Confusing Means And Ends

Last summer some of the students in Physics S-1, "Principles of Physics," figured out an ingenious way to get good grades in the course.

They had good reason to want to do well. The Summer School course was made up almost entirely of premedical students taking one of the courses that is required of anyone who wants to go to med school. A good grade in introductory physics is crucial for a pre-med.

Besides that, Physics S-1 was an unusual course. Taught by Paul G. Bamberg '63, associate professor of Physics, it used an innovative "self-paced" method Bamberg helped develop; students were allowed to progress at their own speed, taking a series of exams a great many times if they wanted to.

It was, in fact, possible for groups of students to get together and take a lot of the course's multiple-choice tests, find out the correct answers to the questions afterwards, and then compile master lists coding all the answers to the tests.

More than 20 students in at least three separate groups cheated in Physics S-1 last summer. It was the grossest incident of organized cheating that has been discovered at Harvard. The students were caught when Bamberg discovered that they could not explain how they had arrived at their correct multiple-choice answers.

Nothing as severe as the summer cheating case happened at Harvard this year, but it was a year full of scattered incidents that seem at least tangentially related.

Perhaps the connection is in goals. All the incidents described here have to do with things people did with the intention of achieving noble ends: Steven Rosenfeld wanted to become a doctor; the leaders of the student security patrol wanted to protect fellow students; and President Bok's advisers to make him more effective in his job.

Somewhere along the line, though, these people seemed to fail to make some distinctions--those between appropriate and inappropriate ways to pursue their worthwhile ends.

The distinctions might have appeared to be unimportant. If, for instance, security patrol members were working long hours, it must not have seemed wrong for them to pay themselves appropriately even it meant cutting corners a little. If Robin Schmidt's advice would have helped Bok, it must have seemed unimportant whether that advice dealt, with matters of substance or purely of style and appearance.

It's hard to tell whether this is a trend, since incidents of this kind tend to surface far less often than they happen. But part of it also seems to be the mood of the University this year.

As the economy gets tighter and standards get more meritocratic, Harvard becomes a more and more competitive and goal-oriented place, a place where success, or the appearance of success, can easily overshadow the means by which success is accomplished.