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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.
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.
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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!
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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.
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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 :)
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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 :)
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The article says not that there were similar phrases, but that, in papers with similar phrases, it turned out that there were significantly larger phrases, and even entire sections, that were all but identical.
The Prof didn't use the pattern matches on their own, he used them as an indicator of papers to give a closer look.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
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.
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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
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~Tim
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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!
So it is rumored. They run the documents through a paraphraser program, and give everyone a document that says the same thing, but says it differently. The theory is that leaks can be detected in this manner.
The problem with the theory is that an intelligent mole will run his own document through a paraphraser in order to avoid that sort of thing. Given that the security system isn't that secure, and that it has such an obvious workaround, I'd guess that the rumor is something of a red herring.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
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.
Unfotunately, some people reading a thesarus do not know the words that are similar in meaning are not the same in meaning. Often something that is they primary meaning in one word is a secondary meaning someplace else.
For Example, you have a crusty old gentleman. One of the meanings of Crusty is Flakey, as in the crust of a pie.
You might not want to substitute the word flakey for crusty in this context. It wouldn't quite fit right.
Reading a paper written with this method gets really funny really fast.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
Err, I think you're blowing things way out of proportion here. We're talking about your average professor trying to get access to a fileserver containing old tests. Circumventing access controls would be excessive in the case where the professor was unaware of the contents of the fileserver (i.e. just casually browsing Windows shares or whatever) and redundant in the case where the professor already knew the contents of the fileserver (unless he was interested in disciplinary action).
Besides, some fraternities have their own internal networks that aren't necessarily connected to the university network. When I was in a frat, we were playing Command & Conquer over the LAN long before we had any sort of non-dialup internet access.
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).
Do you want to be the one to try using diff on every combination of 350-550 papers? That's well over 61,000 combos on the low end!
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.
Interestingly, there are actually papers in mathematics journals containing theorems proven by machines. In those cases, I was told they list the machine as a "co-author".
/blueninja
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?
---
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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
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
That's irony.
--
"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.