Lingering questions about the "cheating scandal"

Harvard released a letter from Dean Michael Smith Friday presenting what most likely will be the final public word on the so-called “cheating scandal.” Harvard Magazine does an excellent job summarizing and glossing the letter, and noting what it does not say as well as what it does. (The full text of Dean Smith’s letter is included in the HM article. The editor also seems to have been able to clarify some of the letter’s ambiguous language about numbers.) The New York Times coverage includes some skeptical notes, and my colleague Howard Gardner, who early in the fall suggestedthat the case might be part of “the regular thinning of ethical muscles in our country,” rightly now suggests that eventually the university should “give a much more complete account of exactly what happened and why it happened.”

That won’t happen, not in any way that would allow judgment of whether the blame and punishment in this sorry affair have fallen where they should. As I have blogged, I don’t doubt that the Ad Board has followed its procedures in coming to the various decisions it reached. (Except for one anomaly discussed at the very end of this post.) What troubles me, and what deserves discussion, is purely a matter of judgment: why harsh penalties were meted out to more than a hundred students (even probation has to be reported on law school applications, for example) when there were so many shades of gray in what students did and so much room for misinterpreting the course’s rules and policies. If there were ever a case that called for judicial restraint, this was it. In cases like this, the human costs of being too harsh far exceed the damage to academic values of being too lenient, or too cautious.

But we’ll never know the details. The first thing that would have to be disclosed in a “complete account” of the case is the name of the course and how it was run. The University has never confirmed that that the course was Government 1310 or the name of the professor, but that information has been very widely reported. The professor has made no comment and no representative of the department has commented either, that I can recall.

So most of what we know about the course comes from anonymous comments from students reported in the press. I have been in touch with several accused students, who did not know each other. All their comments have been consistent with the reporting in the press. Of course, that does not mean these comments are not exaggerated or might not be incorrect in some details, but the overall picture is consistent and troubling at two levels. First, would Harvard think it OK if we all taught our courses this way? And second, did any of the course practices create enough confusion in students’ minds that they did not realize they were cheating when, according to the Ad Board decisions, they were? Historically, Harvard has not used a strict liability standard—you had to be ableto know you were cheating before you could be punished for it. And as I have blogged, the Ad Board in the past has used a high standard of proof and has paused in the face of flat denials.

Let’s look at some of what has been reported about the course.

The professor announcedat the beginning of the course that he didn’t care whether students attended class, and that he intended to give out a lot of As as he had in previous years.

The course atmosphere was highly collaborativeand it was accepted practice for students to share notes. Of course swapping notes happens in lots of classes—it really would be silly to try to ban it. And surely any professor who instructs students that class attendance was optional could not rationally discourage note-sharing. But if two answers to a week-long, take-home, “completely open book, open note, open Internet, etc.” were similar because students had shared their notes before the exam began, did the Ad Board consider that cheating because it was a violation of the “no collaboration” policy that governed the exam?

 A student reportedly was