates A’s from B’s when everyone learns the material and that’s often just effort.
I went to a target school. Most reputable TAs and Professors I've met agree grades are mostly a scam. Historical issues with grade inflation or large curve disparities across semesters because departments force fixed grading distributions, devoid of any context. It makes it harder to design fair exams and homeworks. The only thing grades are good for are improvement indicators - not if you did well with understanding the material of the class you took. Some professors choose students to assist in classes based on how they improved from prerequisites, rather than if they got an A/B/C.
I think most people understand grades aren't purely a measure of how well you know a subject, but also related to how much your parents donated to the university, or how important you are to the football team.
What should devastate people's trust in educational institutions is the relationship between Harvard and Epstein. We get to watch this university, whom I'm told is full of the world's smartest people, claim it was ignorant of what was really going on.
Harvard gave a sex trafficker a security card and his own office while he paid them millions. Harvard faculty was even joining him at his parties, I find it hard to believe what he was doing was really a secret.
Regarding grading: I am a professor at a large American state university where football is king. I have never been pressured to change a grade for the kinds of reasons you mention.
I'm not saying that grading is perfect -- measuring what has been learned is hard, and there can be pressure not to be too harsh overall. But this sort of corruption is, in my observation, not widespread.
Then what's the point of telling us that you've never been pressured to change a football players grade? Obviously nobody is going to pressure you to change a grade for a student not in your class.
Because I've learned some about the way academia works -- where pressure comes from, and how it operates.
If the administration tried to hatch some conspiracy to inflate the grades of athletes or legacy students or whoever, ... then a quarter of the faculty would rebel, and the other three-quarters wouldn't even notice. Senior administrators send out lots of emails concerning this or that, and when they say to jump, nobody is scrambling to ask how high.
(1) To the best of my observation -- and I read Inside Higher Ed regularly -- this certainly happens but it's not common.
(2) AFAICT, when it does happen, it happens through known channels. e.g. there might be a few classes or majors which have a reputation as going easy on athletes, and instructors there might be asked to stay in line.
I'm not saying it never happens, but it's certainly uncommon enough that "grades are meaningless" isn't really true.
Suppose you had an important football player in a class, and because of a grade you gave he missed a big game, do you believe there would be negative repercussions?
If so, there's at least a little bit of pressure towards passing those students. I wouldn't even call it "corruption", just normal human bias that everyone is guilty of.
I don't speak from experience, but I believe the answer to be "probably not" -- at least not on the academic side of things. There would be repercussions for the player of course, and maybe also for the special tutors that athletes get to keep them academically on track. But I doubt the athletics office would even try to contact me or my department chair. Dealing with academic bureaucracies is a giant pain in the ass, and I certainly wouldn't try to make it easier for them.
I think there are typically a handful of classes that are known to be "athlete friendly" and I can imagine pressure existing there. Indeed, here is one example I have read about:
Yes, a report written by the vice president found they did nothing seriously wrong. Doesn't change my mind much because I already knew their stance on the whole thing.
Everybody loved Epstein right up until he got caught, and nobody had a clue what he was doing. This is the position of everybody involved with Epstein, not just Harvard. Call me dumb but I'm not buying it.
We lose trust in institutions when prospective government employees cheat on maths tests, but when they dropped the white phosphorous on villagers, massacred children, burned down peoples farms, etc in the war that occured between 2001-present... we wondered about brad pitt, paris hilton... and kim kardashians hair colour.
We want them to be really really good at following orders and not to think too much about the moral aspect of bombing civilians. The reason cheating is banned in West Point is not because it is wrong, but because it displays that people prioritise their own individuality over that of the institution, and that they do not blindly believe in its ideals
>We want them to be really really good at following orders and not to think
I know this is common trope but tends to be more widely held by those with limited military experience.
For example, U.S. Marines are often considered highly disciplined (sometimes conflated with being very good at blindly following orders). From boot camp onward, they are encouraged (sometimes mandated) to read from the Commandant’s reading list. A perennial favorite to assign junior enlisted is A Message to Garcia. However, after nearly 40 years, it was removed from the list explicitly because the message was often misinterpreted as advocating strict obedience and went against the intent to promote independent thought.
Particularly in counter insurgency, the military wants/needs critical thinking, not blind obedience.
Does the military want critical thinking from its lowest soldiers? As a person with close to no military knowledge, my understanding is that the U.S. Marines are more of an "elite" group and might therefore be more empowered as decision-makers.
In general, I would say yes. I think there is a realization that a counter insurgency will struggle if low ranking troops are not thinking clearly. A single bad decision from a Lance Corporal can erode months/years of effort or escalate into an international incident.
Actually, I believe the Marines have the lowest intellectual bar of entry and the highest physical one for any branch. To your point, they do push small unit leadership to a lower level, which may be why they try to advocate a leadership mindset at low levels.
The critical thinking that the military does not want is "Why am I here" or "Why is the United States here". Tactical/execution ingenuity is favoured; philosophical or political consideration for whether or not a war should be happening in the first place is more likely to be pathologised as "treason"
I don't think we should overlook the fact that a larger part of the issue may be that there simply was much less to sweep under the carpet in previous eras. Society today is much, much larger and more complex than society in George Washington's day. (Much more complex than in any time in history in fact.)
This is not to imply that George Washington is no better than the corrupt politicians, judges and police we have today. George Washington was, by all accounts, a very good man.
My only point was that it was far easier to actually be a good man in the time of George Washington than it is to be a good man or woman today. Not even a tenth of the opportunities to get yourself in trouble back then.
-> when they dropped the white phosphorous on villagers, massacred children, burned down peoples farms, etc in the war that occured between 2001-present
"But within a year, Operation Iron Tempest had fizzled out. Many of the suspected labs turned out to be empty, mud-walled compounds. After more than 200 airstrikes, the U.S. military concluded it was a waste of resources to keep blowing up primitive targets with advanced aircraft and laser-guided munitions."
When did you go to university? As I went a couple years ago and cheating was universal to the point that you could ask random classmates for the answers to quizzes you had not done yet and the frosh leaders collaborated to give the year below them all the answers. We had a massive drive of answers maintained by the student society.
Academic integrity was an absurd pretense. Except for a few niche programs like political science and history, it just did not exist.
Not arguing that this is a good thing, just that higher education in general is not all that reliable.
I was working at a well-funded ($86M Series B) fiberoptic startup in Fremont in 2000. We were trying to develop a polarization-maintaining fused fiber coupler, which we knew little about except for reading some papers. We were led by a young Chinese guy who kept everything he knew pretty much to himself. We all went out for pizza. I asked him, how did you solve so-and-so problem? Remarkably, without hesitation he said, I called up my friend at so-and-so COMPETING STARTUP, and asked him how they did it. (And he didn’t share with me any details of the solution, either). Then, I knew Silicon Valley was immersed in a sea of electrons…
Okay, so if it was a trade secret, that's trouble. But people will give away all sorts of information all the time. That's what the network is for.
If you want to publish a blog post on something, it's really involved. You have to make your vendors look good, your engineering team look good, and then there'll be this army of people on HN and Reddit who will nitpick everything so that you lose any of the good will you generate.
Wayyy better to just use private channels to exchange that information. So, if I'm considering data pipeline stuff I'll just hop on Discord with my friends and ask them how it went at their company and they'll just tell me.
Obviously none of us will tell the rest of the world, but we'll tell each other. Heck, strangers will do that in SF and Silicon Valley in general. Most people easily understand what parts are MNPI and what is company-private IP and what isn't. Until Xiaomi or Huawei or whatever stole that bloody robotic arm off T-Mobile even big companies would routinely officially sanction this information sharing.
You don’t understand anything about fused fiber. There’s no useful theory. Everything is process art and exact replication. It’s probably true in semiconductors too. TMC and Intel use the same equipment vendors.
No, I don't understand anything about fused fibre. Just want to clarify that part. I'm talking about the idea of sharing info rather than the specific case, for which I have no knowledge. Not pretending to know that.
For lots of software too it's just the real mechanism of stuff. I've definitely straight copied infrastructure code from friends at other companies. Not hardware process stuff certainly but it's straight plagiarism.
And honestly, I don't understand what the significance of "Then I realized Silicon Valley is immersed in a sea of electrons..." Is. I thought it was just colour but clearly you intend some significance to it.
I assume there is more context here, so out of curiosity, why do you consider that example “cheating”? Was the competition friend a low level engineer who stole and leaked information, or was he in the competition’s leadership and agreeing to share solutions? Is there a rule at either company, or law that was broken?
This seems like a problem with the american style of examination.
Why are exams that contribute to the final grade being reused? Why are they such trivial questions that you can reuse answers from previous exams?
My CS/Maths/Physics exams all consisted of longform written or worked answers. Maybe 10% max were trivial, no multiple choice, no question re-use within 10 years or so.
Sure, if you went and memorised every question ever asked for every subject in the 12 hours of final exams you might get lucky and have a very similar question.
> This sort-of feels like cheating on the side of the professors.
There are some general issues with leadership training in the military.
You're randomly and arbitrarily in charge until you're not. You're randomly and arbitrarily practicing your group cooperation skills until you're not. In theory you'll get a lesson about paying attention, hopefully not in a career ending manner.
There is a strong push to demonize the kids who do dumb things. But its worth considering they're not evil, just a bit slow on the uptake.
Surely if a kid at training methodically organized the process of unloading a truck that would be valid leadership training. If the same kid organized the chemistry lab so operations run smoother, that's good too. If the same kid organizes group study sessions against an outline of the syllabus that is good leadership. If the kid goes a bit far and study session photocopies change from similar questions to the test, to actual questions from the test... The kid's not necessarily evil incarnate but a bit slow on the uptake about the precise definitions of expectations and an attention getting reaction from the actual leaders is appropriate, whereas blaming the kid retroactively for Iraq not having WMD is just a bit overboard.
West Point is not a run-of-the-mill academic institution. Its mission is to recruit people of character and train them for positions of leadership. Cadets must be nominated by a member of Congress, or by the President or Vice President. West Point occupies a special place in the US, both at present and throughout the country's history: https://www.westpoint.edu/about/history-of-west-point
Test and answer banks are not unique, and don't directly permit cheating unless the professors are ignorant of it (would be startling if true) or lazy. When I was in college, the professors knew that student organizations maintained these so they changed up their tests to account for it. The banks, then, only helped the students by guiding their studying ("concepts x, y, and z will be in one of the first two tests, so know a, b, and c").
Despite these test banks, the only widespread cheating when I was in school was on homework, which usually screwed the students when it came time for the exams because they had no practice. They weeded themselves out this way.
Eliminate take-home exams. As for collections of answers or old tests, those have always been around and generally aren't considered cheating. In fact they're good preparation for allowing students to get familiar with the testing environment.
But there's no excuse for lazy professors/instructors and each new test should be distinct. Re-using an old test or old test questions is questionable behavior by a professor.
I agree with what Veen posted earlier: the cheating students should be expelled.
"To meet and rebuke this bad habit of the masters, the schoolboy mind, with its accustomed ingenuity, had invented an elaborate system of tradition. Almost every boy kept his own vulgus written out in a book, and these books were duly handed down from boy to boy, till (if the tradition has gone on till now) I suppose the popular boys, in whose hands bequeathed vulgus-books have accumulated, are prepared with three or four vulguses on any subject in heaven or earth, or in “more worlds than one,” which an unfortunate master can pitch upon."
It ain’t “organization.” I studied so hard in high school, college, and my first year of graduate school that I laughed sometimes at the problems on final exams— because I had seen very similar ones in my preparation. That’s why this scandal, in freshman calculus, is so serious. This is how you get later-dissimulating individuals, like Westmoreland, Petraus, Flynn, Pompeo. You want more headlines like these?
You are right. There are multiple pathways to being a liar. The Army is EXTREMELY concerned that any patterns of dissimulation will have consequences on the battlefield.
Wow that sounds amazingly corrupt. I have never experienced anything like that in my life. The school I went to was not a university I think (I'm not sure how to compare the Dutch & US education systems) but they would change and improve courses based on student & industry feedback every year, so while you could get an idea from upper year students what kind of questions they would ask, you would still have to learn it.
considering iraq wmd, the financial collapse, the bailout, syria, libya, russia-gate, and the pandemic (among other things) I think the x-axis should go back further and resemble a negative sloping line instead.
While you raise a good point, the ascii art is a bit much. It may be novel because it's rarely done, but novel doesn't necessarily mean it's good for the site.
People saying they should be expelled:
1. They are mostly first years (this was a Calculus 1 course).
2. They will go through rehabilitation
3. West Point instituted second chances in 2015, not just for this group.
4. Together implying that they will have plenty of time to prove that this was a one time thing, or not.
Compassion and vulnerability are also important parts of leadership: leaders that can admit they made a mistake, perhaps even acted selfishly, and reflect on that behavior and avoid it in the future are better than those who cannot. This is the "new" way of leadership now, and personally, I am all for it, compared to the "old" style of pure hierarchy, repressed emotion, violence + fear as motivators, etc.
Given that turnbacks and rehabs have been a thing for years, it is probably working out the way the Army hopes.
I got in trouble a few times in the Army and there was a lot of effort to "rehab" me. When I got in trouble as an NCO, the whole point of my punishment was to make me a better NCO. That's what they said and it seemed that's what they were trying to do.
Anyone know if studying ancient Spartan training methods is a part of the West Point curriculum?
The Spartan boy, learned only the basics, according to Plutarch, such as music and mathematics. Their principal training is a military one, often even crossing moral boundaries, such as learning how to steal without getting caught. The philosophy was that, in case of a war, a soldier might have to steal food in order to survive. The main key point here is that, when a boy was caught, he was not punished for his act of stealing, but for being caught! The Spartan youth had their favorite "game" of stealing food or other possessions from servants (Greek: είλωτες, helotes).
A well-known story that proves the Spartan training and loyalty is this: Once, a 13 year old Spartan boy stole a fox from a village near his camp. Alas, a trainer found him and asked him what he was doing off campus. The boy had seen the trainer and had hidden the fox beneath his cloth. As the boy said nothing, the trainer insisted. The fox, still alive, beneath the boy's cloth, started scratching him, in order to escape. While doing that, the boy continued to deny the stealing until the wounds suffered by the fox killed him.
"To sum up: far from being some ideal system of child-rearing, as Xenophon might have it, the Spartan agoge appears functionally identical to modern systems which use trauma to condition child soldiers."
The whole series is a great and very deep dive into Sparta and the summation is clear: If Sparta still existed, we'd all invade to stop the horror.
The helmet in the West Point emblem is the helmet of the Greek goddess Athena. I suspect any Spartan influence is incidental and superficial.
> The committee began with the creation of an emblem that consisted of a sword, a universal symbol of war, and the helmet of Pallas Athena. Athena, a fully armed mythological goddess, is associated with the arts of war, and her helmet signifies wisdom and learning.
For all the folks doubting the decision making here, unless you know specifics, I suggest that the system is working well.
Years ago I worked very closely with the current Commandant of West Point BG Buzzard. I know him to be a man of honor. Based on my experience working with him and other quality officers during my enlistment, I can assure you that they are experienced, highly educated (BG Buzzard has a masters from Harvard), and have a good sense of the broader impacts of their decisions.
Fascinating that this kind of cheating happened in 1976 [1] at which point it was only the second most serious cheating incident. The first being from 1951 when 90 of 100 students were expelled or resigned.
Seems like they'd be a good fit for politics instead!
This is obviously made with (some) jest, but it is fascinating we pride ourselves on being societies where "the military answers to the civilian authorities", but we have nowhere near the same standards for civilian leaders as we apparently expect for military folk.
As a "math guy" I was more than once put into the uncomfortable position of being asked to help with problems on calculus take-home exams. Given the utter mathematical cluelessness I've observed in the average American college student, even at top schools, I wouldn't be surprised if cheating on math exams has always been rampant. For every busted incident there are probably a hundred or a thousand more that went undetected.
Sleep deprivation to provide "realistic combat stress" is a goal in military training. Also giving the trainees 30 hours of work to do per day is a realistic although brutal way to teach prioritization. Certainly, after graduation, most officers are going to use radio procedures or legal processes or excellence in first aid is expected a lot more than calculus on the job.
Personally I thought army basic training was OK other than not having a full nights sleep for two months. Certainly I could never pass a calculus exam on a couple hours of sleep over the past weeks. It really is amazing how unproductive humans are after a couple hours of hard work or even just ten hours sitting in a chair.
Also your job assignment for officers is given based on your GPA and your GPA will be based on a curved test. So its not that cadets are accepted in a grueling process and then it smooth sailing, its more like the grueling process just begins and whomever high scores the calc test gets branched Aviation in three years whereas the guy at the bottom of the calc test gets Chemical corps or ADA (supposedly the work-life balance of ADA is the worst in the entire Army...)
Seriously. That's what surprises me about a lot of cheating: really? Cheating on this material? Why not at least wait to cheat when it really counts, on something very difficult to do without cheating?
a) They are selected for a variety of qualities, and mathematical competence weighs only so much, I suppose. b) They have many duties that eat up time and energy, and no doubt make it harder to study than it would be at a standard university.
Historical reasons, but I don't know enough about this to say what they were. I infer that some of it may have had to do with the more uneven level of secondary schools in the US, as compared to the UK--where Sandhurst has a much shorter period of study (doesn't it)--or I suppose France/St. Cyr.
Or, in the 19th and earlier 20th Century, public school, just as in Germany the Abitur qualified one to do one's compulsory military service as an officer of the reserve. Now, the instruction in the public school and gymnasium leaned heavily on classical studies, and no doubt for much of the period scanted math and science. But there would have been a consistent level of schooling.
In the US, particularly until the late 19th Century, I'm not sure that was so. The congressman on the recent frontier had an appointment in his gift, just as did the congressman whose district took in the Boston Latin School. Combining the military and educational instruction gave a chance to bring everyone up to at least a known level.
I 'cheated' on all my Air Force tests, D: all of the above and whatever answer that was longest. Like you could just skim the answers and select the longest one and move onto the next one without reading the question. What a horrible way to teach someone.
There was a post on the AITA subreddit recently about a father who finds out his son has reported his friends for cheating on a math final. The dad had no problem with cheating whatsoever but took issue with the actions of the son. Whether or not this story is true, it reveals that 99% of people on twitter feel cheating is completely acceptable. In school I was under the impression cheating was relatively rare and no one proud of it, but I learned that I'm really out of touch. https://twitter.com/AITA_reddit/status/1340437223594979334
The top voted comment, with around 20K upvotes, rips into the father: "Instead of berating your son, you should be proud of what he did and support him by explaining that doing right is not always easy but necessary. You should be talking to administrators at his school about the culture they have inculcated."
In contrast, the top voted comment which defends the son has only around 2,400 upvotes.
Can't speak to "99% of people on twitter", but looks like only 10-15% of people on Reddit.
Yea I didn't link the reddit thread since the post itself was deleted, but indeed reddit seems to lean towards anti-cheating and twitter seems to lean towards pro-cheating (well, anti-snitching if nothing else). Really curious about how that dramatic difference developed.
reddit is a karma farm, so find the bandwagon and push it as extreme as possible to get those meaningless internet points.
Note this applies to anything controversial on reddit especially politics. Only one extreme position will be allowed in all discussions in the presence of karma farming.
Top level point: Lying in the Army has been normalized due to required attestations that are likely impossible to accomplish, leading to 'pencil whipping'.
I don't think that this is at all unique to the Army and I see this kind of thing where I work as well.
I didn't know about West Point's honor code, and found it ironic. At my university, in physics at least, it was a loud secret that all ROTC students shared answers for previous years testsand homeworks.
At least in my cohort and my university, cheating was endemic and done by almost everyone on every assignment. Not cheating was a significant disadvantage. I didn't ever hear of anyone getting caught which I find astonishing, since I'm sure the graders were faced with multiple identical answers.
Maybe because the subjects were quantitative, there was less scope for plagiarism detection? Or maybe they just didn't really care, or they didn't want the administrative trouble. I'm not sure.
Seems like they've figured out the best political trick to "winning" in international geo-politics and war? Anyone who's honest with the nature of humanity knows that complete nuclear proliferation will never work to bring peace on earth, because basic game theory tells us at least one side will just cheat and keep some hidden nukes ;)
After successfully navigating almost 4 years at West Point, these idiots risk everything for one single exam. Ignoring the Honor Code violations, their actions demonstrate they simply are not fit to become officers as their decision making skills are severely compromised.
Except this is how a lot of them navigated it/navigated getting there (as they are first years). I don't think this is their first time, other than being caught.
There has been a lot of talk about the ethics side of it. But another side that is also disturbing is that they would need to cheat to pass the class. West point is supposed to be an elite institution. Maybe the admissions processes is also compromised?
The other point that no one seems to be bringing up is that cheating on an introductory calculus test is a nonsensical thing to do. These aren't MBA students, they're engineering students, right? Everything in a technical math curriculum builds on what came before. If you have to start cheating that early, the only rational thing to do is to admit you're not in the right program and drop out gracefully.
Academic ethics aside, cheating at this level is just plain bad judgment. No one who has to cheat in Calc I is going to get through Calc II without having to do the same thing, over and over.
If they cheated then they should be kicked out. No second chances. They are training to be officers in the military, many of which will be responsible for the lives of others.
Did nobody out of the 70 realize the answer they were copying from was wrong. West Point should look at its math education in addition to the integrity of its cadets.
Their honor system is supposed to make how the test is administered irrelevant, so why did that not work should be the fundamental question, I think.
Honor systems can work. A well known example is Caltech, where almost all exams are take home exams which students typically take alone in their room or in some other isolated place.
Caltech may have an advantage in this because the classes are hard and it gets harder for you each year. If you need to and successfully do cheat, at least in a class that is at all relevant to your field, you are quite likely to flounder in subsequent years.
So it may not be that Caltech students follow the Honor system because they are actually more honorable than most--it may be because they are smart enough to realize that cheating isn't really going to help them.
Why are you assuming the students from Caltech follow the honor system and don't cheat? Seems incredibly likely that a good portion of them do cheat on take home exams.
While that may be true, he is being replaced by a plagiarist with a lose grasp of truth who is under widespread suspicion that he got the job by cheating.
This might be cynical, but I'm not sure we can hold politicians to the same standard as the military. Their job apparently is to lie cheat and steal as much as possible and hopefully drop a few crumbs for those who support them.
This would require a dedicated military full of honest dependable people, for the same reason you'd probably chose those types to assist you in robbing a bank.
I seriously doubt a bunch of first-year cadets with a looming calculus exam sat around in their dorms thinking "what would Trump do?". Yours is one several comments here expressing this sentiment, and aside from what it says about your capacity for independent thought, it illustrates an inability--all too pervasive these days--to conceive of any issue in non-trumpian terms.
Trump has set a precedent for what is acceptable behavior of public servants and the lasting damage will take decades to undo. He pardoned someone convicted of war crimes. He's convinced hundreds of sitting governors, represetnatives, and senators to openly object to and instill distrust in the integrity of elections. He's publicly questioned and disparaged the integrity of nearly every government institution from the military to intelligence agencies to the IRS.
So, yes, we're viewing this in Trumpian terms because there's a very clear link to eroding trust in government institutions.
Because trust in your officers is staggeringly important. Even more so when you are put into a combat position and rely on those same officers to lead and guide men and women who may die. Honor and integrity in the military should be one of the most important elements of that person's character.
Add to that, if they can't be trusted in an academic setting where the consequences are a bad grade, how can you trust them in a situation where there are lives at stake?
I had originally written "world", but I have no idea what sort of international rep US military academies have. They are undeniably good engineering schools, but less accessible to int'l students.
I will bite. I don't know the context in the USA but there was similar issue in Turkey that ended very badly.
So in Turkey there is this islamic cleric, a charismatic figure who was a "Youtuber" before the internet. His organisation was spreading his message through VHS tapes and he gained substential following. Innocent enough, right?
Well, the problem is that the guy was preaching about infiltrating institutions, "the capillaries" in his own words, to create a "golden generation" and to achieve that cheating, killing, destruction of lives was acceptable for greater good.
The Turkish military was the primary target of the organisation and the military at one point began expelling people for being associated with this organisation.
How they were getting in? First it was through legit ways: study for the exams. Later, those who get it keep their alliance with this organisation and did whatever they can to get more people in. At some point, they reached dominance in the admission process and some of the branches were recruiting from this organisation - exclusively. They were passing the exam questions to the organisation and the organisation got all their people in. They created an unofficial ranking scheme inside the military where officially highly ranking personel could be below the cafeteria guy.
At some point they were everywhere that matters and were the unofficial partner of Erdogan up until they decided that they want it all and clashed with Erdogan. Erdogan won, then they attempted a coup. Erdogan won again.
Crazy stuff, right? I wouldn't believe it up until the coup night when people dragged civilians associated with these people out of the tanks on live TV and CCTV footage of the airbase that bombed the parliament. On the CCTV, businessman known to be associated with this organisation was running around the base, checking the screens, talking to solders - he was clearly directing the air attacks that nigh.
So yes, corruption in these institutions is a big deal.
People can have opinions but you don't want to have an organisation infiltrating your institutions. In Turkey the culprit is usually islamists, in the west it tends to be far-right extremists. A guy with opinions passing an exam is different from a nazi organisation pulling an operation to get in the ranks.
Idk, between this and bombing children in the Middle East, I feel like there are larger problems to address. Also US military is not the largest military in the world.
True, there is no objective manner to determine the "largest" or "most powerful" military. However, via this listing of militaries by different types of equipment[1], the US leads in 8 of 14 categories. I'll admit I thought the US would lead in more categories, but this is the majority of listed criteria. If one adds in military size, it would become 8/15 (still over half). The US also leads in various military strength indices.
For better or worse, the US is assumed to have the most powerful military in present day.
> Idk, between this and bombing children in the Middle East, I feel like there are larger problems to address.
Do you think allowing more people who break clear explicit rules of conduct for immediate personal advantage into the military (and visibly doing so, so that you send the message that it is acceptable) will make those bigger problems better or worse?
> Also US military is not the largest military in the world.
By manpower? No. By virtually any capacity measure? Yes.
Maybe by manpower to, once you account for the large degree to which military functions are contracted out (including armed combat roles in war zones) and add in all the contractors performing those functions.
I think that the military has larger things to worry about as far as integrity. I think that cheating on exams won’t change anything as far as military goes.
People in Russia and China really don’t think the US military is the most powerful military.
Why do you keep bringing up people's beliefs if you admit they are irrelevant? Debate GP with facts about the military if opinions are so untrustworthy.
Seriously? Upon enrolling, they swore to uphold the honor code. They failed to do that. How can they be trusted in their duties as officers in the Army, where they also swear oaths about the protection and defense of the US, when they've shown a inability to maintain oaths.
Nor is it a surprise. Prospective cadets learn about the Honor Code as part of the application process. It's not like they report and find out about it on day one. (Although nominated and accepted, I chose not to attend West Point.)
Because troops may not follow an officer they don't trust and respect.
When I was serving, I once came across a unit who didn't respect their commander. And the unit was pretty fucked up as a result. They weren't effective, there were whispered jokes about him, and people were showing up late & leaving early. If we had gone to war, there was a good chance that many unit members would have found ways to avoid serving under him.
His boss at the Wing/Group level should have pulled his ticket and replaced him. The phrase commonly used for this is "Loss of trust and confidence in their ability to lead".
If the people who will be in command of thousands of American soldiers and lethal weaponry across the globe are willing to lie, cheat, or cut corners to further their own career, that's not good for America or the world.
It does take a little time to adjust to the honor code, but among all the things learned at WP, this one stuck with me the most. I (and many of my friends) came to literally hate lying/cheating, and to disdain those who do. But there’s another route that is taken too — the opposite, where some cadets become very good at lying/cheating. What starts out as a trivial lie must be covered up with larger more intricate lies, moving from something accidental or thoughtless to something intentional and deliberate. The cover-up and defense, often bringing friends into the mix, turns toxic really quickly. This is what happens when a perceived innocuous lie is seen a a life-ruiner.
My father also went to a service academy, and often after catching me in a lie would say, “I’m mad at you about lying, but I’m ever madder you were dumb enough to get caught!” My dad is one of the most moral men I’ve ever met, and I only just now connected the dots here with regard to a zero-toleration honor code.
I suspect the 2015 change was a practical rather than principled change: to make it easier to catch and correct violations instead of letting them fester and spread.
In some ways the service academies are a giant experiment in human character. Humans naturally lie, cheat, and steal in order to survive and protect their own tribe (i.e., go to war). Can you change that? Not really. But you can create a culture like that. The change, as ironic as it may seem, may do a better job of creating that kind of culture by attacking the tendency to dig deeper holes.