CBS News.
West Point has expelled at least eight cadets and are holding more than 50 back a year as a result of the military academy’s worst cheating scandal in over 40 years.
The military academy investigated 73 cadets suspected of cheating on a freshman calculus exam in May administered virtually because of the coronavirus. More than 50 of the cadets were athletes, several of whom were on the football team, according to a West Point spokeswoman.
“West Point must be the gold standard for developing Army officers. We demand nothing less than impeccable character from our graduates,” said Superintendent Lt. Gen. Darryl A. Williams in a press release.
Fifty-five of the 73 immediately admitted to cheating through the academy’s process of willful admission when confronted with suspicions of cheating. Willful admission was instituted in 2015 to encourage cadets to adhere to the academy’s honor code and take responsibility for any violations of the code. However, officials have concluded that this program has not been effective, and the academy is terminating the program.
This is the worst cheating scandal at the school since 1976, when 153 cadets resigned or were expelled because they cheated on an electrical engineering exam.
I’ll make some remarks that may surprise readers.
First of all, engineering is hard. Calculus is hard. People must resist the temptation to cheat. The only way to learn engineering is to take a deep dive and spend all of your life with it, for at least four straight years. There is no other way. There is no replacement for devoting your life to study of this subject. Ask me how I know.
I’m not sure why West Point – or any other school for that matter – would think that America can eviscerate God from the institution and expect honesty. Without God there is no foundation for morals. That is obvious not just in everyday, pedestrian life, but from the classic debates (e.g., Frederick Copleston versus Bertrand Russell, Greg Bahnsen versus Gordon Stein, etc.).
Second, while all of that is true, engineering professors must not turn engineering into exercises of memorization. I don’t know that they did this, and I certainly don’t know the details of the incident. But engineering isn’t done by memorization. Any engineer who creates models and designs by memorized conversions, formulae or techniques should be fired. It’s not done that way, and professors too stupid to know that shouldn’t be teaching.
Lectures and tests should focus on mastery of the concepts and material, not rote memorization.