Busting a Harvard Cheater

Message to cheaters everywhere: do your homework. When the answer key to a difficult problem set was inadvertently picked up by one of the students in Biology 22, "Evolutionary Stable Strategy" (ESS), Head TF William Piel proceeded to give students a run for their money.

Instead of simply passing out a new problem set, Piel decided to use game theory, one of the primary topics studied in ESS, in order to subtly frighten students who might have felt tempted to glance at the lifted answer key. In a biological context, game theory is used to predict the optimal behavior or adaptive strategies of animals in a competitive environment while also having to account for the probability of alternative strategies in the neighboring environment. Piel wrote a creative game theory word problem that would apply to the classroom situation and e-mailed the problem to every Bio 22 student. He set out to test his students' honesty and to discover if anyone had been paying attention during lecture.

According to Piel, the problem was set up in typical ESS fashion, "where the strategy of one depends of the strategy of others. And the payoffs for the others are intended to encourage an outcome undesirable to the perpetrator."

The problem read as follows: "Consider the following payoffs: If the student who took the answer key fails to return it and is eventually caught, he or she will get a zero for the ESS problem set (let's call this cost C). If the student is caught willfully sharing the answer key with other Bio 22 students, the student will be referred to the Administrative Board (suffers cost C as well as the Ad Board cost D). A Bio 22 recipient who refuses to read the answer key and reports the perpetrator who passed it out (given that the perpetrator fails to report himself/herself) will get 15 points added to his or her problem set (a benefit B). There is no penalty or reward for a recipient who reads the answer key and then reports the perpetrator who passed it out. A recipient who fails to report the perpetrator will suffer cost C. What is the optimal strategy for those concerned?"

Though Piel jokes that his zany e-mail was not to be taken seriously, intense Harvard students clearly did not find their head TF's response comical. Only one day after the game theory problem was e-mailed to all Bio 22 students, the answer key reappeared. As far as Piel knows, it was not distributed to any other members of the class. Amazingly, not only did the well-respected TF get his answer key back, he also proved that perhaps information learned in the Harvard classroom is applicable to real life situations. Even science people can get creative sometimes.