Yiqian Gan

Student ID: 3032527070

Sixty Harvard students, involved in the so-called biggest cheating scandal in the
history of the Ivy League, were forced to suspend their studying at university because
of their unpermitted collaboration in the take-home open-book final exam of the
course Introduction to Congress. Written by Farhad Manjoo a week later, the article
There is no Harvard Cheating Scandal: The Students Should be Celebrated for
Collaborating strongly opposed Harvards punishment to these students and
emphasized the importance of collaboration in academic fields, protesting against the
ineffective design of the course assessment and unreasonable hatred for cooperation
of universities.

According to the author, those students cheating was not intentional in the first place.
Due to the vagueness of the test questions and the suspension of the instructors office
hours during finals, the exam was essentially tougher than it should be to some extent.
On the other hand, instead of simply duplicating their peers work, students gathered
together merely in order to clarify the ambiguous questions, which Manjoo argued
that was not only always allowed in the course, but also frequently practiced in the
process of course study.

Despite the fact that the rules of the test clearly forbade any form of discussion of the
test itself, Manjoo urged that the validity of the rules go through further inspection in
advance. The article demonstrated that, as cooperation played a fundamentally
essential role in all areas of life as the source of innovation and solutions, the actions
that those students took actually deserved encouragement rather than banishment. As
the design of the exam regulations suggested, no abilities were taken into account

during grading except for mere memorization.

Apart from banning students from sharing ideas, the exam regulations had other
unreasonable content in terms of Manjoos words. Although the design of the test was
mainly for the purpose of differentiating students by their performances, there are still
far more alternatives to test students capabilities than the instructor had adopted.
Also, the restriction on discussion combined with the permitted online consultation
was primarily paradoxical, as it suddenly legalized discussion with any strangers on
the Internet, unless you shared thoughts with people from the same course.

Manjoo demand that universities be more tolerant of collaboration, in which case the
considerable improvements in all other areas of life would arise in academia
eventually.