Maybe professors leave the room during exams. I think a number of universities do this. Outright "adversaries" sounds insane and toxic though. I don't know how an undergrad institution could even function if students and professors were actively trying to undermine each other.
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One example of an adversarial university environment is how fraternities and sororities keep copies of exams and assignments from prior years. Professors know cheating is rampant, so have to change the questions every semester.
Some courses at Caltech had almost identical exams for at least a decade when I went through. The professors knew cheating like the above simply would not be tolerated by undergrads.
I sat on and helped run the Board of Control, which handled academic honor code violations, for several years and professors who had been at other universities would absolutely rave about how much more they could trust Caltech students. And that was while reporting a suspected cheating case to me.
This honestly sounds ridiculous to me. Every course I ever did we had access to years and years of past papers. Doing past papers is one of the best ways to study. Teaching or learning to the test is a good thing if the test is good.
Some professors would provide past exams for study aids or use them as homework problems.
However, the explicit default was that you should not look at solutions from prior years. Professors would announce at the beginning of the course that they reuse questions and looking at prior years solutions was an honor code violation. I think it's pretty clear it's cheating when the expectations are clearly outlined.
If you had inadvertently come across the problem before and independently solved it, you were expected to disclose that as part of your answer. I personally had to do this several times, and never suffered any negative consequences for it, but the expectation for honesty was there.
So why not just provide students with officially sanctioned practice papers that are not past papers and also guaranteed to not share questions with the actual exam?
If you write a new exam paper every year that is also guaranteed not to share questions with the actual exam. From a professor’s point of view many questions that are superficially different are similar enough to practically be the same question. There are many, many questions that ask about what the real cause of the French Revolution was, or test to see if you will recognize that this problem is basically a red black tree.
In college where I was at last year exams were public knowledge and anyone had access to them. No one seen it as cheating to try last year exam before going on this year.
Yes, it means teachers have to vary tests, but then again it gives you repository of exercises to learn from and to train on. It is just win for learning.
This is an explicit rule introduced at the beginning of most Caltech courses, so the norm is that that behavior is cheating due to being warned in advance.
All my exams (but one) were take home with well understand rules of engagement. The one exam that wasn't take hime was a visiting professor who made us take the exam at the same time in our normal meeting room and then the left the room for 3 hours. I don't think any of us cared that it was in that particular room, but it was weird to all take the test at 2pm.
Thirty years ago, the exams were all take-home.
At Caltech, they were normally take-home. Institute policy was they were not proctored. The exams had a time limit from opening the exam to pencils down. The conditions, like open-note or open-book, were specified.
The students were totally on their own with this and nobody would know if they chose to cheat or not. Cheating was so trivial to do there was no cred for bragging about it. If other students found out someone was cheating, that someone would be ostracized by the students, which was much worse than anything the institute could do to them.
Of course, people are people and I'm sure some cheating went on. But I bet it was at a much lower rate than at places with proctored exams.
As for me, it was the first time in my life adults trusted me and treated me like an adult rather than a child. I much prefer that to the extended childhood offered by other universities. I was motivated by simple pride to earn the degree rather than cheat and get a tainted one.
I graduated from Caltech last year, and the exams are all still take-home. You're expected to time yourself and not consult course materials, and basically nobody cheats. It's a rare sort of equilibrium where nobody's cheating, so it's very hard to start -- you won't find any co-conspirators, and if you're found out it's social death.
Incredible! What an environment that must be! I hope my kids will find themselves in a university like that.
I'm a bit saddened that other universities have not attempted to emulate this. Maybe it only works because Caltech is such a small place, small enough that you get to know most of the people there, and the social interconnectedness is strong.
10 years after Caltech, I went to law school. I was surprised to find that they did not have take home exams. Law is a profession that actually has ethical requirements, but apparently we can't trust law students to behave ethically?
This annoyed me not only because of the lack of trust, but because law school exam questions are almost always essay questions that take a few pages to answer. No way did I want to try handwriting that much.
Fortunately, they did allow you to at least bring a typewriter to the exam (they set aside a separate room for this so it would not disturb the people who were handwriting).
There were limits, though. The typewriter could not have more than 2 lines of storage. This was around 1992, and already by then microprocessors and LCDs had become cheap enough that even most entry level typewriters exceeded the limit. It took a fair bit of effort to find one that was acceptable.