Oh, Professor Snape, how right you are…

(source)

I’ve been preoccupied by issues of academic integrity ever since I started the first grade. I grew up in post-Communist Romania during very turbulent times. The social, political, and economic turmoil that my home country has been (and is still) going through has profoundly affected the quality of its school system. Standards of academic integrity have fallen so low that cheating, plagiarism, and bribery have become the norm among both students and faculty members. I’ve experienced firsthand some of these acts of corruption and I’ve struggled with the ethical dilemmas posed by them. Over the years I’ve come to believe that integrity is a very important issue for any academic institution because people’s ethical foundations are formed during school years and because peoples’ personal and work ethics have a major impact on the social and economic well-being of a society. Given my interest in issues of academic integrity, I’d like to find the best way to foster a culture of honesty and integrity on campus (or in any kind of community for that matter).

One of the leading scholars on the issue of academic integrity is Donald L. McCabe, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers University, whose research is focused on academic integrity, honor codes and student moral development (Rutgers Business School: Donald L. McCabe). In a 2005 article, Professor McCabe confessed that he had devoted his research career to questions of academic integrity because of his experience as an undergraduate at Princeton University in the mid-1960s. He graduated “from a high school where cheating was common,” and was “somewhat skeptical” when he was admitted to Princeton, an institution which has a very old honor code. The young McCabe was surprised to find that he “never observed, suspected, or heard of anyone cheating” during his four years at Princeton. However, after working for more than twenty years in industry, where he “witnessed at firsthand the continuous erosion in the ethical values of recent college graduates,” he became interested in doing research on academic integrity. Due to his experience at Princeton, he “was particularly curious to see whether campus honor codes were still a viable strategy” (26).

In a 1993 seminal article, Professor McCabe, together with Linda Klebe Trevino, a professor of organizational behavior and ethics at Pennsylvania State University, explored the effects of honor codes and other contextual influences on academic integrity. They surveyed more than six thousand students at thirty-one institutions of higher learning, fourteen of which had academic honor codes, and seventeen of which did not (“Academic Dishonesty” 528). For the purpose of their research, McCabe and Trevino proposed that for a policy to qualify as a traditional honor code, it needed to meet one or more of the following criteria: “unproctored examinations, an honor pledge, student reportage (non-toleration), and the existence of a court or peer judiciary” (530).

The results of this study painted a very complex picture. First and foremost, McCabe and Trevino found that “self-reported cheating was significantly higher among students in the non-code sample than among those in the honor code sample” (529). The researchers provided three main explanations for this result. First, the honor pledge “clarifies expectations regarding appropriate and inappropriate behavior”, so “it becomes more difficult for potential cheaters to rationalize and justify cheating behavior”. Second, an honor code school emphasizes student responsibility more. Finally, students abiding by an honor code “are frequently given privileges such as unproctored exams”, so they might be “willing to comply with an honor system to preserve such valued privileges”. All these factors – the authors claimed – help lower the rate of cheating (525).

However, given some of the other results of the study, I doubt that the code itself was the most important factor. The study also showed that academic dishonesty is discouraged by “the understanding of academic integrity policies, the certainty of being reported, and the severity of penalties”. Still, the factor that had the strongest influence was the perception of peers’ academic dishonesty (532). In my opinion, this is a very important result, because it really helps us understand what drives people to be dishonest and what can motivate them to be honest.

The study also had some unexpected results. First, one of the institutions without an honor code scored very low rates of self-reported academic dishonesty. It turns out that this particular institution “is strongly committed to the concept of academic honor, making it a major topic of discussion in its student handbook and at orientation sessions for incoming students”. Second, students at one of the institutions with an honor code reported high rates of unethical behavior. Apparently, this particular school “[had] diminished its efforts in communicating and implementing its code” (534). These findings support the idea that the mere existence of an honor code doesn’t tell the entire story.

Since peer behavior was the most influential factor in their study, McCabe and Trevino argue that not only is academic dishonesty learned from peers, but that “peers’ behavior provides a kind of normative support for cheating”, so social learning theory could be useful when dealing with academic integrity issues. Social learning theory supports the idea that people learn through “the influence of example” (527). According to this theory, “Students look to their peers to observe what they do and to learn about behaviors that garner peer approval” (“Individual and Contextual” 392). Clearly, social factors have the highest impact on academic integrity. Thus, in order to combat cheating and plagiarism, academic institutions need to “create an environment where academic dishonesty is socially unacceptable”, which means that the institution communicates its policies clearly and that students perceive that their peers are adhering to these policies (“Academic Dishonesty” 534).

McCabe and Trevino published multiple articles on this issue over the next decade. In general, the more recent results were consistent with their original research, but the researchers have also found some new interesting facts. In one article from 1997, they reported that fraternity/sorority members were more likely to cheat than non-members and students who perceived that their peers disapproved of academic misconduct were less likely to cheat (“Individual and Contextual” 391). These results also points to the fact that social factors are the most influential when it comes to academic integrity and that a campus culture of honesty and integrity is the best way to deal with academic dishonesty. Contradicting the results published in the first study, the 1997 article claimed that students who thought that punishment for cheating was more severe were more likely to cheat (391). This raises many questions regarding the effectiveness of very strict policies on academic integrity.

McCabe and Trevino’s original research had one caveat. The schools where they conducted their studies were mostly small, selective private schools where most students lived on campus (McCabe, Trevino, and Butterfield 358). Moreover, traditional honor codes are typically more found in these environments (362). In order to test their hypotheses further, McCabe and Trevino decided to do another study which included large public universities. In the fall of 1999 they conducted such a study that included private and public institutions, small and large ones, and a 2-year community college (364). In 2002 they published the results in an article written in collaboration with Kenneth D. Butterfield, a professor in the Department of Management and Decision Sciences at Washington State University. In this study, the researchers also looked at schools with a modified honor code, which is a compromise between having a traditional honor code and having no code at all. Specifically, an institution with a modified honor code “clearly communicates to its students that academic integrity is a major institutional priority”, gives students “a significant role both in the judicial or hearing body on campus and in developing programs to inform other students about the purposes of the code”, and allows (but does not mandate) “the possibility of unproctored exams or the use of a pledge at an instructor’s option” (362-363).

The overall result of the study was that “the level of academic dishonesty is highest at colleges that do not have honor codes, is moderate at modified code institutions, and is lowest at schools with traditional honor codes (368). As with previous studies, the 1999 one showed that peer behavior had the strongest influence on cheating and plagiarism at all schools. However, this correlation was highest in schools with modified honor codes, which also “rank lowest in terms of students’ perceived understanding of academic integrity policies and perceptions of the severity of penalties”. These results suggest that modified code schools have not accomplished their mission to make academic integrity a major priority and to communicate their academic integrity policies clearly and effectively to their students. Thus, it makes sense that students in such contexts rely more heavily on peers for guidance (373). Still, modified codes should not be discounted since schools implementing such codes have achieved lower rates of academic dishonesty.

All of the studies done by McCabe and Trevino indicate that having some kind of honor code lowers the incidence of cheating and plagiarism. However, more recent studies have helped bring some nuance to these findings. On such study was done by professors Mastin, Peszka, and Lilly in 2005 and 2006 and published in an article in 2009. In this study, the researchers asked 439 students from an introductory psychology class to complete an online task. The students were told that they would get extra credit in the class based on their performance in the online task. Before they started the experiment, the students were asked to do one of three things: read instructions asking them to be honest; read instructions that included an honor pledge and place a check mark next to it; read the same honor pledge and type it up in a text box  (174-175). The study found that 14.1% of students cheated, but that the “honor pledge condition had no significant effect on the frequency of cheating” (176). The researchers explained this result by stating that “Agreeing with a single honesty pledge might not reflect internalized attitudes” (177). Therefore, simply having honor code might not have the same impact as previously thought and other factors might need to be considered.

Some psychologists argue that cheating represents “a thought/action problem of moral functioning — explaining the psychological gap between moral understanding and moral action” (qtd. in Wowra 303), that is, students know that cheating is wrong, but they do it anyway. The reasons why students cheat are very complex and many researchers have tried to answer this complicated question. In a 2007 article, Scott A. Wowra offers an answer that is relevant to the topic of this paper: academic dishonesty is linked to moral identity and social anxiety. According to Wowra, students who suffer from social anxiety “cheat because their concerns over making a good impression override their need for integrity” (304). Moral identity is harder to define, but it can be thought of as “an internal set of moral prescriptions that help define who [one is] as a person” (305). After conducting a study on seventy college students from a large, public university (309), Wowra found that students who were committed to a principled ethic were significantly less likely to cheat that those who weren’t (313), but that social anxiety had only a small impact academic dishonesty (316). Still, he points out that the students without a strong moral identity had four times the symptoms of social phobia relative to the other students and that “academic dishonesty may well be another means of avoiding potential social rejection (317).

All these studies have broad implications concerning academic integrity policies. It seems clear that schools that have chosen strategies such as strict supervision during exams continue to have high rates of cheating and plagiarism, but that honor codes in and of themselves don’t work either. It seems that the most important factor is the culture of academic integrity that exists on some college campuses. This idea is reinforced by the example of the non-code school with low rates of academic dishonesty (“Academic Dishonesty” 534). On such a campus, academic integrity is a top issue to which all members of the campus community are exposed. Furthermore, such an institution emphasizes individual responsibility and makes sure that students are involved in the process of enforcing academic integrity. This scenario is matched perfectly by an environment with a modified honor code. However, in order for the code to work, all members of the campus community have to make an effort in promoting and abiding by the code.

Works Cited

Mastin, David F., Jennifer Peszka, and Deborah R. Lilly. “Online Academic Integrity.” Teaching of Psychology 36.3 (2009): 174-178. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 14 Nov. 2010.

McCabe, Donald L. “Academic Dishonesty & Educational Opportunity.” Liberal Education 91.3 (2005): 26-31. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 14 Nov. 2010.

McCabe, Donald L., and Linda Klebe Trevino. “Academic Dishonesty: Honor Codes and Other Contextual Influences.” The Journal of Higher Education (Columbus, Ohio) 64.5 (1993): 522-538. JSTOR. Web. 14 Nov. 2010.

McCabe, Donald L., and Linda Klebe Trevino. “Individual and Contextual Influences on Academic Dishonesty: A Multicampus Investigation.” Research in Higher Education 38.3 (1997): 379-396. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 14 Nov. 2010.

McCabe, Donald L., Linda Klebe Trevino, and Kenneth D. Butterfield. “HONOR CODES AND OTHER CONTEXTUAL INFLUENCES ON ACADEMIC INTEGRITY: A Replication and Extension to Modified Honor Code Settings.” Research in Higher Education 43.3 (2002): 357-378. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 14 Nov. 2010.

Rutgers Business School: Donald L. McCabe. Rutgers Business School. Web. 14 Nov. 2010. <http://business.rutgers.edu/default.aspx?id=449>.

Wowra, Scott A. “Moral Identities, Social Anxiety, and Academic Dishonesty Among American College Students.” Ethics & Behavior 17.3 (2007): 303-321. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 14 Nov. 2010.

Growing up in Romania, I went through a particularly corrupt educational system. Having seen the disastrous effect that such an education has on people, I have become utterly convinced that a good education is not about getting a college degree or a good job. I believe that a good education is about honesty and hard work first and foremost. I also believe that an educational institution must take very firm action when it comes to cheating and plagiarism. An honest education cannot coexist with cheating practices. However, recent events have made me question my opinions about academic discipline.

I’ve recently transferred from Northwestern University to the University of Illinois, which has brought many changes in my life, both academic and personal. In terms of my academic life, I’ve noticed a one major difference between NU and the U of I: the U of I seems to have a much stricter student code and a much more serious policy when it comes to dealing with cheating.

Take, for example, the cheating policy on exams. On the one hand, most of my exams at Northwestern were pretty laid back. Students could choose where they wanted to sit down; the exams were always identical for the whole class; there was no ID checking during or after the exam. The supervision was always very flexible and, in fact, some exams weren’t even proctored. In spite of all of this, I never noticed any blatant attempt to cheat.

On the other hand, I was rather surprised about how strict exams are at the U of I. First, during most of my exams I had to follow several rules just to ensure proper seating. For example, the students have to sit right behind each other, never diagonally, and there has to be at least one seat separating each student in the same row of seats. In one exam I couldn’t even choose where I would sit. Instead I was given a random number when I entered the room and had to sit on the randomly assigned seat. Second, many exams have several different versions so students sitting in close proximity to each other never receive the same version of the exam. Third, when turning in some exams, I’ve had to show ID just so that the professor and teaching assistant are absolutely certain that I’m truly who I saw I am. This is certainly something I’ve never experienced before.

The most extreme policy on academic integrity that I’ve ever encountered was in the Psychology 100 class at the U of I. In the syllabus for this class, the instructor states that “a student ‘suspected’ by an instructor or a proctor of cheating in an examination is considered to have cheated. Students have a responsibility to avoid any behavior that, however innocent, may look suspicious to a reasonable observer.” (Baym) I understand the point of this policy is to discourage people from even thinking about cheating. Still, I wonder if doesn’t go a little too far. I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine a situation where a student might get punished for appearing to be cheating when in fact they’re innocent. It would be interesting to find out if there have been such cases in recent years at the U of I.

I’m also wondering if such strict policy doesn’t have an impact on students’ performance on exams. R. W., a classmate from Rhetoric 105, recently complained to me about the ridiculously strict supervision during exams. (W.) He told me that during a recent exam his professor stood behind him and watched him for a full three minutes before moving on. This made R. feel a bit nervous and unable to focus on his exam. His story struck a chord because I also tend to get nervous when I know I’m being watched during an exam. For example, when a professor or a teaching assistant stands behind me and reads my work, I feel very self-conscious because I’m afraid that the professor or teaching assistant might see me make a mistake and think I’m not very well prepared. This anxiousness sometimes causes me to make actual mistakes. These kinds of situations make me wonder if ultra strict supervision doesn’t become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Do students have a poorer performance on exams because they get nervous when they’re being watched?

All of this has made me question whether the U of I is a little too strict when it comes to matters of academic integrity. I decided to research the history of disciplinary action at the U of I and came across a very interesting document. In early 1980, a student named Peter Bulgarelli sent a letter to the Senate Committee on Student Discipline, complaining about a problem that he had recently noticed. (Bulgarelli) He claimed that there had been a “tremendous increase in cheating during [the previous semester’s] finals”. The most astounding part was that the increase in cheating was due to “students spending much more time devising schemes to obtain the final than studying for it.”

I find the fact that students used to resort to “office break-ins” shocking because I’ve never personally experienced anything like this. I can definitely understand why Bulgarelli was so concerned about this phenomenon. Stealing a final exam, just like any other form of cheating, invalidates the efforts of all honest and hard-working students. However, I’ve never personally heard of students breaking into professors’ offices to steal exams. The reason for this is probably that, in this day and age, all the buildings and offices are locked during evenings and week-ends. Moreover, all doors require swiping an iCard to open. This probably means that it’s next to impossible to break into an office on campus. This would explain why such events don’t take place anymore.

Perhaps the reason why the university has such strict policies on cheating nowadays is due in part to the pervasiveness of cheating in the past. Bulgarelli is one individual complaining about cheating during one semester. Still, it does make me wonder how common such infractions were in the past. Bulgarelli does mention in his letter that “the fraternity system which [he was] involved in may be a major culprit”. Were fraternities actively involved in planning office break-ins? Did they encourage their members to steal exams rather than study for them? How widespread was the issue among non-Greek students? Obviously, stealing exams being part of the social scene may have exacerbated the issue. In this case, the university’s reaction to enforce increasingly stricter rules regarding cheating and plagiarism seems not only reasonable, but also desirable.

I decided to delve a little deeper into the issue and find out what differences and similarities exist between today’s policy on academic integrity and one from the not-so-recent past. Comparing one student handbook from about half a decade ago with the current one revealed some interesting facts. The current handbook has 107 pages and is almost twice as long as the 1961 handbook for undergraduate students. However, there’s an even more striking difference between the sections on academic integrity.

The 1961 handbook contains a section called “Personal and Academic Integrity” which is only four short paragraphs long. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1961) It emphasizes individual responsibility by stating that “education is a personal and individual matter. No one can ‘educate’ you; you must educate yourself.” The 1961 handbook also underlines the importance of honesty in academia, claiming that a “true scholar is a person of honor” and that “a sense of high integrity is necessary to the student as he goes through the process of higher education”.  It describes education as a moral issue by saying that “cheating and plagiarism are morally degrading”. Finally, the 1961 handbook emphasizes the importance of faculty in encouraging “honesty in academic work”, “protecting the honest student and preventing dishonesty”, and taking action “to discipline the guilty student”.

The student handbook for the current school year (2010-2011) delves a lot deeper into disciplinary issues. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010) The section on “Academic Integrity” is almost nine pages long and goes into every single aspect of the issue, from the definitions and penalties of infractions to the procedures of dealing with infractions. It only briefly states that the students’ personal responsibility is “to refrain from infractions of academic integrity, from conduct that may lead to suspicion of such infractions, and from conduct that aids others in such infractions”. This statement is interesting in that it also mentions suspicion of cheating as a problem, which could help explain the strict policy of the Psychology 100 class. The current handbook puts more emphasis on the responsibilities of the university (“maintaining academic integrity so as to protect the quality of education and research on our campus”) and of faculty (“establish and maintain an environment that supports academic integrity”). Still, this part is only the preamble, which is half a page long. The rest of eight and a half pages go into great detail defining cheating, fabrication, plagiarism, bribes, favors, threats, and many other types of infractions, and then laying out the guidelines to deal with said infractions.

Comparing the two handbooks side by side, it’s clear that 50 years ago the university emphasized personal responsibility while nowadays it emphasizes the strict enforcement of rules. It almost seems as though current administrators do not trust the students one bit. Given the history of breaches in the student (as documented by Bulgarelli in 1980), it would make sense for the university to expand the student code and enforce it more strictly. But doesn’t the university exaggerate nowadays?

It seems clear that University of Illinois has chosen to enforce a much stricter policy on academic integrity that the ones from the past and that it has a good reason to do so. It would be interesting to delve deeper into this issue and compare policies from several schools to see what impact they have on students. Specifically, it would be interesting to look at cheating rates and exam performance at different institutions and correlate that with how strict policies on student discipline are.

I now doubt the idea that cracking down on cheating is always the best thing to do. Yet I also agree that combating any form of cheating is essential to a good education. But how much is too much? How strict can policies get before they have an impact on students’ academic performance? How strict can policy enforcers be before they start punishing innocents? And how much do other factors, such as the university’s financial standing, impact the enforcement of the student code?

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Works Cited

Baym, Carol. “Psychology 100 | Introduction to Psychology | Fall 2010.” 2010. PDF file.

Bulgarelli, Peter. “Letter to Senate Committee on Student Discipline.” 21 January 1980. Student Life and Culture Archival Program. 19 October 2010. <http://www.library.illinois.edu/archives/slc/researchguides/rhetoric/rhetoric_pdfs/Letter%20to%20Senate%20Committee%20-%201.21.1980.pdf>.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Illini Guidelines.” 1961. UI Histories project. 19 October 2010 <http://uihistoriesproject.chass.illinois.edu/cgi-bin/rview?REPOSID=8&ID=9453>.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Student Code.” 2010. Student Code 2010-2011. 19 October 2010 <http://admin.illinois.edu/policy/code/FullCode_web.pdf>.

W., R. Personal interview. 13 October 2010.

I will never forget my first midterm in college.

The exam started in the most ordinary fashion. The professor came in, handed out the tests, and I started working on my sheet of paper. At some point I noticed that the professor left the TA in charge of proctoring and then left the room. He probably had something better to do than watch a bunch of freshmen taking an exam. I returned my attention to the midterm. Soon afterwards something remarkable happened. The TA got a call on his cell phone and stepped out of the room. I immediately raised my head to look around.

To my great surprise, I was the only person in the room to do so. Everyone else was scribbling on their midterms or doing calculations on their pocket calculator. I was surprised because I expected everyone to start sharing answers. But that was not the case. After turning in my midterm, I went home and thought about what had just happened. For the first time in my life I felt deeply ashamed of myself. Why was my instinctive reaction cheating? Soon I realized that this was something I had been taught to expect.

I was born and raised in Romania right after the fall of the 42-year old communist regime. The years of my childhood were a time of great economic hardships for Romanians because of the difficult and drawn-out transition to democratic and capitalist structures. Due to the economic turmoil, the budget for education was slashed dramatically. Teachers received crummy salaries so they started looking elsewhere for income. The best ones left the school system altogether, while others stopped teaching during school hours and asked students to come to private tutoring. The Department of Education did nothing to stop this downward spiral.

I wanted to have a good education in spite of all of this so I asked my parents and some older friends for help. I read the textbooks thoroughly. I did extra readings and exercises. It was inevitable that the plummeting quality of education in my country and my passion for learning collided. Thus my school years were fraught with drama. By eighth grade I had changed classes twice due to lousy teachers, but the greatest shock was yet to come.

The first major exam I ever took was at the end of eighth grade. I studied very hard for this test, but on the first day of the exam a woman came in to the room and gave away all the answers. When I came out of the exam room, I started crying hysterically. My mother, who was outside waiting for me, immediately asked me what the problem was. I told her about the woman with the answers. “They can’t just do something like this,” she said, grabbing my arm. We went upstairs to the exam committee and there my mother had me tell the story again to the committee members. We received an incredulous answer. We were subtly told to shut up and go home if I didn’t want to have “problems” during the later days of the exam. It was then that I realized that the entire system was corrupt and that the purpose of education in Romania was no longer good and honest learning. It was something else entirely.

In high school I gradually realized that most Romanians saw education as a means to an end but not in a good way. To most of them education meant little pieces of paper that stated what degrees they had received. The process of acquiring knowledge along the way was not at all important to them. In fact, it was a nuisance. The ultimate goal was graduating from college and landing a job, while doing all of this with as little effort as possible. Oddly enough, in Romania this goal was attainable to most people, yet it seems to me that those who act in this mindset can never fulfill their intellectual or social potential because they never even try. Moreover, the country that they live in can never achieve anything truly great. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Romania continues to be one of the poorest countries in Europe.

For myself, I’ve always wanted the same things as everyone: go to college, get a job, start a family, own a car and a home. In other words, I wanted the American Dream. However, I couldn’t seek it in my home country, not because it wasn’t attainable, but because I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my integrity in the process. So it was around my sophomore year in high school that I decided to pursue higher education in the United States, a country famous around the world for the quality of its universities.

At the beginning of my freshman year in the United States there was an onslaught of seminars about the student code, specifically about academic integrity. However, I was skeptical because my strange educational background had taught me not to believe in appearances. It was only after my first college midterm that I was convinced an education based on honesty and hard work was truly possible.

I’ve lived in the United States for four years now and I’ve grown accustomed to this new side of education. During this time I’ve met a lot of different people, most of them very conscientious about their studies or their work: students who stayed up until the wee hours of the morning to study for an exam, professors who held office hours after 5pm because they wanted to help students, and so on.

I’ve also encountered a few exceptions, most notably one student who last summer asked me if we could work on homework together. During our first meeting it became very obvious that he wasn’t interested in collaboration but in simply copying my work. I politely told him that I couldn’t take part in this and left. It felt good that for the first time in my life I could refuse to engage in dishonest behavior and not be crucified for it.

I’m now well on my way of achieving the American Dream. I’ll soon graduate from the University of Illinois and hopefully find a job. Yet, as President Barack Obama put it in his back-to-school speech this year, education is “about more than getting into a good college” and “it’s about more than getting a good job” after graduation. I think that what Obama means to say is that the results of a good education are neither a college degree nor a good job. After all, a lot of Romanians have those two things. No, the results are the educated people themselves, people who can solve problems without compromising themselves or those around them in any way. Or, as Obama put it, “the chance to fulfill our promise and to be the best version of ourselves that we can be.”

There’s an old Romanian saying: the country burns and the old lady combs her hair.

Well, now it’s literally burning.

Say NO to chicken nuggets!

(source)

The Social Network was an awesome movie.

I don’t care if it’s based on fact or not. I don’t care if it accurately portrays Zuckerberg or any of the other characters. It’s a movie, for God’s sake! It’s fiction (or at least it’s fictionalized)! 

The movie had great writing, great acting, great directing, great everything. It had an engaging story, a well-paced and suspenseful plot, and above all great characters. That’s the definition of a good movie, right?

Anyway, I loved the two main characters, Zuckerberg and Saverin. I didn’t come out of the movie theater feeling that Zuckerberg was a douche and Saverin was just a poor victim. Far from it, actually. It seems to me that Zuckerberg just wanted to get the company off the ground and Saverin was never around to do his job. Freezing the account was just the last drop.

Their relationship - complicated, nuanced - is kind of like real life. Which is ironic.