> A student's honor that he didn't cheat is considered good enough.
Individual students certainly can have this integrity, but the demographic as a whole is demonstrably susceptible to cheating.
It also offends basic scientific process, in that it suggests that you don't need to bother with trying to make sure your results are robust; instead it relies on someone's word. Why bother having exams, then? Just ask "Do you think you understand the course material properly"?
Many times I honestly believed I understood the material, only to fall way short on the exam :-) Scientists can honestly believe their (wrong) results are correct, because it's easy to have unintended sources of error. This is why others try to replicate results, it's not necessarily about catching cheaters.
Think of it like running a marathon. Is there any satisfaction from thinking "I honestly believe I can complete a marathon!" ? I don't think so, but there's a heluva lot from actually completing one. Same for a tough degree program.
I agree with you, but the analogue is not scientists having their work replicated, it's doing the work in the first place. We don't accept 'trust me on this' in a scientific paper.
Regarding marathons, some people do cheat them - they're more interested in the social rewards than the personal growth. Some people flat-out lie about doing them at all. Different folks have different motivations.
> Individual students certainly can have this integrity, but the demographic as a whole is demonstrably susceptible to cheating.
Certainly demonstrably true of a significant portion of the demographic of "college students".
Caltech would probably argue that Caltech students are not a representative sample of college students, and that generalization from the more general class to the more specific here is a textbook example of the fallacy of division.
That's a 'begging the question' fallacy, where the conclusion ('Caltech students are more honourable than that') is used as the premise (ditto).
Even if we all agree that Caltech students are not representative of college students in general, it doesn't automatically follow that there is no significant degree of cheating.
But that's exactly how you presented their supposed argument: "Caltech students don't cheat because they're not representative of the general student population", with the vague assumption that Caltech students are more honour-bound.
Not being representative of a population doesn't give any information about the makeup of the subsample, unless you have more information to add.
> But that's exactly how you presented their supposed argument: "Caltech students don't cheat because they're not representative of the general student population"
No, its not, which is why you had to present a "quote" that isn't to advance that story.
I presented how they would reject an argument from the general population, not positive argument for the absence of cheating at Caltech.
What are you talking about? You presented the argument as a potential rebuttal to the claim that students cheat. It's inherently implied that it's an argument for the absence of cheating at Caltech... otherwise it wouldn't be a rebuttal at all, and instead is a non-sequitur fallacy.
Yes, if you strip away the context of the literal words you said, you're correct. But in context, you're not.
An interesting question is does Caltech's admissions process select (unwittingly or otherwise) people who are likely to follow the honor system, or do people tend to rise to an expectation of integrity? I suspect the latter is more likely.
I also suspect that a university with strong anti-cheating measures is expecting students to cheat, and students will naturally fulfill that expectation.
> An interesting question is does Caltech's admissions process select (unwittingly or otherwise) people who are likely to follow the honor system, or do people tend to rise to an expectation of integrity?
I think the latter is definitely true, the former is probably true, and perhaps more importantly, Caltech's admissions process selects for people who are likely to view a system where rules are enforced primarily by monitoring as a challenge, making the alternative to trust being an arms race that consumes resources on both sides that could be more productively employed.
Even if it selects for that trait, it doesn't mean that there isn't a significant level of cheating. You can reduce the incidence of X and still have problematic levels of X.
Edit: An example: the US homicide rate has fallen in recent years. That's good news. But the US still has a serious problem with homicide, as its homicide rate is an outlier at 4-5 times that of all other first-world nations. Americans are getting less murderous, but murder is still a serious problem there.
Individual students certainly can have this integrity, but the demographic as a whole is demonstrably susceptible to cheating.
It also offends basic scientific process, in that it suggests that you don't need to bother with trying to make sure your results are robust; instead it relies on someone's word. Why bother having exams, then? Just ask "Do you think you understand the course material properly"?