Honor codes work
The universities accept this tacitly for two reasons.
1. They need the income from the students. If they'd fire every student caught cheating, they'd go bankrupt pretty quickly.
2. It's an extreme amount of administrative work for the professors to deal with. In my experience, I need to invest a day's worth of work per cheating student, all things considered. I really have better things to do in life.
To put it pithily: the students pretend not to cheat, and the universities pretend not to notice.
This is nothing new, students have been cheating since time immemorial, the world keeps on spinning ... there are lot's of stories about cheating in what may be the oldest exam system in the world, the Chinese Imperial examination. (As an aside, if you want an alround fascinating story that involves the Imperial examination, check out the history of the "Taiping Rebellion".)
Very few people talk about what it feels like not to cheat and why students do it. So here goes:
I made it through college without cheating. My university actually managed to scare me from doing so with freshmen orientation. I focused on studying and making sure I took advantage of walk-in hours and student teachers. For a while I thought everyone was doing this. Then, as weeks passed in each semester the students got more and more brazen. During my years of school I was outright asked to share my test (sometimes during a test), I was offered payment and I was made to feel ostracized when I didn’t “help”. It sucked.
The worst part came when I would meet other honors students and find out how they got their high scores. I was surprised at how many of them cheated, to what degree they would cheat and how little they knew about their course work. This is when I found that there was no incentive not to cheat. Honors students got scholarships and were often given some very good internship opportunities.
Why would anyone not cheat? No one cares if you do. You’ll have an easier time. It doesn’t hurt your career. It also does wonders for your social life. My final two years I pretended to have low scores on tests so as not to be asked to help cheat. I kept my grades a secret and would often not look at graded papers in class. I stopped talking about any of my classes with anyone that was in my major.
I honestly don't think what I did should've been considered cheating, and I would do it that way again today- in fact, don't our jobs work just about the same way? But I'm all in favor of strict rules around cheating on testing or final projects. Those are where you demonstrate what you personally have learned, I don't think it should matter how you got to that knowledge, but you should have it.
Why would anyone not cheat?
As you say, the incentive and resource for the university to do something about this just isn't there.
the university is indirectly cheating when they publish statistics about the grades their students get.
It was pretty rare that I heard of anybody doing so.
I'd recommend going ahead and having those kids expelled, or at least starting the process and taking it as far as you can go (before the university has to step in and make a point of stopping it). Change has to begin somewhere, so why not with you?
Edited to add: I don't really buy the economic argument either. A top school has a pretty long list of kids wanting to get in. They could toss out half the current students each year and never run in to an issue filling back up the next year. If anything, it would only serve to improve their reputation as an "elite" school where you really do have to pull your weight to make it through.
By the time you're out on the street, they have your money. If tossing out a few cheaters makes the class size a bit smaller for the rest of the semester, that also can't be anything but a net good.
cheating on an exam
it was made abundantly clear
so why not with you?
having those kids expelled
A top school [...] could toss out half the current students
Clearly I've been living abroad too long. I had completely forgotten about this aspect of the American psyche.
You're right. No amount of having done something wrong will ever be enough to make something an American's fault. I remember golfing with a guy and hooking a ball into somebody's yard, saying something along the lines of "glad I didn't break that window." He then went on to explain his view that the golf course should pay for things like that, since it would clearly not be his fault if he hit a ball through somebody's window.
Expel that guy's kid, and I can see what you mean. Good luck fighting the good fight!
require the students to defend their work in a viva voce and a written final.
Also equality is a problem. Academics are human too, and tend to have preferences regarding looks, sex, nationalities etc that are hard to ignore. I had female students rub my legs in presentations, wear super short mini-shirts, see-thru top with massive clevage etc. Preventing this is a major advantage of anonymous grading. These days you want to protect yourself against harassment lawsuits. I feel very uncomfortable with non-anonymous examiations even though I agree that from a pedagogic point-of-view they preferable, not just to deal with cheating, but also because they give a much better view of the students strengths and weaknesses, leading to much better feedback.
Some universities still require PhD theses to be defended in public, for instance Oslo: ==== begin quote
The PhD degree is conferred on the basis of:
completion of the programme's educational component
the doctoral thesis
the doctoral examination
The doctoral examination consists of the trial lecture and the public defence of the thesis, also known as the disputation.
=== end quote
I want to quote Sir Ken Robinson [1]:
> They have spent ten years at school being told that there is one answer – it’s at the back…and don’t look, and don’t copy, because that’s cheating. I mean, outside schools, that’s called collaboration.
I don't think cheating is the big picture problem. I think it's how we think of are tests. Imagine a test designed in such a way that you couldn't cheat - or even that collaboration was ok - what would it look like? Could it be an open note/open book test?
The way I give tests to my students is open book/open note but not open neighbor. I do this because I'm realistic - memorization is not comprehension and whatever they did memorize will be lost 5 minutes after class ends (they have N other subjects that they need to memorize material for - even though I teach a core class they have much more important things to worry about). My tests are long and short answer but not hard - so if you have been comatose for the lectures you won't do well (I have had people fail my tests...). Some teachers have the one notecard rule and think that they are clever tricking the students to memorize the material - they aren't. You may retain some more information - but it's still the core of the problem memorization != comprehension.
Yes I understand some fields do require memorization - such as history or the medical profession. But people don't need to memorize the bubble sort or the binary search algorithms - it's been done a million times and if anyone ever needed it for their career a quick google search would reveal this site [2]. Yes they need to understand it - but they don't need to memorize it.
Yes, especially since Khan Academy can't totally prevent cheating. For example, one can always create two accounts, one that is used as a draft to get hints and the second one that will enter the correct answer after the hints have been showed to the first account.
"go out of their way to avoid actually learning anything, that shouldn't cause the site owner any grief whatsoever."
Obviously, Khan Academy staff has a different take on this problem and that's great. Online education should strive to cater to cheaters, too.
Universities survive just fine giving out take-home tests and trusting students not to cheat. Honor codes work, even when there is an actual useful reason to cheat.
But on a site like Khan Academy, where the end goal is to learn something useful, all the user is doing is cheating themself out of the thing they signed up to get. Let them go nuts. If they want to go through a course, but go out of their way to avoid actually learning anything, that shouldn't cause the site owner any grief whatsoever.