Will This Be On The Exam?

The affair of the Harvard students who "cheated" on their take home exam, and for which many were expelled, has continued to exercise my moral indignation whenever the subject reappears in the news, or I read about it in some on-line communication from Harvard to its alumni.  I still think the professor was entirely wrong to permit a take-home final exam, wrong to establish a course with obviously minimal standards and then express righteous indignation that the students were not rigorous in establishing their individual integrity; the president and administration seem to me way wrong in turning a deaf ear to the numbers of students who claimed that the professor encouraged some form of sharing, deciding to fail so large a cohort rather than demand that the professor offer another final exam.  Everything is done on a computer nowadays, and for better or for worse, that technology makes inadvertent copying epidemic.  I am surprised that Doris Kearns Goodwin, a professor at Harvard, did not speak out, since she herself suffered the ignominy of having it revealed that substantial portions of a book she wrote on the Kennedy's a decade or so ago, contained numerous passages taken verbatim from the writing of other authors without attribution.  I am willing to believe it was a common scholarly inadvertence, most often caught by the author in question.  Anyway, the course was a total gut, the Harvard administration knew this, and so why are they completely bent out of shape?  As a teenager I used to write term papers for students at the University of Iowa, often buying them back if they received high grades and sell them as "used" for half price.  In my innocence (?) I was startled at how indifferent the graders were to the papers in question, how the same paper would receive such a range of grades, indicating to me that the grader probably read the first page and gave the student what was "normal" for that student, especially considering the absolute stupidity of the so-called "professor's comments" in the margin.  Of course, students should do their own work, but of course the administration should create circumstances where serious performance, high standards, and integrity are foregrounded.  I remember only too well in my Harvard days asking the proctor if I could go to the toilet and a witness followed me into the men's room to ensure that I kept my hands on my dick and not on some study aid I had secreted for instant help.  As an undergraduate at the State University of Iowa in classes of thousands swelled by the arrival of the guys on the GI Bill we took true and false or multiple choice exams as the final, if you can believe it, in the courses that the social sciences offered for distribution.  What a joke; half the guys in my row figuring me a nerd with a brain were copying where I put the marks on my paper.  I learned from these experiences, however.  As a college professor myself I forced myself to read in detail every paper, forced myself to create essay questions that would be in intimate dialogue with what we had discussed and highlighted in the classroom hours, forced myself to read carefully and immediately every paper, struggling to return them within a day or two, so I could ask for rewrites immediately.  We were in the moment, as the Buddhists say.  Harvard's buildings do not collapse like the ones in Bangladesh, but the glimpse into that so-called "cheating scandal" makes you realize the degradation of the factory model as applied to higher education, Ivy League education, no less.