The root problem is that a lot of higher education is nurturing a culture of cheaters right now.

Your future doctors, scientists, government officials, etc... will have had to compete and gain coveted academic and career opportunities, in an environment that both has been heavily gamified, and is being overrun by cheaters.

Insulting measures like this TopHat practically endorses the culture of cheating, by telling students that they can't be trusted, and turning into yet another cheating challenge/task.

Schools with any integrity should be bending over backwards to find, nurture, and support students of integrity.

And to save those who only got admitted by being sketchy, but first semester is a chance to unlearn the bad lessons from before.

Not by treating them as criminals to be monitored, but by treating them like the respectable people they should aspire to be, and which the school expects and requires that they be.

And, for any hopelessly shitty students, who fail to honor this first semester extension of trust, the school should smack them to the curb. Lost tuition income, lost named buildings/chairs, and expensive lawsuits from helicopter parents, be damned.

I have an inside perspective on this via an academic integrity company.

A couple weeks ago there was an exam in an R1 institution that double booked the facility so one section did the exam in person on campus and the other did it "from home". The score distribution of the in person exam was a typical bell curve, and the distribution of the online exam looking like a power-law curve with over half the students scoring 100%.

Thankfully this outraged the professor, and through a variety of means (which I will not disclose publicly) over 25% of the students were caught red handed. Actions are being taken against them, though I'm not sure how far they will go. The evidence against them is overwhelmingly conclusive. In some cases the evidence led to more evidence of cheating in other courses. It seems clear that more that 25% cheated, but I guess catching some is better than none.

As someone who is keenly aware of this crisis, I feel tiny bursts of relief when I see these small wins, though it does feel a bit like bailing an ocean with a teacup.

It also doesn't help that our outrage-driven media overwhelmingly exposes us to cheaters.

Everyone's heard of Theranos, Enron, Martin Shkreli, and Bernie Madoff. This week, my 70+ year old aunt asked me about Charlie Javice and Frank. Yet, there are thousands of very successful people quietly building their castles who live and die in relative obscurity because their stories just aren't that thrilling.

If you spend a lot of time interacting with people in the latter category, or if you have them as your mentors, then you will be exposed to a model of what success through hard work and integrity looks like. If you don't, then it's very easy to think everyone successful is a cheater, and that cheating is the only way to break the ceiling into success.

It’s not about individual people - it’s just scale, paired with Goodhart's law.

No number in a spreadsheet will tell you who’s the genuine student. The moment you’re ranking like that you lost.

Long term human interaction in reduced groups is far better at creating genuine environments. But of course, that system doesn’t scale, and it’s a breeding ground for nepotism.

In this moral framework, would it be acceptable for the lecturer to take attendance orally, or is that also insulting?