Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Cheaters, Spammers, Chessmen
GA Tech TAs not given credit for program exposing those who don't give credit. zorba1 writes: "Chalk another one to the 'TAs get no credit' department. CNN is running an article on how on how Georgia Tech's College of Computing professors wrote a cheat-finder program that discovered 186 Intro to Computing cheaters. As a former CS TA at GaTech, some clarification points:
- The app was developed by TAs, not by professors.
- It doesn't detect 'exact duplications of computer code.' It removes variable names and examines duplication in code structure.
- The only reason it's in the news is that GaTech recently required nearly all students to take one or two introductory CS courses."
The stench whiffed 'round the world ... Kelsevinal writes "A look at this article on the Chicago Tribune website reveals that our good friend Bernie Shifman is getting a little publicity... Think what you want about the situation, but I think it's funny as hell. I bet Shifman likes it too ... think of all the human resources depts. who might see this!"
After all, not everything is Free. xueexueg writes: "I just noticed that the Free Software Foundation has finally gotten around to setting up secure servers for orders and donations. For ages you actually had to print out and mail an order form to them, but now, at last, you can give them money for goods or charity, in your proverbial underwear."
And let's face it, there aren't that many places in the world where you can order T-shirts adorned with a levitating gnu.
Does this remind you of Gorman Seedling's electric collars? koganuts writes: "Updating a story posted by Slashdot on January 9th, according to The Los Angeles Times, "Gov. Gray Davis' proposal to let state and local police obtain roving wiretaps on suspected criminals was dropped from the legislation containing it Tuesday after the legislative counsel's office concluded that it was illegal." There were also provisions in the proposed bill which extended wiretapping to e-mail and the Internet. One thing I never knew was that "...wiretaps cost an average of $56,767.""
Have you learned your lesson? Eblis writes: "The Learning Machine Challenged hosted by AI has finally ground to a halt, with results available at lmw.a-i.com. Congratulations to the winners and to AI for hosting such a successful contest!"
The only reason it's in the news is that GaTech recently required nearly all students to take one or two introductory CS courses.
...
And people are complaining about this? No one forced them to go to a technical school or anything
I live under the bridge, in a pile of feces.
$56,767 per wire trap?
Is this just another made up number that if repeated enough people will assume that it is true?
What does this include...
FBI Agents pay check? Judges? Infrastruture cost in the FBI, that would cost the same if there were 2 wiretaps vs 20? DA's paycheck? Is this offset by any bribe money?
Did they take the entire FBI budget and divide by the number of wiretaps and come out with a number that way? Which if were true then not issuing 2 wiretaps would save 100k+ a year..
One of the tricks we used (at my school) was to look for trailing whitespace and the combination of leading tabs and spaces, since this kind of thing is preserved when copying, invisible, and unlikely to be the same across independent correct solutions. It's true though that this automatic testing can't do much for the really simple assignments (ie, write insertion sort).
Much better was simply (when possible) assigning the same person to grame the same piece of code across all assignments; certain bizarre idioms or mistakes really jump out at you and catching cheaters that way is much more effective.
I've run similar programs (at UC Berkeley) that check for structure of student's programs. I don't have numerical analysis of the results, but from my personal observations, anything that hit above 30% on the similarity level was almost always valid in one way or another. (maybe not blatant cheating, but too much collaboration, etc.)
Of course, we only used this on projects, which tended to be much larger than homeworks. (i.e., we would never ask them to just calculate the fibonacci series, more like pseudo-Life simulations, games, etc.)
Copying code is a WORSE offense in a beginner's class, because these are people who are for the most part never going to progress beyond this in programming, so won't have opportunity later on to learn the lessons they should be learning now.
By copying each other's code...or more likely everyone copying one person's code, they are making it less likely that most people will learn the basic concepts of how a program works, even on a high level of abstraction.
They'll just be Lusers who can say they completed CS coursework.
A CS senior should already know what functions and variables and whatnot are. A freshman biology (or whatever) will not, and they won't learn later.
And don't think for a second that this doesn't help a person understand better how to be a better end-user.
I just thought it was being a little _too_ fair to Shifman. They didn't mention at all how he threatened the people involved, nor how he started it all. Also not mentioned are his letters rudely demanding that the site's listing be removed from all search engines and to stop being "hosted" by google (he got confused about google's caching feature). Although both sides of the story are told, it seems to me that Shifman's side is portrayed in a much better light.
My friend is a pretty bright fellow and a TA at UIUC. He wrote a cheat detector for one of the classes that turned out to be pretty effective.
The class requires you to write specific functions with specific names. His perl script would take a student's code, rearrange the functions in a predetermined manner, cut out whitespace, rename variables, etc.
It would then do pairwise comparisons with the class.
Typically, if people are cheating, it's rather blatant. If more than some % of the class has the same function implemented in a very similar way, he throws it out as a comparison factor because the function is probably too small or too obvious to implement any other way.
That's precisely what struck me as so irritating about this whole epsiode. There are two possibilities here. One is that Shifman suffers from some combination of stupidity and emotional disability that's causing him to behave so foolishly. In that case, I find him a lot less distasteful than the mob of nerds who are ridiculing and provoking him, like some dweeby version of the kind of abuse Jon Katz used as a springboard for his new career.
The other possibility is that the whole thing is a masterful troll, exploiting the bullying mob mentality of a lot of "anti-spam activists". I would get a huge kick of out of that turning out to be the case.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I graded an introductory scheme course once. You have no idea how easy it is to pick out cheating in an introductory programming course. You can actually pick out pretty much the whole solution history, much like a genetecist can track speciation through differences in DNA.
Beginning programmers make such a wide range of mistakes that it's obvious which people discussed the problem before hand, which people programmed their solutions sitting next to each other on different computers, and which people just made a copy of someone else's solution (while they were away from the computer, it is often claimed).
I'd say that all but the last of these scenarios is fine. What IS galling - nay insulting - is that they students think that the TA won't notice that two programs have exactly the same error epidology. I could understand if they thought they could get away with copying and modifying a working solution, but when the solution doesn't produce the required result, the TA HAS to grok the code. And you quickly notice when solutions are "similarly stupid". Strangely enogugh, the right solutions tended not to be copied. I'll spare you my specualtions on the social dynamic that results in that scenario.
So no program necessary, IMHO. Of course, I had a fairly small class. I would hope that bigger classes get a couple of TAs.
And it seems there is a good portion of the Computer science students here at CMU who thought they were signing up for .. uh, CS.
Software to catch students copying the code of others has been in place at the university I am at for quite some time. When I was in second year (2000), all our code (in Pascal) was checked against each others using some sort of comparison system. I'm also currently tutoring a first-year introductory programming paper (in Java) where a similar system has just been put in place to check the students code. This is significantly more effective than having us try to spot people who we think are copying, and allows us to pinpoint people early, before it becomes to the harder labs, so giving those who are cheating a chance to stop, and actually learn the material themselves.
I haven't, either, but I'm still hopeful.
I really have to marvel at this guy's ability to totally destroy his own career. I mean, even my parents, who've never been online without my presence, know what spam is and how repulsive it is. Did this joker not have a clue, or did he delude himself into believing he'd actually get hired by someone? I've heard for a long time that spammers have this warped belief that there's nothing wrong with what they're doing. I've mostly written it off in favor of the view that they know what they're doing is wrong but just don't care. I still think most all of them are aware, but maybe there are a few true idiots out there who just don't get it. Well, we now know there's at least one of them. Either that, or he has a screw loose somewhere, as several folks theorized when this topic was originally posted. As messed up as that sounds, it could very well be the case. Whatever it is, I'd love to get his resume so I could tell him what I think of his qualifications. I'd also have the pleasure of passing it along to some friends at a few hardware and telecom companies, for their amusement.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
Hey Gary. What's up?
I had one student who was failing every single assignment, but then magically turned in a program which ran flawlessly, was multithreaded, and had network support. Needless to say, a few seconds on Google turned up the original -- and uncited -- source code.
What a dummy.
Preventing someone from gainful employment isn't a tort in and of itself. Defamation, slander or libel are indeed torts (and lost business due to them could be found as specific damages by a reasonable court, in addition to general damages due to disgrace/dishonor/reputational damage/etc), but in order to be actionable, the statements made must be false.
The statements made on that site about Bernie strike me as either factual or otherwise non-actionable -- unless the large numbers of people who claim he's spammed them are making it up.
Quite likely the Sea World case was one in which the court found that the pot smoking claim wasn't based in fact -- if you could find the name of the plantiff (or some other source of additional info), I'd like to look it up.
IANAL, but civil law is an interest of mine, and I'm reading from West's Business Law (the chapter on torts) as I write this.
And this is cause for an all-out personal defamation? Stupid - agreed, unsoliticted - true, annoying - most definitely but to escalate to the sort of web page that is listed .... crumbs, I wouldn't treat my worst enemy that way!
... I would write more emails than that!
... either way!
500 emails per month is what 16-17 per day? Hmmm
Take the current DOLE situation here in Aus: You have to apply for 4 jobs per week (and prove you have) in order to get paid. At that rate of application, it is almost job application spam!
But admitedly, I don't think there are any innocent parties in this whole affair