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Technology vs. Cheating at the University of Virginia
Isaac-Lew sent in this story about a professor at the University of Virginia who heard rumors that his students were cheating and took action - he wrote a program to search through all the papers, identify common phrases, and flag the cheaters. Now a large chunk of the class is facing possible expulsion for plagiarism.
When I took the compiler design class at calpoly pomona in the mid 80's, the prof ran a suite of lexical analyzers on the source code we submitted. It would score a program on categories such as data structures, complexity of the code, recursive vs iterative, etc. If the scores between two programs were similar, then he'd have a look at the source. Changing variable names or changing the order that stuff was defined didn't affect the scoring.
Once he'd identified the students involved in any potential copying, he'd then factor in how well you were doing on the various exams, homework, questions you'd ask, etc. By the time he called the students in, he'd have a good idea of who was copying from whom. Then it was a matter of splitting the grade between them if they admitted to sharing too much code or a visit to the dean. occasionally there were claims that someone must have stolen a printout or something like that.
It was one mean course but you came a way knowing the material.
Various instructors in our department have been using grading scripts of various sophistication ever since I got here. The more involved scripts check for "similar" submissions. Moving this out of the realm of computing may be novel, but I doubt it.
The real problem is the complete lack of respect for honor codes. It's my opinion that an honor code is a wonderful idea. By college age, students are grown up enough to be responsible for themselves. There should be no need for the instructor to watch the students during an exam or otherwise babysit them.
While honor codes are good, cheating still happens and it always will. Everyone knows it. There are two major problems with the implementations of the honor codes:
No one bothers to turn in cheaters.
In my experience, when cheaters are caught, they are rarely given more than a slap on the wrist.
The second aspect is much more serious than the first. If the faculty don't respect their own system, how can they expect students to respect it? Even worse, just a few people in high positions who don't care can have a disastrous effect. I've had talks with faculty members during which they bemoan their lack of success in getting any sort of action brought against cheaters. It's completely out of their control. Unless the honor council (student or otherwise) takes action, there's little the instructor can do.
It's not fair to the faculty, it's not fair to the students and it's especially not fair to the cheaters, who learn the unfortunate lesson that such behavior is acceptable and rewarding.
At the beginning of the class, he decided to review some 'stats' about the programs with us. He had written a program to strip out all comments, reduce all variable names and functions to one character, and then outputted this as a solid block of text.
He then proceeded to compare programs. "Hmm, these two programs have the same number of lines .... but they're not the same. Hmmm, these two do as well. And look, they're exactly the same!"
He then awarded the cheaters a single t-shirt that said something like "I cheated and got busted" and told them since they shared code, they could share the t-shirt.
I was adjunct (part-time) faculty for a computer programming class at a university that shall remain nameless.
I handed my class written instructions at the beginning of the semester that cheating would be punished by failure of the course. I did this because it was university policy to give your grading policy at the beginning of the class.
I even gave examples in class of what I considered cheating to be. A typical quote to my class might be "Asking someone to look over your program because you can't figure out the bug is not considered cheating...giving someone your program and telling them they can copy it is."
I had to fail 13 students that Fall semester due to cheating on the final computer programming project. In one circumstance, the copying of the program was so close that another person's name (her boyfriend) was in a comment of the program. When this person called me, weeping, that she didn't understand why she failed, I explained to her that her program was almost identical...line for line...comment for comment..for over 200 lines with another person's program.
She actually had a reason that the comment with the boyfriend's name was there. It was so far-fetched that I can not recall it with accuracy, but I informed her that I just didn't believe her.
I also found out that a folder of my old exams was circulating around. That's when I started putting questions on exams that were almost identical to the previous year's exam, except one character would be changed in the question which would render last year's answer wrong.
It was at this point that I understood that students cheat because they are actually convinced they are smarter than their teachers. They cheat because they are convinced they can't be caught.
Here is the kicker. I met briefly with the university advisor towards the end of this all. He had met with these students personally. I was informed in this meeting that the cheating WAS MY FAULT!! I was also informed that I needed to learn how to give final projects that students can't cheat on.
It was then that I learn an even bigger lesson. This university didn't want any one cheating. But if they did cheat, they really didn't want to know about it.
It would certainly be closer to real life.
Typical example: Grade school busywork problem. Add up the integers from 1 to 100 inclusive. The clever student may realize that:
001 + 002 + 003 + ... + 100 = Xand that ... + 001 = XAdd vertically to get: ... + 101 = 2X
100 + 099 + 098 +
101 + 101 + 101 +
101 * 100 = 10100 = 2X. So X = 10100/2 = 5050.
Do we praise the child for being clever and coming up with this idea? Or do we punish him for "stealing" and idea that Gauss came up with long ago? What if the child never heard of Gauss? The accomplishment is still clever, isn't it? With these net searches, schools will "discover" more cheating than there really is. And like our criminal justice system MUST err on the side of the accused (even if it means a few guilty getting away), an innocent must NEVER NEVER NEVER be wrongly convicted.
At my university it is looked upon as a good thing, aslong as 50% of the material is made by one self. Becuase this indicated that the person is good at cooperation, and that's much more important than technical skills.
...Pay is commensurate...
Where I used to work, the only thing that determined who got paid the most was who got hired most recently. At that company the norm was a 3-4% raise, but starting salaries were rising at more double that.
We had one guy that had been there 11 years find out that a fresh from the U. new hire was making $15,000 more than he was (When he demanded a raise he was told to shove it, and found a new job three days later).
I don't work there any more. Go Figure.
Interesting to see how different the reaction is to these areas. There are elements of commonality and while I tend to vehemently come down on the side of the righteous on IP, and against cheating, I have to admit that some of the arguments made to defend intellectual freedom could be used to support cheating, especially in this way. Remember how trivial it is to change those bits of copied code or papers into prime numbers. Really, I've always leaned toward the position that the cheater hurts mainly himself. Does removing the artificial monopoly of the first to come up with an idea encourage or inhibit innovation, etc.? Not an easy question when you bring it into this arena.
The mathematician that others all quote,
Who's the professor that made me that way?
The greatest that ever got chalk on his coat.
One man deserves the credit,
One man deserves the blame,
And Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.
Hi!
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobach-
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize!
Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'.
And ever since I meet this man
My life is not the same,
And Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.
Hi!
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobach-
I am never forget the day I am given first original paper
to write. It was on analytic and algebraic topology of
locally Euclidean parameterization of infinitely differentiable
Riemannian manifold.
Bozhe moi!
This I know from nothing.
But I think of great Lobachevsky and get idea - ahah!
I have a friend in Minsk,
Who has a friend in Pinsk,
Whose friend in Omsk
Has friend in Tomsk
With friend in Akmolinsk.
His friend in Alexandrovsk
Has friend in Petropavlovsk,
Whose friend somehow
Is solving now
The problem in Dnepropetrovsk.
And when his work is done -
Ha ha! - begins the fun.
From Dnepropetrovsk
To Petropavlovsk,
By way of Iliysk,
And Novorossiysk,
To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk
To Tomsk to Omsk
To Pinsk to Minsk
To me the news will run,
Yes, to me the news will run!
And then I write
By morning, night,
And afternoon,
And pretty soon
My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed,
When he finds out I publish first!
And who made me a big success
And brought me wealth and fame?
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.
Hi!
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobach -
I am never forget the day my first book is published.
Every chapter I stole from somewhere else.
Index I copy from old Vladivostok telephone directory.
This book was sensational!
Pravda - well, Pravda - Pravda said: (Russian double-talk)
It stinks.
But Izvestia! Izvestia said: (Russian double-talk)
It stinks.
Metro-Goldwyn-Moskva buys movie rights for six million rubles,
Changing title to 'The Eternal Triangle',
With Brigitte Bardot playing part of hypotenuse.
And who deserves the credit?
And who deserves the blame?
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.
Hi!
(Tom Lehrer, Lobachevsky)
You programmed the quadratic formula? Whoopdee doo!
At the University of Toronto, a program called MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity), which was designed by the UC Berkeley Computer Science department, is used to compare programs submitted by computer science students. Here's an article that was posted at the UofT website some time ago:
a sp
:)
http://www.newsandevents.utoronto.ca/bin/000228g.
Personally, I was in an Introduction to Computer Science class last semester (CSC108H), and it was quite obvious that certain students were plagiarizing work. Luckily for those students, that specific assignment was not MOSSed. We were warned from the first day that we should not copy, even to the extent that if we were discussing a certain assignment with a friend, that we not take notes and go and watch television or something afterwards so that the slightest hint of code would not creep into a students assignment. From what I understand, however, some students were caught when some other assignment was MOSSed. Even all the assignments are submitted by FTP and date stamped so that the late submissions would be identified.
It is quite funny though, those students that didn't seem to know much got a nice welcomed surprise on the midterm (which was quite easy if you knew what you were doing). But, even the MOSS program has its weaknesses. Basically, the trick to avoid its search schemes is to change the runtime of your code. Change certain loops around (eg: a for loop to a while loop), and move certain portions of code from one place to another. Heck, even throw in some extra "useless" methods that accomplish the same thing. Though, if a student were to take time doing that, they might as well write their own code. It's really funny how some students do amazingly well on their assignments, but have a "bad day" and barely pass the midterm and final exam. Unfortunately, there were quite a number of those in my class.
A friend of mine once told me, "the system forces you to cheat". That may be true sometimes...though I'm quite content doing my own work I got a 4.0 in CSC108H by the way
When I was in my second year at university, a friend of mine stole my program off of my machine and turned it in as his. He went to all sorts of lengths to change the program so that the prof wouldn't know that he copied it. He even went so far as to accidentally change the working bits of the program! His copy didn't even work! Of course I didn't find out about this untill our programs were handed back. He admitted that he had copied the code without my knowledge and took the sole hit on the matter. Nothing really major happened to him. The worst part was that the professor was very suspicious of me for the remainder of my time in her class. I got an A, he even got out with a C. Doesn't seem fair.
something clever
According to Babelfish..
Well, where do you think my post came from? Come on, its not like I can speak Deutsch or anything.. :-)
p.s. translate it back and forth again, and you end up with:
"How a former English major, who I must agree. Only if it is not lazy and loosely to skip, your own research doing, but, if you do not have evenly the brains REWORD the material, steal then you are easy burgers for some years for fastening, to you that you are ready for use to the use decide, in order to be real category a user."
What you say !!
It's proof of nothing, they said. That's not my daughter's paper.
At that point, don't you just say "That's the only paper I got with her name on it by the deadline, so either she gets a zero for cheating or a zero for missing the assignment. I'll even let you choose which one."
Of course, you only use that in courses where there is a "no make-up assignments for missed assignments" policy.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
This post is ohso bang on.
To be able to teach a subject -- ANY subject requires that one knows it COLD.
Moving towards that state actually DEMANDS teaching. You can't know what you don't know unless someone has asked you a question about a mentally vacuous place that you've forgotten about.
I've learned a great deal just supporting family and extended family members' computers. You rapidly realize that you're not quite the guru you thought you were.
It's humbling. Humble is good.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
At UC Berkeley Dept. of CS, it was standard practice for our projects to be run through similar software. Most programming projects, though, are done in teams. When you get two team members who don't know each other, usually the work gets split up, each team member goes off to finish their part, and then they join up at the end to test it or something (as opposed to the more eXtreme approach i used with my friends). Well, a friend of mine actually didn't cheat at all, but his partner actually copied a significant deal of code from a previous semester's assignment by someone else. He had no real way of knowing, but when the project was found to contain copied code, he was accused. Now, being found guilty of cheating at school seems to me to be about the same as having a prison record. He really had no way to prove he was innocent without his fraudulent team member basically saying so. He managed to have his record kept clean, but I don't remember the details of how, whether his partner admitted the truth or not.
I had another project my freshman year... we were way behind, and it was due the next day. It was 2 am, we were at the lab trying to write a lisp interpreter in scheme. We had it half done. One of my partners has strep throat. One was nowhere to be found, and one was there with me. The guy who had vanished "TALK"ed my partner and said that he had a friends completed project and we should use it. We didn't know they ran it through programs like this, so my present partner wanted to go along with his idea. I said "fine", went home, got some coffee, and finished the project myself by 6am. I even turned it in with their names on it. I'm not really sure why. And that was just because I hate cheating, not because I thought I'd get caught (though we would have).
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
It's not just who hold the pursestrings that matters - what matters is what the University considers important. If it's money, and if enough money comes from the students, then the University might hold off for monetary reasons. However, money isn't always top on the minds of University administrators - often it's the University's image.
As an example, I was a math grad. student at Johns Hopkins. One of the things that had come down from the University administration a few years before I got there was that we were to hold the line against grade inflation. The University as a whole has made this a priority (i.e. that Hopkins grades mean something significant), and one of the consequences is that we never had to worry about a lack of administration support when it came to punishing cheaters. The image of Hopkins had been tied by the administration to the idea that grades received at Hopkins represent what they ought to.
Not that this was a completely effective deterrent. It always boggled my mind when grading tests the number of people who would cheat off their friends when their friends also had no clue what they were doing. (We usually graded tests by giving each TA one or two problems, and that TA would then grade those problems across all sections - with fewer than 200 students per class, it's pretty easy to pick up on something you've seen before) I mean, if you're going to cheat, wouldn't you at least pick someone who knew their stuff to cheat from? I'll wager that upwards of 70% of the time the cheater was cheating off someone else who had no clue. I will admit that the standard punishment was usually simply giving the student a 0 on the test, which almost inevitably led to an F in the course. I don't think we ever found sufficiently flagrant violations to warrant referring the matter upstream. (Pretty obvious acts of desperation, mostly) I also don't remember ever catching anyone who wasn't a freshman.
Compare this to the conventional wisdom about a certain other institution that apparently values above all its reputation of having the best of the best as its student body, and is seriously hostile to anything that might make a student look bad. (This is mostly mere grapevine gossip, but backed up with horror stories from someone who TAed there, and some anecdotal evidence from people who've been undergrads there) Presumably an institution with less cultural capital would want to prevent its grades from becoming meaningless, but that place has a different set of priorities.
Not that it mattered, much.
Well, keeping resources from other students is pretty low. But turning in cheaters, I think, is not so much. The fact is that most classes in most schools grade on a curve. If people do well by cheating, it screws up the curve for people who did decently without. Also, it's worth considering that the more undereducated people your institution turns out (because they skated by), the less your degree will be worth. It's in your interest to protect the reputation of your school, the integrity of your classes, and your position on the curve. ;)
Odd, I've gone to public schools for the entirety of my academic career, and every teacher who has ever said anything to me about research has said that plagiarism in any form is not okay and will not be accepted.
Be careful when making generalizations about a system that is actually very different from place to place.
Some few years ago, I was a TA for an undergrad CS course that had two TAs at UNC-CH. One day I was too sick to grade my students' programs and my partner got to grade the entire bunch. Guess what he found? Two students w/different TAs (i.e., he and me) turned in the same program. We two TAs and the prof were pretty much livid and after the prof discussed the problem w/the students involved, we took the one we judged to be truly guilty to honor court. We all three "testified" against the student.
Because of privacy issues, we never found out exactly what the ruling was, but I'm pretty sure he got convicted and wound up having to take the course over.
John.
So, about 12 years ago, I was the head grader for a CS course at CMU, and I devised a similar approach to catching cheaters on computer programs. The class was around 100 students, so comparing each pair of programs was ruled out. Instead, I just ran the programs through a script that counted things like semi-colons, braces, parentheses, number of lines and so on. Then, it was just a matter of looking at the ones that were "close" based on those numbers.
It all works because cheating is, almost by definition, lazy -- if you're going to go through the effort to change the original sufficiently to make it hard to tell that you cheated, then why not just do the work yourself?
As it happened, among the people we caught were 2 people who not only happened to be roommates, but also happened to be alphabetically next to each other in the class, and who can been caught cheating once before.
Of course he had to write a program. Don't forget, he's dealing with 800+ papers a semester. If you read the original link, his classes are so big they are in 3 auditoriums and he is on closed circuit TV in the other two. Hard to remember the minute details of that many papers, if he does all the grading himself. If it's (quite likely) split by some of his grad students, he has to use a program since no one sees all the papers a semester, let alone all the ones from previous years.
In a creative fiction course you don't need it. Similarities (much less wholesale plagiarism) in short stories are blatantly obvious and in novels even more so. Add that to the fact that most creative writing courses are much smaller than 500 students. In addition, frequently all stories are peer reviewed and discussed. I could still tell you the major plots of virtually all of the stories written by my classmates in every creative writing course I took in college.
For the record, I took as many creative and other writing courses as most CS majors did programming courses.
LetterJ
Head Geek
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
I disagree. Being in group projects in school taught me an Important Life Lesson: other people are unreliable.
Copy one person, it's plagiarism. Copy many, it's research.
The issue really isn't copying. You can copy to your heart's content, as long as you don't claim you wrote it yourself.
Do we really need the university to "teach" us what we already know; especially since it seems that every discipline is trying to "teach" us this same "lesson" over and over and over again.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
But how many times do we have to learn this lesson? It is tiersome to learn it in grade school, junior high school, high school, undergraduate, graduate, etc. etc. etc. It also teaches the uncaring how to slack in a group setting: Is that an Important Life Lesson for them? You bet, but it's a huge pain in my ass.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
I used them so that students could teach each other. I wanted the strong students to help the weak
I want to redefine the terms; strong and weak are victimization characteristics. I'll use students that care and students that don't care. The caring students didn't help the uncaring. The caring did all the hard work and left the busy work for the uncaring to do. Some projects have a lot of mindless busy work (a database application, for example -- or help files), some don't. The students that care will end up doing all the goal-oriented work while the others will fill in the gaps, even to the point of doing practically nothing. The students that care, work on the project all the time. The students that don't care want to schedule meetings to make lists (read the Dilbert Principle some day).
simply because you don't really understand something until you have to teach it to someone else
Another gross misconception; an academic cliche if you will. Every time I hear that my brain translates it into proper English: "Your professor is lazy."
I was asked far better questions by the students who helped others
That's because we know what you want. We ask hard questions because it will get us a good grade, because it pleases you. It's classic conditioning and one of the traits of highly successful people to boot.
I learned the most from the knowledgeable professors that made me sweat it out. They would see my problems and tell me to think about it some more; they wouldn't help me except for guiding with principles. I learned the least from group think pseudo-philosopher teachers with an agenda other than that of teaching the subject at hand.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Well, at least one of our classmates was kicked out of the program (CIS anyway, if you consider them classmates to us CS-types).
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
It'll be really interesting to see what happens to those that already graduated... :)
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Which works just fine up until you get a Machiavelian member and an apathetic teacher that uses group-think to get out of grading. This happens all the time; it's not like the poor perfomers write "Ha, yeah, well, I didn't do much on this project." It's usually more like "Everyone else slacked while I did all the work" (lie lie lie).
Besides, we can always work in groups of our own volition, right? We don't need the professor to assign them, right?
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
I have (and do) teach. I love to teach. I have no complaints against group work where everyone is a caring individual; it's only when the uncaring people get involved that it becomes a useless mess. Due to the fact that it is impossible to assign groups where there will be no uncaring people, I can say that group work is a dubious undertaking. I've had lab partners that were incredible; I've also had ones that sit there and ask, "What was the answer to number 4b again?" (ready with their #2 pencil to mark the correct response). Working in groups is critical to real-life jobs and situations; but in a university setting where your grade is yours alone it has little place.
I had exactly one professor that allowed us to "fire" fellow classmates on jobs. The entire class was a group excercise in large software development and we divided up into fairly large groups at our discression. We could punish individuals who didn't tow their weight (and even punish those that did pull their weight for whatever reason the masses desired -- fairness has little to do with it). There is still at least one student I know of that has an incomplete in this class because of this (remember, I graduated in 1997).
Besides: What prevents you from working in collaborative groups without the professor demanding that you do so? Humans are social creatures and we make alliances with positive effects anyway...
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
At my university a lecturer has written a search engine that is fed large chunks of text and can scan the web very quickly for it, so plagiarism from on-line sources is rooted out.
Apparently it works too. Very useful seeing as there have been people handing in dissertations where they've admitted in private that they've copied chunks of stuff from web sites.
Kind of annoying when you work your behind off and see someone else cheat to get the same marks as you.
... Did all this in his head.
After a few weeks in his class everyone knew that taking more than a few words from someone else was completely unacceptable and that he'd find the original author before he presented the grades on the paper.
You'd quote a passage from an obscure book which would fit in nicely in your paper (i.e. without the proper "quoted from... " around it), and he'd take the book along to class....
This was 1985.
Roger.
with TP, a bad way to go...
Try smoother paper, is easier on your ASS
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
nice paraphrase of the comment above...PLAGARISM at its best...though you did re-word it SLIGHTLY
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Not Paying Attention causes soooooooo many problems in today's world. Those caught after the announcement are Too Dumb for College.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
Out in the "real world" (not in school, obviously), a business purpose of code reuse is to avoid paying person X to write what you already paid person Y to write, where X Y.
Ok, so they found common phrases, even paragraphs, in the papers. Yes, some of these are copying, I am sure. But are they also trying to kill teamwork?
I remember all the time having study sessions, or 'work sessions' with friends in a class. If there was a big paper to write, we would all get together and discuss the issues, really hash them out together until we knew them. It would be inevitable that we would probably end up with some of the same phrases on our papers. Someone probably said something memorable that really clicked with us all, so we all end up writing the exact same words, or very similar ones.
Also, like the article mentioned with the one student, there is the 'who cheated' question. Which I don't think they can really answer. How do you know which student copied, and which wrote the original? Unless someone offers to give themselves up, you can't tell, and attempting to tell is just gambling.
This sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen if they expel ANYONE.
Had we read the article, it would be noted that exactly that is what UVA is trying to do. An example was given of a student who had given their paper to a friend as a model, not intended for them to copy (I remember this happening myself). Not sure how UVA will determine this, but that's their plan.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Read the article, specifically the last few paragraphs. In your attempt to karma-whore by posting early with some well thought and legitimate concerns, you missed the part of the article where your concerns are addressed.
The article specifically says that half of the folks whose papers came up as duplicates were probably the source of the original material, and most of them were guilty of no more than showing others their work.
The story also says that it would be extremely hard to prove that they meant to plagiarize by giving a classmate a copy of their work for reference, so no action would be taken against them.
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
Nobody (at this moment at least). Gaijin99 has enough karma to post at 2 by default.
...
--
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
A lot of people hate their jobs, and I think that CEO/VP/whatevers do to. But, I know that they all are thinking "Woo, am I glad I went to college for 4,6,8 years so I'm not a waiter or something"
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
If you're writing at the college level, there is no "implied bibliography". You need to cite your sources. That's academic writing. A realistic instructor might realize that this kind of thing would happen, but only a lenient one wouldn't mark down for it.
I have been a grader in a junior-level
physics course required for physics majors.
The thing about the course was that the
professor was lazy and never changed homework
assignments year after year AND after the
homework was graded he gave out his own
canonical solutions. By the time I came along
I had a good chunk of homeworks with the same
varibale names, diagrams etc. as the original
canonical solution. I told the professor, the
professor appealed to the class for integrity,
then the homeworks became reworded versions of
canonical solution. At that point it became hard
for me to claim plagiarism and that was that.
I'd guess about 20% were cheating.
The thing is though that this usually happens with
obligatory classes, the ones where the students
just want to be done with and consequently
professor feels the same. If a class is elective
people will only take it if they are motivated.
Then it is reasonable to expect and even demand
the honor system to work.
If I may play devil's advocate a bit.. if we all abhor cheating so much, why do we continually reward it?
My experience has shown that fully 90% of all popular movies and TV shows are blatant ripoffs of the other 10%. In the professional world, haven't we all seen the 'go-getters' get where they were going only by stealing the ideas, credit, and work of those below them?
I live in a city where the highest ranking officer of the mass transit department was caught lying about her experience on her resume. It seems she fabricated _all_ of her 'mass transit' experience. What happened? She apologized. And got to keep her job. Do you think a fry cook at McDonalds would get the same treatment? He'd be lucky if he wasn't prosecuted.
We spend a lot of time teaching our children that cheating in school is wrong, presumably because "that kind of behavior won't cut it in the 'real world'", but who really believes that? If that were true, Microsoft would have folded when they presented IBM with an operating system written by someone else.
It's a backstabbing, dog-eat-dog world, why can't we just live with it?
Praise the Force Field! Praise the Laser Project! Slackware Loon #19830573
Professors were always "updating" their textbooks every year, and forcing us to buy them for large $$. I want to be able to use this to diff the two versions of their textbook and see how few words were changed from the "12th edition" to the "13th edition" - and put this info out in public to keep professors (slightly more) honest.
paul
Silly Rabbit, sigs are for kids.
Where does moderation go when it disappears?
(Granted, maybe I should be asking this on the Slash 2.0 thread.)
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> "Let's see the bad kid who sits next to me, who isn't named Sloppy, explain why his paper also has that mathmatical feature."
Prof: "Unfortunately, Sloppy describes that next kid's work quite accurately, so I still don't know who copied from whom!"
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
...home directories. We had this on our undergrad lab accounts, unbeknownst to me until my friend, who was scraping by and ended up dropping out, said "hey, thanks for the code."
"What do you mean?" I said.
"I just grabbed it from your directory."
Great...and it was probably Scheme, too...all those hours of slaving over parentheses...
This is a valid concern if it requirements to convict some one were simple and strictly tech based. They're not. An honor trial is a pretty elaborate process. I would suspect it's unlikely that an unwitting "source" of the copied material would be convicted. UVA's honor system has a single sanction: expulsion. As a result, it doesn't require too much doubt in the minds of the jury to avoid conviction.
woo! I have done this trick without the glass of water. It's really fantastic - multiple differently colours clouds of light zooming around inside the bulb, and them Boom! time to clean the shards of glass from inside of something you didn't own.
I also understand that grapes are good, although less dramatic.
DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!
or at least don't blame me when the disaster occurs.
We use just such a program in many of the CS courses at my school. The program will generate place holders for the variable and function names in a tudents code, then do the lexical analysis. The idea is to look for structural and algorithmic similarities. These similarities usually imply one of two things: the program was REALLY easy, or somone copied. These casea re then reviewed by the prof.
Its a matter of turning synonyms into common words and then checking against patters such as those. And if you think of rearranging the words, you can test against the order of ideas/pertinent words.
---
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
An introductory statistics course may require you to manually calculate "8!" to answer a probability question. But an advanced course might allow calculators for solving the same calculations -- because at that level the challenge probably is to realize that a certain probability calculation is required, and the actual calculation is a detail.
Various schools have various policies.
Actually, when I programmed the quadratic formula solution I learned it better than before I did so. I had to internalize the process in order to know how to tell the computer how to do it.
Did you see her turn that paper in? Did you see her give you that specific paper
:)
Jesus christ. I feel your pain. I'd almost respond with "Well, your daughter's name's on it, she never bothered to refute that it wasn't hers to begin with, so how about we just say she never turned the paper in and she flunks the class anyway?"
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I'll get flamed for this, because most /. readers are excellent coders and most of their peers were successful only because they were in the /.'er's group.
Ahem. Not that we've ever met any of those people while we were at University of Cincinnati. *cough* kelly *cough*. Never.
I had this very problem with. I'm now a master's student and I've been fortunate to move all work onto my own machines but I find many MANY people that would tromp through your homedir just to find an assignment.
It got to the point where I would have a fake non working world readable but compiling solution and a hidden version that would not be made readable until the professor had to read it.
Im all for cooperation in the academic sense but when you are identified as a good student and you become a target for copying from the unscrupulous.
I also get miffed about when professors have the same exam each year and the people that won't go memorize some old test ( programming languages in particular at this school ), you get to be graded against a scale that is an rewarding system for those testing their own knowledge.
We've had this for years.
We have Computer programs that mark our coursework and its now routine to check all programs for plagarism.
We don't tend to get expelled though. Cheating is so common they wouldn't have any students left after the first year. Instead you lose the marks, People soon stop doing it.
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/CourseMaster/
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~ceilidh/
Geez, "Ender's Game", or what?
tags. That's all it means. Be careful when using
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'm a CS major at Georgia Tech and all our programs are turned in using a custom environment that processes all the code through such cheat checkers. It seems to work pretty well and those who are caught are shuffled away quickly and quietly. It's understood that if code's not your own, you'll probably get caught.
______
everyone was born right-handed, only the greatest overcome it.
______
everyone was born right-handed, only the greatest overcome it.
http://leftorium.net
Maybe Edwards is right; how can they possibly know if there's no plagiarism anymore? I think the students have just taken more time to disguise their plagiarism...
0x or or snor perron?!
code reuse is good when your originally wrote it the first time. A lot of the students at my school get stubs/template files from the teacher and have to fill them in for labs and excercises. Then they use these stubs when writing programs and whatnot. Today i tutored a guy late in his first year of programming courses that didn't know the syntax for writing a method in java.
I agree with the motto "why rewrite it if i already wrote it".
modularity. good stuff.
"i wrote a linked list class last quarter, why don't i just derive off of that?". good stuff.
"i have no clue what these lines do but they're in the lab that the teacher gave me so i'm putting them here". not so good.
"i'm not sure what my friend did in this part of the program, but he says to write this and it works so i'm keeping it". not good.
you get the point. code reuse is good if you've actually learned it and written it the first time. It also doesn't help to implement something a couple times so that it sticks in your head even more.
yep, i'm aware of that. i've written many programs that used other libraries/classes and i did not take the time to understand every line within them. it would be ridiculous for me to do so. Since the original article was about acadamia, i was commenting on acadamia.
*** Work like a king, command like a slave, create like a dog.
The purpose teaching is, funnily enough, to teach people. The point of doing an assignment is not the end result, by doing the assignment the student learns a great deal. If they simply utilise someone elses code then they dont learn anything.
Code re-use is a good thing, learning from others work is a good, dont get me wrong here. Uni is not about how you would do things in the real world, it's about giving the student a grounding in a wide variety of base level computer science knowledge, and the only way you can get this knowledge is by implementing things..... yourself
anything we get from a computer we tend to treat as absolute fact. It is all to easy to find some connection that implies plagiarism.
Obviously anyone who was using this system would compare the flagged assignments by hand, rather than linking the system up to an auto-enrolment-termination system ;) In the case where the teacher is reasonably sure that cheating has occured then it is easy to check. Interview the two people seperately, the one who cant explain the assignment/program didnt make it...
But doing this teaches a great lesson for the working world! By being put in groups with folks who need some extra help, universities around the world are preparing scientists and engineers for day-to-day dealings with marketing and sales departments.
:/
Don't have time to explain it to them? Then be prepared to be held accountable for an unrealistic release date.
This post was intending to be funny until I looked around at my office...
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
In my CS classes, we turned in the source to our programs, not just a binary. Are you saying that the CS professors and TAs couldn't immediately recognize a program where only the variable names changed?
You should have gone to a different college -- one where the teachers actually paid attention.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
cheating != learning
If your school informally requires cheating, maybe you should formally transfer to a different school.
A school's good name matters for getting a good first job, but your actual knowledge will carry you further.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Being a '99 RPI grad (CSYS)... didn't someone have the script that ran the code (for CS1 or CS2) through a preprocessor, then compared the output (so even if all you did was changed var names, it would catch it)... then did a compare and gave relative percentages? I remember seeing this, and reading some rather revealing results...
Of course, I also heard nasty rumors that CS2 was being taught on MSVC++...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I seem to recall that suspicious papers are being reviewed to try and figure out who copied what from where. The suspected students aren't being automatically expelled.
Cheating even includes having someone look over your shoulder in the lab and give you hints.
So, how are you supposed to debug stuff? That's crazy for an intro course.
The first offense results in, at minimum, an F in the class and the the CS department will refuse to sign off on any of your financial aid forms.
So, they penalize the poor more than the rich? Nice.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
I think it would involve parsing the entire program and then creating a new document that lists all of the keywords and operators (tokens)... then simple analysis of the tokens similar to what Prof. Bloomfield did (looking for a certian number of tokens in a row that are identical) would produce pretty good results. However I think a search for 6 in a row would not work well because there are more words in the english launguage than there are tokens in a given programming launguage.
Basically.... do something like what LEX does... given the grammar... produce a list of tokens that you can analyze.
If your interested about grammars and parsing, I found a good website at: http://epaperpress.com/y_man.html
Steve
I have spent some time checking out www.plagiarism.org. Their turnitin.com site pretty much automates the task from the instructor's point of view, the surprising thing is the cost of the service -- actually reasonable. I think that the fact that the students have to submit their work through the site might reduce plagiarism significantly even if the software doesn't do a thing.
Now _that's_ funny.
Determining who is innocent and who is guilty is easy.
Who submitted the paper first obviously can't cheat off the guy who submitted his a year or so later.
~~Dan
No man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
Hmm... I think you're taking a position that strays dangerously close to elitism. Allow me to explain:
:)
Are all people smart enough to succede in a competitive four year university environment? No. Do these people not deserve to succede? I'm not so sure. Inteligence and usefulness are very different things, and if a dumb but useful person needs a piece of paper that says 'certifiably smart' to go off and do good things with their useful qualities, then I'm all for them cheating to pull it off. Would you rather have the earthly incarnation of virtue running your stock portfolio, or the guy who cheated on every test in college but never got caught, and knows a few dozen insiders?
People who can't succede in a university environment also have a responsibility to themselves to cheat. Until the income gap between those with college degrees and those without college degrees narrows a bit, the stupid owe it to themselves to at least try to get through a college program without getting caught before resigning themselves to poverty or near-poverty.
I've never cheated in school in my life, and I know that there are plenty who do. I like to think that this knowledge pushes me a bit harder.
Anyway, I doubt anyone will agree with me, but it's a useful point to consider.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Allows Plagiarism
and submit it to all the search engines so that it's the first thing that comes up when people search for that tech. You might get some action then... (either that, or encourage people to go to higher quality institutions.
Anyway, since when were techs universities?
Surely then the question was,
Who the heck modded him up in the past so that he got all that karma.
And then, when dealing with your clients, you have to put up with their stupidity. There's nothing worse in "working with" another company to produce code, and having their developers being incompetent, slow, (or even hindring on purpose).
If you think most /. readers are excellent coders, maybe you should get them to work on some of the open source projects around, most of which are appallingly coded. There's more to coding than being able to write a few lines of Perl that nobody else can read.
For a near-perfect example of good coding, check out the latest version of Angband.
For an example of probably the worst I have seen, look at libmcrypt.
Lucky the idiots who moderated that message up weren't also marking the university course, or all the plagiarists would have gotten an A+
The greatest example I ever saw of cheating was in my Operating Systems course this semester. We had to write a basic shell (with some simple but useless features thrown in so people couldn't just take Bash or something obvious like that). In discussing the grade results, the grading TA told us that two people had handed in shells that he himself had written in the past, and that that was a pretty bad idea.
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"Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
grep -ri 'should work'
If you read the story, you'll see that he did assume that the students could be trusted until one of them came to him and informed him that others were cheating.
Cheaters weren't punished solely on the basis of the professor's program. As the article pointed out, it's likely that as many as half the people who had identical papers actually wrote them, with the others being the cheaters. The prof used the results of the program as a flag to indicate which papers he should investigate. The students he accused of cheating are now being reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
I had a similar experience in high school, a million years ago, in the early 60s. Back then, it was slide rules. Bill Schmidt (RIP), my chemistry teacher, gave 95% credit for setting up the problem correctly, 5% for working out the answer. He wanted us to think through the logic. He believed any monkey could work the slide rule. The result (not unrelatd, IMHO) was that chemistry was far and away my best grade on the New York State regents exam.
As a student in a CS program also, I know how this works. I am a teaching assistance to a data structures class in c++. Cheating is an issue we have always talked about, because it is so easy to copy from other people, or from previous years. Taking part in running a course, all teachers can do to try to stop it, is to change assignments from year to year. But that can only go so far. I know we also have a simple program that compares students assignments for parts that look alike. It has been used to find some similarities, but not many.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Its not what it is, its something else.
>read this in a book, or a newspaper) don't some
>of the government agencies use minutely different
>wording for documents they hand out, so they can
>try to track leaks?
You read that in a Tom Clancy novel. I'm not entirely sure which one tho... Most of them (except Red Storm Rising) are a set of interconnecting sequels, prequels, and spinoffs.
The idea you describe was invented by his "Jack Ryan" character; and was a primary way "Ryan" distinguished himself early on and became a rising star in the CIA.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
Excuse me gents,
I am a tenured CS professor at an Ivy League school. Someone tell me where I can get "da 'leet goodz"... where can I copy this program to catch the cheaters?
Thanks.
Find and share links to celebrity profiles on MySpace! http://www.myspacecelebrities.com
However, as a UVa Alum who has his fair share of bitterness as well (and most certainly DOESN'T call the school "The University", "Mr. Jefferson's School", or any of that bunk, I will defend the honor system.
Same deal here. I was never a part of the Honor Committee (although I was randomly chosen to be a juror once). I think if it's effective, an honor system can be an asset to a university, but when it's considered a joke it's a huge negative. This is an opportunity to test it out, which is always a good thing (except for the accused students of course...). Here are just a few somewhat relevant facts that weren't mentioned in the article...
"How Things" was first taught in either 91-92 or 92-93 and was extremely popular right from the start (based in large part on its 'gut' status). Prof. Bloomfield has cashed in beyond just his class... check out his book on Amazon.
While many universities have honor systems that are similar to UVA's, UVA considers itself to be the originator of such a system. Every first-year (freshman) is told some story about how some guy had something stolen back in the 1800's and demanded 'honor' from the guy who stole it to 'fess up. True or not, UVA takes it seriously and those students on the honor committee expect to keep UVA's honor code above all other schools'. I do think that if this gets a lot of national attention, something will have to happen, only because it would otherwise expose the inability of UVA to enforce its extremely-highly-regarded (at least by its members) honor system.
Because the honor system is so ingrained in the UVA culture, many (if not most) tests are allowed to be taken home, or at a different time, etc. A previous poster said with all the email and web information, a student has diffculty determining what is his/hers and what isn't... that's like saying "I was in the library taking the test and there were all these books there and so I'm not sure that I couldn't look at them to 'research' some of the answers..."
Officially, a UVA student is expected to uphold honor outside the classroom or even UVA. Back around '90-'91 they seriously considered making using a fake ID an honor violation and were going to ask local bars for cooperation in busting students.
Officially, the student reporting the honor violation (in this case, the girl with the low grade who complained to the prof) must personally confront any student she accuses of cheating face-to-face before an honor trial can be investigated. The accused can either leave UVA or deny the charge, after which an investigation/trial can begin. Note how this differs from normal laws where a victim would report the crime to the police who find and arrest the accused, and who is officially charged in court by a DA. So this could be a big loophole for the cheaters to squeeze through... unless the girl confronts a person directly, nothing can really happen. The fact that the prof found out who may have cheated probably won't matter, unless he decides to give that info to the student, which probably isn't allowed. She may know that a lot of people were cheating, but may not know exactly who, and therefore can't confront them directly.
The prof, Mr. Bloomfield, has no say who will be tried nor will he have any role in the decision(s) if a trial or trials do occur. He would be asked to give evidence about the cheating, but that's it. A jury would be comprised of a few Honor Committee members but mostly random students.
As has been stated by others, if a student is found guilty, the only allowable consequence is expulsion. There is no middle ground. Thus, the standard for guilt is extremely high, mostly because normal students are very hesitant to toss out other students, especially when many of those jurors probably realize they may have been just as guilty at one time or another. On the other hand, a unanimous decision is not required to find the accused guilty as in a criminal trial... I don't recall if it's simple majority, 2/3's, or what percentage, but it's not 100%.
Exactly. And I *THINK* that was probably what was done, since in the article it said that when they looked sometimes entire passages were the same. At least they checked the papers. A bad statement in his program could have expelled his whole class!
Mike
--Ask a silly person, get a silly answer.
Not unless I were a pointy-haired boss. When I used to interview people I didn't check diplomas, but I found that it was very easy to separate the competent from the poseurs. "In your compiler class, did your compiler use register coloring?" "When you implemented that large database in your last job, how did you index it?"
As to borrowing or stealing work that he can pass off on his own, it doesn't fly in the real world. Generally, if you're good at finding existing stuff that fits the bill, it makes you a valuable employee because you save time and money. But most jobs require creating something innovative and different. Who's going to write the new database code for him? Certainly not his co-workers; they've got their own job to do. His only option is to change careers (the usual solution) or become a PHB (common only in companies I didn't work for -- IMHO one sign of competence is that you'll change jobs rather than tolerate horrible management).
...because, IMHO, the next worse thing after plagiarism or cheating is accusing someone of them without cause.
One of my C.S. professors back at college accused me of cheating on a programming assignment one time without any real evidence or proof and despite the fact that I offered to completely rewrite the program while he watched.
It was extremely embarrasing for me, so I complained. That professor is not longer teaching there.
That would explain Slashdot's popularity there...
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
Anyone who sais that having to teach (or even explain) something to someone else doesn't help you know your subject better obviously hasn't actually done it
Not really. For instance, you probably don't need to compare A papers with D papers assuming a somewhat consistent grading system...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Er, probably not. I'd think Newtonian physics and basic E&M -- IOW, first principles -- would be more likely subjects, no?. But that wouldn't necessarily quickly translate into knowing enough fluid dynamics to study, say, lift.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
As a seasoned systems administrator in a college department and former student myself, I know that in a college environment, the efforts to which some students will go to cheat show an astonishing amount of creativity---breaking into accounts, exploiting lack of permission control on other users' accounts, searching through the recycle bins, etc. The use of technology in this environment has made cheating easier, and harder to trace.
Yes, but that's only true if the cheater actually goes to the trouble to thoroughly cover his tracks. A cheater, by definition, is unwilling to do hard work. He might bother to erase a log file or rename a few variables, but the fact that his assignment is a carbon copy of someone else's work sticks out like a sore thumb.
An example from my previous place of employment: I gave an circuit simulation design project to a group of graduate students. Five of the assignments were practically identical. The students had renamed the components in each of their respective assignments, but had forgotten to change the time stamps and license code at the bottom of each plot, which showed that assignment had been run and printed on the same computer about 3 minutes apart. Furthermore, the schematics, when superimposed on each other, were identical (same wires, nodes, component orientations, etc.)
The effort it takes to cover your tracks, and cover them well, is simply more than most cheaters are willing to go to, else they would have done their own work in the first place. Believe me when I say that professors know what to look for, and we can usually find blatant evidence when cheating occurs, if we take the time to look. The only reason that most students get away with the cheating that they do is simply lack of time on the part of the professor to perform the pattern matching. Automating the searching/matching process now makes it feasible for a professor to effectively police a large class.
The risk is that some of the students are probably innocent, merely being guilty of having their own papers copied without their knowledge. Indeed, we've seen many cases here where the person whose work was copied ends up in a situation where they have to prove their own innocence.
In the rare cases I've seen where a student's assignment was copied by a stranger without his/her knowledge, the direction of the copying was obvious. The overwhelming majority of cheating is blatant plagiarism from external sources or else collaborative in nature. One student will let one or more friends copy his work, and again this is easy for a professor to spot.
Unfortunately, the technology of online composition and submission of papers (as typically done at most Universities) lacks sufficient security, encryption, and authentication standards.
However, no amount of security or encryption is going to stop collaborative cheating or outright plagiarism.
I just fear that the cost of this action could possibly end the academic careers of too many students guilty of nothing more than failing to see how their work could be copied.
Believe me, the student will get the benefit of the doubt unless the evidence says otherwise. Universities are very sensitive to lawsuits by outraged students and parents. No professor is going to turn in a student for an honor code violation unless he is sure he has undeniable proof. Any professor can tell you about cases where he let a cheater walk because he didn't have evidence that would stand up in a court of law. Faculty members can be sued for false accusations, and we don't make them lightly.
It may be, and I'm not defending it.
What he's looking for is massive word for word copies, and thats what he's found.
No, what he looked for were matches of 6 continuous words or more. It just so happened that when he found them, he also frequently found whole sentences (or more) that were identical. Again, in this case, he probably found a bunch of real cheating. BUT, sequences like that might be more common in a more text-based course. Which isn't to say that cheating doesn't occur there, but you might need a different standard to look for it, is all I'm saying.
---
I read the article and still wanted to ask the question. And you are right. RTFA(-1) would be helpful. Right along with WAFA(-1).
You don't think there is a potential for mistake? Maybe in this case its fairly obvious, sorry. It seems like a dangerous proposition; even though in this case it was warranted. I'm just wondering where the limit is, and what 'should' be considered significant. Thanks for your help...
So what is considered a significant match?
Of all subjects, physics along with mathematics has to be the least interpretive subject a person could write about. Writing a sentence that is NOT UNIQUE would seem to be unavoidable. Compared to an essay written for a class in the social sciences; a 'paper' written for a physics class should be riddled with exact matches.
I mean for an introductory physics student, how much can be said about gravitation? I would imagine that too much creativity would actually be a problem.
Where do you set the limit? If I was a student who diligently wrote a concise paper on some physics topic, and who's honesty then publically called into question: I would sue the prof AND the university. This whole things smells...
You would think that Slashdot readers would be better people than to spread around urban legends.
But then, after all, this is an AC post.
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
UCSB's site.
Berkeley also has their MOSS, which TA's and prof's may have heard of:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html.
I think it probably takes a look at a pseudo-compiled version. That's what I'd do, anyhow.
Andrew.
I think you mean astronomy, not astrology. Astronomy is the study of celestial bodies. Astrology, as Isaac Asimov once put it when someone called him an astrologer, "is superstitious crap". All that "Venus rising in the seventh house of Mars" nonsense.
Oh, so you are an astrologer... Well, I'm sorry about that.
However, many people don't seem to know the difference and I think it's important to distinguish science from pseudoscience.
The UVA Honor Code is agreed to and signed by every incoming freshman as a condition of enrollment, and every exam and paper is also accompanied by a summary of the Honor Code forbidding cheating and is signed then as well.
The terms are clear, and these students clearly violated them. However, I do not think summarily expelling them is warranted. They made a very lazy and stupid mistake, and kudos to the instructor for catching them. But expulsion is too extreme. Most students, and all programmers, have, at one point or another, taken another's work without giving due credit. Even given conclusive evidence that these students meant to deceive the professor and violate the honor code, and clearly cheated, to destroy their academic careers seems too harsh. The honor code is not taken as seriously in the student body as the administration would like to believe, and using these kids as examples isn't necessarily just. A semester or two of academic probation -- and the scare they've already received -- will teach them a lesson.
I'm awaiting flames, many people will get indignant and question my sense of honor and academic integrity, but I think an honest self-evaluation for most people would result in some level of sympathy. Caught in your darkest hour, making your worst mistake, have you done so much better than these?
Just $0.02 from someone who believes people take some things too seriously.
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
"Common" in this case means "shared," not "typical."
Two kids' papers about physics are very likely to contain the same raft of cliches from Bartlett's, but if they both say "In an effort to attract tourists, North Korea is offering a honeymoon travel package that includes visits to a maternity hospital and an irrigation dam," something's prbably amiss.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
The undergraduate math classes I went through had open book (closed neighbor), take-home, unlimited time (but in one session, on the honor system) exams.
I gained an absolute hatred for those exams, 'cause the unlimited format was the signal that the instructor was going to put in problems which the textbook didn't even get CLOSE to touching, and which no one had talked about either in class or in study sessions (neither tangentially or especially not directly), and even when you figured out the "trick" to solving the problem, would take hours of grinding out symbolic manipulations by hand (with all the corresponding potential for making stupid little mistakes 3 hours back) to come up with an answer which you really had no way to sanity check.
My only consolation is that everybody else in the classes did about as badly as I did (except for the inevitable few "prodigies").
yeah, its called 'diff'
When I was there (finshed last year) now making 80k coding, I often used other peoples code, and never was called in for it. However I did always put in the header "This code is not myown, I am resuing other peoples design. For more info please contact me." Dont know if their program is a just a way to keep people from copying or not. I remember being in the lab late at night and hearing people talking about trading code for one class(almost always compilers, That class should have been worth about 8 units for each of them) for another, say Operating systems. The moral, Code reuse is a good thing, just say that it is not original
.sigs suck, thus nothing here.
The problem with a fileserver (from the students prospective) is this:
1) A fileserver can be accessed by anyone, including the prof. Prof changes testing format, old test value is degraded or lost
2) Fileserver with access permissions won't help because it is still connected to the univeristy network and the prof can have IT manipulate it's network however is needed to access the documents. This is hairy and probably encounters some legal issues depending on state on University laws, but could lead to the result of #1.
3) Have local access (console) only. Now it's basically the same as storing the physical papers, except everyone can printout what they need. This doesn't add much value though, so the work to do it may not get done.
just my 2 cents
- Sig
. Maybe someone will develop a modified version of the professor's software to check their paper against the original and insert a synonym every five words or something.
That sounds like WAY too much effort to go to before writing the damn paper yourself. IF you are so far out of your element that you can write a computer program to randomly insert proper synonyms into the paper every five words, but cannot manage to write a paper... maybe change your field!
-rt-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
. Maybe someone will develop a modified version of the professor's software to check their paper against the original and insert a synonym every five words or something.
That sounds like WAY too much effort to go to before writing the damn paper yourself. IF you are so far out of your element that you can write a computer program to randomly insert proper synonyms into the paper every five words, but cannot manage to write a paper... maybe change your field!
-rt-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
Granted it sucks when cheaters do well and get through will much less effort then yourself, but look at it this way, it will catch up with them in the end, one way or the other. I got enough things to worry about instead of torching others academic careers.
As incredible as it seems to all of you that this kind of cheating would take place, it is even more dumbfounding to the students here. The Post article hints at the seriousness of our honor system, but i don't think it gets across its finality. If the students currently in the university are found guilty, they are asked to leave or are expelled. If a student who has already graduated is convicted, they lose their diploma. The system is single sanction so any guilty verdict leads to this penalty.
Several students have already withdrawn, even this late in the semester, after this broke. It's that damned serious. It is a sad commentary that this could occur here, where honor is supposedly a very serious matter, but I guess we don't take it as seriously as we pretend to =(
beware the jabberwock, my son! the jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
every reference? Hell's bells, in my student days I used to pad my bibliographies if I thought they looked a little slim.
Just look in the bibs. of your reference books, and copy those refereces that look juicy, and throw them in the citations as you write. Hell, I used to make citations up!
Oh, wait... we were talking about the honor system..... whoops....
"A child of five could understand this! Fetch me a child of five." -Groucho Marx
"A child of five could understand this! Fetch me a child of five." -Groucho Marx
WWJD? (J == Thomas Jefferson, UVA founder)
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
An incident that occurred at my former high school when i was in grade 10. Every year, everyone had to write and present to the class (and teacher) a speech. This teacher had two different classes (of the same subject). One student in my class and one in the other class gave exactly the same speech in front of the same teacher, and luck made them do it within 2 days of each other.
Malcolm solves his problems with a chainsaw,
Malcolm solves his problems with a chainsaw,
And he never has the same problem twice.
To those who clearly didn't understand this (I was just about to make an identical post ;-)
Obviously there is no community of trust, or honor for that matter.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Simple. You have TAs do it. That's how it was done in the big lectures at Marquette when I was there.
From the artical it looks like the program goes through the students paper looking for pharses that might be plagerized, the searchs the internet (i.e. google) for those phrases.
what i'm not clear on is what a 'phrase' is. is it a sentance? maybe something that uses a proper noun; like.. "It was sure the Sir Walter was doomed, for he..."
also the seach bothers me. i know some sites have papers that you have to pay for, like 10 bucks an essay, surely those wouldn't be on google.. i would think..
damit! i was going to post fake code.. but i got
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted.
arg!
-Jon
-Jon
this is my sig.
two suggestions:
1) umask 077
and
2) chmod -R og-rx ~
-- http://www.cerastes.org
I'm a graduating student at the university of pennsylvania. One course I just finised today was Operations and Information Management 311, which focuses on business C++. Every homework assignment had a corresponding model that we could work from... the teacher, however, made it clear that we had to physically type up our own programs without copying anything from the samples. He even went so far as to water mark the files so that a dialog box would pop up saying "Oops!! this is a sample. Do not turn in."
Today he just gave out 22 zero's for the last assignment.... I noticed that he added a bunch of spaces after each line. I removed most of them, but apparently I didn't remove all of them.
Is it just me, or does that seem a little crazy? Coders borrow. Good coders steal.
--
Need ecommerce that doesn't suck? FoxyCart is for you.
nice. did you stay down here or head up to the valley? I'm about to graduate myself and trying to decide where to go.
I ate my sig.
Ok so that sounded kinda dumb.
The important thing is, that the above is nothing new. The UC system has a program that compares project's source code files for signs of cheating. It apparently goes so far as to count the number of functions, function calls, parameter types, sizes of code blocks, etc. This way you can't just borrow your buddies' program and change a few variable names. I've heard its some pretty advanced stuff (what do you expect from the people that teach us?!) and amazing to watch in action. One of my friends got called in for cheating... but as it turns out, he was retaking the class, and had used some code from the previous quarter!
Hopefully someone out there can give some more info!
I ate my sig.
I guess so.
I was basing this on cheating I've seen going on, where people were cheating out of laziness and opportunism rather than a desire to blag their way through a degree. Often people borrow papers from friends, and when faced with a charge of cheating they're hit with A. possibly getting a friend thrown off the course if they get the blame or B. getting them selves thrown off. If said person is then given the option of owning up in exchange for repeating the year rather than simply being expelled (the usual case in my university for known plagarisers) then I reckon they would take it.
I don't know how big a deal it is. If it goes on too much then it will definitely lower the quality of graduates, and damage the reputation of the institution when these people finally arrive for day 1 of their new job and don't have a clue. I have to say though that in this example the course sounded like a classic 'no brainer' module which everyone takes because they don't want to do anything serious - so they're bound to cheat if they can.
In the case of this incident, the article implies that some or most of the papers were copied from the year before, in which case you just look at the dates.
There are also other ways of demonstrating who did the work - compare it to other papers by style etc., ask all the potential authors to justify an unclear point and see who does a job most consistent with the original, or simply to ask people to own up - under pressure I think many would, especially if they've copied from a friend. I'm sure there are serious cheaters, but I reckon about 80% are opportunists who would own up especially if given a chance to retake the year rather than being thrown out.
The purpose of an education is not to teach skills for "the real world." Not at any University I'd go to, at least. The kinds of schools that teach about the "real world" are called "technical colleges."
In the Databases class that I took this semester, I recalled a incident of cheating among three students (one of which is a grad student). The three students submitted an assignment which was to write views in SQL. The three students turned in three copies of the same SQL code. The TA caught this by looking at the code, and saw that there were bugs in the code in the same places on all three submissions. As a grade, each student got 1/3 of the total points that the assignment was graded as.
Once a friend of mine copied my work, that I gave him so he would print it for me. It was a MS Word file, and he copied a whole exercise with ctrl-c, ctrl-v.
We used different fonts, with different sizes. He was so lazy, but so lazy that he even didn't change the font!
That's why I use LaTeX now. Everytime someone asks me just to see my work, I handle them a postscript file and a diskette with GV for Windows. :)
--
This space left intentionally blank.
At my school, they've been doing this for a while now with multiple choice exams. They figure out, statistically, who is likely to have cheated, and the correlate with seating positions and stuff, so it's fairly effective.
Quoth The Queen: As a former English major, I have to agree. Not only is it lazy and slack to skip doing your own research, but if you don't even have the brains to REWORD the stuff you're stealing then you ought to flip burgers for a few years until you decide you're ready to be a real student. Then you can flip burgers with eloquence.
I used to just get someone's work, read it 2 times and then I wrote it down with my own words and my 'opinion' at the bottom. Well, its true that some of the students were a bit pissed when I used to get A for the copy, while they got B or even C for the original :)
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
> Oddly enough, '91 was about when I was a graduate teaching
:) Nope University of Texas, funny story about the non-working program. I was always amazed as many of the programs were fairly trivial, and the cheating probably took longer than actually writing the code...
> assistant in the Beginning Programming Lab... You weren't at Miss. State, were you?
I actually saw people with printouts of other people's code, highlighting variable names so they wouldn't forget to change them when they turned the program in... :(
Back in '91 when I was in school, viruses were fairly new so whenever someone couldn't get a project done it would somehow be eaten by a virus.
It's not all that different in the "real world", where when interviewing someone with 10 years of perl on their resume can't even write a simple loop. "I usually just change other people's code" is a common excuse...
I'm a 3rd year student at Sydney University; last year one of our lecturers sent a message to the local ugrad newsgroup saying that he'd written a program that supposedly detected plagiarism. Apparently he then busted about 20 or so people for plagiarism.
;-)
:-)
One of the people who got caught claimed that the people had "hacked" his ugrad directory... it turned out that he didn't have a clue about UNIX permissions - he'd left his directory world-readable.
This script also apparently checked for things such as "same idea different variable names" which I guess is the first step to avoiding plagiarism that people think of
So I doubt that this story is so "breakthrough" as it seems... although it does seem to have enticed a good deal of conversation
Just thought you'd like to hear my experiences...
- Liedra
The CS department of the Australian National University has been doing this for at least 8 years.
They don't look for "phrases", however; too easy to randomise. They look for digraph pairs, amongst other things.
It is surprisingly good at picking out dupes; evern programs where the variable names have been changed.
Anyways....
I've searched first 6 words of second paragrpah
A +d ecade+ago+it+would+have+been+hard%22&btnG=Google+S earch
of the article using google:
"A decade ago it would have been hard"
and found 5 pages containing exact match!
Check for yourself:
http://www.google.com/search?lr=&safe=off&q=%22
Or you can learn the fine art of cheating...
People who copy papers verbatim are probably dumb.
People who write their own papers are usually intelligent, if somewhat misguided.
Those who can produce a copy that bears no resemblance to the original paper are the geniuses.
For physics, this is definitely true, as it is for numerical calculus, but the majority of advanced math problems are of a symbolic nature, and a calculator is quite unnecessaty. Heck, half of the problems at a really advanced level begin with the word "prove", not "calculate".
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
I got accused of cheating or helping someone cheat in my intro Pascal course my freshman year of college, lo those many years ago. It was an exceedingly easy class - it was mostly write down the code the professor wrote on the blackboard, go to the mainframe lab, type it in, and debug his errors. We had an assignment or two at the end of the semester where we typed in a short SAS program/script/whatever that printed out some nice graph. The professor told us to add a line that read something along the lines of "SAS graph created by ." I dutifully wrote this on the paper, with my name of course. A couple days later, one of the students in my class asked me for my paper since he had lost his and the assignment was due later that night. I gave him my paper, which he typed (including my name), and submitted it as his own. The TA called me in to his office the next day or so to discuss the assignment, but luckily I was able to explain to his satisfaction what had happened.
A community of people sharing the same documentation, pressured by the moderation system to align their opinions like molecules in a magnet or LCD ...
This is not a signature.
Like it or not, in the real world, you have to deal with other people, and sometimes, other people are dolts. This doesn't change the fact that you have to work with them.
They don't even have to be dolts to cause difficulties in the group. If you get two strong-willed, smart people in a group, that will cause as many problems as a smart person and a dolt, if not more. When I was in grad school (biology), I took a 1st semester biochem class with mixed grads and upperclassmen. Early on in the class, we got assigned in groups and were given a topic for our project. In my group there was me (older, strong-willed/stubborn, smart, "We're all in this together" attitude), 2 chem undergrads who were just trying to survive the class, and 1 pre-med student (also arrogant and smart, but since the class was on a curve, "me against you" attitude). We had the hardest topic and made the best project, but man, it got ugly. After hearing one of our "discussions", a complete stranger came up to me and said that she thought we were a couple breaking up in public at first, and maybe we should all calm down a bit. Eventually, we ended up doing a separation of powers thing, pre-med ran the presentation, I did the writing (pre-meds intro to our paper was longer than the rest of the paper combined - she basically tried to pre-empt everything everyone else wanted to say) and experimental design.
The next semester's project with just the two undergrads (and one grad student) was much easier, but not quite as good. Something to keep in mind...
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
One thing I hate about partial credit is when I'm working on a rather complicated problem that I've alreaady previously laid the groundwork for. Several times I've been able to significantly reduce the size of a problem I'm working on by thinking back to ways I've played around with the subject, or perhaps solved pieces of the problem in other classes. Thus, "putting it all together" can be almost instantaneous, but supporting all the pieces of my answer takes upwards of an hour. geh. - Ithil END OF TEXT (device control 3/7)
Oh my is this true... : - )
If you read the entier article, you will see that he hasnt caught any cheaters in the next term. He belives the students have learned not to cheat.. He couldnt be farther from the trueth. The students have learned to cheat better. They have simply learned his algorithem, and now are makeing sure that it will never return true on their papers. UCBerkly has maintained a code scanner for some time, they scan code for similarites. But if you can code at all, you can tweek a peice of source code to not match in a few minutes. Search and Replace is a good tool, but not enough. Defeating these programs simply require a little bit of thought. As for "Files" the refer to, you do not need to look any furhter then the local greek system. All frats have a box FULL of files/test/papers.. yada yada. To be used as "Study Aids". While the article notices that tech is a doubled edged sword, it may be worse then that. As I have seen Many papers that have been submitted two or three or more times to the same professor for the exact same assignement in differnt terms. The funny thing is how much the grades seem to drift. You can expect to see any where from 1 to 2 full grade point drifts. I think this tends to prove that grades in higher education are more luck of the draw then a reflection of the students performance. I think the professors dont want to catch cheaters becouse of the trouble it will create for them. Any ways if they would adjust their assigments between terms they would remove the abililty to cheat.
My dad, who works with Professor Bloomfield at U.Va. brought the original article in Charlottesville's local paper to my attention earlier this week (I tried to provide a link to this article but it's no longer on their web site). This is the culmination of Bloomfield's LONG fight with the Honor system at U.Va. A few years ago, he told my dad he had basically given up on trying to catch cheaters. His class is SO popular (it fulfills the Universities basic physical science requrements for non-science majors) that we (my dad and I) had to rig up a way to "tele-conference" in 2 other class rooms of students (I used to run the video camera in the main lecture hall, too). Because of its popularity, he's had to deal with so many people (who don't care about the science but just want to graduate and play football) blatently cheating on the final paper (which is worth 25% of your course grade, BTW). I, personally, can't believe how many people scheduled for graduation are taking a course intended to first-year students (the 100 designation at U.Va.).
However, almost nothing has been done by the honor committee on his previous referalls. I think this is mostly due to U.Va.'s 'single-sanction' policy (see http://www.student.virginia.edu/~honor/ ) and a student jury refusing to pass a judgement that will result in expulsion. Lou said it was too much work for him and nothing ever came of it.
I'm glad he decided to have one more go at it, though. Maybe they'll listen to him this time.
I never liked requiring work for the grade. Thats not partial credit thats just crap. Partial credit only benifits you when your answer is not correct, if the final answer is complete and correct you get full credit whether you show your work or not.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
The reason for handwritten notes is that its a farily well shown fact that the more times you write something down by hand the better you remember it. There is also the fact that a random sheet of notes handwritten is nearly useless unless you wrote it yourself, understand the concepts well enough to understand what you wrote, and have some sort of resonable organization on the page.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
I must admit there is something lost when you rely on a calculator. Those basic rote type mathematics like addition and subtraction are very slow for me. They always have been so I'm not sure that not using a calculator would have helped me get faster with them, but having won sure doesn't give me incentive to find out.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Of course this has been said over and over but I will repeat. The professor used the program to find candidates for possible cheating. He then looked at this much smaller list and made actual "by hand" comparisons of the papers and found large portions if not entire essays that were the same. If that isn't proof of cheating I don't know what is.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
On the other hand if you have been sneaky in the past the prof might say "You do this all the time leave me alone."
The best asset to have in college is a few proffesors on your side.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Thats the difference of when a teacher grades the papers vs spawning off the jobs to a million mindless grad students. I mean the teachers are paid to teach right, that doesn't include the grading part I guess.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
The teacher caught them blatently cheating and told them they had failed the course. The knew they couldn't win by fighting the actual grade so they went and got withdrawl sheets for the class. The teacher refused to sign them (and the dean backed her at the time) because she felt that the students should have the failure on thier record.
Anyways the students had rich parents who hired lawyers and at that poin the dean caved. The prof said that she would not teach in a school where breaches of integrity were allowed and moved to cali where she got paid twice as much.
I think that if the cheating is substantiated that I give kudo's to the prof and the administration for backing up thier policies.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
I think the above point was not so much that not crediting the authors of the work is a moral problem but more that it is a legal problem by the time you get to college. Not that too many law suits are going to come over Phys 106 but you might get a whole lot of people up in arms in your upper level courses where the papers have a very real possibility of being published.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
(Sorry the engineers in my school always gave the english majors a bad time so I couldn't help myself)
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Thats not such a bad thing because you understand how it all works. The problem is when you transfer that program to Bob's calculator and Bob does his homework with it and has no idea whats going on. At that point a great disservice (depending on how much you value the quadratic formula) has been done to Bob and the classes job has failed.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Face it people, "all Men are NOT created equal" (to purposely misquote Thomas Jefferson and his buds from the delcaration of independance). Some people are made of college graduate material and some people are made of burger flipper material and all of that is good.
The problem is we have a great surplus of people to do the jobs and they all want paid a million bucks and I don't think its right to lie and cheat your way in to those positions. May the person that can write a computer program or an essay or whatever get the job that requires it and may the rest of the people fight over the burgers. True it is elitism but of the most useful and necessary kind. Would you want your mother repairing your computer? (no offence to the probable high number of extremely competant mothers in the world)
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
to note..... Did the prof write his own program, with the thousands of others that have done the same in every programming class that ever was? Or did he maybe use something someone else wrote? Be interesting to find that out. Can we say two edged sword?
Hasn't this already happened to Martin Luther King, Jr? Several parts of his graduate work were plagerized... It wasn't found out by automated means, but it was just as much plagarism.
Calculators are still banned in any math exam, whether it be quiz, mid term or final. Everything has to be done by hand.
Is the pain worth it, just to see defeat in the eyes of your enemy?
At Marianopolis College students are sometimes asked to submit diskettes with their papers saved in MS Word format. Supposedly, these papers are kept on record for a number of years and referenced against all other papers submitted in order to discourage plaigiarism. But that's just what they tell US. Those disks probably end up storing some prof's porn collection.
The professor told the students exactly how his plagiarism checking program worked..... matching 6-word phrases.
The students didn't learn NOT to cheat, they learned HOW to cheat without getting caught. All you have to do is break up the six word phrases, and his program is rendered useless.
Heck, since he open-sourced his checking algorithm, the students could easily make a checking program of their own that found six word phrases, allowed them to edit them and break them up, and retested the "plagiarism stealth" of their paper.
Had he kept exactly how his program worked closed-source it would ave been much more dfficult for the students to figure out how to get around it, and maybe his little project would be valid.
The next step is literature.
As stated in one of the several articles I read about the incident, unless they can prove a severe degree of complicity (basically, you gave another your paper and said "turn this in, it's ok"), those who were copied off of are generally in the clear.
UVa's student-run honor system brings trials for those accused of lying, cheating, or stealing, under a single sanction of expulsion. A trial is conducted before a student jury--however, they must meet a "seriousness" clause.
It's very easy to rearrange the words in a sentence to retain the meaning and trick the program. I did this for almost every essay in highschool... the teachers knew, but they couldn't stop it because it's impossible to find paraphrased material through any computer search.
This post is brought to you by the letters T and A, and the number 69
I admit I cheated. In sex ed- in the 6th grade I copied off a friends paper. I woulda failed otherwise. It still shows in my performance now :) Glad the teacher didn't catch me on that one!
You got that lecture for the past four years and you're just now a sophomore? hehe
"I'm no dummy, I've been here 7 years."
My management wanted to ignore the whole thing at first, pretend it never happened. I explained that we weren't the only victims, and that other people might notice. I told them that if that happened, then it's going to look like we aren't smart enough to identify our own work. Wouldn't that look good?
So in my review of his paper, I included copies of my papers, with the identical text sections highlighted and correlated in each. Then I said I thought it was pretty good work.
The final published report looked a lot different.
Right on!
Another prof has done this type of numerical comparison before. Check out Prof. David Harpp at McGill University.
I serve on an honor council, so I get to hear a bunch of these not-so-great situations. We've had some doozies, from zero citation on papers to using false excuses for extensions to using brute force to steal exams.
Plagiarism is not limited to copy/paste jobs; it also includes people who choose to not cite anything (essentially a copy/paste job). Give credit where credit's due.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
That's why you don't accuse someone of cheating based exclusively on the computer program. If the program finds 6 words that are the same in the 2 papers, you check the papers. If the repeated 6 word phrase is in quotation marks and properly cited, it's clean. If not, it's likely that it's plagiarism. However, if those 6 words are the only repeated words in each paper, it may well be an honest coincidence.
The computer program is a tool to find potential plagiarism that ought to be checked by the instructor, not a tool to automatically expel students.
It's certainly true that teamwork is an important skill that needs to be encouraged and taught. However, this article is talking about blatant plagiarism. Papers that are exactly the same are not worked on cooperatively; they are copied. Most likely, the copier didn't even bother to read the original before handing it in.
Teamwork is for things like weekly problem sets, studying for exams, and proofreading (not writing) papers. My school (Oberlin) does a very good job of encouraging teamwork when it is appropriate. I don't cheat and most of my friends don't cheat; I can't honestly say how much cheating there is on the campus. There are certainly people who do cheat, just as there are people who don't. (We have a student-run honor system that sounds very similar to UVA's.)
Verbatim copying is acceptable, as long as it's quoted and clearly cited. Never, under any circumstances, should you pass someone else's work as your own. This is especially true in academia, where people are (and should be) judged on the creativity and originality of their work.
And why is that? The purpose of the search is to prevent cheating. Catching all cheaters isn't necessary to achieve that. It's enough if the students know that some sort of efficient checking will be done.
Since many CS classes at my University (the REAL University of VA, Virginia Tech) use an online-grader (a program that takes your submitted source code, compilies and runs it and verifies the output vs. the teaches sample output), they also have written in a syntactical anaylsis program to check for cheating. I mean, if someone is copying source (that is uncited, of course) then the same variable names and spacing will be used. These are mostly used in the lower CS classes that include many non-majors (I think if in-major programmer get caught, the other CS majors that busted ass to crank out the code would probablly get violent ...). But alas, this does backfire - I have heard stories of students going onto other students machines, copying their work and submitted it). This leaves the plagerized student high and dry because there is no real way of telling who cheated (either way, in our honor system, both students are punished).
--- I am graduating with a CS degree this June. I have to tell you that about 50% of the people graduating in my class don't deserve a degree. They got it by copying programs from past classes or riding the coat tails of others in "group" projects.
---
Well you'll get your revenge when you'll get a job and ditch everyone of your coworkers and get promoted because you're more competent (that of course, if you're not stuck with a stupid team leader that rather like ass-kissers than competence). 50% of the CS are cheating in your class? that's about the same number of incompetence or low ethics I see.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Well IRS is you paying the taxes, if you don't care about the guy next door that doesn't pay his taxes and in the same time makes you pay more because of this, you might not care, but I do. Hell while at it, why have a democratic and economic system if nobody cares about the rules? You live in a society, nothing is perfect, but either you accept the rules, or you go live in a communist place with lower life standard.
.02$
my
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
You don't take tests to show that you are a human calculator, you take tests to prove that know how to work the problems. If you're too lazy to actually write down the steps that you took in your head, well too bad for you. You could just be running the problems though some program that you got from someone.
No, don't say, "Well, then calculators shouldn't be allowed on tests." Most people aren't human calculators, such as yourself. They shouldn't be penalized because you just don't feel like showing your work.
Anybody got a Perl or Python implementation of this?
I need it for works....
Yeah! Women are just like that...
Two words: grading curve.
Or, just perhaps, because they all went to the library and had a look at the same books, one after another.
The funny thing is, this is plagiarism! If they use enough of the text from the book, whether directly or from memory, to be recognizably the same, then they have plagiarized the book's author(s). (Unless of course they give credit, but then it shouldn't get flagged anyway.) But the public school system basically teaches kids to do this with all their papers, so it's no wonder that people think it's okay.
While it's true that most students who share course material know full well how it will be used, this is not always the case. At UVa, part of the whole honor concept is that people can be trusted. Thus, letting other people see your work is not such a big deal, as long as it's not a homework-type assignment with only one right answer.
:-)
As for papers: well, it's certainly unusual, but I can think of numerous (quasi-)legit. reasons for wanting to see an old paper that scored well. For instance, different profs can have widely varying ideas of what constitutes good writing, and I don't see anything wrong with trying to learn the teacher's preferences by reading stuff s/he's graded before.
Also, there's always the truly accidental security breach, where you leave a copy of an assignment on a lab computer, or lying on the printer, by mistake. As they say, never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity
Your point is BS. Its obvious that the students were using all means at their disposal to write their papers. But, according to you, the prof should be stuck with pre-computer techno (v-grep) when grading them.
Also, the community of trust idea only works if both sides are trustworthy. The prof in this case was tipped off by a student that there was cheating going on.
I'm not sure if this is a joke, but the method that the prof used, judging from the few details in the washington post article, is actually called "fingerprinting," with 6 word shingles in this case. See this citeseer article for more about the technique: http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/mitzenmacher01estimatin g.html (sorry about the slash spaces)
(Incidentally, Mitzenmacher was my prof this semester, and he talked about fingerprinting a bit, as you might expect.)
Good luck!
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
I was a TA from 1993 until 1997. I'm very glad to hear that the profs at RPI have changed their tune. Say "Hello" to Drs. Goldberg, Krishnamorthy, and Musser from me (Brent Edwards).
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
I am not at all saying that teamwork isn't important. It's absolutely vital. It's not as though I am a new student. I've already got a BS in CS and a BA in Art Design. I've done my time as an undergrad, found a job, and have been in the workforce. I learned a lot more from on the job teamwork than through the classroom. In the classroom, everyone gets a grade. Some want A's, some are satisfied with B's or C's, so long as they get their degree. In the office though, you don't preform, you get fired. That's life. Because people in college have varying expectations, it ruins the group dynamic.
BigCat79
BigCat79
"The dead have risen and are voting Republican!" --Bart Simpson
You mean my roommate's term paper isn't open source? Somebody call the police!
BigCat79
BigCat79
"The dead have risen and are voting Republican!" --Bart Simpson
I think he's got a point though. Yeah, he may not have said it the best way, but what he said makes sense. So long as information is free to be copied and people can paraphrase, you can always cheat. When you think about it, there's lots of information I hope will never be free. Health records, bank information, dirty letters to my girlfriend, etc. If these things can't be protected somehow, that's a problem.
BUT... there were a group of girls that sat beside me that also skipped class and rarely paid atttention. But they all passed with flying colors. Why? Because during tests they would open thier books to the vocab page and lay it on the floor beside the desk. Then they placed their purses in front of the book so the teacher wouldn't see it.
It pissed me off every time. But I aint a snitch. Or, as the Spanish would say, Yo no es el snitchio.
D
Mad Scientists with too much time on thier hands
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
However, in other fields where it's more text based (like "read these 4 books" instead of "study chapter 3 on partial differentials"), the papers could be excessively similar because they all draw phrases from the same sources.
You make a very good point. A deal of effort should be made to make sure that these students were blatantly cheating. Perhaps look up other papers the student's wrote to see if those papers were also plagiarized. They're talking about taking away diplomas from students who have already graduated so they better be damn sure the students are guilty.
Who ate my pie!
Mod this up.. (+1 Interesting)
The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
Did you cheat in college?
1) Yes
2) No
3) CowboyNeal
The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
You don't have to do NxM at all. Does the "similar pages" button on Google try to directly match the page with every other page on the web? I don't think so... Hash tables make this kind of task easy and fast. A table indexed by all the 6 word phrases seen so far can be checked faster than the disk can read the papers. Count hits, sort, threshold, and print out candidates for hand comparing.
[place clever signature here]
I'm surprised that the student in question wasn't either expelled or put on academic probation by the dean right then and there for what clearly was cheating? I mean, if the parents really did something like sue the school over this, there would be the daughter's fingerprints on the paper and other such evidence to indicate that it was _her_ paper.
As for the parents' reaction, though I should be surprised by it, sadly I'm not. It's the "entitlement mentality" at work. They probably feel that they paid a lot of money to the college, and that their daughter is "entitled" to her degree, regardless of her actual performance or lack thereof.
But I could never get further confirmation from anyone if, in fact, my 'F' stuck. It was all very insidious
At some schools, giving an "F" requires that the professor fill out a fair chunk of paperwork to indicate that the student really deserved that grade (and by extension cover their butts in the event of what happened to you). Where I went, a 2.0 average or better per semester was required to stay in good academic standing, and getting an "F" meant that you don't get credit for that class. With that set of rules, then in that situation, "promoting" the grade to a "D-" would have nearly the same effect on the student's academic standing, without the extra paperwork and headaches for the dean or the school.
> If you think that colleges come down on
> plagiarism because they need more money, you
> really did miss out on the important part
> of your education. If your good name is worth
> that little to you, I feel pity for you, and
> anyone who associates with you.
Of the colleges I've attended I would doubt that ANYTHING that administration does isn't directly related to money.
You missed my point though, well actually, I think you missed all of them.
> So why didn't you simply delete the notes
> before the test? If you truly learned it,
> you wouldn't need them, would you?
True, but then why would I have bothered to enter them in the first place if I knew I was just going to delete them anyway? Duh.
> You cannot justify the 5% by saying you
> learned the 95%
Perhaps not, but do you know what? Had I not "cheated" I would've learned little. The material would have been dry and boring and I wouldn't have bothered studying it. If I actually learned more by cheating than I would have otherwise I think it was justified. Impossible to prove perhaps, but justified. School isn't about being more moral than thou. If I cheated but learned more than you (if in fact I had remembered any of it) then didn't I get more out of the experience?
> The point of the class is to teach you how
> to quote correctly and such.
Yea, but my point was colleges busting students while they're supposed to still be learning that. After the successfully complete the class, so be it.. not during.
Beyond that, I can see if someone blatantly rips off entire paragraphs or more. Getting all antsy over a sentance is a bit much. I've actually seen professors stoop to that. That to me is an honest mistake, I can't see someone intentionally trying to rip off a single sentance in the scope of an entire document.
Anyhoo, don't pity me. No one else does.
Reminds me of a probability & statistics class I took once. I couldn't find a mathematical solution for a problem on the final so I wrote a Pascal program to find a solution. (Our school only did Pascal so I used what they were familiar with). Despite the fact that I couldn't run it to find the answer (no computers in that class) I got credit for it.
I admit, I was one of the first geeks in my HS to get a graphing calculator. I had a Casio something or other, then a TI-85, the somewhere along the lines I picked up an HP48GX. I always used to program in my math notes before a test. ALWAYS. If I was in the real world and had to solve problems like that I'd have those resources. No one does that crap from memory, and if they do it's because it's relevant to their occupation and they've done it a million times.
But by the mere routine of punching in those notes on those ridiculously small keypads I found I almost never needed to refer to them during the test. Typing them in and checking that I could actually understand the typed in version had made me memorize the information.
Did I ever get caught? Hell no. I wrote a program that looked like the screens you'd see if you reset the TI-81 which was what the school used. I'd show the teach it was reset and off I went. Do I feel I cheated? No. I took the time to learn the information so that I could understand it and enter it in a compressed form in the tiny memory of those calculators. The fact that 95% of the time I didn't need to refer to it proved to me that I was "learning", and that's the whole point.
How does this relate to this University scandal? "Cheating" takes a wide variety of forms. How many times have people in an English related class been busted for not properly quoting something? Ever been acused of plaugerism? I know someone that happened to and it's BS. The point of the English classes is to teach you to quote things and what not. Do it wrong and we'll threaten to throw you out of college. Nice.
Now how about these students that already graduated? College need more revenue? Simple, revoke some diplomas already granted and make past students come back at their expense. QED.
That may be true in most math courses but it isn't in Calculus. I took Calc2 one, maybe two years ago. The professor invited us to use computers and/or graphing calculators. The calculators (like my 48GX) were too damn slow. It'd take several minutes to enter the problem and forever for it to compute an answer (even if it could).
As for computers.. The professor made available to the class all the latest in software. The programs I recall were Macsyma, MathCad, Mathmatica, and so forth. Our professor had alot of experience with these types of programs and knew how to foul them up. On his assignments generally half the problems were computable by these programs, show some work too and you got credit. The other half would result in either an error or an insanely complex answer. Write one of those down and you got no credit. If you understood the problem you could solve it yourself or feed it peicemeal or in another form to the program.
That class was a pain in the butt but I not only learned alot about calc but about programming as well. I found it a pity that I didn't meet up with that proficient a professor until one of my last math classes in college.
If educators would take the time to incorporate technology into their classes THEY WOULDN'T HAVE TO FEAR IT. Instead they're still copying their forty year old textbook onto the chalkboard and having kids solve fifty of the same problem again and again. Or even worse.. using PowerPoint.
Its thoughts like those that keep me sane in my education
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Please don't tell me that one is at highschool to learn, because it simply ain't true. Your main purpose in highschool, or at least until the end of 10th grade for all I know, is simply to train yourself to do lots of pointless work. Not bad considering that that's probably how it is in the real world many times.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Watermarking is pretty cool, I especially like the idea of an acrostic. The watermarking could be taken to an extreme by using an encrypted acrostic or something like that. Finding it would be very difficult to detect (mine shouldn't be, though). Matt
Disclaimer: I know there are lots of good teachers out there, but lets face it; if you were a good lawyer, you wouldnt be teaching, but litigating. The same applies for almost everything else.
------
C'mon, flame me!
No sig for the moment.
As a TA and undergraduate grader, I also came across a lot of rather uncreative cheaters. There was one pair of homeworks that had the exact same layout, only different paper and handwriting. The only error in any of the solutions was a very small one that could only be explained as a copying error. Then there was the group of three homeworks with plots printed out on the same crappy printer. Everything about the printouts was the same, except for some slight rewording of the captions. My personal favorite was someone who constantly looked at other people's papers during an exam. He didn't even try to hide it (I was looking at him and standing less than 10 feet away when he was doing this). Fortunately, he wasn't very good at cheating, so he still failed the course.
The common problem in all cases is the lack of disciplinary action. Even when the cheating is obvious and is reported to the professor, little more than a warning is ever the result. Cheating became a big issue and students and faculty made a push for an honor code, as if that would change anything. Simply enforcing existing rules would be enough, but for some reason that doesn't happen.
Too often the punishments for cheating are either too lenient or too strict. A warning just tells students what they did wrong so they can cheat more successfully in the future. Extreme measures tend to be strongly resisted by incompetent parents who believe that their little angel can do no wrong. Public caning would be a nice solution, but discipline has been pretty much outlawed in the US. Cheating has become the American way, so we might as well just stop pretending to fight it if we're only bluffing to begin with. We're only telling students that it's ok to break the rules if you have someone who can put up a good defense for you. Oh, wait, that's the US judicial system too. Nevermind...
So many phrases are implicit in the English language, and even more (and more complex) phrases become implicit with cutlure and subject related effect, that I'm not surprised more "cheaters" were not identified. Frankly, I find the procedure to sound like a lazy way around both judge and some reasonable variation of a due process -- and the results extremely dubius besides.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hilarious, and a MST3K quote to boot! Manos, the Hands of Fate ... I can't believe I sat through that.
So let me get this straight. When he checked papers on a surprise basis, he found lots of cheaters! (or plagarists, etc)
... you make the connection.
But once word got out that he was going to be checking, his results plummeted? Well, DUH, of course.
You see, there's this thing called a thesaurus. You can find different words that mean the same thing
On a different note (and I don't remember if I read this in a book, or a newspaper) don't some of the government agencies use minutely different wording for documents they hand out, so they can try to track leaks?
This is not enough to accuse people of cheating, but it is certainly a good way to find papers that should be examined more closely. When I have graded papers, I usually catch everything that Moss does, but it is nice to know I haven't missed anything.
Programs like this will only become more common. I, for one, am glad; if people who are not willing to do work are barred from getting a BS or MS degree, then it makes my own degrees mean a little more.
So noting new about students :)
--
The computer told me to press any key to continue,I pressed the one looking like this (|) !!OH SH*T!!
I have in the past let other students look at my code. to stop them using it directly most of my varables are incorrect in one or other way, or I put syntax errors into the code, AND allwasy put my name in multiple times, I still cannot forget when the out come to 4+5 = "My name" as the final solution, and they missed to check the code. Cheets may prosper in the short time But they are cheeting themselfs in the future
--
The computer told me to press any key to continue,I pressed the one looking like this (|) !!OH SH*T!!
My first computer course was on an XT running on DOS and was the basics - wordprocessing spreadsheets etc.. One of our tests was to set up a spreadsheat on AsEasy (as easy as 1-2-3 gettit?), managed to complete the test before time and a freand asked to see my work, well, it wasn't a serious asignment and we were supposed to leave the finished sheat on the screen, if he wanted to go through it, so what. Turns out he copied it, miss-spelling and all (yup, my spelling is creative). Next class we were call in by the lecturer, and we were both accused of cheeting as the lecturer couldn't tell who had done the original. Luckily the lecturer was a practical man and could see my genius over the other dunce.. well it wasn't a serious test as I've said, but I've been a bit more carefull about my work since. I couldn't care less if people copy my stuff, as long as I have proof that it was myne to begin with, but I suppose that's what copyrights about? Or is it about making money?
I'm also in high school, and our final CS course involves nothing but two group assignments and an ISP.
Quite frankly, I really enjoy it. So far we've got through one group assignment, and although I did 100% of the programming, I was happy that way. I did approx. 5% of the documentation, and none of the bitch work.
Maybe I just liked it cause the program was do able by one person, so it wasn't a problem I had to code the whole thing.
Oh well.
well i think the dirty letter thing is something you should either 1) stick to email or 2) stick with paper....and make sure you trust your girl enough not to share them :)
Although nowadays with the internet, "confidential" juicy bits of fun are now finding their way to everyone....for example, check out all the college girl stripping webcam movies on gnutella ;p
. . .
I get emailed a few times a month by people who are either a) thanking me for putting it up because they referenced my paper in their own, b) thanking me for putting it up because they copied it (presumably) or c) asking me for permission to use it. Heck, someone asked me if they could use my graduation speech at their own graduation. Talk about lazy (you know who you are).
. . .
* this point is debatable....people sure want information to be Free though!
. . .
A good book it is indeed. I saw it at the bookstore last night. But mine will clearly 0wn!
(if it ever gets out of proofreading... yeesh!)
-John
In the amount of time you've spent bitching about Michael Sims, you could have done something a lot more productive, like putting the site back up under a different domain.
Please, shut up. We don't care. Stupid political tensions and dick sizing contests fuck over a LOT of projects -- it's unfortunate, but it's nothing new.
-John
Easy. The same way I have come to expect hundreds of people on /. to come up with high-scoring posts that are uniquely worded, yet say nothing that hasn't already been said in an earlier post or the article itself. (Present company excluded :)
"The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life"
Don't sweat it. The same thing went on when I went to college. All it means is that you will do great at your first job and be recognized. On the other hand, the cheaters, when they get a job their lousy skills will forever doom them to maintenance programming. :)
The computer rarely stumbled upon six-word matches in papers that otherwise appeared to have been written independently. But almost every time it found a six-word match, it found long passages in common, up to cases where "virtually the entire paper is the same."
The CS department at Georgia Tech had something like this, but it compared across all sections of a course, IIRC. It checked variables, spacing, structure. I think it also graded automatically. Not very popular with the students, as I remember.
Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that. -CP
Now I always "thanked" my peers by name at the end of my assignments, and included any book that I might have read, seen, heard of, etc.. that related to the topic (any many that didn't too). I once referenced "Star Trek" in a physics assignment, and also in a management essay.
This often lead to me having a MASSIVE biblography in my work, along with many web pages. now, I'm in a class with 100 other students (it is a small university in regional Victoria, Australia) the assignment has to be handed back in, say, 3 weeks. Now that is a LOT of checking to do on just one assignment, I knew it never would be done. But once I was called up because another student had work very similar to mine. we both where placed in a room with the lecturer, Head of school and the tutor for the class and asked questions. Now I had given this student a look at my assignement befor i had refinded it and before I had included the biblography. They had, indeed, used some elements of my assignment, not so much chuncks of it, but we had worked together and I had told him about some of my sources. but he hadn't referenced them. a simple mistake, many make it.
The question is, is that cheating or is it just being neglectful and unaware. Some people hate referencing, and therefor do not do it properly. many incidents of cheating where like that.
Trav
Leg Godt!
Here's an interesting issue. If a student taking a course where a writing requirement is also a very apt programmer, and writes an artificial intelligence program which he can interact with, supply data and information, and which will then write his paper for him, is this fair game?
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
This is a good point, and one which I failed to talk about in my original posting. Let me clarify -- I don't think that a professor should spend 15% of his time grading the paper of each student, but of all the students together. Now, as for a 15 page paper, it should take a professor more than a minute or two to read through it. And professors should also be doing more than simply reading though students papers and slapping a grade on them at the end. I go to a good university(UOR) and almost all of the professors write detailed comments on my essays, even when I get perfect grades. This is what I mean when I say spending time on a students paper -- suggesting improvements either for revisions or for the future, and once in a while remarking on something the student did exceptionally well(to help the student). This is what students are paying professors for.
Of course, some professors don't do this and some TAs don't do this. Some of them simply place a grade on the paper when they're done reading it, based on their valid interpretation of the merit of the paper. The idea being that a professor/TA should not waste time commenting on a persons paper when that person might not pay any attention to it: if the students wants clarification on why they got their grade, they have to go to the professor. I have to admit, you can argue that this benefits the student just as much as if the professor commented lavishly, as it teaches the student that if he needs to go out an ask people to explain their impressions of him.
However, ultimately, a large part of what we as students are paying for is detailed comments on essays we hand in.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I think you are missing the point of school: to learn. Most real world project teams are working on smaller parts of a whole. Yes, you are a part of a team, but you are also working on an independant part of the project. You need your team members so your piece works with the other pieces, not as a technical reference or someone to do your work for you.
And if you think your boss will know who is working and who isn't, you're either naive or have had really good bosses so far.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
are you guys going to support my new p2p termpaper swapping software docster or not ??
--
Matthijs
like any investigation, you don't just pick ONE piece of evidence to convict someone of wrongdoing. Evidence mounts up against the accused person, and this program just happens to be ONE piece of evidence. Of course, if this program is the ONLY one that shows plagiarism, and no other behavior by the student presently or in the past suggests that they are cheaters, then I would hope the administration would be intelligent enough to dismiss this as a fluke.
-Bill "Not-so-private Dick" Clinton (playa, pimp and ladies' man extrordinare)
"As a UVa grad, let me point out that the class in question here is generally regarded as a complete "gut" class."
Heh I thought as much as soon as I realized it was a class on "How Things Work". It is hard to imagine anyone having a much respected qualification on such a subject. Not to mention the fact that the essays in question were only 1500 words long. I guess he never got someone to submit a paper on "How jocks writing term papers works" or he would have been onto their game long ago :)
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
As a former English major, I must concur. Not only is avoiding doing your own research an act of sloth, but if you are not cognisant enough to PARAPHRASE the purloined material, then you should employ yourself at a fast-food restaurant until you decide you're ready to fill your cup of knowledge at a state university.
No need to be an asshole about it. Point me to something on /. that hasn't been a trite observation.
/. is pretty trite, but at least the people are intelligent and can get through the day without referencing Survivor...
Whoa, slow down there big fella... Saying that Edwards' Law is a trite observation makes me an asshole??? I think the point I was attempting to make was that Edwards' "Law" isn't much of a "Law" at all.
It irks me these days that if someone can come up with something that is true more often than it is not true, suddenly it becomes "A Law". (Also, see Moore's Law, Murphy's Law, etc.)
But, as for being an asshole about it -- gosh, Mr. Thin Skin, I completely and humbly apologize.
P.S.
I'll grant that much (most) of what takes place here on
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
For code similarity (Computer Science applications), there is an excellent piece of software from UC Berkeley called MOSS. For the kind of text similarity this guy was doing, you don't have to home-grow your software either. Just look at findsame. Both use some rather sophisticated algorithms.
As with security through obscurity, cheating detectors need to do only well enough that fooling them is more work than doing your own work. A six-word match doesn't meet that criterion. I'm not surprised that he didn't find many matches this year, but I'd be surprised if some students didn't get around the check by, say, changing tense throughout the passage.
Preventing cheating should of course be easier than prosecuting it. Smaller class size, with instructors teaching somewhat different --more up to date-- material is more expensive, but better for the students; I have a feeling that if the instructor thus knows her students and is percieved to care whether they learn, that they will be less likely to cheat.
Good job to the students for teaching their prof a hard lesson -- he needs to care and be involved. Kudos to the prof for caring and going after them.
Gremio
--
Let the machine do the dirty work. --K&R: Elements
I am also a TA at my university, and i agree, it's not too hard to recognize when someone's cheating.
However, these are a list of reasons why i think people get away with it so easily:
Large classes:
In classes of 100+, one TA usually doesn't do all the marking. There may be 2-4 TA's. Right off the bat then, students automatically reduce their chances of getting caught by about 50% since if you copy someone's paper (or code in my case), there is a good chance the same TA wont be marking both papers.
Lazy TA's: Some TA's are just lazy, and do a piss-poor job. I can look past the simple changed variable names and other simple things like that. However, by 3rd year (i was TAing the 3rd year Operating systems course), people are usually more inventive than that, but still, you get used to how they do it. But that's only if, as a TA, you give a damn. I do, but i'm well aware that many of my colleagues do not. They just skim the code, and scribble a mark on it. *sigh*
No time, but also...: I'm sure if TA's and Professors had the time for a full investigation, they'd find many of the cheaters on any given assignment. However, TA's have work to do, Profs have work to do, there just isn't the time, and moreover the motivation to scour the assignment submissions to catch every cheater. It's a significant investment, often with little return.
There are other reasons, but instead of geting long winded, i'll tell you what my university is doing about it. A friend of mine just completed an undergraduate thesis on this very subject. He devised a program which checks source for similarities, and flags those papers for further investigation by the TA's/professors. Gee this sounds a lot like what Bloomfield did. Of course, with source you've got to be ignorant to variable names and simple block comparisons, and while i'm not privy to how he actually did it, his system was used this past term to identify cheaters in at least one course. We also use a submission format simliar to sending your assignment to a printer. Ie, if your course code is CS 305, then you just lpr -P305 assingment.tar.gz and you're done. It sends it to a holding directory accessible only by the profs and TAs, which auto timestamps it of course so adherence to deadlines is a simple matter to check. Then you can run the cheating program on the code in that directory, and everyone can get on with their lives. It's not perfect, as i'm sure it never really could be. There's a fuzzy line regarding what is and is not cheating. But it's a start. Cheating became somewhat of an epidemic a couple years back, and it motivated the faculty into supporting initiatives like this, as well as making their own. And they're not done yet. It's always the same thing, one person doing someone wrong may be ignored. Several people, enh, and inconvenience but still "what can we do?". You get a significant amount of people doing it, and something's going to get done about it, just like in physics, just like in CS or anywhere else.
It's funny, i've seen people work harder at making their code look different so they wouldn't be caught as cheaters than just trying to learn how to do the assignments so they wouldn't have to cheat in the first place.
When you're in a hurry copying someone's work, make sure you don't copy the person's name.
Unfortunately, "until you decide you're ready to" = 6 words in common and . . . You're expelled. Thanks for playing, though. Come back soon.
But your response brings up a point that I think a few people may be missing here. Not changing the wording is stupid, but changing the wording doesn't make it not cheating. The point is that the cheaters copied the IDEAS verbatim from someone else's paper. (without citing, etc., etc.) Whether they used the same words is irrelevant. The fact that they did just made them easier to catch.
The point of having rules against cheating isn't so students have to spend a bunch of time rephrasing sentences they took from other places, the point is to force students to learn something about the subject they are studying. So, even if a paper passes this professor's test, it doesn't mean that it isn't plagiarism. The example from the beginning of this thread was plagiarism AND it would have failed the test. Hence the author would have been expelled. Now, if the second guy had worked a little harder, it would have been plagiarism that didn't fail the test. And thus he couldn't have been caught AND he wouldn't have been expelled. But he still plagiarized. And he still deserved to be expelled. . . If it had been a real paper. . . Which it wasn't. . . And I realize that.
-krazo
is the professor who gave this gut course.
He claims he was teaching 500 students at one time. No, he wasn't. He was entertaining people who wanted to fill a requirement as easily as possible. Whatever learning that happens in such a "class" occurs almost entirely by student effort.
I remember my days as a physics student. I participated in three separate programs before I finally got disgusted. The first, my undergraduate program, was decent. But classes that were too large (over a dozen students) eventually wore all of us down (I think the faculty could be included in that statement). I wound up taking a four year break from academic studies after getting my batchelor's. When I decided to return to academia, I first entered a tiny program given at a liberal arts college. The faculty were quite distinguished. The year I spent in this program was, without a doubt, the best year I had in academia. The next year it was off to a major university to complete the Ph.D. After one semester I bailed out. Academic game playing and dysfunctional bureaucracies finally drove me out. I gather things are far more ridiculous today.
Names withheld to protect the innocent.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
When I was a graduate student I TA'ed a class that was a traditionally feared and dreaded by the students. I was marking one of the labs when I noticed that the discussion from one student sounded very very familiar. They were not words that I had written, but words that I had read elsewhere. I checked my old textbooks and found the discussion there, word for word.
Knowing that we would recognize a discussion copied from the current textbook, this student went to the library and checked out one of the older texts he could find. He didn't realize that his choice was the very textbook I used when I took the class.
I gave him a 0 for his discussion and told him to find a different textbook.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Umm.. why would you need to write a program, when whatever they're using to edit the program the little bit that they are will have global search and replace already? I could teach them how to do it in vi in about 1 min.
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
(note: I got this information from the Oregon Daily Emerald Newspaper, gotta give references).
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
One year's class had 500 students, according to the article. Even if he spent 50 hours grading essays, Bllomfield would still only be spending 6 minutes per paper. How long would I spend working on a paper that the prof was going to look at for 3 or 4 minutes?
Having technology at their disposal doesn't make it easier for students to cheat, its the method of testing which makes it easier. It all depends on how the exams are structured. I still sweat at the thought of taking an open book exam where the last person slips the exams underneath the teacher's locked door. And yes, I did go to a pretty decent school. On the other other hand, notes from previous courses (called the word ) were used frequently at that institution as well.
Corporate Gadfly
Jonathan Archer: the most beaten up Enterprise captain in Star Trek history
--Ronald Reagan's adaptation of a Russian proverb
- When I was TAing an undergrad prog course, a prof assigned
a "greatest common substring" assignment.
After people had turned their programs in,
(this was more than 10 years ago when people
actually turned in printouts)
he mentioned that he would run their programs
looking for common substrings in their code and
long substrings would be analyzed for plagarism.
Students were given the option of withdrawing
their programs; many did.
- As a programming TA, we routinely ran
a not-very-sophisticated "cheat check" program
which looked for copied code. By comparing
object code (with debug info and variable names
stripped), we would often see code that
differed only by changing variable names.
- Sometimes the copying was ridiculously
blatant- at one institution I taught at, every
student was required to include an "honesty
pledge" at the beginning of all programs.
Oftentimes, we would find (and work to expel)
students whose programs differed only in the
honesty pledge. The most memorable was one
student who failed to delete the spaces that
arose when his name was shorter than the much-longer name of the student
he copied the program from.
- Sometimes, students are held liable if
their code is copied without their knowledge.
This thwarts the "dumpster-diving" for printouts
that can happen; students are much more
careful with their printouts if they are
responsible for someone else copying their
code, even without their knowledge.
- Before everyone had their own computers and
had to actually turn up to a lab to use VT100s, we
would often look at the 'last' logs and see if
suspiciously similar code was written by students who
were sitting next to each other in the lab. Or
sometimes if we weren't sure if something was
on the up-and-up, we could see how much time the
student spent on the program, when and from where.
More than once we had a student whose friends
were telnetting in to get the assignments from
our assignment distribution program.
- In the same vein, we could look around their
directories to see if they had written test data,
tried some other strategies, etc. to see if they
were genuine.
- These days, I make sure my exams test
the knowledge that would be obvious if you
actually wrote the code. If you didn't write your own code, you'll get hammered on the exams
and fail, even if I don't figure out where your
code came from.
Programming is vulnerable to copying. Oftentimes, for short assignments, there aren't that many possible good solutions to a problem, so repetition is not nescessarily the sign of forbidden collaboration. In general, the longer the assignment, the easier it is to spot. But over the years, there have been some amazingly boneheaded cheaters... Even if they do manage to sneak in someone else's program, almost always they get nailed on the exam. And catching a student cheating is depressing; I feel an obligation to the students who do the work to make sure that the student is expelled or disciplined as sternly as possible. Oftentimes, that is ugly and sad, but needed. Here's some advice: if you are enough of a moron to cheat and get caught, 'fess up and throw yourself on the mercy of whomever decides. It is so sad to watch a student deny the obvious and people are so much sterner when the student thinks the story is fooling someone...It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
> Reminds me of a probability & statistics class I took once.
> I couldn't find a mathematical solution for a problem on the
> final so I wrote a Pascal program to find a solution. (Our
> school only did Pascal so I used what they were familiar with).
> Despite the fact that I couldn't run it to find the answer (no
> computers in that class) I got credit for it.
As you should have. Although this doesn't really have relevance to the discussion at hand, it demonstrates a good point in that proving that you know how to solve the problem is more important than actually solving the problem, because, as you say later, in the real world you can use a machine to do the mathematical grunt work.
> I always used to program in my math notes before a test.
> ALWAYS. If I was in the real world and had to solve problems
> like that I'd have those resources. No one does that crap from
> memory, and if they do it's because it's relevant to their
> occupation and they've done it a million times.
Since you don't know what's going to be relevant to your profession after you graduate, why would you sell yourself short by doing it by machine?
> But by the mere routine of punching in those notes on those
> ridiculously small keypads I found I almost never needed to refer
> to them during the test. Typing them in and checking that I could
> actually understand the typed in version had made me memorize the information.
So why didn't you simply delete the notes before the test? If you truly learned it, you wouldn't need them, would you?
> Did I ever get caught? Hell no. I wrote a program that looked
> like the screens you'd see if you reset the TI-81 which was what
> the school used. I'd show the teach it was reset and off I went.
> Do I feel I cheated? No. I took the time to learn the information
> so that I could understand it and enter it in a compressed form in
> the tiny memory of those calculators. The fact that 95% of the time
> I didn't need to refer to it proved to me that I was "learning",
> and that's the whole point.
The fact that you had to write the program means you weren't supposed to use the notes, so using them was wrong. The fact that you did write the program means that you knew it was wrong, and you still did it. The fact that 5% of the time you got an answer right by checking your notes means you cheated, and that's the whole point. You cannot justify the 5% by saying you learned the 95%. I managed to learn the 95% as well, and yet I didn't cheat.
> How does this relate to this University scandal? "Cheating"
> takes a wide variety of forms.
But none of those forms is right, or morally supportable.
> How many times have people in an English related class been
> busted for not properly quoting something? Ever been accused of
> plaugerism? I know someone that happened to and it's BS. The point
> of the English classes is to teach you to quote things and what not.
> Do it wrong and we'll threaten to throw you out of college. Nice.
No, it's not nice, but what does "nice" have to do with it? The point of the class is to teach you how to quote correctly and such. At the end of the class, it stands to reason that you should know how to do it correctly, and if you don't then it's not unreasonable to assume you did it intentionally, which is a legitimate ground for expulsion. I have known several situations of plagiarism review, and in every case the "BS" accusations (honest mistakes in accrediting sources) were very obvious, and often resulted in simple failure of the paper in question. Also, try plagiarizing something in the real world, as a journalist. What do you think happens there? What happens is that you get fired from your job and your street cred goes in the toilet, and you might as well find another line of work because nobody will trust you again. I've seen that happen, too, so the fact that colleges come down on it hard is just a reflection of the real world. It's not nice, but journalism rarely is.
> Now how about these students that already graduated? College
> need more revenue? Simple, revoke some diplomas already granted and
> make past students come back at their expense. QED.
If you think that colleges come down on plagiarism because they need more money, you really did miss out on the important part of your education. If your good name is worth that little to you, I feel pity for you, and anyone who associates with you.
Virg
> Of the colleges I've attended I would doubt that ANYTHING
...my point was colleges busting students while they're
> that administration does isn't directly related to money.
You're right there, but colleges prosecute plagiarism to defend their academic reputations, which has the side effect of getting more students to apply. Moreover, most colleges will not readmit a student who was expelled for cheating.
> > So why didn't you simply delete the notes before the test?
> > If you truly learned it, you wouldn't need them, would you?
> True, but then why would I have bothered to enter them in
> the first place if I knew I was just going to delete them anyway? Duh.
There's no "duh" here. By your own words in the original post,
> But by the mere routine of punching in those notes on those
> ridiculously small keypads I found I almost never needed to refer
> to them during the test. Typing them in and checking that I could
> actually understand the typed in version had made me memorize the information.
If your method of learning is to prepare your crib sheet, then your doing so did indeed help you learn. However, that's not justification for using the crib sheet to cheat. So, to answer your question, you'd enter the notes even if you weren't going to use them because that's how you learn the stuff. Duh, right back.
> Perhaps not, but do you know what? Had I not "cheated" I
> would've learned little. The material would have been dry and
> boring and I wouldn't have bothered studying it.
Then you don't deserve the grade. I studied much that was dry and boring, and so did everyone else who went to college. Your bad study habits are still no excuse at all.
> If I actually learned more by cheating than I would have otherwise
> I think it was justified. Impossible to prove perhaps, but justified.
> School isn't about being more moral than thou. If I cheated but
> learned more than you (if in fact I had remembered any of it)
> then didn't I get more out of the experience?
You didn't take any ethics classes, did you? Let's take it two ways: one from enforcement and one from justification. I ask three questions:
1.) Did you do something to help yourself on the tests when you knew it wasn't allowed?
2.) If you told your professor that you did it, would he rescind your grade?
3.) If you told your dean about it, would you be put to a disciplinary hearing?
The answer to all three of these questions is yes. On the other front, let's translate your example into a different infraction. "If I stole but gained more than you, then didn't I get more out of the experience?" Of course you gained more, but you broke the rules to get there, which is as morally indefensible as stealing a TV so you can say your TV is better than mine. If you and I go up for the same job, and your better grades get you the job at my expense, your cheating stole my job opportunity. How do you defend that?
>
> supposed to still be learning that. After the successfully
> complete the class, so be it.. not during. Beyond that,
> I can see if someone blatantly rips off entire paragraphs or
> more. Getting all antsy over a sentance is a bit much. I've
> actually seen professors stoop to that. That to me is an honest
> mistake, I can't see someone intentionally trying to rip off
> a single sentance in the scope of an entire document.
I've been involved in dozens of hearings involving accusations of plagiarism. I've never encountered a single instance where an accidental lift-off wasn't obviously such. The amount of idea stolen was never the issue, because it never had to be. One student was disciplined for stealing a single formula in his paper, but that was because the entire paper was a proof of that single formula, and he passed it off as his own creation when it had been created by a different student several years earlier. Others have lifted entire passages, forgotten the proper footnotes, and had the professor bring them up on charges. We universally dismissed such charges, since, as you say, they were obviously honest mistakes. Later, as an editor, I encountered many mistakes, and many ripoffs, and they were painfully easy to tell apart. I never fired anyone for not properly crediting a source. I have removed writers for stealing stories. To get back to the point, just because there are trigger-happy profs who will accuse everyone of plagiarism does not justify plagiarism when it occurs. That's tantamount to saying that stealing a little is okay because people are falsely accused of stealing every day, because people steal by accident on occasion, and because there are some who steal a whole lot of stuff.
> You missed my point though, well actually, I think you missed all of them.
No, I didn't. You feel that your cheating was justified because you benefitted from it. I got that point, but I daresay I disagree with it. I'm not sure where you molded your moral compass, and I can hardly claim that I've never broken the rules, but if you think I'm being "holier than thou" because you cheated and I'm calling you on it, you need to revisit what honesty means. There are few people who would label your argument legitimate.
Virg
If I sent in a digital copy of a term paper (via email) and the professor cracked my encryption scheme to get lost in the masses of other students?
Dang, I knew this security by obscurity thing would bite me in the ass one day...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Forcing people to work in groups to "prepare them for the real world" is a fallacy. In the real world, people in groups who aren't pulling their weight get fired. In school, they only screw up the grade for the group or force the working members to work harder. Group-graded work should be banished from colleges and universities until the ability to vote a group member "off the island" is added.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
So sad and so true. I can't stand hearing students referred to as customers. While colleges and universities have an obligation to not mistreat students or jerk them around adminstratively, students are not g-d damned customers buying a product, they're students. At least in theory.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Also, do better in life. I am sure that those people will work very tough if they skate through in school. What the hell are those people there for anyway? to please their parents?
Eventually, you have to sink or swim, if you cheat your way through school, what do you think your chances are?
And to you that is bitter about your class mates cheating their way through: don't worry about it, they will wish they hadn't done it. I have found that cheating and lazyness is their own punishment.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
So am I the only one who thinks that the girl who turnt in all her fellow students because she didn't score as much as they did is a real bitch?
...
Well, no, she's just maximizing her ROI (return on investment), by downgrading everyone else to bump up her score.
Now, if it was her boyfriend in another class who narked, that would perhaps be something
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Here at RIT we all have projects for Computer Science Class twice a quarter. They have a software program that roots out cheaters. Cheaters of course get appropriate punishment. However they have a large expensive software package that will only catch people who are definitley cheating on the projects. It sounds like this teacher wrote his own little program and I don't think his software is a valid determinant of who is cheating.
It could be possible the whole class is a bunch of cheats, but I seriously doubt it. Only about 3 or 4 people get caught cheating on the CS projects here.
I mean come on, doesn't the teacher read the papers? If he read them he would be able to tell which ones were similar to each other. Bad teacher methinks.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Katz? Is that you?
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
The hard part is telling just who is guilty...
No kidding. I taught assembly language last year at a state college. I didn't catch any cheating on any project until the last one, which I graded on the same day as finals. (We were pressed for time - it was a short semester.)
The last assignment was to control the VGA DAC through raw I/O to fade in and fade out the video display, and some of the students obviously decided they didn't want to (or couldn't) expend the necessary time and brainpower to understand the material. I got four assignments in where the PROCs for doing the fading were almost identical. (They were identical except for the comments - they were sneaky, you know?) Had I been able to determine the cheaters, I would have flunked them immediately. I would love to have gotten all four of them together for a chat, but I couldn't. As it was, I had to drop the score and apologize in comments in the source I handed back, just in case one of them was honest.
What a pain in the butt.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
My CS professor taught me the most valuable tip one could get. You copy something, its plagerism..you're busted. You quote the same thing, its research and you'll probably get an A for it.
This is in response to many posts, probably off-topic, but who cares? Not me.
Group projects are almost invariably the worst kind. First, people who are bright will sometimes band together to preserve a grade. Recently I did that on a project that counted a LARGE amount. Amazingly enough (not sarcasm) we TWO against groups of FIVE AND SIX got higher grades. 100s to be exact.
People will now be saying, "what's your point? You're an idiot. Go away." And things of this nature. Be quiet.
My point is, we both shared work equally, finished it well ahead of schedule, and put other people to shame. We graded each other for a portion of the grade (both getting full marks) and actually deserved the A. Other people obviously gave people 10s to preserve friendships. If you had to choose between giving an idiot friend an A and losing that friendship what would you do? Give the A of course.
That is reason 1 why group projects suck.
Reason 2 is:
If you happen to be in a group with an idiot, what will happen to the work load split between you two, three, etc.? It will shift from them to you because you want to get a good grade. You don't want them to screw up the project. I was also recently in a group with a couple of morons. It sucked. While we didn't have to grade each other, we did have to *work* together. This is what followed:
One guy did a good job, he had his stuff in, and while it wasn't *great* it was decent enough that our grade would stay the same. The other guy procastinated, got all his sources from the internet- this doesn't seem bad, but when only 1/2 can come from here this put me in a position to FIND MORE BOOKS! You can't imagine how unbelievably pissed off I got about that. He ended up giving it to me- unformatted like we had said beforehand- the day it was due and it looked awful. I want to do various and malicious things to his dog. (Just kidding guys, calm down.)
In both these instances the thing that makes groups bad is the other people. I took a long time getting there, but I don't care. It's late and I'm rambling- learn to deal with it. If the other person is an idiot or won't do work, you're screwed into getting bad grade or doing their f--king work. Either way you lose. If you happen to work with somebody as intelligent as you then other people will get pissed off. (I forgot to mention how people screamed, "unfair, how come they get to work together!!" as we told the teacher who was in our group.)
This post summed up into one sentence: groups suck, teachers: assign individuals projects to assess individual skills or assign different projects to different people, grouping them by ability and giving the assignment accordingly.
Omerna- out.
--------------------------------------
No sig for you.
How about showing the equations you input into the calc to get the answers? Full credit *and* you used the calc. Simple, effective, full credit.
--------------------------------------
No sig for you.
Interestingly, the UW CSE department(http://www.cs.washington.edu) uses something like this to check compiled code for similarities. Apparently last quarter a lot of kids got in trouble for cheating, but I don't have any more information.
At my old university (NCSU), students had to be very careful about these kinds of practices (e.g. decompiling or copying source and changing variable names) because work was checked at EVERY phase of compilation to catch possible cheaters.
"C" is for cookie, that's good enough for me.
Oddly enough, '91 was about when I was a graduate teaching assistant in the Beginning Programming Lab... You weren't at Miss. State, were you?
I had to grade all those programs, and I have a very good memory; stuff sticks in my head. I wasn't even looking for cheating, but after looking at 30-60 different renditions of the same problem, the programs that were direct copies of each other just jumped out at me. One case of blatant plagiarism involved two students who had a NON-WORKING program sharing it; I caught it because of some weird typos that kept it from compiling that were identical in both student's copies. On close examination, I noticed that a few variable names had been changed, but otherwise the code was identical, down to misspelled comments.
The thing that gets me is that if you're going to risk an automatic 'F' by cheating, why not copy a WORKING PROGRAM?? Even if I hadn't caught the cheating, the students would have gotten a 'D' or 'F' for the lab because the program wouldn't even compile. What they did was akin to robbing a liquor store (and risking jail time, being shot by irate owner, etc.) for $3! Dumb. Just dumb.
As for viruses/virii, we had a problem with the lab computers getting infested with the BRAIN virus, and I spent part of a lab session dumping a captured specimen into the debugger and showing interested students how the damn thing worked. (I was learning, too--I'd never had one in DEBUG before). That part of the lab was much more interesting to them than the usual stuff...
---dragoness
Me too!
(Sorry, couldn't resist the AOL joke)
As I mentioned somewhere else on this article, I ran the Beginning Programming Lab as a TA for a few semesters. I found out that (a) I knew more than I thought I did because I was able to distill it down into explanations for confused students, and (b) I had a lot more solid understanding after having to distill it for the students. I also learned a hell of a lot about debugging Turbo Pascal programs... it got so I could look at a certain run-time error and say "You're dividing by 0 somewhere. Fix it" without looking at the code--just seeing the same error over and over again in the same circumstances.
My students also learned the value of believing the grad student TA when she says, "the power is flaky around here, SAVE YOUR WORK OFTEN!" I still remember the cries of dismay the first time power hiccuped during a T-storm.... the lab did not have UPSs, you see.
They believed me after that.
---dragoness
For a near-perfect example of good coding, check out the latest version of Angband.
Of course, the entire Angband/Moria code-base was re-written nearly from scratch several years ago to make it more modular, portable and maintainable--the original codebase lifted from Moria was a labyrinthine mess of C code and had gotten to the point where it was nearly unmaintainable.
So of course it looks good--NOW. Find some really old copy of the original UMoria source code, and it won't look so good.
Of course, you might be saying that some open source projects could benefit from a complete re-write with an eye toward portability and maintainability the way Angband/Moria was--and you'd be right.
---dragoness
If you've used every function on your graphing calculator, you just might be an engineer...
That is why some disciplines, such as engineering, have licensing tests. Upon finishing college, electrical engineers must take the FE exam before working for some employers, this is a comprehensive soup-to-nuts exam of what they have learned in college. Then later on in life, there is the more prestigious PE exam to become a professional engineer, which requires much more studying for, even though you're no longer in school. And these aren't "gimmie" certificates like those silly Microsoft certificates people like to paper their cubicle walls with, they're the type of credentials needed to design aircraft control systems and run nuclear power stations.
That is why my professors always wanted groups of two on projects, no more, because in groups of three or more, there is always one person doing all the work, one person providing suggestions, and one person (or more) standing on the sidelines just basically observing and being a cheerleader. And if there was an odd man out, a lone nut, he worked by himself (ask me how I know... but actually I prefer it that way, I've had to carry my lab partner more than once, half the time they don't even show up, so I made damn sure the prof knew about it.)
I once had a math professor who pointed out that people often use their programmable calculators as PDAs, with phone numbers and class schedules and even "crib" stored as text files. He used one of those modified TI-85s with the external screen that could be placed on an overhead projector, and when I wanted to know where I could get a copy of the programs he used for his lectures, he let me use the link cable and his calculator, and along with the program I got several pages of crib from a physics class he didn't even teach...
As a current CS student, I know several people who were fingered by a similar system which compares partially compiled code for our practicals. At least two of these people had not copied their code, the the maxim "a computer never lies" means that they have little way of appealing. CLearly there are only a certain number of ways of solving a given problem and in a year as big as ours there is a high probability of the code being accidentaly similar. This is especially true since the programming style that most of the people have is derived from the lectureres themselves.
Those who cheated on the paper not only had an advantage, assuming they cribed quality work, on the paper but also had extra time to study for exams. The person who busted butt to write the paper was also balancing their time spent on that class with the other courses they were taking.
In any case the cheating must have been pretty brazen for it to filter around to other students.
But masters, remember that I am an ass: though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.
Especially with the scene graph assignment, some students had trouble grasping how to do a hierarchical scene traversal with a transformation stack. If they came to see me, I'd explain the theory, then explain in high-level pseudo-code, then get into heavy psuedo-code and eventually most of the coding approach.
I figured if they were spending that much time with me, they were learning. They still had to understand it enough to code it up.
At Duke's School of Engineering at least one professor has been doing this for some time, mainly on programming assignments though. Both C programs and assembly language are said to be run through the program and the professor claims to have gone through several judicial boards already as a result of the program. It seems a logical idea for an EE professor but it takes a unique english professor to code such a program. I support this woleheartedly.
The result of this was that I would speak in english to all the people sitting nearby me because they were bad enough at spanish that it was easier to speak to them in english than in spanish. So, in that case, it didn't really benefit anyone...
I must burn in hell, suffer and pay for my sins
But Gods the one who's losing, Satan always wins!
Worst was when I TAed for a class recently. My university has changed the 'official' language from C to Java (BLAH). In a class full of seniors who were months away from graduation, I had to teach them how to do file IO in C. And these people expect to be hired in a few months? Give me a fucking break...
I must burn in hell, suffer and pay for my sins
But Gods the one who's losing, Satan always wins!
In classes at my school (UC San Diego) the rule commonly mentioned in classes is the Gilligan's Island rule. What this states is that if you need help from another student it's ok to talk about the program with them, but you have to watch an episode of Gilligan's Island or some other equally brainless activity for half an hour before you touch a keyboard.
I must burn in hell, suffer and pay for my sins
But Gods the one who's losing, Satan always wins!
Someone mod this up +1 funny
Why doesn't someone make a site where you submit your term paper so other people can copy it. The catch is, you sign away all rights to that paper. If someone copied that paper directly, but the author had given them written permission, would it still be plagiarism? The author's signature and permission would be avaiable on the site.
Um, not as I remember...he bought a DOS like OS from Seattle Computer Products and adapted it to the IBM platform. He didn't steal anything!
I would like to get all of the professors papers and run them through the same test. Anyone and everyone uses each others sources. Where is the original idea? Educate these kids, don't label them and destroy their potential...
In an age of declining enrollments and scary profit margins for campuses, the student consumer is king. Not that this is a good thing; far from it. However, if these students wished to exert their power, they would go en masse to the president of the university and threaten to pull their student loan funding from the school and give it to a competitor.
Our good professor would quickly discover how much academic integrity matters then!
Obviously, these people are going to work for Microsoft one day :)
Grading should be objective based on what one has learned (meeting the requirements of the class), not what one has learned compared to the rest of the class.
Don't worry, consider this preparation for when you get out 'into the real world'. Out here, things are just about as bad as being on any group project you ever had in school. In a group of 5, there are usually 2 who know whats goin on, 1 that can muddle by, and 2 that are clueless. Give the clueless ones tasks like talking to management and they become bearable.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
The University that I attend (SUNY at Buffalo) has a quite strict policy regarding cheating in CS classes. Cheating even includes having someone look over your shoulder in the lab and give you hints.
r se s/SP2001/116/policies.shtml
The first offense results in, at minimum, an F in the class and the the CS department will refuse to sign off on any of your financial aid forms. A second offense is automatic explusion from the department.
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/faculty/pventura/Cou
eli
Ideally, one of the best things about academia is not having to put locks all over the place. The only stupid people I see in that guy's story are the deans who were too lazy to look at the evidence.
this is funny!! Thanks for the good humor.
He did you a vast disservice, you got college credit for doing third grade work. Part of the reason for education lies in teaching an understanding of how things work. How can you evaluate the output of the calculators you used if you don't understand how they work?
I know the material, I don't cheat (they stopped accusing me of that by the end of Soph. year, I had a 'reputation'), if I get 85% of the answers correct, why do I deserve a D?
Because you didn't meet the spec. If the question calls for you to show your work, and you don't, you fail.
Trust me, you'll be better off in life if you learn now the discipline to slow your mind down and work a problem through. Intuition is fine, but it must be supported by the basics. I never learned to slow down, and nobody taught me the building block theory. I'm still paying for that today.
Ok I've been here before.
People copied my work exacltly and the professor
simply ran a diff on all homeworks. He was ready to refer me to judiacial review when I talked him out of it. Basicaly explaining that everyone did it and this was natural in a computer class. Obviously people work together. He agree and failed me on all homeworks that showed up copied.
I basically had to get a perfect score on my final to get a B! so I did and I did. Moral here: Talk to the profesor and explain how he is about to ruin your life until he agrees hehe.
As for attacking plagirism using tech, I think that's a useful idea. It won't eliminate the problem, but it will discourage such theft of IP. This makes for a very interesting argument FOR consortiums like the RIAA. Not that I like them, but it is a good example of IP being trampled, even if not in a purely legal sense, but in an implied sense.
The point is, I blatantly plagiarized someone else's "watermarked" post, replacing their acrostic with one of my own. So if it weren't for the dates on the posts, there would be no way to tell who plagiarized whom.
Of course, this is a trivial example, and in the real world, a plagiarist would not know where to look for a watermark, or how to tell if one even exists. So it could work. But the more complex (and obscure) the watermark, the less likely it is that the whole thing would be copied intact. And of course, there's the time factor that you mention. The returns diminish very quickly.
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Manifesto for the Peoples of the Third Millennium
There were sanitation problems... :)
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Cheating is bad, morally wrong, whathaveyou. But half of the problem has always been professors that didn't give a damn about whether or not students cheat. It's great to hear of a professor skilled enough and willing to put in some extra time to find cheaters. To be honest, I really don't care what happens to the people who did the cheating--if they get expelled, that's fine. If not, that's fine too. The important thing is that he's caught them and they won't ever cheat again--and nor will some of the other students there on campus.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
No.. I am currently enrolled in college and have now completed Calc II... Never not once... not even in homework did I use a calculator... I didn't even bring one to college b/c they told us that for Calc you won't need it (bull I thought).... But, it can be done and actually I found it a great help... B/c you aren't relying on the Calc you really are forced to understand the concepts that you are learning... Yeah.. I know doing definite integrals is a bitch, but ya gotta do it... The difference b/twn the courses that are taught w/ and w/out calculators is how they are structured.... No of course I'm going to do recursive equations w/ 200 interations... but, if you only do 2 interations aren't you learning the exact same thing...
--- My Karma is bigger than your...
------ This sentence no verb
I'm a CS student now, and I had a professor do this in a LISP class I had. He was the professor who does reseach in AI, so he wrote what I assume to be a fairly sophisticated program that would check all of the students' code, and identify people that had possibly cheated from one another. It even dealt with those that went to the trouble of changing variable names, inserting or removing comments, or even switching the order that trivial code occurred in. I thought it was pretty cool, those that got caught were somewhat less impressed.
I think it is very difficult, if not near impossible, for someone to come up with something with absolutely no outside influence. We all learn from those around us. (That "no man is an island" sort of thing.)
This is not to say that everything has been invented/discovered, or that no one can add to the overall knowledge-base. That would be false. I am just saying that we all learn from each other, and when we proceed to expand the knowledge-base, we very frequently partially utilize what we learned from others.
However, I agree with you that credit should always be given where it is due.
Indeed, that is the hard part, and my earlier reply does, in fact, illustrate this. Doh!
Uglyduckling's response is well taken, however, although I suspect that it's a little optimistic to expect people to fess up just by being asked. Of course, there is the time-honored "prisoner's dilemma" technique -- isolate the suspects, and tell each of them that the other one already ratted them out...
But really, we're entering the realm of truth-detection, which is an inexact science, to put it kindly.
My fundamental question is, how big of a scourge is cheating, anyway? Yes, it's bad, and should be punished when found, but... it's also a time-honored tradition, and hasn't seemed to cause the downfall of society yet.
So, perhaps a moderate path is best -- punish those cases when it's clear who was the copier and who was the copiee (I love making up new words!), and scare the willies out of those in unclear situations, then let it go at that...
Speaking as a student, I went through most of my programming projects with no problems. I understood how the code should work and wrote it accordingly. However, that did nothing to help me debug programs and see what problems common mistakes could give you when a program is run. I learned just as much helping people fix their problems as they did by having me show them how to do something. I saw everything from people not understanding pointers to people just throwing all the code that a teacher went over in class into a program and hoping it compiled and worked "magically". I really learned how to use debuggers with other peoples messes, which in turn helped me when I got to the real world and had to write "complex" programs instead of "read add and write" type of learning programs.
Nope, sorry, after my time. They just checked our sliderules to make sure we hadn't written cheat notes on the edges.
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www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
This article reminds me of an incident around my 2nd or 3rd year doing CS at univ. We had a project to do for one of our courses; out of about 100 students in the class, roughly three quarters handed in the same work! "A" copies from "B", "C" copies from "A", D copies from "C" etc .. how stupid can you get, anyway? Not even bothering to change the stuff to try look different. Nobody got expelled though, sheesh ... we just got a serious talking to from the head of department, and from then on we had to sign standard forms to the effect of "this is my own work blah blah" and hand that in with our projects. As I remember it, I wasn't one of the people who copied, I don't think I even handed anything in.
It should probably have read totally solve rather than apply, but there you go
Perhaps, more specifically, it has more to do with solving something on a symptomatic level as opposed to solving the underlying cause. Applying a technological "solution", in this case, would curb cheating to some degree - but it would not "cure" the students' desire to cheat - they would still cheat, if given the chance.
People generally seem to want to treat things symptomatically, usually because its so much easier, but I guess Edwards Law may apply - perhaps you can't. Take school shootings (like Columbine) for instance - many people would loudly proclaim that guns should be banned, because if students could not get hold of guns these things would not happen. True, these things would not happen - however, you haven't solved the problem, only eliminated one possible symptom of an underlying problem (which will usually just manifest itself in some other way, e.g. suicide). Banning guns is much simpler than figuring out why some US kids are so screwed up to begin with. Anyway, this is getting a little off topic here ..
Indeed, we've seen many cases here where the person whose work was copied ends up in a situation where they have to prove their own innocence
In one of the departments when I was at University the standard policy was to divide the marks received for a project, by the number of people who handed in the essentially same project. This worked fairly well. In most cases copying was done "by consent", i.e. friends sharing their work amongst each other knowingly, so this system worked reasonably well to help curb copying.
I was a tutor for a while, and I must say, it is extremely easy to pick up when people have copied from each other. Many people fool themselves with the "they'll never notice, they have so many projects to mark" syndrome. Even when people have gone to a reasonable amount of trouble when copying (i.e. changing variable names and indentation) it is still usually quite easy to spot.
I attend Georgia Tech and personally know of a few students that were removed from a CS class and given a failing grade because they were caught cheating by the same means as this article outlays. The Computer Science department at Tech runs a program on all programs that have been turned in by CS students. Being that the programs are all turned in via FTP it makes this quite easy. The program simply looks for similarities in the programming code such as similar variable names, constants, and other similar lines of code. It then flags all programs that have similar code and then the faculty only has to look at those few programs that are similar. This works well because the students are aware of the program so they are less tempted to cheat or are forced to cheat very well, which can be just as educational in my mind.
The worst thing in the world is a manager who THINKS he knows how you should implement a specific feature, and doesn't realize that he knows bull.
Also, a manager who is clueless is more likely to accept a clueless employee who can't program and no one realizes it until one week before the drop-dead shipping date.
Most people I have interviewed for programming jobs who were just out of college or university have never designed their own C++ class hierarchy. But they say they 'know C++' because they double clicked on a button in Visual C++ and typed 'MessageBox("hello","test",MB_OK)'. Ask them about proper STL usage, exception safety, why would you use 'mutable', under which circumstances would you use or not use virtual multiple inheritance and you get dumb blank stares.
Why is this?
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
I believe you're referring to THIS English/French commercial...(plain-text link)
:p
http://humor.inept.net/videos/exam.mpg
I think it was for Kiwi or something, since I forgot the point of the commercial.
That's a pretty stupid attitude. In a time-limited exam (a dumb idea in the first place, but universities cling to this one with a death grip) they save you wasting time doing calculations on paper or in your head. They also force you to sanity-check all results.
Exactly and if you're going to cheat do it properly. That means copying the ideas not the text. People who get caught cheating are those that are too stupid to cheat well.
Cheating successfully is about innovation, ingenuity and creative thinking. Sorry to tell you guys, but the genuinely successful cheater will also turn out to be an exceptional developer.
Apparantly he and his assistants don't grade the papers all too closely if a sizeable percentage of the students are cheating, and have been for quite some time. If large chunks of the same material are being passed around from 5 seperate classes (essentially) then the probabability of more than one of them coming from the same section is rather large. Even if there are multiple people (TAs) grading the papers.
I don't see the need for this on a large scale if in fact they were doing their job correctly in the first place.
So. Everyone picks an item to go write about. Prof then takes his checker to find matches between papers, based on word length of match, using 6 as a minimum value. It sounds like the match lengths ranged between 6 and >1000, for a 1500-word paper. Prof then investigated the matches, and found lots of fish in his net.
BTW, I think RTFA would make a useful (-1) moderation option.
The American Dream went to hell in a handbasket when someone decided that "The Customer" was King, and the customer beli
Indeed. My primary concern is that in this case, and many others like it, telling exactly who's work is the original (or if both were cribbed from a third source), is difficult, and often becomes a case of each of the students blaming the other.
In some courses, it is easy for the grader to determine which work is original. In other course it's not. I suspect this one is the former, but I also suspect that a significant number of students who did nothing wrong will have to deal with the stress, inconvenience, and humility of having to prove that they did nothing wrong.
Definitely. There was one student in the class ahead of me that went one step lower. He simply printed his term paper directly from his web browser, URL and all, not even bothering to cut-and-paste the text into Notepad or Word. Suffice it to say that he recieved prompt punishment for his little oversight.
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Bow before my sig, for it is good.
Your subject is "This is bad?" WHERE THE FUCK IN THE POST DID ANYONE SAY IT WAS A BAD THING? Sorry but that really pisses me off that you assume that because the post said "now a large chunk of the class is facing possible expulsion for plagiarism" it means they are wrongly accused. If anything this news post was commending the professor.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Isn't this exactly how Bill Gates started with DOS? Cheating obviously is a valuable skill, so make cheating hard, the best cheaters will survive and only get better. Maybe the next richest man of the world will come from that class!
when walking on thin ice you might as well dance
As a 3rd year physics students. Doing homework in gropus rocks for the smart students. I am not sure what it does for everyone else.
The physics department at Rice University encourages collabaration on homework. This really does help, because alone you can not solve everything. (Problem sets often do ask to solve everything, or at least a fair amount) If you get stuck because you do not understand a concept, it is much better to work through it with someone else, rather then being told the answer (and often given the look, go away, I want to get back to my research).
The only problem with groups (when doing physics problem sets), is that if the group gets stuck, it is really stuck. However, in that case you do not look as silly when asking the prof, since you came with most of the class.
On the other hand, doing exams in groups is plain silly when you get graded competativly (unless you are content with a B or a C).
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"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house"
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"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house"
-George Carlin
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"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house"
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"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house"
-George Carlin
I teach CS at an branch campus of a major state university in the US (next to Virginia) in Germany. In 1998, I caught 3 students cheating on a case project - lifting the entire text from the a CD-ROM contained in a similar book from the same author/ different publisher. These students (all from the same subcontinent) believed that copying wasn't cheating, claiming it was cultural. Same students caught cheating on another instructors homework assignment (turning in identical SQL programs). The students were not expelled, but through complaints if this going on, the main campus "retired" the dean in charge of this overseas branch. I understand the students involved did graduate and no further action was taken.
Remember, for every CD you purchase, you give the RIAA that much more power. RIAA = SCO = IP terrorists. Any questio
Actually, you are seriously wrong about lawyers (I am one). Getting a teaching gig at a law school is an extremely prestigious position, at the better schools only going to those who graduated at the tops of their law school classes and who clerked for judges, often at the appellate or even Supreme Court level. Granted, for most law profs actual classroom teaching generally comes second to publishing influential law review articles, but to be a teacher of the the law is in fact a huge indicator of competence.
This used to be true, but the calculator I used in college more than 10 years ago was powerful enough to solve almost ANY equation for me, and could even perform integration. I can honestly say that even though the teachers allowed it, I REFUSED to use the calculator in my math classes because I literally could solve a problem without understanding anything. I knew that I would need those math skills in later courses, so I wanted to actually learn them. But it was tempting....
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Can they actually take away diplomas they have already awarded? Granted, if the students commited such acts, they deserve it. But since the school was not taking appropriate actions at the time they studied there, can they really legally take away the diplomas they already handed out?
(1) "Technology Exposes Cheating at U-Va"; Amy Argetsinger; Washington Post; May 9, 2001.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
For reals. Rappers who used to be in the game like me know that you gotta keep it real. If you don't got the talent to come up with fresh and just bite your styles, then you're just playa hating. Come back when you're ready to be a rapper.
How does this differ from taking GNU software and adding your own bits and re-releasing it? :P
Imagine the credits..
GPL Homework License... termpaper, version 0.9
sh0utZ to my h0mieZ in this class last year..
While I agree that cheating is wrong. I have a question. Why do so many professors routinely depend upon one's ability to write a 100-page grammatically perfect research paper with at least 30 references as the primary method of evaluating their students' subject matter knowledge, when such measures are often meaningless? As long as you have the skills necessary to summarize, quote or paraphrase, keep good footnotes, and can add a couple of pseudo-insights to a paper demonstrating that you can have an original thought; you do not need to understand a thing. While earning my MS and BS degrees, I sometimes had the misfortune of having a professor who had this type of requirement. I was able to assemble papers that would earn A's using only these skills. On the rare occasions I did not earn and A, it was never about my subject matter knowledge. The lower grades were for issues such as 5 or more misspellings, some minor grammatical mistakes, or something of this nature. Looking at a typical research paper you would think it should reflect real knowledge, but as many modern programs that assemble research papers clearly demonstrate, they do not. What they do reflect is a good short-term memory, an ability to organize information and some excellent writing skills. Even more damning is the fact that research papers can make subjects in which they are used boring and unfulfilling thus repelling many would by students from important fields. This type of requirement is clearly a technique that lazy burnt-out professors use to make it look like they are giving a lot of work and know their subject matter when they are actually doing nothing and may know little or nothing of the subject at all. If you doubt me, grab a syllabus from a class where this is the primary requirement. Typically you will see some readings, lectures, a paper and maybe a final. Anyone with some borrowed notes could manage in this type of class. Really! Next time you are in this kind of class, go look at the lectern when the class is over. I bet you will see the lecture the professor's just gave written down line by line.
There are methods in which the evaluative, organizational and critical thinking skills that are used in writing a research paper can be used successfully to foster learning. A paper that is used to enhance or promote learning in this way can be very beneficial and may be part of a broader evaluative process. To defend this position I have a personal example of how an excellent teacher used a research paper successfully in her course. She was one of those teachers who dressed up, who seemed to always be positive about her subject matter, who found ways to relate the material to her students lives and personal experiences. Her goal was to make connections with the material and her students. She happened to be one of those new teachers condemned to teaching an English 101 class and still she shined. She used papers when she felt it would benefit the student. For example, after teaching about the works of Dante and a modern version of the same story, The Towering Inferno, she saw that I was really interested in the author. She asked if I would like to do a paper for extra-credit (I was already Srt8-A student) on Dante's Inferno comparing the original to the modern and with various other redactions of the Inferno. I did this paper out of love for the topic that she inspired. It had a many excellent references and a lot of original thought on my part. It was by far one of the best works I had ever written. The class placed the research in a meaningful context and till this day brings joy to my heart to contemplate. Given this experience, I know that a research paper has a correct and good place in education.
I think that many professors use the requirement for a research paper for all the wrong reasons. This might relate to the fact that we are in a culture obsessed with tangible, if often useless, marks of academic progress or it might be because they are simply burnt-out and lazy. Regardless, research papers can be powerful tools for learning if they are used in the right circumstances. Hopefully, they will be used so again.
Robert Beguiristain
P.S. I worked in a university for many years, I could always tell the better professors. They are the ones from whom the students learn and to think verse the ones where the students needed to write that 100-page grammatically perfect research paper with at least 30 references. I also happen to know that when your sitting in a bar with some professor having a drink that they will often criticize their peers for doing this. I wish they would start doing so in public. I think it is all about fear.
I mean think about it, if the teacher reads and remembers enough phrases that pay, you're going to get caught ... or in this case, if he GREPs your sorry lazy butt.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Wow! when did RPI lose its love affair with Java? That was the big thing when i graduated in '98.
Reboot macht Frei.
Get Boleslaw Sczymanski (sp?) for the 400+ level courses. He's hard to understand, but very good.
Reboot macht Frei.
erm, who? maybe this was one of those profs i didn't get...
Reboot macht Frei.
Come ex maggiore inglese, devo essere conforme. È non soltanto pigro e lento saltare facendo la vostra propria ricerca, ma se neppure non avete i cervelli PER RIPETERE lo stuff allora state rubandoli dovete lanciare i burgers per alcuni anni fino a che non decidiate che siete pronti ad essere un allievo reale.
Reboot macht Frei.
First, it should be noted that although this program helps identify potential cheaters and plagarists, only a human being is capable of determining whether or not a work is authentic. People should be considered innocent until proven guilty, regardless of what the computer program says.
Second, I think the state of academia is dismal when it comes to engaging the students with assignments, essays, etc. We still use a "one-size-fits-all" approach that aims at the impossible: homogenized learning. I know from personal experience that when an assignment isn't "interesting", people don't take it seriously and consider cheating. I have done it myself.
Third, this whole article in the Washington Post is a piece of propaganda that can be summed up in one phrase: "Obey authority". Fuck authority. If you want to learn, learn. If you don't care, cheat. You are in control of your own life, and don't take your professor's point of view too seriously.
If we all just did what we were told, it would be a mightily boring existance. That said, if you're gonna cheat -- be smart about it ! The best form of cheating is paraphrasing, understanding the arguments of another person and restating it in your own words. Done correctly, it is almost impossible to detect. And you actually learn something in the process.
~~+++ATH0 . . . END OF LINE
I posted an article a few months ago about academic dishonesty at Clemson University. I can vouch from personal experience, all that it takes is a gratuitous "threat" and that pretty much takes care of any issues of dishonesty; being in the position of getting brought up on these charges is deterrent enough. Even as someone who was almost brought up on dishonesty charges, I do agree that there needs to be some way of catching those who always seem to slip though by "borrowing" work from others. I personally know many people who always wait until the last minute to do assignments and then try to bum stuff off of others; ironically these slackers have some of the highest GPAs in the major. Bottom line, cheating has always gone on and will continue, until it one day catches up with those who can't do anything themselves; these people eventually just end up cheating themselves.
Perhaps if the professor didn't require 1500 words on topics that require less than a few hundred to explain, you would see a lot less of the copy-and-paste "filler" that is rife with opportunity for "cheating". The "busy-work" element of a set-word-limit paper does nothing except make it more difficult to grade. For this particular class, a nicely drawn diagram with arrows and lines is all that is really needed to expess a perfect understanding of these simple concepts (lift, drag, gravity, force, whatever).
:)
Fight busy work!
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
As a physics major here at the University of Virginia, I've graded Bloomfield's "How Things Work" and in the past there have been honor violations, however nothing to this scale. It's somewhat depressing to be a Physics major and having the press come storming into the building to tape an exam (yesterday they videotaped a couple minutes of Physics 252 exam - introductory physics 4 for majors).
I guess what I don't get is as a grader, we pretty much knew that the people in the course really didn't have much of a care to write their papers all that well. The year that I graded, I'm pretty sure that there was only one or two papers that got turned in twice. However, I must give Bloomfield props in writing this program to check everything that went through the system. . . Some people are like, "Oh come on, there's always a chance of having the same sentence as someone else!" This may be true, however when there are more than five sentences that are exactly the same that aren't cited from a source, something is up. Alas, tis time to get back to working on Independent Study papers. . .
I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.
The idea of the community of trust is that trust is assumed...you don't need to prove to your prof that you deserve to be trusted. And because you're trusted, you're less likely to cheat. Running every paper through this program goes counter to that, because it assumes that there are cheaters. Its the fact that profs assumed there were no cheaters that I had take home, closed book exams when I was there. That I could take finals out of the classroom and go sit under a tree with a smoke while I took it, out of sight of my prof.
If people assume you're cheating...well, I know first hand how that affects ones actions in a relationship. If someone doesn't trust you anyway, your motivation to be trustworthy is gone. Maybe the same applies here.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
I posit that the truly astute student (especially in the pre-Law and/or business realms) should *try* to get him- or herself nailed for cheating. After all, what better practice for the real world than facing a group of your peers (i.e., an Honor Council) who believe you are an idiot and arguing your way to what you want? Alternatively, it's excellent practice for administrative manipulation--knowing who to talk to and how to pressure them. After all, it's not the content of college that matters in the end, but rather the life skills you learn while you're there. Getting out of a major academic violation is one heck of a pass-fail exam to see if you've learned enough to earn a degree.
This reminds me of an upper level undergrad math course at my school in which the professor left not only the exam document but her answer key in a shared folder of her account -- that is, freely downloadable on the web. Some students found out and used it to study -- some even copied straight from it (which is pretty silly in an upper level course).
When she found out she was apparently in tears (I didn't take the class, but I know several people who did). She said that if the cheaters dropped the course immediately she would not press the issue further. About half the students dropped the class that day. She had an advantage though, since the IP of everyone who accessed the answer key was logged, and it wouldn't be too hard to match up those IPs to real people who lived on campus. I think she was too shocked to want to go through with punishing all the cheaters.
As a TA at a Large Public Institution, we also used a cheating detector. Check the software at
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html
(other variants are at
http://www.findsame.org
http://www.plagiarism.org)
That system would return us a list of all programs that it--working conservatively--thought may include some degree of plagiarism.
I manually went through all code that it found was a good match, and removed those that seemed (to me, subjectively) to be coincidences.
There were very few of those. If the system had fingered you, chances are you really had matched it.
It was actually pretty clear which pairs of students had even worked together: they'd tend to solve problems in pretty much the same way, and their code would look different (different variable names, different choices of what precisely went inside or out of loops), even though their ordering of functions was the same and their variable declarations were similarly placed.
In contrast, students who had copied-and-pasted were obvious. Their code would jump out at us. Most coders had pretty specific styles, and when it varies between capitalization, function names, comment styles, indentation styles, and even (sometimes) the language of comments and variable names...
... well, there's no question that someone has added a snippet of code from someone else. Since the system would show us the someone else, we pretty much knew the culprit.
That said, we accused no one of plagiarism. It's too much of a pain--at most universities--to deal with the long chain of accusations and defenses. It just isn't worth the effort. So we knock their GPA down a fraction of a point and go on with our lives.
Which is disturbing, actually, because we found some students who had been known--among other TAs and professors--as cheaters. Who had been confronted semester after semester. Who had always gotten a few points off and gone on with their lives.
Hm. As a student, it takes me about one hour per page to turn out a reasonable-quality essay.
As a TA, it takes me about one minute per page to grade the same essay. Which balances out at the sixty-person class. Most classes are smaller, but then again, most classes require a lot of preparation besides the grading itself: students dropping by to ask questions, emailing, composing reasonable answers.
Look: we're looking for good, coherently expressed ideas. Do you have a meaningful argument? Do you express your ideas clearly? It takes under a minute to read a page of a journal article; how long should it take us to read your essay?
No, not really. If you turn in "more then a few phrases" of your own work, you are being dishonest. A friend of mine once had a student turn in the same essay twice: "but it fit both requirements," the student said. Nevertheless, the question was to ask students to do research and to demonstrate a variety of knowledge. I'm not at all convinced that turning in the same essay twice counts.
Rule #1: Thou shalt not get away with it.
I just can't wait until Remo II comes out.
But how, exactly, would you prove you took those notes two years ago, and not last week after you heard about the pending investigation? It's pretty easy to postdate something in pencil.
My lord you really are a fool. My grammar is not great but my spelling is flawless. Yes I am a consultant and a very good one at that. I think you have just illustrated my point about degrees being useless, thank you.
I'm a programmer, I don't have to spell correctly; I just have to spell consistently
Let me say right off that I never obtained a degree. Do to some familial issues I had to go strait to work out of High School. Eventually, with the help of some kind employers, I managed to leverage my way into the IT industry as a programmer. My lack of a formal education has pushed my to study new technologies almost constantly. Do to perceived notions I have to be able to answer most programming questions right off the top of my head. All this to compete with those individuals freshly out of college, who generally can't code their way through a simple factorial algorithm.
This article is a good illustration of the failures of the current university system. Employers rely on the degree this institutions grant as indicator of knowledge, when anymore they are simply indicators of the fact that someone spent four years in a university. I think this is why certifications are currently so popular among employers.
Just my 2cI'm a programmer, I don't have to spell correctly; I just have to spell consistently
Nice FP,
syborgue_munkie!
But whose boss now?
its and will be me.
Too late for you,
your time is done.
My time is now,
You will kneel 'n bow.
circuitboard_simian: I am not that other. My circuits are cleaner, less shit-encrusted, and more wholesome.
Your right of course, CM, that was a lame attempt. That fucking wanker spooge slurping SheMan should show some pride and confidence.
circuitboard_simian: I am not that other. My circuits are cleaner, less shit-encrusted, and more wholesome.
So here at MIT, there is a killer class called 6.170, Software Engineering. Takes around 25+ hours a week. They ran a fuzzy check program on everyone's problem set code. Turned out 56 people had copied at least some code. About 1/3 of the class. You got a zero for any problem set you had any copied code it. It is impossible to pass without any Psets. They did it right after drop date. It really sux for the kids that let people see their code. Pretty typical copy rate though. Actually was surprised it was so low.
Having attended the University of Califonia Santa Cruz for the last 3 years, I have had a lot of my programs scanned for cheating. In fact one of my professors wrote a program that checks for cheating called CheatChecker. -Chris
As far as I know, most University's are looking into this kind of thing. I developed one for the University of Leeds here in the UK in 1998/99 as my final year university project. Mine was specifically to find plagiarists in their Computer Science coursework (C++ and so on), and wasn't too difficult to do, but was effective and generally found 14-15% of the class the be cheating.
Of course, the deterrent of having such a system has ended up being much more effective than the system itself, if you make it widely known that 20-40 people are being warned/punished for plagiarism out of every group of 200 who submit coursework... I know no-one'll care, but I wrote it in Perl and it's available to anyone who wants it...
Paul (pcardno@mmm.com)
--- Band: Joey Ultra
I must concur. As a former History major, this is simple laziness! If you are not acute enough to MANIPULATE the ill gotten goods, then you should get a job flipping hash until you decide you're ready to fill your cup of knowledge at a university trough.
A case can be brought up against a person only if the offense has been in the past year.
A couple fwiws:
The honor system is a single sanction system. If you are found guilty of lying, cheating, or stealing, found to have intended the act, and if it is determined that similiar acts would be detremental to the coummunity of trust, the student is asked to leave the university.
Otherwise, all records of the trial are destroyed.
Students (and alumns) are only formally bound by the honor system while in the county in which UVa is or when the person identifies themself as being from UVa.
One of the primary reasons I chose to be here at UVa was because of the honor system, and while any system certainly has issues, I've found the honor system to work amazingly well. I'm able to leave during finals and come back if I please, take home tests are abundant, I can leave my things laying about outside and they're still there when I come back, etc, etc. Sure, you have to use common sense, but it really is amazing how nice it is to be able to pretty much trust everyone!
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Or, in rare cases, President of the United States.
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Als ehemaliger englischer Major muß ich zustimmen. Ist nicht nur er faul und zu überspringen locker, Ihre eigene Forschung tuend, aber, wenn Sie nicht sogar die Gehirne REWORD das Material haben, stehlen Sie dann Sie sollen burgers für einige Jahre leicht schlagen, bis Sie entscheiden, daß Sie betriebsbereit sind, ein wirklicher Kursteilnehmer zu sein.
Depending on your particular class and university, you could always consider talking to your professor and/or teaching assistant. And I don't mean to direct this at you personally, but thinking longer and harder is also an option in many cases.
If you start the assignment the night before it is due, and don't have time to ask the professor for help, or have time to think longer and harder, there is no reason you should get a good grade. The purpose of the grade is to estimate your _demonstrated_ ability at solving a particular problem within the given _constraints_.
That said, grades are still bogus because of what they don't include.
-Paul Komarek
Hmmm: "all your base are belong to us", hey, there's a nice 7 word common phrase...
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I used to be one of the people who would share his programs out. I would do my version of it, then do a completly different version that looked nothing the same. I'd also introduce some errors, or put comments saying "figure this out yourself" in it. Not everyone liked 360 assembly!
I knew who would take my code and tinker with it. They are the people that even with their CS degree, they are not gonna get far. They are the same people who could do the modula-2 code, but could not figure out how to save the code from the hard drive to their floppy.
As for group projects, on one of our group projects, one guy did next to nothing. He was supposed to handle the printing code. What he gave us did NOTHING. I had to rewrite it rather quickly. We let the prof know that as well, since we worked our ass off (won a programming contest with the code as well!!!)
The other group project (OS) went much better - different members. The other groups hated us. The idea was each group would submit two programs that would run on the (batch) OS you had to design. My roommate's program was self-modifying code.
One piece of advice for group projects: If all three people of your group do not know C, do not do your project in C. We decided to learn it that way. I'd spend all day putting pointers in the code, my roommate would spend all night taking them back out.
katute no nihonngo wo sennkou sita mono no watakusi ha, daisannsei desu. jibunn no kennkyuu wo yaranai koto ha nasakenai dake deha naku, nusunnda jyouhou wo iikaeru tisei mo nakereba, tyantou sita gakusei ni naru ki ga deru made, 2,3 nenn gurai ra-mennya to ka de tutometa hou ga ii kamo siremasenn.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Once, in my CompSci studies at Southwest Missouri State University, my class was given a fairly straightforward assignment. You know the type:
"Given a telephone switchboard with a certain number of lines, and an average call time of n, what is the number of calls that can be processed in a given time period." or something similar.
Well, I set down to turn the description into a specification. When I did, I turned some phrases into variable names:
"number of lines": numLines
"average call time": averageCallTime
"number of calls": numCalls
...and so on. The assignment was easy, and I turned in my homework a few days later. Not too long after that, the professor called my best friend and me into his office to discuss the assignment. It seems, and I swear to God that I'm not exaggerating, that our independently-written programs were pretty much line-for-line identical. The only difference was the "// By ..." line at the top.
What happened? My friend apparently went about completing the homework in the same style I had, and (probably because we worked together a lot) had converted all of the key phrases into the exact same variable names. The algorithms were reasonably standard and we both had the same idea in mind. We'd done enough projects together that our commenting and indenting style matched pretty much exactly.
Honestly, given that two best friends and frequent collaborators turned in identical work, the common response would've been dire. However, the professor was pretty cool, and he knew the two of us well enough to actually believe our story and trust our reactions to the discovery (my version began with a stammered "NO F...ING WAY!").
There's no way, ever, under any circumstances that I would actually expect a teacher to believe that we hadn't cheated. Fortunately for us, ours did. The moral: hey, sometimes coincidences happen.
P.S.: I graduated a while ago. Posting this excuse isn't meant to get me out of any current trouble. :)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
They are embryonic OpenSource coders!
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I wrote it so that if the solution wasn't an integer, it would hand me the peices in the same form that I would have when I was done solving it by hand.
I handed in homework with no work and a handwritten copy of the program to the teacher. She liked it, handed it around, and gave me an "A+". :-)
Ciao!
The Doctor What (KF6VNC)
We "learn" how to do this in real life, we don't need the university to do it for us. In real life, you can fire people too, or at least pawn them off on a disadvantaged (doomed) project. In a university setting they happily cruise along thinking that life is going to be easy until they smack into a real job with real responsibilities. Universities do these people no favors by using fake group situations to coddle them.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
I was just joking, but you aren't even being humorless correctly. I guess code reuse is fine if you wrote it the first time, but the whole underlying point here is that you should be able to use code you've never even seen the internals of before. And you've done that, assuming you've ever written anything in C or C++ or Java or any language that relies on a standard set of libraries. Did you ever dig around in the glibc source to "learn" how printf() really works? I should hope not, because by that logic you'll eventually work your way down to some assembler statements in the kernel. You just used it, because it's to spec and always works and you don't have to have a clue how. And whoever wrote glibc (I wouldn't know, because despite having written literally hundreds of programs based on that library, I've never looked at the source) did the same when making low-level IO calls to the kernel, etc. That's called black-box abstraction, and without grasping that concept a lot of important things in computer science are lost upon you. The logical leap from abstraction is of course code reuse. Hence "i'm not sure what my friend did in this part of the program, but he says to write this and it works so i'm keeping it" is like the highest design principle you, as a computer scientist, can aspire to, assuming your friend writes his code bug-free and to spec.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
It's called "code reuse" and it's been drilled into our heads since day one. You mean you haven't gotten the old "when engineers want to build a bridge, they don't design the whole thing from scratch" lecture ad nauseum for the past four years? I have, and I'll be a sophmore next year :)
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
What it did was to concatenate the whole thing into a stream of data; it stripped out comments, indentation, spacing etc. In short, you had a line of elements (it didn't even bother about variable names, so changing 'int i' to 'int x' wouldn't bypass the system). Then, it looked for commonality with other submissions. If a stream of elements of a certain length matched another submission, it flagged it up as a potential plagiarism.
Very smart and it caught a few people out, despite them having been warned that electronic means were going to be employed. I actually took the course that semester and it was pretty obvious to the lecturer I hadn't plagiarised; I was using C style coding stuff (I think I embedded a calculation in an if statement, IIRC) which he hadn't taught :)
--
The article implied, that the cheated papers seem to span multiple semesters as well. So at the very least, you should be able to call newer versions of an older paper copies. I think the later students would be hard pressed to claim that they were preparing homework prior to joining the class.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Actually, 6 words really isn't all that much. If you have 500 students for 10 years writing on the same subject, you are highly likely to have a few 6-word phrases be the same. There just aren't that many ways to describe the cause of the Civil War, or the tone of 1984, or the application of Turing's writings to modern computing. Then again, I'm sure he was not going on single matchings of 6-word phrases, but multiple occurances of the same.
Now, I'm not sure that the "corrective feedback mechanism" necessarily worked, or students got better at embelishing to not be caught by a simple computer program, but that's another story.
-Alison, who is happy to be done with College finally...
Exactly how DO you make a lightbulb shine by microwaving it in a cup of water???
But seriously, how can you expect everyone to come up with a unique expression describing how an airplane wing works? It's pretty cut and dried - this type of crackdown might be appropriate for a creative fiction writing course, but for the hard sciences it's expecting too much. Of course a verbal definition of energy as being equal to "mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light" is going to come out quite similar on different papers.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Frankly, I'm skeptical that performing this kind of lexical analysis on source code could be helpful, especially if the class places strong emphasis on good coding style. Maybe a better method is to try what we had at Purdue so many years back...compare the runtimes and memory footprints of each submitted program, and if you get a match between two programs, start the investigation.
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
I'm also concerned that someone might have gotten their hands on the professor's analyzer, and then written a script to alter individual papers in order that the analyzer wouldn't pick it up. (I know this is unlikely, but the point is, without more evidence, I don't know how unlikely this is.)
Please understand, I worked my ass off for my (sometimes admittedly miserable) grades and I'd love to see cheaters strung up by their feet and used as pinatas. I'd just like to make absolutely positively sure that they cheated before it happens.
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
Whoops, despite "plain text" on my last submission, Slashdot removed the words I put in angle-brackets as unknown tags. What I meant to say was:
See BAR for your grade (on Foo's program)
See FOO for your grade (on Bar's program)
Although there is a catch22 on this. In programming, if you get stuck, you need help. There are two places to turn usually.
1) Look on the web for some sample code that is doing what you need to do.
2) talk to a friend to figure out how to do it.
Either way, you are going to end up with code that looks like another bit of code. There are only SO many ways to code a certain algorithm. Just because two people in this case happened to, for example, code the same bug into their software doesn't mean they cheated.
It can mean that they collaborated, or one tried to help the other out with the basic concepts, and the other got the same flawed idea and implemented it in the same flawed way.
Maybe I missed something. I don't know how performing a pattern match on Term Papers in order to identify cheaters relates to the "community of trust"
Actually, it relates quite closely to it - by driving out the cheaters, the students, and future employers will know that they can trust the degrees and professed knowlege of the graduates in a field.
If an employer hires some Computer Science graduates from University X, and they all turn out to be incompetant cheaters, who plagerized their way through their degrees, then that employer will no longer trust Computer Science degrees from University X - they've seen that the degree in question is meaningless. Other students in the meantime, see cheaters getting good marks, and figure "Why should I bother working, that person cheated, and they got away with it." - Then the problem gets worse, because the students no longer trust the faculty to reward hard work and knowlege. If that pattern repeats, word spreads around, and eventually, no-one will hire people with Comp.Sci. degrees from University X, because the community no longer trusts them. Then, nobody will bother taking that degree, because you get nothing out of it anyways, so the department gets closed down. Thus, by not bothering to try and stop cheaters, the department becomes untrustworthy, and ceases to exist.
Asside from that, I do much the same thing myself, and got to fail one student, and have another thrown out of the University just this past semester. (I submitted the last of the paperwork for it an hour ago.) Strangely enough, those of my students who know that someone is being thrown out for cheating are quite happy about it - it makes them feel that their own hard work and studying was worth the effort they put into it.
Incidentally, the methods I used mostly involved copying sections of student's projects into the search box on Google, - I got perfect matches on both of the cheater's projects. The other part to catch cheaters was the fact that I had about 16 different tests scattered around the class during test time, with minor changes like different numbers, order of multiple choice questions & their answers, and different HTML code for the relevant section of the test. Since nobody had the same test as the people beside them, it was really easy to catch the guy who copied answers from the one beside him - his answers weren't related to his questions, but if he'd been doing test number 7 instead, he'd have had perfect... strange, eh? It makes for a bit more time marking, but in the end, it's worth it.
... you die by the sword.
I don't have one bit of pity for the students.
Trolling is a art,
And of course it's difficult for someone who copied a paper to apply their own acrostic.
But the real point is, if you have no idea that you are being copied, you have no reason to go the the extra trouble of watermarking. And since you don't know when the copying is happening, you need to have each version watermarked. And you don't really feel as if you have an excessive amount of spare time. Certainly not extra time that you want to spend writing papers. So this precaution comes at a high cost.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
-AP
I'm all for encouraging teamwork while at the same time discouraging verbatim copying... up to a point. In the real world you want to borrow as much as you can without limiting yourself to that. So it is a matter of how much you can lift and still add something. So verbatim copying isn't per-se bad... but you'd better be able to add something beyond that. That is where value is added. Sometimes the "good enough" is the enemy of the great. But sometimes the "great" is the enemy of the good enough. The hard part is deciding on what is important. The important is worth putting the effort for the great on, the unimportant, it is a waste to do more than the good enough for. There are only so many hours in the day, and deciding what you put forth your effort on is often the most important thing in the real world.
Guess it's my turn for "RPI TAing experience."
CS I is required for virtually everyone on campus (at least it was when I was there, '91-'95. I undergrad TAed CS I for my last two semesters). People who were business majors (read: hockey players) or pre-med (6-year accelerated program with Albany Med) had to take a course which went pretty in-depth in C. I wouldn't expect an automatic A or B for those people; they aren't (computer) geeks. You haven't really taught a programming language until you've tried teaching pointer arithmatic to a hockey player ;-) Some were good; some clearly just wanted to get through the course.
The number of cheaters in CS I is astounding. Ever since they made it a requirement and started putting everyone through it, the quality of CS@RPI has declined. Period.
I'm not excusing cheating in CS I, but I don't think you can judge the quality of RPI's CS dept by CS I, either. It'd be like judging a school's math department by the performance of the remedial algebra class.
Personally, I think the changes made to the curriculum in '94 were a serious mistake; everyone should have to suffer though two semesters of data structures and program proving ;-)
-jon
Remember Amalek.
> What about in the real world where coding is always done in groups???
The real world can be remarkably like school sometimes. I remember one real-world project where I literally hid from a cow-orker for several weeks, so I could actually get the project done by the time it was needed.
> Fret not, because the good coders are often recognised rather quickly, and are the first to be promoted.
Not in my experience. I have never worked in any environment where there was anything approaching a concensus that the best programmers got the best pay.
Usually, the dumb fucks make the rounds of the experts until someone tells them how to fix the problem (if only to get the DF out of their hair), and then the dummy makes a bee-line for the supervisor's office so he can announce his "discovery" of the problem.
But perhaps Joe Supervisor does see through this nonsense; usually the good programmers get assigned about five times as much responsibility, and get 2-3% more pay in compensation.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Is this any harder in the "real world" than it was in school? Nope. The internet is out there for everybody, and it's now just too hard to track everyone's work in a foolproof way
You don't understand. In a school you have to prove something about yourself, viz. that you have acquired some knowledge. In the real world nobody really cares about what knowledge happens to sit inside your head. In the real world people care about getting things done and if you can do things by getting stuff off the net, more power to you.
If someone handed you one and it looked real, would you call the university to verify that it was real? No, you'd say "wow, MIT!" and hire him/her.
Heh. Haven't worked for large companies, have you? A mom-and-pop shop might not check, but a big corp *will* check, and it will check your previous jobs, and dates on them, and etc. etc.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
However, as a UVa Alum who has his fair share of bitterness as well (and most certainly DOESN'T call the school "The University", "Mr. Jefferson's School", or any of that bunk, I will defend the honor system. Sure, every university has one but is it so ridiculous not to expect honorable behavior on the part of students much less your average citizen?
Fine, PHYS 106 is a gut. Does that in any way lend any more credence to cheating in it? I think not.
Tell me, what's wrong with requiring honorable behavior? What's wrong with sanctioning those people who don't live their lives ethically?
First, I'd like to point out that the article does not clearly indicate that the students accused of cheating are necessarily currently taking the class. That is to say that I don't believe that 122 of 500 students in a particular class cheated but that 122 of 1500 cheated. Still, 1 in 15 is pretty pathetic.
Now, I attended UVa (granted it was several years ago now) and have been on an honor jury so I can speak a little to the system.
I can't recall for certain if UVa even HAS a statute of limitations on honor violation accusations. In other words, it doesn't matter if you are currently in a class, have recently taken a class, or already graduated. I believe that students have even had their degrees revoked after graduation due to past honor violations. In addition, if memory serves, the UVa honor system still technically applies to an alum beyond the scope of the University as well.
Also, from my experience, honor jury members are as cautious as the Post article suggests. After all, someone's entire college career is at risk.
If the University system has little enough regard for its students to place them in a classroom with 200 peers, where the professor is TELEVISED in, where they don't have an opportunity to interact (or maybe even MEET) the professor, why is the professor surprised that the students didn't bother to do all their own work?
I've got two problems with this article.
1) The degree to which the papers are similar seems to have been totally ignored. If I find a clever turn of phrase in a textbook, it's entirely possible that it will turn up in a document I'm writing, maybe even for another class. What EXACTLY has been plagiarized? A sentence? A paragraph? An entire paper? I've used the word "the" enormous numbers of times, and I've never cited it once. I have no idea WHO I'd cite to begin with...
2) Using this as a last-minute "Gotcha" for graduating students is absolutely despicable. I'm not proposing that there should be a statute of limitations on academic dishonesty, but to tell a graduating senior "Oh yes, by the way, for the last three weeks of class you're going to have to defend your academic integrity by proving that you didn't cheat." How is this reasonable? What recourse does a student have? Why should the student have been allowed to enroll (and pay for) seven more semesters of school, after "plagiarizing" a Freshman physics paper? It seems to me that this is unjust.
Hell...I dunno...it just seems like an awfully stinky deal to me.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
"There are always stories of files being kept of old papers," Bloomfield said, "but I had never heard of it being made real."
Apparently Mr. Bloomfield never saw the upstairs closet of any fraternity. Our "files" were crappy and we still had hundreds of papers and class notes going back a decade. Some houses have huge libraries organized by class and professor.
-B
"This article is a good illustration of the failures of the current university system."
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Let me draw your attention to a factor no-one seems to have commented on here so far.
The article relies on two unfounded assumptions: one, that choice of identical phrases means plagiarism, and two, that there is some permissible proportion (NOTE: *unnamed*) which this instance supposedly exceeds.
There is a vast difference between plagiarism, being the original author of a piece (which is one reason correctly picked up on) and everyone having permitted access to a common source.
Let's look at this another way. You get me 20 school kids with a homework assignment: provide free buses for them to get to the library as well. Now say what amount of `identical phrases' you can *expect* back - because they all cheated? Because exactly half of them did? Or, just perhaps, because they all went to the library and had a look at the same books, one after another.
s/library/internet/, now re-run the above program.
I suggest realizing where the article excesses on hype and where it jumps to conclusions are good things to be doing right now, especially if you're a professor at the university in question.
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Of course the program isn't making the accusation. It's only doing pattern matches that MIGHT indicate cheating, after which it will require a human to read over the actual papers to see if its really cheating, or just an unlikely coincidence that a 6 word phrase matched. All the program does is eliminate those that while they might be cheaters, they at least had enough sense to do some paraphrasing.
:)
Ultimately that would be the most dangerous type of program. A program that can take any document and paraphrase it randomly to result in an entirely new document that covers the same information. At the simplest level, a language parser that isn't much more than a glorified word substitution program could be effective. At the more complex level (for reorganizing the entire paper from the outline down) would require fairly sufficient AI to accomplish. THAT would be a fun project though. 500 students could turn in the same paper on the same topic and it would be nearly impossible to accuse any of them of cheating.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I'm pretty sure the university gave fair enough warning. I remember when I went through orientation in college they gave us a pretty extensive explaination of what constituted cheating and what would happen if we were caught. In addition, most of the individual instructors brought the issue up briefly at the beginning of the semester. Of course, each class had a somewhat different definition of what constituted cheating. Group work was generally not frowned upon, expecially in those classes where homework was more or less optional or only counted for a small percentage of the final grade.
:)
Still, acedemic dishonesty was explained quite thouroughly, and I'm sure the university in question was not timid in explaining it either. There may be an "Honor Code" but an honor code requires that you're honest or the system falls apart. Salting the system from time to time doesn't degrade it. Its unnecessary to warn the students that they're going to check for cheating, they shouldn't be cheating in the first place.
And there's a lot to be said about making examples out of others. It only helps to keep the others honest.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
HEEEEEEYYY!!!!!
Wait just a damn minute.....
:)
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
The professor hands out the test, and the student is blown away. No possible way to pass this test, much less ace it. So the student thinks about it for a while, and eventually pulls out a $100 bill, attaches it to the test, and writes "$100 = 100 points = I pass" at the top of the paper. Having done so, the exam is turned in.
Next week, the exam is returned, and attached is a $50 bill and a note that says "$50 = 50 points = you fail".
is that this was for a 1500 word essay. it's not like it's hard to come up with 1500 words about some everyday example of physics in action.
these people are in college, if they can't come up with 1500 words about something that easy, they deserve to fail the class.
"...I've found it much easier to do in a real job because everyone (me included) is prepared to tolerate other people's ideas when it won't mean the plummetting of a good grade"
And here we see why a lot of commercial software sucks. With school, it's the grade that suffers. In the real job, it's the product.
The difference is that a grade is on a permanent record. A goofy product gets sold anyway with comparatively little accountability.
If you cannot teach someone else concepts presented in an undergraduate (or high school) environment, chances are (a) they had a bad teacher and/or (b) they do not have the proper prerequisites for the class. If a person appears to have the knowledge required to be admitted to a particular course, the fact that they cannot be taught a concept invariably points to the instructor.
Never attribute to stupidity what can be explained by an elephantine ego and an unwillingness to find an appropriate metaphor.
Most of the time I find a frustration in teaching others to be a symptom of what I like to call "lifelong geek syndrome." This means that some poeple have know something for so long, they have forgotten what it was like to first learn it. I have a hard time remembering what it was like not knowing immediately what a for-loop or a while-loop look like, how they work, and what they are for. This does not absolve me of the responsibility of showing compassion when someone new to the topic ends up working with me on a project (which happens a lot in a web development environment).
Compassion does not mean passing off the busy work or mundane tasks. This helps no one. If they do substandard work because of lack of skills, the mundane tasks will show this and reflect on others. If the person really can't hack it, you need to check the prereqs. If they haven't got the prereqs, YOU ARE NOT DOING THEM OR ANYONE ELSE A FAVOR BY CARRYING THEM. If they have got the prereqs, a little extra care can go a long way. If they have the prereqs and no amount of effort on their part is taking them anywhere, the prereqs probably need to be checked.
Sometimes people have to fail in order to shift gears. If they don't shift gears, I don't want them coding my software.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Having studied both math and physics to the graduate level, the need for assistance varies with the level of the material.
First-year calculus is baby math. Computer assistance can help many students learn the concepts, but it's not really necessary.
But by the time you hit the highest math most engineering students see - vector analysis, matrix theory, differential equations, computers become valuable tools even if they do nothing but keep everything neat and tidy. If someone thinks it's cheating for the computer to do this rote stuff, I DEMAND that they say the same thing about all of those cheating students using MS Office instead of quill pens - the former includes spelling checkers, grammar checkers, a thesaurus and dictionary, etc.
(I do have concerns about these programs being used to actually solve the problem, but most (all?) can be used in an "editor" type mode.)
When you get into the heavy math - PDQ with boundary conditions, special functions, and (shudder) tensor analysis, you're at the point where you *will* be shelling out big bucks for your own copy of thick reference books. You can do this by hand (I did), but you can easily spend 30 minutes at each step just copying the information from one step to the next, carefully checking that you didn't transpose entries, convert a contravariant index to a covariant one, etc.
As an aside, I actually revisited my PDQ boundary problem class 15 years later in a parallel computing class. I had done the Fourier transforms analytically before, and could only handle very limited forcing functions. Doing it numerically (with FFTs) I could handle a much broader range of problem but I was the only person in the class who had a clue what was going on.
I'm a strong believer in the value of analytical techniques for getting the deep insights, but at the same time I think it's not an exaggeration to say that a quarter of my college experience was wasted in mindless rote work. At that time, a "small computer" was still a departmental PDP11/780, so it was probably unavoidable. But not today.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
"One of the things we have not yet understood is the power and potential rascality of the Internet," said Spanish professor Gies, a former faculty senate president. "I don't think we've trained students yet about what is fair and not fair."
WTF?!
You mean to tell me that these individuals have gone through grade school, gone through middle school, gone through high school, and now are adults in a university, and yet they still don't know the difference between what is right and what is wrong? Betweeen what is accepted and what is forbidden?
I don't have a university diploma/degree - but I damn well know and learned how to write a paper in high school, what was considered right and wrong, what was plagiarism and what was quoting a source, footnotes and a bibliography. You know, it is all part of the "standing on the shoulders of giants" (Newton) thing!
Those that have stooped to this level should be expelled: They have demonstrated a lack of disregard and respect for thier fellow man. They are still children, not worthy of attending university, nor a degree.
I can't see any justification - especially for the class in which it occurred. I understand that it is a common thing in all classes, but in this class - damn! - can you say bone-head physics? Not that it wouldn't be educational (heck, it sounds like a fun class, actually), but with that kind of class one should be able to easily describe the physics and such of common devices, off the top of thier head, with few if any references (now, of course, getting it to 1500 words could be a chore, but just have a few cited examples - key word "cited")...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Copy one person, it's plagiarism. Copy many, it's research.
--
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
--Britt
...for ease of memorization. Each stanza beginning with a successive letter of the alphabet, for example. Makes reciting several pages' worth a lot easier when you won't have a printing press for several centuries.
Now that would be an interesting use of acrostics in a term paper. "Prof, I can prove that this paper is mine. Here, follow along while I recite it from memory..."
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I'll grant that much (most) of what takes place here on
I've never seen Survivor. Sorry, you'll have to explain this one.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I was chuckling when I posted my first article, wondering if anybody would notice that.
I honestly believe that, while the "look for cheaters" software is an interesting and useful step, it's not going to help in the long term, or even in the medium term. Frankly, students have far more time to spend on finding easy ways to skip out of honest work than the professors have on fighting the disease.
Does that mean that tech can't help? No, it's a useful tool. Just remember that it's only a tool, not a complete solution.
It should probably have read totally solve rather than apply, but there you go.
No need to be an asshole about it. Point me to something on /. that hasn't been a trite observation.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
-Omar
According to Babelfish (which I'm finding less and less useful for translating things like Rammstein lyrics):
"As a former English major I must agree. Only if it is not lazy and to skip loose, doing your own research, but, if you have not even the brains REWORD the material, steal then you are burgers for some years easily to strike, until you decide that you are ready for use, to be a real class participant."
ha!
"Smear'd with gumms of glutenous heat, I touch..." - Comus, John Milton
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
What you say?!
:-)
For Great Translation!
ugh...
"Smear'd with gumms of glutenous heat, I touch..." - Comus, John Milton
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Yeah, I'm still waiting on my delivery from Torgo's Pizza. ;-)
"Smear'd with gumms of glutenous heat, I touch..." - Comus, John Milton
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
He's referring to the honor system.
Plagiarism detectors are only the first line of defense: they just point you at papers that need to be looked at more carefully. If the students are pulling the data from the same source and properly citing it, they will be exonerated by the hand review that must necessarily follow before a cheating case can be brought forth. The administration, which is not very computer-savvy, won't convict somebody based on "My program says he cheated." They want to see both papers with the similar passages highlighted.
When I run student programs through Moss, I always get hits. For example, there are only a few ways to write linked-list code. But when I look at them with an experienced eye, it's pretty easy to tell the cheaters from the non-cheaters -- and the people who just worked a bit too closely together can be differentiated from both.
My high school AP English teacher runs all of our typed papers (we have to give her an electronic copy) through plagiarism.org. This website will (for a fee) compare documents/essays/term papers/etc. to its huge established database of papers found in books and online. In addition, I believe that it adds new papers that are run through it to the overall database, so it builds itself up, and intra-class cheating can be caught.
This threat is probably an effective deterrent to plagiarism, as the penalties in our (public) school are fairly harsh for decent students (removal from honors society, 0 on the assignment, disciplinary action). It seems that the professor could have used this, and had access to an even larger accumulative database.
Yes! That guy!
Copying others' work is not the infraction. It is failure to cite borrowed ideas.
Mark down, sure. And hopefully require some sort of basic paper-writing instruction. But expulsion? Too harsh. Better to just kick the student's ass a bit (metaphorically of course:) and make them try harder next time.
---
When were you a TA? When I was there (1995-1999ish), I was under the impression that they had a perl script that checked codes and made some checks to detect plagerism. Was I wrong? :-)
--
So when I click on the link in the story, I currently get a 404 page. So I tried to find the
story by going to the WP's Metro section, where I found a story titled "here we go again and again". Clicking on that headline give me a really hilarous test page.
Someone's having troubles...
I would consider it to be "doomed" -- you couldn't pay me enough to be a "chief" anything.
You're basically the fall guy. You're expected to be available to all of your employees 24/7 in my experience, and if there are weak links anywhere in your chain, well, it's your responsibility.
Yay, so you make a lot of money, you run up a lot of debts, you get some ludicrous credit and generally screw yourself with it. Again, this has just been what I've seen in my personal experience.
And then, no matter how well you've done, the board can and will just decide to send you packing on a whim. You're the most visible target when they come looking for heads to roll.
My college papers were crap, but at least I wrote my own and tried to come up with a concept original enough that nobody with the same teacher would have the same subject, much less paper. And every semester, we would see at least two kids in every class get pulled aside and never come back, and someone would check and find out that they cheated. They never got much sympathy.
What bugs me most is that they don't even try hard to not get caght! Students with the same teacher cheating! In the same semester! Just a tip for potential plagarists (Not that they have the sense to take it.): DO NOT COPY WORK FROM ANYONE AT THE SAME SCHOOL, MUCH LESS TEACHER!!
Several of the Psalms are designed that way, or with other similar literary devices. The most notable, and probably the one you're thinking of, is Psalm 119. (Coincidentally the longest chapter of the entire Bible.) Each line in every 8-line stanza begins with the same letter in Hebrew.
I have zero tolerance for zero-tolerance policies.
Constitutionally Correct
That's the key part about avoiding plagiarism - you noted the outside sources that you used, rather than trying to skate by as if it was all your own work. Score one for the prof...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
In the real world nobody really cares about what knowledge happens to sit inside your head.
Well, in my real world, I sure do. If I'm interviewing you for a job, there are the the following basic rules as far as I'm concerned:
I can do google searches and swipe other people's work without anybody's help, thanks, if that's what it takes. If I was going to pay someone actual money to do work for me, I'd want to feel assured that they either have a clue, or aptitude and a whole lotta love.
Heh. Haven't worked for large companies, have you? A mom-and-pop shop might not check, but a big corp *will* check, and it will check your previous jobs, and dates on them, and etc. etc.
I've only worked at one big company (Dun & Bradstreet) - I don't think they checked my credentials since I didn't present any. But I'm willing to believe you on this one.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Is that it's so likely that someone else will point out EXACTLY the same thought you have. Not that I disapprove of his methods exactly. But talk about doublespeak.
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
The ones cheating have forgotten that community of trust. The ones that are not cheating will again be able to trust that being graded relative to their peers is a fair process.
t
S1mply r3pl4ce j00r r3gu14r t3xt w17h h4X0r c0d3, d00d!
More
"Research Assistant"
-- fencepost
fencepost
just a little off
is gonna gitcha!!!
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I'd thank the dear Jesus that she turned those cheaters in. I'd hate to have one of them operate on me. Forget thaaaaaaaaaat!!!
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
But how, exactly, would you prove you took those notes two years ago.
If you're really concerned about this, always mail a copy of your paper to yourself and leave the envelope sealed. This will establish that you had that paper on the date it was postmarked.
--
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
I don't know if I should defend the students or not... The professor was really lousy. I think he was having enough of a problem keeping his job as it was, because he decided not to bother with a major cheating scandal and swept it under the rug. The university didn't invite him back the next year... But I guess you have to wonder about people who think that changing variable names will keep them from being caught. These students obviously had no understanding of what they were doing in that class.
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Easy enough, and being the geeks we were, one classmate rewrote his working code so that when it was printed on a line printer, it read GREP vertically down the page.
For kicks he stuck it up on a pinboard in one of the labs before the assignment was due, thinking nobody would be inclinded to take it.
No more than 3 hours after he stuck it up, he had some student email him asking why the code didn't work, as this student had just typed it in off the page, with all the /* */ padding and other useless crap that he'd padded it out with.
As an experiment we tried typing in the code of the print out again, and found it took longer to type it in, than write the actual program from scratch.
Another incident was one year a data structures lecturer posted assignment marks (assignment on hashing) in a hash table based on student number. The instructions on how to find your mark was given at the top of the list.
Most of the students had to go visit the lecturer to find out their mark because they didn't actually understand hashing, yet they had apparently passed the assignment.
Let me preface this by saying I am a U.Va. student--although I haven't taken this class. My girlfriend took it in the Fall of '99.
:)
The interesting part of this situation is that it was the new method for submitting the papers that enabled this to happen. Prior to Spring of 99 I believe, they had to submit the papers in hardcopy, making it nearly impossible to catch semester-to-semester cheating. The email submission, while being a first step towards easy collective intelligence (ease of publication, distribution), will probably mean the expulsion of at least a few students.
However, UVa's honor system is single sanction, meaning if you're guilty, they have to kick you out. This makes the student jurors extremely reluctant to pursue such an option.
Anyway, I thought the most interesting part of the Washington Post article was when he said that the news of the honor investigations was released before this semester's papers were due, and he found "very little" plagiarism. The system is now in effect.
on the other hand i am very glad to see this kind of software being used more broadly. my CS professors used such software for years to check classmate's code against each other. it's about time universities stopped handing out diploma after diploma to people when they have basically cheated their way through school.
of course i'm not saying i've been the most innocent person as far as cheating goes. i've been on both sides (cheater and cheatee) and can definately say that those instances of poor decision making are the few things i regret. so students, think before you cheat. you may someday value having actually EARNED something.
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
Well, just yank the textbook to a digital medium and put it in the list of papers being tested.
You'll spot who is liberally quoting the text quite quickly that way.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Every now and then I get a request from somewhere in the far East (can't recall which country they come from) for an "elevator control program". I usually just reply with "every bit of free material I have it already on the web". I get all sorts of crazy "this is my project, will you help by doing it all for me?" requests... but this elevator control program was getting to be a common theme. Well, eventually some guy made the request with a 4-slide powerpoint file attached. Fortunately, Robin uses windows so I was spared from having to reboot... and the PPT file turned out to be a class project assignment, complete with the grading requirements. A sure sign of an academic assignment is the arbitrary requirement for a flowchart, even when it doens't make a lot of sense to draw one. For a moment I considered making a web page with the PPT file converted to four gifs, sort of a FAQ. Sad as it is, we had a good laugh.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I'm a student at U.Va. Louis Bloomfield advised me when I was deciding to minor in Physics. He's a rather fair-minded man. His actions seem rather well thought-out to me. He's only turning in those who had very huge sections copied, like a third of the paper. Those who wrote the originals will mostly get cleared, but they will still be charged. The basic honor pledge is "On my honor as a student, I have neither given nor received aid on this [assignment/exam]." The Single Sanction policy is well explained before students arrive. If you can't abide by it, you don't belong here. A lot of people don't take it seriously, and even many of the professors have issues with it. It's about time there was a wake-up call. I'm sure many people here know of the kind of students who are cheating like this. It's not people who are struggling to make it through. It's the ones who want to party their time away and still get into the commerce school, or something like that. U.Va. is crawling with people like that, and I'm really sick of it, and I get the feeling around here that there are a lot of people who are tired of being taken advantage of under the trust that the honor code affords. Yesterday, during the worst exam I have ever had in my entire life, I left after I had attempted all the problems, went out for a walk, came back ten minutes later, and finished. At the end of the exam, I wrote and signed the pledge, and my exam was accepted without question. The honor code is a wonderful thing that's worth protecting.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
The professor didn't just do this out of the blue. Other students complained that they were being taken advantage of, so the professor investigated. There was trust, it was broken, and those who broke it got caught. That is EXACTLY how a community of trust works.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Oh my is this true... : - (
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
The professor saw that her programming style was similar to mine. We were not cheating, but it shows that programming style can be picked up and recognized.
When it comes to writing code or prose, style can be similar because they are learning together.
A simple diff won't be able to pick this up, or counting the number of common words. But, it can be a flag for a human human to check further.
Fight Spammers!
That's probably my biggest gripe with so many of the poorly written programs (like, say, Windows) in the universe today: rather than making life easier through technology, they often make life harder...
In any event, I'm glad that they've spotted the cheaters. What is the point of cheating like that anyway, you're in the class to learn and cheating isn't going to give you the information.
It does make me a bit nervous though, back when I was still in college people would sometimes ask how I had done something (often from the semester before), so I often mailed people copies of my programs so they could see how I'd handled a problem. Will this come back to haunt me if they turned in my program as if it were their own?
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
Its not uncommon in college to have an archive of known "A" quality essays. Most are more than willing to help their friends get some material.
However the proffesors solution will only stop naive copying. Anyone with the time to reword the essay, or with access to a program to do it for them will require much more sophisticated copy detection. Even then, with a large enough datastore the problem quickly tilts in favor of the plagiarizar.
Boy I'm happy to see my school come up on slashdot, but not like this.
Those of us who came to UVA from out of state seem to have a lot more respect for this school in general. Unfortunately, we're very outnumbered, and they're STILL trying to raise the tuition on us to lower the in-state tuition.
The overall opinion I get from in-state students is that.. eh.. it's UVA. Not that it's "The University" or "Damn this place rules" but "It's alright I guess." If you're that complacent about the school, chances are you're going to be about as active in participating in the honor system.
I fear that it will eventually die here, and that is a shame. It nearly has already. Used to be that an Honor Violation was basically The Big Hammer of Doom. Today, that has deemed "too harsh." I really hate this political correctness crap or whatever the hell it is. An Honor Violation should be somewhere up there with the Wrath Of God or whoever you pray to. Otherwise, you get the situation today. People just don't care.
"Technology really is a double-edged sword when it comes to cheating," said Thomas Hall, student chairman of the university's honor committee. "The means for detecting cheating are catching up with the means for cheating."
...)
-----
Time for a new development in Cheating Technology. Remember when graphing calculators were still new and alien, and nobody made you wipe the memory or tape over the IR port before an exam?
All this just means that the *good* cheaters are still under the radar. Maybe someone will develop a modified version of the professor's software to check their paper against the original and insert a synonym every five words or something. (Hey, that would be a decent shareware app, if you could only trust cheaters to pay you on the honor system
In my technical writing class at Oklahoma State, we were required to submit a packet at the end of the semester with hard copies of ALL our work. We were also required to submit a disk with all our class files on it. From what the professor said in class, the English department is building a database of papers that have been written in that class so that plagairism can be prevented.
---
Am I the only Slashdotter who is sick and tired of losing 9000 karma points every time they moderate?
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
I had English teachers that banned dictionaries during exams.
I never did understand why. Now thanks to your post, I understand their reasoning. They must have thought that it is too easy to look up a word in the dictionary and simply take what's written as truth.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Group projects in general are worthless. Whenever I have one assigned, I wait for the option to do it yourself. If that option isn't given, I wait for the end of class to ask the prof to let me do it on my own anyway. The extra work is usually worthwhile. Every group project I ever got stuck with, some one slacks. That's the rule. And I don't want my grade to suffer for it. What makes it worse is that I'm doing my Master's at night. I live 1 1/2 from the campus. It's a real pain to 1)make it to class once a week after working a 10 hour day, and 2) finding one or two nights or weekend-days to get together with your group to work on the damn thing.There are alot better ways to foster teamwork than group assignments in college.
BigCat79
BigCat79
"The dead have risen and are voting Republican!" --Bart Simpson
It will be so only for a short time. Very soon it will become too much work to scan each paper against every paper ever submitted, and that's what the task will devolve to. Pretty soon it will become an intractable problem to search through N*(N-m) combinations, where N is the total number of papers ever submitted, and (N-m) are the papers submitted before this quarter/semester. To do any less thorough of a search is to defeat the purpose of the search.
For example, lets say that 300 people took the class this semester, and that is the average number of people in the class each semester for the past ten years. That means that 9,000 papers have been submitted, and 2.6 MILLION combinations of papers need to be examined. Yikes!
I suppose that the job could be "chunked" into groups and run in parallel on more than one machine, but that does not degate the raw volume of data that would have to be examined.
And if that fails, you can always submit your question to "Ask Slashdot".
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
What about in the real world where coding is always done in groups???
/. readers are excellent coders and most of their peers were successful only because they were in the /.'er's group. But, to be quite frank, this is what it usually is like in big software companies.
I'll get flamed for this, because most
Fret not, because the good coders are often recognised rather quickly, and are the first to be promoted. Then when you are the boss you can sack the people you know that don't put enough into the group.
And the degree only "really" matters for your first three jobs, then its all experience. So the bad coders won't be progressing up unless they change their ways...
So you will get your revenge, it'll just take some time.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Simply put, I do almost all of my work in my head.
I know the problem, I know the steps, but I can't really help jumping ahead of where my pencil is.
I know this is a bad practice, but someone like me gets penalized by a partial-credit type of grading system where correctness does not equal full credit.
I know the material, I don't cheat (they stopped accusing me of that by the end of Soph. year, I had a 'reputation'), if I get 85% of the answers correct, why do I deserve a D?
Kalrand
-the voice of reason
When I was beginning high school, calculators were still not allowed. We spent many hours looking up log tables, and approximating trig functions. There was a certain amount of faith required in working that way, because the answers were never particularly accurate.
The next year or so after that, calculators became part of the curriculum. I advanced immediately. Freed from the complications of trig and log tables, I had more time to understand the problems and to learn how to solve them. I was a battler in first year math, once I had a calculator, I actually did pretty well. I was equal top of my high school class. You don't get that by punching buttons alone.
Open-book exams are another classic case-in-point. Students love them, because they think they're easy. Good educators know that the real skill isn't in transcribing from a book, but in knowing what to transcribe. Anyone can copy verbatim, but not everyone can copy the right stuff. A key trap for students at open-book exams is to turn up with every document that ever crossed their study desk during the course of the class. I always turned up with maybe the main textbook and one pad of notes. More often than not, I never opened either of them. Open-book exams are a classic trap for young players.
All this stuff about calculators and internet and all that simply means that educations needs to change to keep pace with the world. A good educator will change the style of his teaching and testing to adapt to the technology and techniques of the day. A bad educator will ignore progress and ban the calculators.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
If Yoda is so smart, why proper sentences cannot he make?
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
The Alice in Wonderland quote is attributed to the original author, yes. The idea to use it in that way was copied from Cheswick and Bellovin, and that ain't acknowledged!
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
If you take those monkeys, edumacate them a little, limit their subject matter and give them all the same limited range of reference works, then you're going to get your Shakespeare sooner rather than later.
For sure, there is more than one way to skin any given cat, but there's only so many ways.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
In a situation involving papers, as this one did, the easiest solution is to have the students sign up (put on a list) the topics that they are writing about, so that there are obviously no duplicates.
The best test is an open book type of test, although it is the hardest to correct, because you had to ask questions that really determine the studendts understanding.
In one math class I know of, the teacher had the final exam set up with a series of fiercely complex questions. But if you really understood what was going on, you got the correct answers, which were all very simple integers and fractions, etc.
You had to know enough to be able to cut through the BS.
This applies to computing very nicely. Did you fix it? Does it crash? etc.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
When I asked him to explain, he said that he had a very clever way of detecting cheating. He compiled the programs and ran cmp, and my program had come out the same as someone else's! I had set my umask to allow world-read of my entire set of files, naively thinking that I could trust my classmates. The other student had copied my assignment straight off the disk drive.
Fortunately, I was able to prove I was innocent because - get this - when the student copied my program he didn't bother to remove my name from the comments !
The grader changed my grade but told me in the future he would hold me accountable for allowing others to cheat off of me, even if that wasn't my intention! Ever since then I was much more careful in how I set my file permissions. The sad part was, the person who cheated off of me had been a good friend of mine. I would have gladly offered to help him out (in the honest sense) if he had let me know he was having trouble in the class. :-(
I should interrupt my rant and note that, as a university faculty member, I certainly do not support plagiarism or cheating in any way, shape or form, &c., &c. But. When you have to subject the creative work of your students to what is essentially an automated quality control process to ensure that it's original work, then they're not really getting all that much of an education anyway, are they? Why not just put your skateboard-and-fire-extinguisher act on streaming video and let the kids watch it at home?
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
Memo to self: Run doctoral thesis through thesaurus a few times.
On a tangent: "Bloomfield's wildly popular two-part course, "How Things Work," offers an introduction to the physics of everyday life -- how an airplane flies, how a television works -- taught in laymen's language." Don't they teach this stuff in high school?
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Hey.
"It seems to have worked, too"
Unless students just started re-wording thier (copied) work. Or copying from obscure technical books instead of other people.
Sig: "You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)"
In this case, it would seem you can...
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
A better solution is to grade one paper, and let the two students split that grade in whatever way they deem appropriate. That way, they have to indirectly tell you who did the work (assuming some level of fair play between them).
When Professor Gies talks of "the community of trust," he is specifically speaking about the University of Virginia Honor Code. This is a formalized institution at UVa, consisting of the following components.
1) In order to be accepted to the University, a student must read and sign the Honor Code rules and regulations (mainly don't cheat, don't help others cheat, turn in cheaters, understand that everyone will be doing this, too). I think in 1986 when I applied to UVa (I didn't go there), one of the essays on the application required me to tell the University what I thought about the Honor Code.
(2)Whenever anyone takes an exam or turns in a project at UVa, they are required to append and sign a statement that says something to the extent of "On my honor, I have neither given nor received aid on this work."
3) Anyone caught cheating is tried before a council of students, not professors, and can be expelled from the university.
As you can see, the University has tried to create a community where honesty and personal integrity are created and maintained by the student body, not imposed by the University Administration. I'm certain that this is the "community of trust" that was referred to.
BTW, this accusation of wide spread cheating is a huge black eye to the University. They pride themselves in the Honor Code as something that sets them apart from other schools. If it turns out that their students are ignoring it, part of their self-perceived elite reputation is seriously tarnished.
The moderators who gave this "+1 Interesting" and "-1 Overrated" need a slap upside the head.
that he's reviewing these results on an individual basis. We use a similar system we wrote to check students in our CS program at school. It really can work. It can also destroy someone's academic record if wrong. This kind of stuff needs human review to insure that it's matching patterns correctly.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
Do your own paper and be sure to footnote absolutely every reference.
-- I Am Not A Terrorist.
Ahh, the old "if you don't lock your doors, you deserve to get robbed" line. For one, most people DON'T know how to chmod, and just use whatever the default that the admin set up for user accounts (should we blame that guy?), and on the other hand, in a community of TRUST and openness they should be able to leave their files however they please for their own easy access (say through a web page).
Look, there are some fairly obvious reasons as to why cheating is bad or immoral. (1) A student is getting credit for something he didn't do; (2) One student is parasiting off of another; (3) Other reasons which I'm too lazy to go into, so instead of pasting and copying the comments of other slashdotters, I'll simplly say read the below comments.
Now, that said, there is also one obvious reason why cheating is not beneficial to the cheater himself: (1) If he is cheating because he doesn't understand the material, he isn't learning the material; (2) If he is cheating because he understands the material, but is too lazy or was too lazy to do the "grunt work," this breeds an attitude of laziness. As far as I can see, each is as bad as the other, if they are a pattern. Of course, most of us who are or were good students did cheat sometimes, or help other people to cheat, but this was something we did once or twice a year: in other words, it was a rarity.
Of course, cheating CAN also be beneficial to a person, if his goals are financial success, reputation, or other EXTERNAL valuables. How do you think despots and dictators "get elected fairly elected"? By cheating. They rig the system. So, in so far as external goods -- namely, power, money, fame, etc -- cheating does benefit the person cheating, IF they do not get caught, or IF when they are caught, nothing is done.
The lessson here: If you're going to cheat, DON'T GET CAUGHT. The only reason for cheating is the belief that it will allow you to obtain external goods(i.e., a better grade, thus possibly better money in the future) than you would have gotten otherwise. So its obvious that IF YOU GET AWAY WITH IT, cheating is GOOD for you if your only criteria is external goods like money, fame, power, grades, etc. However, it does not increase your worth as a person, nor make you any more knowledgeable(except, perhaps, in how to cheat).
Now, that I've talked about why cheating is "bad"(I quote it because only religious zealots and other oh-so self-righteous moralists believe in "absolute morality"), and about the benefits and costs of cheating to the cheater, let me identify part of the problem.
As another slashdotter said, part of the problem is the professors. Many students don't feel that professors spend a lot of time on their papers. This may be because some professors do not comment on papers alot, and for various other reasons. A student is not motivated to write a good paper if a professor is going to spend 10 minutes grading it, and it is not fair to ask a student to write a solid 10-page paper if the professor is going to spend one minute on each page. So, in short, professors have to spend an appropriate amount of time on the papers they grade, relative to the standards(length/quality/etc) they set for their papers. If a professors term-paper assignment costs a student 15% of his time, then a professor should devote 15% of his time to grading the papers he receives.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
But don't forget that these people will devalue your degree. The guy who hires the flunkie friends learns firsthand that people from X university aren't worth hiring. Suddenly, you become worth less becasue he's not going to hire anybody else who graduated from X...
I only wish there was some way to prove original authorship.
;)
There is, and it's standard part of writing a paper: Notes
The notes you take researching your paper are the equivalent to a scientific lab book, which can be used to support claims of original authorship.
Good research and writing habits provide much of the tools needed to defend one's IP claims
Beyond that, one could look at other things:
- Non-final drafts of the paper.
- Library check-out logs showing you actually used the books you referenced
- An oral examination of the paper's material. (Most papers reflect just a portion of what was learned during the research)
- Witnesses. Roommates, friends, etc. testifying to you keeping them up until dawn the day the paper was done, with your incessant keyboard clacking.
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Uh, that's why the quotes.
A fingerprint such that different papers from the same author show the same 'fingerprint', as well as showing that a paper plagarized to some extent has a similar fingerprint; the size of the match indicates the size of the plagarism.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Heh, if they're re-wording the copied work to break down the search strings, then it means they must be rewriting significant stretches of the papers...
:)
Which means that some thought had to go in.
Now, if the prof could somehow develop a 'fingerprint' technology...
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
I can't stand and could never stand this kind of attitude. It makes me remember a girl from my University who would keep some exam tips for herself, like hard-to-find copies of a previous exam's typical questions. So she would be the only one to be well prepared for the exam. Those people don't deserve to live in a group. They don't fight to succeed in their life, but to beat others while doing it.
Why would I care if the guy next door bought a more expensive care than mine by eluding the IRS? I will certainly not get out at night to scratch his body paint so that my car looks and scores better!
That girl is a bitch. Mod me downn as Flamebait, I don't care.
Please tell me I'm not the only one to notice this...
Your post talks about how the professor's program nearly ELIMINATED the plagiarism by the final class... But then your sig at the end reads:
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
This seems like a perfectly good example of a technological solution being applied successfully to a sociological problem... Maybe Edwards' Law is more like a trite observation...
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
As a computer science student at RPI, I can tell you that there are plenty of teachers that screen students' programs against the others, looking for plagiarists. There are always a handful each year that get caught, but there are plenty more that cheat and get away with it. My thought is that while it is important for CS students to know how to program well, it is also a good skill in general to know how to cheat and get away with it. (Bill Gates comes to mind...) Also, as the internet keeps growing, there will be an increasing database of essays, programs, etc. While these can be used for cheating, they can also be used as teaching tools. The problem is, it is impossible for teachers to check a student's paper with all these files. But as long as they try, it becomes a fun game, no?
"almost no plagiarism"...this seems to assume someone still did it after a butload of kids got caught, this is just fucking astonishing!
Friend: "Dude, you sure you still want this paper, I mean that proff guy nailed all those people with his computer.."
Stupid Cheater: "What? Uhh...Yeah dude...Whatever, just pass the bong."
Fucking idiots.
Burn Hollywood Burn
plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please "research"
Seriously, one criterion used in assessing professors for tenure is whether they have written books. Almost all the undergraduate textbooks for a given topic are essentially identical, without a single unique idea. Why? Because when someone needs to write such a text he just regurgitates what he's already seen in other books. This is why the few original works, like the Feynman lectures on physics, are so valuable.
Evidence for this exists. In particular, Stephen Jay Gould (in an essay printed in Natural History magazine and reprinted in one of his books) noticed that certain examples of evolution were used over and over again, repeating the same errors. What really caught his eye was that eohippus was described as being "this size of a fox terrier" in every modern book that mentions it. He had a grad student look back in textbooks through this century and found that at first the eohippus was described as the size of a cat or a small dog or a fox. At some point the fox terrier description appeared and within a decade or so that was the only description given. Are students held to a higher standard than their professors?
BTW, I did a google search on "eohippus terrier" and the first hit was in French, "Ce petit ancêtre du cheval moderne...la taille d'un fox-terrier".
Metro-Goldwyn-Moskva buys movie rights for six million rubles, changing title to "The Eternal Triangle", with Ingrid Bergman playing part of hypotenuse
Which is the reason for, as someone else suggested, inner-group grading. Just like performance evaluations by the leaders of groups in the business world.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
A potential solution to this would be to simply not punish the ones whose paper got copied -- only the one who plagerized.
But your anecdote with the 3rd greade teacher exemplifies the fundamental crux of the problem. How do we know who was the one that copied and who was the one that was copied from?
---
---
I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
C'mon, let's be fair about this. Is the professor or TA or whomever really taking the time to read these 1500-word papers? How could they not know that copying was going on?
A magic matching program to catch complete lifting of entire text? Unless they have Alzheimer's, how can this go missed when each paper is marked in the same time frame? Unless...
IMHO the markers give so little attention to the papers, and the students know this, so cheating is effectively encouraged. I've heard "urban legends" of guys purposely removing random numbered pages from assignments, and having it go unnoticed. So who is screwing whom in this system?
Anybody want a peanut?
I know the difference between Astronomy and Astrology. I did nean Astrology though, sorry to disappoint you. I nearly became a professional Astrologer before I went into the IT fields...
BTW, Venus Rising in the 7th house of Mars is utter nonsense. The seventh house is where planets are when they are setting in the west, not rising in the East (12th house).
Because of my work with a calculator, I can usually guess rising signs given time and day fo birth even though the shirical geomwtry involved is somewhat tricky... That was my point, and this discussion is becomming off-topic quickly.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Seriously, isn't this efficient use of resources?
... what if you had to take a course that you would never use in your life afterwards. Wouldn't it make sense to just borrow the tested code, instead of reinventing the wheel?
Think about it
After all, it's what all good coders do when we use object oriented code, templates, and base our new code on previous working code.
Note that I don't cheat and personally think cheaters (which is probably the majority) should all get caught and bounced out of class, but just thought I'd point out we're (geeks) some of the worst offenders, especially us open source dudes.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
...Run it on all new comments.
"Sorry, this post is almost identical to an earlier post in this story."
I thought that was crazy, there can't be that many people that have written a program that does this astounding feat!
=-=-=-=-=
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
Aiii! This may work beautifully in the arcane and arbitrary world of higher education, but in the real world, you can't afford to understand every line of code.
Example: I need to print a box on a windoze screen. I say: msgbox "somejunk"
Do I know what the source code for msgbox is? No
Do I know what win32API it's calling? No
Do I NEED to know that to use the msgbox function? NO!
That is the reason why I spent $600+ bux for my version of VB6, so I wouldn't have to.
I give you another example: I wrote a function that hits a web site (with xmlhttp) from the web server. I send a zip code, and retrieve the Census Tract, the Average Income, and varous other geographical codes, and I dump them in a database. This is used by the Audit department at my company.
Do I know how XMLHTTP implements the TCP/IP bindings? No, and I couldn't care less. And neither does my boss, because I did it in less than half a day.
I implemented PGP encryption on email with GPL software, in 2 hours. I did the same thing with Rijndael.
I made a file upload utility from GPL'd software for my intranet server that does not require a dll. It works like a charm, and I did not read the source code. OH MY GOD MY BOSS WAS PLEASED, because I had it running 3 days before the deadline.
The reality is that if I had to learn why a program works a certain way before I used it, I wouldn't be using the internet (cuz i can't figure out IP domains and subdomains)
I don't even program in C, or Java, or Lisp, or Perl, but I am good with vb and vbscript. Does that mean I have to rewrite C programs in vb?
In the real world, you reuse as much as possible, whether you wrote it or not, whether you could replicate it or not, simply because it makes sense economically.
Our stock is up, I got a raise, my wife is happy, and I work 40 hrs per week MAX. And I still have time to read (and post to) slashdot).
It's the real world, the one where grades don't count, the one where your net worth is directly affected by your efficiency.
But, in the arcane and arbitrary world of Academia, true, the rules are different. Which is to me a stupid way of preparing people for real life. Imagine a drill instructor teaching new recruits how to disassemble and reassemble helicopter turbines just so they can get air support when they're on the ground, as foot soldiers.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Reminds me of my University prof's who objected to anyone bringining in programmable calculators.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Third, this whole article in the Washington Post is a piece of propaganda that can be summed up in one phrase: "Obey authority". Fuck authority. If you want to learn, learn. If you don't care, cheat. You are in control of your own life, and don't take your professor's point of view too seriously.
My guess is you aren't a college student. If you were, you would probably realize that attending college was your own choice. If you believed that you shouldn't trust a professor's "authority" then you wouldn't care to go in the first place.
The problem here were students who realized the importance of "obeying authority" by handing in an assignment, but didn't realize the importance of actually completing the assignment themselves.
Always nice to see a 'hoo on the boards :-)
As a current student I can tell you that things have changed very little since your graduation. I'm living on grounds (campus for your non-UVA types) right now and in the basement of my building there's a few posters talking about Honor's impact on minorities. I see the African American community and the Hispanic community are suffering particularly badly this year.
There's a lot of talk here about what this type of thing will do to the system. Many are saying that the media attention and the massive scandle will force a lot of these cases to the jury without sufficient proof (i.e. the cases of those that wrote the origional material). The worry is that juries, being comprised of students, will prosecute because they've read about this in the news, and the system will loose credibility in the student body.
The other potential nightmare is the opposite. Media attention focus' on UVA and, despite the best efforts of the Honor counsil, none of the charges pan out. Case flops. What then?
There's a lot to be said for this kind of technological enforcement. It's important. The system, no matter how based on trust, must have a measure of enforcement to work. Enforcement requires investigation. UVA prides itself on its ability to allow students to take great liberties based on the trust confired from the honor system. I take most of my exams in my dorm room on my computer. It's much nicer then writing the damn things out in a bue book and it's much more comfortable as well.
There's not much more I can add to this. I can tell you all with certainty that these cases will see trial. I can also say with reasonabl certanty that some of them will end in expulsion and/or revocation of the degree. It is the number of them, and the satisfaction of the news media with that percentage that will make or break this institution in the coming year.
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Having often had that experience of doing 75% of the work and getting 25% of the credit -- it sounds like this is an improvement. Assuming the peer grading doesn't turn into a popularity contest...
Apparently this prof had 500 students in one class. If he actually read all the papers, he wouldn't be able to pick out the instances of same wording from among them all (Probably 5 or 10 slaves^h^h^h^h^hgrad asst's graded the papers for him, but that gives you a pretty good chance that the duplicate papers won't end up in front of the same guy.)
Detecting this in programs and in english composition is probably a bit different. Programs are probably going to look quite a lot alike because they do the same thing -- but variable names don't become identical by accident. So it really just comes down to whether they cribbed from each other, or all of them cribbed from the same source (Knuth, e.g.) and didn't bother to rename the variables... and how much cribbing from Knuth is allowed?
I only wish there was some way to prove original authorship. I think 95% of the time it would become obvious just by asking the two people a few questions about the subject of the paper -- if only one knows what's in the paper... If it was duplicate computer programs, the odds would rise to 99%. If all else fails, you could do stylistic analysis (compare the suspect report to other reports turned in by the same people.)
I think it would work pretty well for English classes -- anyone who can rewrite a paper well enough to get past that scan, without lowering the grade a point or more, would be competent at English composition. But for a programming assignment you could just change the variable names with a global search and replace, and it would fly right past this sort of scan. (I could write a program that did this for those too dumb to do their own global search and replace in about half an hour, but if they pirate homework assignments, how do you keep them from pirating the program...) I suppose you could write a more sophisticated scanner that identified identical structures in the programs, but if the assignments are as simple as when I was in college, it will be hard to decide when that wasn't just two people independently arriving at the same algorithm.
They can't do a computer search for plagiarism on hard copy!
Just kidding. I _do not_ want to have to work alongside someone who got through college by copying papers from the internet. Obviously schools need to do a lot more along this line, or else a college degree will soon be worth no more than the high school diploma is now.
Plagiarism charges could be disproved if students would simply embed acrostics in their original work. Of course, you have to make sure that your acrostic is embedded in such a way that it will be copied by the plagiarist, unnoticed. Generally, it's not all that hard to "watermark" your work in this manner. Even this post contains an example of a reasonably subtle acrostic. Naturally, any paper containing an acrostic of the author's name would be assumed to be a completely original work.
We had one guy that had been there 11 years find out that a fresh from the U. new hire was making $15,000 more than he was (When he demanded a raise he was told to shove it, and found a new job three days later).
I don't work there any more. Go Figure.
You are *not* the weakest link.
I didn't say your current boss will reward your talent. He won't. Not if you'll keep doing your job at the same lame price, increased by the annual changing of the carrot.
You can always make more by going to another job. But only if the other job wants you more.
It's the ones who never get that who end up making low-five-figures for their entire lives.
And if you really want options, buy some. The risk/reward works out the same, without the golden-handcuff effect.
--Blair
"The rest of us go into consulting."
Do your own work, never have a problem.
Except when a lot of other people are cheating and it hurts you on the curve. Even here at Columbia some people cheat just to keep up.
--------------------------------
The reason? These foreign students took their grades very seriously (they were paying for this course themselves) and attended all the available tutorials hoping to gain an edge over their fellow students. In one of these optional tutorial sessions, an identical problem was used as a worked example, and the students present took copious notes. While phrase matching may assist an investigation into cheating, I feel it is vital that academics don't fall into the popular trap of believing that everything churned out by a computer is necessarily the whole story. Unfortunately, as the quality of automated systems improves, so does misplaced confidence.
I was once a TA in a psychology of memory class, where the students were assigned a term paper. Two students each handed in a description of a simple but clever memory experiment they had allegedly done at their (different) frat houses. Another TA and I stumbled across the similarities in their writeups -- enough identical phrases and statistical results for it to be quite clear that the papers were functional copies -- and reported our findings to the professor, who flunked them both. The students -- graduating seniors -- appealed their case to the dean, who came back to the professor asking for an explanation for his decision.
Taking this as an intellectual challenge, the professor -- a mathematical psychologist -- proceeded to do the statistics to determine the probability that two different samples of people from two different frat houses could be run through the same experiment and produce exactly the same results -- identical statistics out to the 8 decimal places both students had included in their papers. The probability of this happening was appropriately small -- several billion to one at least; the dean upheld the grades.
This book assumes that you have access to a calculator or computer that can graph function, find roots of equations, and computer integrals numerically.
Also a quote from a student:
I have difficulty visualizing graphs in my head, and this has always lead to my downfall in calculus. With the assisstance of the comptuers, that stress was no longer a factor, and I was able to concentrate on the concepts behind the shapes of graphs, and these becase gradualy more clear.
Basically, my point is there there are plenty of things where calculators really are a neceissity. OFten having the aid of a calculator is precisely what allows a student to think about the concepts and truly understand the problem. I doubt I would have as good an understanding of math if I had needed to spend hours on end on simple, repetitive calculations. These would have gotten in the way of and detracted from my learning of the overall governing principles that I was learning about.
I also graduate in CS in June and can tell you that lots of people in my classes also don't deserve their degrees. The worst example has to be last term where we had a Java program made up of 5-6 classes, and the teacher would post the other classes so we could work on ours without having to have written the whole thing initially, and people would just decompile the code and turn it in with changes in variable names and such. It gives people like me, who acually like coding and have worked hard to get good at it, a bad image when anyone can get the same grade because they downloaded a decompiler.
This can't catch on yet, if only for the reason that very few schools that I know of require an electronic copy of your work. Personally, I've never been able to just email a paper to a professor except in times of relative emergency. I don't see feeding N pages of paper through a text reader as being practical, either.
Professors will just have to pay attention, I guess.
As a former scholar in the field of Mathematics I am in accordance with your statement. Students who do not perform their own investigations not only display their lackadaisical attitudes for all to see but to make matters worse to not even attempt to SCRAMBLE the words around is a true sign of an individual lacking basic mental powers. The solution is short term confinement to a bovine slaughterhouse where upon the act of manipulating beef patties shall be mastered until one is again fit to become a pupil.
The only true fix is going to be the custom-written paper. Not only is this expensive, but it's not too hard for analysis to see if two papers were written by the same author. If your work comes back with a bunch of different writers' "fingerprints" on it... busted! Time to buckle down and do your own work!
--
Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Once, quite recently, I received a very good final project from a very bad student. I had never seen the program before, but it was immediately obvious that they had cheated. How to prove it? I entered several of the longer identifiers at Google as search terms, and lo and behold, a link to the original program appeared as the first hit. It was a posted solution to a course assignment at University of Queensland, Australia, in the CS department. The extension student was, in fact, living in Australia at the time.
They were very shocked when I sent them their F, along with the source URL.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
Let me get this straight, two thirds of the students aren't watching the actual lecture, but rather a COPY via closed cirtuit TV... I wonder if there is any corelation between students who watch a copy of a lecture, and students who hand in copied assignments.
Probably the best benefit to come, were reliable and pervasive anti-plagiarism methods in place, would be the fact that everyone would feel free to share their work with each other. I've always been open with my own work, but it is annoying when others pester you with questions when you know the intention is to cheat )to a greater or lesser degree). But, if you knew that actively showing and discussing your intended submission would still require that others produce their own original work, I would tend to be even more open. The key word here being "actively" discussing your work - this allows for sharing knowledge, which is always useful in the learning process.
I've always thought it was a shame that many a piece of work I did at university is handed in, comes back with a grade and a few comments, and whether it's a good or bad grade you never really got to discuss it. For instance, imagine that for any given assignment you could look at everybody else's drafts. For any reasonably substantial work, there's little chance two people would independently come up with the same work, and there's still the option of oral discussions to clear up any doubt.
I don't think being the source of copied work is an offence (unless there were some conclusive proof of an actual profit motive) and I would expect it's easy to tell who was the author of a piece of work.
A further benefit would be that the assignments themselves would have to be written to allow proper grading of the responses - anything that has only one real answer or approach is worthless because no matter how bright you are, if someone else happens to mention what the answer is, then all you're doing is trying to find a way of paraphrasing that answer, rather than thinking about how to solve the actual problem. (can you paraphrase an algorithm? whatever the semantic equivalent is for practical assigments.)
I used to teach GED classes, and I had students who passed who came back and told me that they had essentially closed their eyes and guessed at the multiple test questions, and done this over and over until they got a passing score.
Here, the fault clearly lies within the educationnal system, in particular the testing.
Where I studied, multiple choice tests were quite the exception. Usually a question was actually an order like "Explain..." or "Outline the process of...". So the answer was not checking a box, but write a little essay (typically 3 lines to half a page). Closing your eyes doesn't work well here.
Then, if you failed the same exame 3 times, you were in trouble. If you failed 5 times - "Good bye, you are too stupid for this place".
(In practice, the 3 / 5 limit was not really carried out, and there are some tricks you can summon. I never knew anyone who actually got kicked. But I know a couple of people who took the "you are too stupid" serious and moved on.)
A stupid educational system makes it easy for stupid people to pass.
Here they do almost all the programming assingments in groups, Before this semester the entire group got one grade. But people complained that other group memebers weren't doing thier fair share of the work. So they introduced a new grading system for group projects. If you're in a group of 4 that means you get four grades. You get an overall grade on the project itself and then your other group memebers give you a grade based on the knowledge you showed in the group and also your participation. Since they started this the groups i've been in have had alot more group interaction and group efforts on all the code and GUI design, were as it used to be one or two people wrote the code and then the rest did the GUI's. It's helped alot and hurt those that really don't know what they are doing.
"Shut up about my driving. You're still alive."
Lets assume that this testing for cheats is done and that everyone knows it (ie, it's mentioned once per semester).
This would mean that (as at the end of the article) very few people would cheat this way.
For each set of "matches":
If paper(s) match against a paper from a previous year or semester, then it's obvious that this current student is cheating.
If the paper(s) match only in the current semester, bring both of the students, and interview them seperately. It would be fairly easy to ask questions that would make it obvious that he or she cheated. Why? Because people cheat to be lazy. If they could provide the answers off the top of their head, they'd not need to cheat.
For the really odd case that both answer questions equally well, then you'd either have to mark it down for both or let them go. Your choice (I'd make it depend on whether they both seemed well versed let 'em go, else get 'em both in trouble).
This process is made easier if one has records of prior cheating or potential cheating.
Ciao!
The Doctor What (KF6VNC)
Far simpler would be to use an acrostic. Acrostics, for those of you not in the know, are where the first letters of sentences or lines form other words, or adhere to some special pattern. Many authors have used this: Lewis Carroll is one famous example, and even one of the Psalms in the Bible is an acrostic. Of course, you have to make sure that your acrostic is embedded in such a way that it will be copied by the plagiarist, unnoticed. Usually it's not all that hard to "watermark" your work in this manner. See this post for an example of a reasonably subtle acrostic.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
The honor system at UVA is student run so the folks that get the money don't control it (in theory, there's always possibily of behind the scenes manipulation by the suits).
Certainly only punishing the guilty is important, but in this case I'm not worried. The standard of proof in an honor trial at UVa is "beyond a shadow of a doubt." I was on an honor trial once and the jurors, judge, and advocates take it all very seriously. I think conviction of innocent people is very rare.
Even though I'm only about to finish up high school, this has helped me to make the right choices about copying. Whenever the temptation to copy something directly from the internet, or a book, the thought crosses my mind: "Will this come back to haunt me later?" Not that it's possible now, but eventually computers will be fast enough, programs inteligent enough, storage cheap enough, that it won't be an unthinkable task to scan and OCR all my past work. How easy would it be, then, to compare everything I've done with copies of the works of others? I can easily imagine a scenario where an exectutive/polititian/whatever makes some enemies, who decide to run this check. Can't you see it as well? Will we, in a decade or so, start seeing tabloids announcing that a certain presidential candidate copied his way through college? Walk the straight and narrow - if for no other reason than to prevent future retribution.
One of the CS professors at the university I attended was incredibly paranoid about cheaters. He wrote a similar program for scanning different students' submitted source code and flagging those that seemed similar. It's a pretty smart thing to do, if you ask me. Heck, I even know someone who got caught by it. I'm not sure how effective it was in general.
Regardless, though, receiving a poor grade on any type of project is a million times better than copying someone else's work, even if you don't get caught.
I don't cheat and I don't steal, which is common sense in my mind, but unfortunately, not in the minds of many other students.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Maybe students should try and claim "First Pos..er..Paper"?
As I'm writing this, I'm currently a graduate student working as one of two currently employed by the university who are qualified to mark assignments in what is a popular course. From this perspective, group projects are great, because I only have to mark 1/3 as many assignments. My experience with actually working in a group as a learning experience is the opposite, though.
To date I've been in groups from both points of views. In computer science groups, I've been a very strong member of the group, and in some cases I've been a very weak group member. In both situations, I've hated it.
In university, people traditionally get assessed individually. Whether working in groups or not, everyone's primary aim is to get good marks for themselves. This is completely opposite from what group work implies.
The real world has teams everywhere. Realistically, it takes years for a really good team to form, where everyone's strengths and weaknesses are used efficiently and people work together. In the real world though, people aren't paying to be fairly assessed. In contrast, they're paid to work with other people. And there's a reasonable chance that if they're dragging other people along, they can leave the job or at least will eventually get reassigned - without effectively losing anything.
In an student team though, you're effectively thrown into a group and given about a week to work out each other's strengths and weaknesses. Then you're required to fight to the death about the best way to get the job done instead of being told by a team leader of some sort who takes responsiility (since everyone's geared towards their own individual assessment). Once a path's chosen at the expense of everyone else's ideals, there's not much option to change it down the track.
When I've been a strong member in a group, the weak members are often just completely left behind. Right now I'm working in a group of four. Person 1 has been sick for the last five weeks (the entire project so far), person 2 has no clue whatsoever about how to do anything, and most of everything's been done by person 3 and myself.
I'll ignore the sick person for now. The second person is a very nice guy, but he's just not grasping the subject at all, for as much as he's trying. He's repeatedly asking how things work, and no matter how much I explain, he simply doesn't get it, and in the process anything that he does related to contributions is likely to drag the mark down or break everyone else's code if it's not completely overhauled and rewritten beyond his understanding before it's used. Effectively, he's a liability. The group mark gets unfairly distributed to him, and our marks get dragged down because of him.
Having said that, I can sympathise with him completely because I've been in the same sort of position with other subjects in other courses. A couple of times I've ended up in groups where the other members are completely ahead of me, or think about problems in completely different ways. It's a really awkward position to be in, knowing that you're piggybacking on what might be a good mark, and not being able to contribute anything useful.
In these situations, strong students don't benefit at all, because of the typical assessment system. They end up with a proportionally unfair workload, doing their bit and redoing other people's bit so their grade won't suffer. Weak students don't benefit either - they just end up in a sea of not having a clue. If anything they might end up doing the drudgery work like writeups. Even then, it's really hard to find useful drudgery work.
Usually, the only way groups can work effectively when people can actually learn from each other, is when they're evenly matched - and that's a very unusual situation.
When I'm in a weak-student position, I've benefitted a lot more from working with other relatively weak students who are working through and figuring out the same problems that I am. The mark might not be as good, but it's more representative for everyone concerned and I feel much better about it as well as understanding more.
Asking good students is perfectly okay within reason, but it's unrealistic to expect them to work as tutors for weak students at the expense of their own work. From a strong student perspective, it gets really tedious answering the types of questions all the time, and often it doesn't help anyway, because students aren't trained teachers.
With respect to the idea that being able to work in groups is a good thing, I have trouble understanding what use it is to teach this in an academic environment. That is unless or until the assessment system is completely overhauled.
There's almost nothing that can be learned in 12 weeks (give or take) of infighting about the best way to do something. This is easy enough to pick up in a real job, and in many respects I've found it much easier to do in a real job because everyone (me included) is prepared to tolerate other people's ideas when it won't mean the plummetting of a good grade. Such group dynamics exercises would be better left to psychology and sociology subjects.
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As Eric wrote in his post, from a different perspective, anything we get from a computer we tend to treat as absolute fact. It is all to easy to find some connection that implies plagiarism.
There's a great statistic on birthdays. How many people do you think you'd need to have in a room before the odds were in favour of two of them having the same birthday? About 365/2=182? Actually about 30.
In a new year's science lecture on the BBC, a lecturer asked the left half of a room of 1024(ish) people to think heads, the other half tails. He flipped a coin and discounted the half that got it wrong. He carried on subdividing until he got to one who got it right ten times.
The problem is that most people don't realise how common some probabilities really are. In the first group of 30 (about a class size), "two of them clearly copied each other's birthdays!" In the second group, "no one can guess a coin correctly ten times in a row, he clearly went forward in time and copied what the coin was going to do - or the coin was rigged and he was told the answers!"
These are amusing, semi-trivial examples but they demonstrate the point that putting all of your convictions behind apparently conclusive numbers is flawed. Six word sequences can only be an indicator of cheating, not conclusive proof. All a six word phrase may really be showing you is that two students come from the same area and share the same turns of speach or that they were both equally influenced by something that was presented in a lecture.
I don't mean to maintain that statistical analysis is impossible, simply that it is all too easy to put too much weight behind it. Add that to the very valid point that in two identical papers, you may only have one cheat and one victim, expelling based on the system seems very flawed.
Think a program like this will send a wake-up call to those students who have forgotten what the community of trust is all about.
Technology has made some of the easy ways out very seductive and blurred the lines between what's acceptable and what's not. Cheating is on a gray scale. Things come rolling into your computer, and you feel ownership of them even if you don't own them.
And that's what I think.
Murphy's Law of Copiers
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
Maybe I missed something. I don't know how performing a pattern match on Term Papers in order to identify cheaters relates to the "community of trust"i>
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
That's irony.
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"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house"
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"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house"
-George Carlin
As a UVa grad, let me point out that the class in question here is generally regarded as a complete "gut" class. The large majority of students taking it are either athletes or people who just need a basic physics class to get their degree. It doesn't surprise me at all to hear that a large number of students got buster in that class.
Oh, and the honor system is regarded by many to be much of a joke, too. This really sucks for the students that got busted, but if they're going to cheat that blatantly in what's essentially a "gimme" class, they deserve every little bit that's coming to them. And it's always nice to see the honor code coming under scrutiny instead of simply being exhaulted as the greatest thing since sliced bread. :)
-jdm, (I'm not a bitter grad ... why do you ask?) :)
Sounds like a job for watermark technology.
"As you can see, prof, if you take any paragraph of my paper and checksum it and rad-50 decode it, you get the word SLOPPY. That's why I had to use the strange word 'strategery' in the 5th sentence; it was the only way I could make the checksum come out right. Let's see the bad kid who sits next to me, who isn't named Sloppy, explain why his paper also has that mathmatical feature."
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
While there is a point where plagiarism can be a bad thing, unfortunately all too often the academic world teaches people that teamwork is cheating, and that is not always a good thing. One of the biggest problems (second in my opinion only to the fact that a large percentage of people in the computer business are functionally near illiterate) is that too many people don't work well in teams.
Many Hackers have a bent towards solitary work, and often reinvent the wheel more than they need to in the first place. We don't need the educational system encouraging this bad behavior.
The world of the Internet and open source development is finally providing a way that hackers from around the world can share their work and learn teamwork. This is a good thing.
While I don't know that the professor that was the subject of this article is really a good example of what I'm talking about, his actions are sure to spur on others to crack the whip and take things too far.
Another problem is also overzelous professors going too far trying to catch cheaters. I am a college student, and I definitely agree that cheating is a major problem, especially in lecture/paper oriented classes like liberal arts. However, professors must be equally cautious in accusing students of cheating. I like this professors system of checking a database of previous papers, but even so, it is very difficult to find who was the original author.
Some professors aren't so careful, and will accuse students of cheating on a whim. I was so accused after submitting a final paper for a liberal arts class I was taking. The professor thought it was "too good" for me to have written it, and said that I must have copied from some other source. In fact, the entire work was 100% my own, using my own language. I didn't even do any direct research, just wrote a bunch of BS off the top of my head. After discussing the issue with the professor, and he relented and gave me an A-.
I want to stop students from cheating (and artifically raising the grading standard) as much as anyone, but not at the expense of trust between the student and the professor. Thats why I support systems that log papers submitted and run heuristics checks on them, but students should also be made aware that such systems are in use. I think this will be the necessary disincentive to force students to not cheat.
Ultimately I think the problem is exacerbated by massive classes (like this 500 student lecture) where the sole requirements for grading are usually a paper or two plus a final exam. If the particular professor who accused me had known me personally, or been at all familiar with the previous papers I had submitted, he wouldn't have been so quick to pass judgement. Huge classes also promote cheating because students know they are far less likely to be caught in such an evironment.
But thats just my 2 bits.
Spyky
This particular prof was acting on a report that there was rampant cheating, and he was more or less looking to confirm. That makes sense.
However, in other fields where it's more text based (like "read these 4 books" instead of "study chapter 3 on partial differentials"), the papers could be excessively similar because they all draw phrases from the same sources.
Of course, you could argue plagiarism if students are pulling quotes and not citing, but a realistic instructor would realize that the students obviously draw from the assigned texts, and kind of take them as an "implied bibliography."
Which doesn't make it right to take other people's words and pass them off as your own. But it's so damn common that it passes for decent paper writing at 5/6 of the institutions in this country. While that's depressing, I don't think the kids need to be busted for cheating as much as get some remedial paper writing classes.
Again, these arugments may not apply to this particular case; these students might indeed deserve expulsion. However, I don't know that the approach is widely applicable.
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Greetings, This guy doesn't hold a candle to Phil, Destroyer of Lives. If you were a CS student at RIT in the late 1990's, then you know who I am talking about. He knew all the tricks. He printed out programs, laid them on top of each other and held them up to the light. Sure, they changed the variable names, but the silhouettes looked the same. He also saved programs for four or five semesters and had all sorts of scripts to diff them against each other. He caught people all the time. Luckily, I worked with Phil and wasn't a student of his ;)
Eric
Are you kidding?
I love these guys, and you should too.
They're the ones who come around the corner every half-hour asking me to explain pointer arithmetic or how a driver interface works.
I'm the star, they're the droids. Pay is commensurate. If this was an egalitarian industry with no pyramid of skill distribution, we'd all be making low-five-figure salaries, and thinking it was as right as the mid-six we're making now, because our peers would be, too. The broader the competition, the better your superiority stands out. It's better to be one in a million than one in a thousand. You get my drift.
It will take a few years after you graduate to sort you to your spot in the hierarchy. But you know how the playing field is laid out. Use that to your advantage.
--Blair
"U. of Macchiavelli, '84"
Excellent point! I have a fond memory of running into my 3rd grade teacher once I was an adult. She actually apologized to me after all those years, because the kid who sat next to me copied from my papers, and she thought it was _I_ who was cheating (I didn't know the kid was copying). She realized her mistake the next year when I wasn't in her class anymore, but the other kid was, and the quality of his work plummetted.
A potential solution to this would be to simply not punish the ones whose paper got copied -- only the one who plagerized. Sure, some people will get away with "aiding and abetting", but better to a let a few guilty go free than to punish someone who was truly innocent.
Those who can't manage, manage managers.
Hope he doesn't analyse my Slashdot posts!
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
As a former CS major, I must concur. Not only is avoiding doing your own research an act of sloth, but if you are not cognisant enough to PARAPHRASE the purloined material, then you should employ yourself at a fast-food restaurant until you decide you're ready to fill your cup of knowledge at a state university.
I beg to differ. Like it or not, in the real world, you have to deal with other people, and sometimes, other people are dolts. This doesn't change the fact that you have to work with them.
In surveys of employers, `communications skills' are almost universally listed as the most desirable characteristic of new graduates. Actual technical proficiency usually slips in at number 4 or 5 on the list. Group projects are intended to give practical experience at communicating in and with a group of other people.
The problem with small group projects is twofold.
I was once of a similar opinion as you - given a group project (group of 4 or 5), I would usually end up doing the whole damn thing, and everyone else in the group shared in the good mark: a fact that pissed me off no end. Then I did a _real_ group project - in a group of 60. This was a second year uni project. We had a semester to organise a conference, each write a paper for the conference, peer review the paper between ourselves, and present the paper at the conference. We had to raise funds, organise every aspect of the conference from tea and cookies to keynote address. At the end, we published a 300 page book of proceedings, had it printed. I still have some copies sitting on my shelf.
A project this big cannot be completed by a single person. This forces you to organise, and work in groups. Rather than trying to finish everyone elses job (which is not feasible), you learn that you have to convince others to do their job.
The best feature of the large project I did was the peer review at the end. Students were asked to assess every other student. These asessments formed a large part of the final grade. Surprisingly, when given the responsibility, students will identify those who are not pulling their weight.
Group projects, if done properly, can be extremely rewarding. However, if group projects are to succeed, the project needs to be big, the group needs to be big, and the marking scheme needs to be independent.
A group of people working in concert can acheive much more than a single individual - I would not have been able to publish a book of proceedings by myself. In addition, for the remainder of that degree, the entire class had a great sense of comraderie, as we had all been through something gruelling, and we had done it together.
Russ %-)
PS: Any educators who are interested in the project I talked about here; I'm more than happy to advocate student centred learning to those looking to implement it.
... and never, ever play leapfrog with a unicorn.
The article says that it takes a six-word phrase to trigger the initial match. That's quite a bit if you think about it; three- and four-word phrases are going to be relatively common, but beyond that...
It seems to have worked, too:
Good corrective feedback mechanism there.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
As a former English major, I have to agree. Not only is it lazy and slack to skip doing your own research, but if you don't even have the brains to REWORD the stuff you're stealing then you ought to flip burgers for a few years until you decide you're ready to be a real student.
"Smear'd with gumms of glutenous heat, I touch..." - Comus, John Milton
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
This interests me a lot. Joe Cheater cheats on his final exams and graduates - let's say college - on other people's work and with a slippery-at-best grasp of the subject his diploma says he's reached a certain level of comptence/knowledge in.
Then he goes out into a workplace that expects him to know what his diploma suggests he should. What now? Well, his strategy is going to be either to catch up fast, or keep looking for work to borrow/steal and pass off as his own. Probably the latter, because if the former was an option he probably wouldn't have had to cheat in the first place.
Is this any harder in the "real world" than it was in school? Nope. The internet is out there for everybody, and it's now just too hard to track everyone's work in a foolproof way. Will he get caught? Maybe eventually - but he's got a pretty good shot at becoming a comfortable PHB too, since so few of us have the energy to verify everything people claim. How hard would it be, for example, to print up a realistic-looking diploma or grad school transcript on a laser printer at Kinko's? If someone handed you one and it looked real, would you call the university to verify that it was real? No, you'd say "wow, MIT!" and hire him/her.
I used to teach GED classes, and I had students who passed who came back and told me that they had essentially closed their eyes and guessed at the multiple test questions, and done this over and over until they got a passing score. So they were out in the world with the equivalent of a high school diploma, who were barely literate and couldn't add 12+13.
We can write nasty things about cheaters, but they do it because we're all too lazy to police/stop them or really verify what their diplomas say they can do. The professor in this article was a very rare exception (he sounded like a cool professor, too). As long as people accept paper credentials as proof of ability (IT certification, anyone?), cheaters will keep doing what they do. Why shouldn't they? It's a much faster way to the top, and most of the time, we don't mind that much.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
"extensively footnote my paper, referring to classmates paper as source...."
Not at all. The cheaters, having both low coding skills and morals, but an impressive sounding degree, are doomed to become senior managers and CEOs.
Don't you read Dilbert at all? I assure you it wouldn't be as funny if it wasn't mostly true.
...let me just say that anybody who cheats "How Things Work" probably doesn't deserve to be at UVa in the first place. I could not take that course, because I was an EE. The course was considered both redundant and overly simplified for engineering majors.
However, I would be really surprised if even the most hung-over College of Arts and Science people couldn't at least pull a "gentleman's C" in that course. It's reputation was on par with other offerings such as "Cinema as an art form" and "History of Jazz", aka "History of Guts" if you catch my drift.
The other thing that non-Wahoos may not have picked up from the article is that there is a "single sanction" honor code at UVa. If you are convicted of cheating, you are expelled. There is no other punishment for "honor violations". The system has been criticized for inflicting its penalty disproportionatly on minorities. The flip side of that is that affirmative action programs encouraged people to enter UVa when they were not prepared. These are the people who will feel most pressured to cheat.
Of course, that was the way things stood when I graduated eight years ago. I'm sure some aspects of this are different now. OK, probably not, but one can hope.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What's shocking to me is not that people are handing in papers with long portions taken from other papers, but that the school is doing something about it. Even when I pointed out that a student had handed in a paper with a different name, the student got no formal reprimands.
Universities know where money comes from. I'd be very interested to see any followups to this article.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
The TA looks on bemusedly the whole time. When the student arrives up front, the TA says "I'm not accepting your exam, we finished fifteen minutes ago."
"Do you know who I am?" says the student.
"No." says the TA.
"Do you know who I am?" says the student, "Do you know who I am?"
"No." says the TA.
"Good" says the student and sticks his paper in the middle of the stack of papers and walks out of the room.
Cheers,
Milo
Do your own work, never have a problem.
The risk is that some of the students are probably innocent, merely being guilty of having their own papers copied without their knowledge. Indeed, we've seen many cases here where the person whose work was copied ends up in a situation where they have to prove their own innocence.
Unfortunately, the technology of online composition and submission of papers (as typically done at most Universities) lacks sufficient security, encryption, and authentication standards.
I just fear that the cost of this action could possibly end the academic careers of too many students guilty of nothing more than failing to see how their work could be copied.