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Georgia Tech Cracks Down on Learning
The Washington Post has an article today on a Georgia Tech student who almost flunked his intro to comp sci course for just discussing his homework with someone else. Note that no one including the faculty accused him of actually copying any code from anyone. However, the "honor code" at Georgia Tech "forbids its introductory computer science students from seeking any help from other students on their homework." The faculty recorded part of his violation on the forms as "He was trying to learn it." This is something that high school seniors might want to keep in mind when selecting which university to attend.
...it's for drinking, partying, having casual sex and possibly absusing some illegal substances.
It must be true, popular culture says so.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
You'd think they'd crack down on drinking, drugs, and cheating first. :P
:)
If schools ban learning, then I guess the "fun factor" is what College is all about.
This happened at my college over an assembly language program. Simple 20-lne factorisation algorithm. They told the lecturers that it's real hard to get 2 different listings for the same simple ASM algorithm. The commenting was different at least, but they still got an official plagiarism warning.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
If they learn from each other, they will progress faster, get better grades, and repreat fewer classes. Does this mean less money for the university?
Maybe they do have a real motive for not letting students help each other: Greed.
"Piter, too, is dead."
I really don't see whats so bad, he didn't get expelled, and he should have asked his TEACHER for help, not another student. Maybe you should consider that their team stinks more :-)
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
They are obviously preparing the students for a life in the corporate computing world; how long b4 u have to sign confidentiality agreements for doing assignments at uni? Doesn't seem as tho they like the concept of open-source.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
Who turns someone in for something like this anyway?
What, me worry?
Teaching people not to be open with there source is bad. the student learns this habbit.Then it leads to the whole open source community will be hit.
Rigid "honor codes" lead to ridiculous situations. I am reminded of a story from a friend who went to Davidson, where someone she knew was disciplined for honor code violations after taking an extra can of soda that a machine mistakenly dispensed. A true honor code should be flexible. Otherwise, what is the point? Everyone knows what they are supposed to do when the rules are cut-and-dry, the purpose of an honor code should be to foster honorable/moral behavior in situations the rules do not cover.
Every CS course I've been in has ENCOURAGED group work. It's not like humans are social creatures who learn best in social situations. I'm glad I didn't go there... or all my friends would be screwed ;)
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
No, wait, listen. There have been numerous discussions on slashdot regarding the difficulty in monitoring and analysing the types of programs written in intro classes. So rather than try to figure out collaboration vs. "let-me-copy-that-program-verbatim", this is an interesting solution.
OTOH, being unable to discuss assignments, theories, etc. makes the class/program no better than a correspondence school.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
[quote]
A brand-new rule says a computer science student is wrong to try to seek answers to questions ANYWHERE other than from course materials or Georgia Tech staff
[/quote]
An exam is one thing, homework is another. Homework is supposed to reinforce the skills you'll need later. One of those skills is research.
How To Be An Incompetent Engineer 101...
If the student did research in a book?
Violation?
If the student asked his father or mother?
Violation?
If the student joined an online discussion group?
Violation?
???????
Schools are not made for LEARNING They are places to contain people until they have been indoctrinated properly. I sit through 8 hours of school every day, I learn nothing. Today was unusual, I learned one thing as a direct result of my classes. Typically, I learn nothing except that trying to stand up to my teachers or fellow students is futile. Every day, the system attempt to break my non-conformity. This incident at Georgia Tech does nothing but reinforce this point. This student wasn't in the class to learn something, he was in the class to receive more specific indoctrination for his selected profession.
I would have thought that the school would promote such behavior. In my past experiences I've learned things quite well from discussions with other students on homework assignments. I think that for Georgia Tech to deny them that form of collaboration would be a great hindrance to the students...2 cents
Copyright the questions and answers, then sue those students who infringe on prior art!
I would send the following mail:
To whom it may concern,
I would like to apologize for my behavior. It was wrong and immoral. I suppose, because of my youth, that I thought it would be justifiable to learn. I now see otherwise, and hope to discontinue this behavior for the rest of my career.
I thought that it might be a good dodge to spend some of my time in first year learning, and that it might be an investment towards my GPA for me to acquire knowledge from other human beings. Oh well, I guess we all learn our lessons of life somehow. I understand that in discussing in an academic forum setting is wrong and I promise that for the endurement of my University career, I will absolve any attempt at communicating with my peers, as it seems to only decrement my academic standpoint and tarnish the reputation of the University, as well as compromising the institution of Education on the whole.
I promise I will avoid learning for the rest of my college career and rely only on myself and my own experiences with the natural environment to do so. Furthermore, I resolve to lock myself in my room for the remainder of the semester in hopes that social interaction will not tempt me into deteriorating my Computer Studies goals. As well, I will avoid going to lectures and tutorials, as well as any open labs, since the professors and TAs may accidentally teach me something, in which case I will compromise the goals the University seems to have set forth.
Sincerely,
****
Glad to know open academic forums (What Universities are intended to be) are still just that.
Karma: Non-Heinous
msgbox("Hello World")
I am a student at a major, top-10 computer science university. Personally, I would NEVER ever discuss homework or even class materials with any student. You see, it only hurts me. Teachers usually adjust my grade to something known as a "bell curve," which means I am not evaluated by my work alone, but by my work compared to the work of others. So, giving any help to any student whatsoever is akin to shooting yourself in the foot. Life sucks, don't it?
In my defense, I will say that at the major, Fortune-500 company that I am employed as a programmer, I spend my day talking to others about design and implementation issues, and all things CS.
I hope this post provides insight into why such a policy may exist, and the motivations that a university has to enforce it.
Love,
Anonymous Coward
This is something that in general is becoming increasingly prevalent in academic communities. Rather than focusing on acquiring and developing knowledge, and passing that knowledge on - it seems that much of the academic hierarchy has become obsessed with obtaining credit for their work.
Not that this isn't due, but this is vastly hindering peoples ability to learn.
They cannot possibly expect a first year student to produce stunning, wholly original work? Did these individuals them selves never work in a co-operative environment?
So when does co-operation become cheating? When does building on the concepts put forth in previous work become plagiarism?
When you steal without any idea of your own.
Anyone who ever wrote "Hello World" is now a lying cheating stealing bastard ('Cept for that first one. They're ok.)
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President
http://www.sportslawnews.com/archive/Articles%2020 01/GeorgiaTechbuzzTM.htm
just copied it from someone and "personalized" the code like most of the others do. No one would have said a word then.
thirsty*i^2
"Ya I finished that last week, it just doesn't work"
wouldn't it be good to wait until we hear the school's side of the story? It is very easy to claim that you were only trying to learn the course material, but with only a single quote -- which was certainly taken out of context -- to indicate the school's view on the situation, it is hardly fair to weigh in on either side.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Getting a job that pays more than Cowboyneal because you graduated. This all would be fixed if the just sent the parents to college with them! Of course, they probably wouldn't learn anything that way either.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Also , GATech has one of the top engineering schools in the country, I don't think you should suggest people stay away from it just because of a stupid incident like this. They meant well, it backfired on them, and they will probably reevaluate their policy, as the article says.
1. The student did something expressly forbidden.
2. Students' excuses in such matters are always pathetic and disingenuous. The student wasn't trying to learn, he/she was trying to cheat.
3. I am appalled by the attitude of the submitter in this matter. This is serious and should be treated as such. Can we get a responsible update to correct this?????
Heaven forbid that people help each other. I pray to God this mentality doesn't exist in any schools I teach at. The teacher knows all and students are simply bins to be filled with info. RIGHT, that's a good pedagogy. The most effective learning takes place when students take authoriship of the learning process. We'll just assume that the lecture format is okay for the moment. Are you really suggesting that students shouldn't learn from each other? I'd love to see how far science would be right now if everyone just stuck their heads in the sand and ignored everyone else besides their mentor or teacher.
You wonder why people have trouble grasping concepts? It's because they try to memorize them as procedures and not as real world results that can be derived if you look close enough. A complete teach-knows-all model helps create that line of thinking.
Sigh...
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
I go to Georgia Tech. Yes, the student was accused of cheating. Yes, this is because he was caught cheating. Yes, the article states this, and then goes on to tell how it's "not that bad." Whoever wrote this summary of the article needs to brush up on their reading comprehension skills.
As for what happened to the student....He had a substantial amount of code (probably around 30 lines) that was verbatim with another student. As the article says, he should have not turned it in and lost the 2% instead of cheating. He can't handle responsibility for his actions so he and his dad pitch a fit and blame it on the college of computing.
Tech may not be the top CS school, but I think our program is pretty good, and their strictness when it comes to cheating only adds credence to the degree you get when you graduate from the Computer Science department. The strictness is not a reason to avoid this school, but a reason to come here.
Shouldn't this be:
"Georgia Tech Cracks Down on Larnin'"?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If you guys want something to be done in the case, I suggest emailing the President's office of Georgia Tech. Please send courteous/well-thought out messages, as they will probably be read more than flaming ones.
Send email to: wayne.clough@carnegie.gatech.edu
Any comments would be greatly helpful.
As an undergraduate engineer I can barely contemplate the horror this sort of draconian policy could bring to our department. Luckily, our department encourages collaboration, however, harshly punishes cheaters. As our university (Simon Fraser University) has had several cheating scandals lately the crackdown has begun here as well. If we had that sort of policy like 90% of the engineering department would get failed out (although 60% do anyways).
... and trying to recruit students next year.
I often provide help and guidance for my fellow engineers but I certainly never do their work for them and this sort of punishment is completely contradictory to the way I was taught to learn. I wish Georgia Tech luck enforcing this new policy
Is it just me, or does it seems like colleges and universities are becoming increasingly out of touch with reality?
Prohibiting one student from asking another student a question is absurd. People learn from each other every day, it's a natural part of being HUMAN. It only makes it worse than many people are PAYING to go and receive this kind of treatment.
This must be some kind of new trend. First, corporations decide to treat their customers like they're criminals. Now we've got universities that want to presume you're violating the rules. What next?
I like the rule some of the upper-division classes at my University has adopted. It's called the Gilligan's Island rule and is a nice comprimise between collaboration and cheating.
You may discuss programming projects with your friends, but you are expected to abide by the Gilligan's Island rule3--the only thing you may bring to such a discussion is you, and no written notes may be taken away from the meeting. Looking at, modifying, or copying each other's files or solutions is forbidden. If you are unsure of what is and is not allowed by this policy, please talk to the professor before doing something that might be considered cheating.
3The Gilligan's
Island rule states that following a discussion of the project, a break
must be taken for at least a half hour before coding. Watching something
inane like Gilligan's
Island on television satisfies this rule.
That's bullshit, I totally support GT and their cracking down on stuff like this. If they say "do the homework on your own" then do it on your own! At my school, probably half the people in the upper division classes couldn't code HelloWorld.c. They get through by asking all their homies for the answers and copying answers on exams. The sooner these losers change their major to English the better. How's it going to reflect on other graduates of the department if you go out into industry and you can't even write a simple program??
You would suggest he take up EverCrack as his career?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
These days a Bachelors degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on anyway. Most companies typically view a Bachelors in most majors as proof that you're capable of learning how to perhaps do a job.
A prof that actually cares about critical thinking in this day and age is a rare bird.
Maybe they will start using google to search usenet comp sci groups for Georgia Tech email addresses. What's the difference between a GT student and anyone else? Seems like the policy is 'figure it out yourself.'
Georgia Tech adds DMCA clause to their entrance agreement.
Don't laugh. I'm being satirical. It's funny because it's not far from the truth.
"When he found himself with a homework assignment he did not understand, and no teaching assistants or professors available on a campus off-week..."
I don't think it was unreasonable for him to talk with another student.
Have things really gotten this bad? I remember being encouraged to work together back in my undergrad comp sci days.
I am currently in highschool right now (graduating), and I am probably going to go to on to University at SFU (British Colombia, Canada) in CS, obviously. I was wondering if any /.-ers go there, and if so, is there anything to look out for such as what this articles talks about? I have read the statement on intellectual dishonesty and I dont find any CS related stuff, but it would be good to know from a first-hand source. And no, I dont plan on cheating when I go there, but this type of thing gives an idea on what kind of a school it is.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
But actually understanding something is downright subversive. God help us if we have the ability to actually do a job. It seems this honor code is intended to prevent the transfer or discussion of ideas in an institution of higher learning. Maybe the dean should have taken that dose when he was offered it back in 67.....
-- Defenestrate Microsoft!
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Hello, World.");
return 0;
}
because that will have similar code to other students...No, instead you must look to the code of great IOCCC winners for your homework projects...
This flies in the face of science.
I'm fairly sure I know exactly how GT's 'No Collaboration' rule came into effect. As with any college CS body, a few students took advantage of their ability to code and modify code to cheat or alternate doing homework assignments.
Rather than deal with the situation efficiently and responsibly, and probably also because of the stygian pro-intellectual property mantras that are chanted in most College CS departments, Georgia Tech introduced yet another ill-conceived Zero-Tolerance policy in order to take choice and discretion out of the hands of individuals and place it in the hands of administrators... who usually don't care or don't have time to investigate individual cases like individual teachers or professors would.
Mediocrity and inefficiency in administration is the direct result of Zero Tolerance policies in almost all circumstances. Any ZT policy will result in innocent people being punished for an imaginary wrong-doing. This is the case with schools who have zero-tolerance drug and weapons policies who expel students for having kitchen utensils or aspirin on their persons. This is the case with schools who expel students for even the most innocent public displays of affection.
Still, the lure of not having to have any personal responsibility for the wrong-doings of their students is too great a reward for the administrators of public and private schools to pass up. After all, how can the life of one student compare to the well-being of all the rest?
As long as people are able to have this mentality and not feel reprocussions from it, this kind of mass anti-social behavior will continue.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I think the article is very conspicuous with respect to how little information it gives as to the nature of the infraction. Perhaps most telling is that the student's program shared 30 lines of code with another student's. We can look at this relatively and say 30 lines out of a large program is nothing (although this is an introductory CS course for non-majors--how large a program could it be?). If those 30 lines were some crucial algorithm, and the rest of the program was simple file I/O, console I/O, error-checking, etc. then I think there's a legitimate cause for concern.
I have to say, I pity those students.
One of the most refreshing and enjoyable aspects of my university years was the opportunity to discuss what we were being taught with fellow students who actually wanted to learn. Anything less and it would have been mind-numbing highschool all over again.
--The more you know, the less you know.
I think I only completed one "major" project by myself, and cheated/copied the rest of the way through. The assignments in most CS programs are bullshit and have no bearing in the business world.
"Submit assessment material on time and submit only your own work."
Quoted from the programming assignment I will turn in tomorrow (emphasis is as it appears on the assignment):
" PROGRAMS MUST BE INDEPENDENT AND ORIGINAL WORK. "
I challenge any student out there to submit a program to his/her professor and it be completely "INDEPENDENT AND ORIGINAL." It's probably never gonna happen. One, if you're implementing any of the algorithms discussed in most common introductory algorithm textbooks, you're probably repeating the work of thousands of students, regardless of how independent you may try to be. Two, it is likely that your prof gave you hints/tips on your program; if you're using those hints/tips, they are not original, not independent.
w|f
if we constantly re-invent things that already exist/known we will never progress. Talking to ones peers may bring knowledge faster, its called effective communication, which is probably the reason we have travelled so far in such a short time (ie: last 100years) Is this a moral judgement or a logical one ?
Honor codes such as this one are ridiculous. In a professional environment, one must be able to co-operate. It's a good thing to get feedback on something from somebody else. A student shouldn't be expected to go running to the prof whenever he encounters some tough bug in his program. If you constantly ran to your boss or supervisor when you encountered a bug, you'd be canned in no time. Competent professionals rely on their own problem solving and research abilities, but they are also able to collaborate...
- A real programmer uses $ cat > a.out
*Takes his Acceptance letter from GA Tech*
Hmm.. I didn't want to go there anyways... *Crumple*
I agree in more ways than I want to admit. And I'm going to be a teacher next year! I've come to the conclusion that schools are set in place not to educate, but to make you proftable. It's not about learning, it's about money. How many times have I heard my professor say, "If only we had more time..." Why don't we get into the really important stuff? Because there isn't enough hours in the day to meet all the requirements that make me look like a good job applicant and see why math or computer science is really cool on another level.
My philosophy: School is a hoop that I must jump through so that one day my students will not have to jump through so many. Never let schooling stand in the way of your education, or so Samuel Clemons says. My latest (guided) revelation is that I am part of a system that is ineffective at preparing students, and all we get are books about standards and attempts to change the system instead of deconstructing problems within the system. True change comes by recognizing the flawed assumptions that are inherent in the system, allowing us to come to a new and more authentic view of how education should work. But individual change is futile; all educators and all education must change as a whole or not at all. The task is difficult; are any of us up to the challenge?
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
For the bonehead award, Programming I was basically just Pascal on personal computers. Well, I had gotten into "trouble" for not commenting my source code. So, for my final program, I wrote it in Pascal, compiled, disassembled, rewrote the assembler code to Pascal inline assembly statements, and lined up the original Pascal as the assembly inline comments. My prof wasn't amused.
But, on the other end, I took another programming course which was supposed to be COBOL, c, and FORTRAN. The first day, the prof said that we will not need our FORTRAN book and would not write any FORTRAN programs or be tested on FORTRAN. However, we were instructed to learn FORTRAN on our own. Well, almost no one kept their FORTRAN book or even bothered learning FORTRAN. I was lucky enough to have already learned most FORTRAN working on physics stuff. Our final program was to write a source converter in c to convert FORTRAN programs to c. Not only did we have to know FORTRAN, but we had to KNOW FORTRAN!
Click here or here.
I graduated from Tech in 2001 and I can assure you that the CS program sucks in many ways. The head of the department isn't even a programmer, he has a degree in psychology. The philosophy of the CS department is to bury the students under tons of work and see who can keep up the outrageous workload. Quality takes a distant backseat to quantity. They also have a stange obsession with cheating. Their "cheating detector" program they use is infamous for false positives, yet the faculty continues to swear by it. If you go to Tech, which is a great school overall, I'd strongly recommend majoring in computer engineering or MIS.
I suspected your post was going to be stupid as soon as I saw the red light next to your ID. And it turns out I was right!
:-)
Makes me wonder what you said before that pissed me off.
Honor Code
All assignments must reflect an individual effort, and must be completed "from scratch." It is a violation of the Honor Code to copy or derive solutions from text books, internet resources, or previous instances of this course unless specifically instructed to do so in assignment directions. When instructed to do so, all material not created by you and its source must be clearly identified. Copying solutions from other students, including those who previous took the course, is prohibited. A good guideline is that you must be able to explain and/or reproduce anything that you submit for any assignment.
Also take the following into consideration
Academic misconduct is taken very seriously in this class. We will analyze what you turn in against other students in the current semester as well as previous semesters. You are required to do your own work without looking at other students code no matter what the source is. You are also expected and required to report any incidents of academic misconduct to the course instructor or to the Dean of Students responsible for Academic Misconduct. Failure to do so is in itself Academic Misconduct.
You are responsible for turning in assignments on time. This includes allowing for unforeseen circumstances. You are also responsible for insuring that what you turned in is what you meant to turn in. WebWork includes a getback feature: This allows you to retrieve exactly what you submitted and insure that it works.
Tests and examinations must be taken at the scheduled date and time. Please do not ask for special treatment because you (or your parents) have purchased non-refundable airline tickets. The safe time to travel is after finals week. The finals schedule published at the beginning of the semester is TENTATIVE. The official schedule gets published very late in the semester.
If you have any personal problems (family/illness/etc.) please go to the Dean of Student's (Gail DiSabatino) office located in the Student Services Building (Flag Building) next to the Student Center. She is equipped and authorized to verify the problems and she will issue a note to all your instructors making them aware of the problem and requesting whatever extension, etc. is necessary.
The .announce newsgroup should be read every day. Official announcements about course matters will be posted there. The general course newsgroup is for posting
technical questions about assignments, tests etc. Complaints, questions about your personal problems, etc. should be discussed with your instructor in person or via email.
I go to a college called Haverford. We have a very strong Honor Code, and most people here like to think it works. The Code leaves what is cheating/plagerism and what isn't cheating and plagerism up to the individual professors that teach the class. For the CS classes we take, the profs let us talk about the problems at length, but we can not take any of the notes or scribblings that we come up with and use that to write code. It is kind of weird, and takes some getting used to, but it works, beacuse it forces students to actually try and figure out the problem and understand it. You can say that someone could just memorize the stuff instead of trying to actually figure it out, but like I said before... most people agree and belive that the Code works, and try their hardest to hold it up.
In my third year of comp. sci, I got together with two friends and we did an assignment together, even handing in the same work. (It was modifying Minix, of all things!) In my report I made up funny fake names for my friends, but clearly explained that I worked on it with them. When we got the assignments back, the reviewer had worked out who my two friends were, and even put their names on my report. I passed just fine, while my two friends got in a bit of trouble (oops). They passed in the end, and I presume it was because at least one of us had admitted to working together.
In my hons year I taught first year kids, and I was quite happy to bust kids who handed up the exact same source code. But I only busted them after they denied working on assignments together, thinking I was an idiot. If they just admitted to working together, then that was cool; I worked out whether they contributed equally, and if so, they were alright.
The moral of the story, in my humble opinion, is that going to university is all about learning to work with other people. A group software engineering assignment was the best learning experience I had. Sure, all-out cheating is wrong, but sharing knowledge is what tertiary education is all about in the first place!
Schools that don't get it, and that treat cooperation like cheating, aren't worth your time.
That said, could there be more to this story? Would a school really be that dumb?
So, now we know why the fight song opens with "I'm a ramblin' wreck from Georgia Tech"...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I'm a third year computer engineering major. I'll put it this way, I have had some very difficult classes. If I had not had the opportunity to work with other students on much of my homework in many of my classes, I would not have passed.
Number one example, my class on algorithms. Each week there was a written homework asignment. Each week, me and several of my peers would gather to work on this homework. We spent many, many hours teaching this material to each other. If one person did not understand a question, the others would go out of their way to teach it to him. We knew we would bomb the test if we didn't understand the homework. Yet by Georgia Tech's standards, we were cheating.
Luckily, I ended up doing very well on the tests because I studied a lot and had the help from my peers on the homework. It made the material bearable and understandable.
To deny students the ability to work together on homework denies the oppurtunity to some of the best learning opportunities of their educational careers. I would probably be much worse off without help from other students.
So, for example, 45% of the grade could be the final, 10% for participation/attendance, and 45% for a project written by the student alone in a restricted environment (e.g., a proctored computer lab). Problem solved.
This is not to say that there shouldn't be other learning projects. There should be, and they should be non-credit and for the explicit purpose of having the students freely discuss and learn from.
That aside, I think this issue is more complicated than the article allows. I was a TA for an undergrad CS course once, and noticed that several of the brightest students turned in clearly duplicate work on one of the programming assignments. I worried over it for a while and ended up not pursuing it, but I'm not at all sure that was the right thing to do.
Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I had one digital systems design course last semester where the prof said something like this: "Even if your correct solutions on the assignment are exactly the same as someone else's, we will still mark them correctly and give you the marks. In the end you will only be hurting yourself because you will not know what to do on the exam and fail the course."
I think this is more along the lines of the "right" way of doing thing. I'm not saying that cheating should be ignored totally. (This course's handins were all written or printouts with small bits of VHDL code, so it was not like there were programs which could be automatically scanned for copied parts.)
The point is that courses should be designed so that learning is rewarded, and copying only ends in the student not learning anything so that they are only hurting themselves and will ultimately meet failure.
Honor codes are the classic case of the old-time Reverend preaching a hell-fire and brimstone sermon to a congregation. The upright and decent get all scared and uptight, whereas the immoral daydream and laugh.
I was expelled for plagiarizing a multiple choice exam. It seems my answers had an incredibly high rate of correlation with many of the other students.
Since then, I've been a homeless bum, and I better hurry before the internet cafe attendant chases me out before I can finish this...
When I did my studies in CompSci discussion was encouraged, the but the formulation of the solutions to excercises had to be you own. This gave a reasonable balance.
On the other hand as a TA I have seen so many attempts to cheat (up to and including trying to get points for photocopies), that I am willing to punish cheaters rather severely by now.
On the other hand we did not get a grade in the exercises, it was pass-fail and there was a requirement to get something like 50% of the possible points in order to pass. So while cheaters often found a zero score on their solutions, there was the possibility to compensate.
Caveat: This was in Germany, meaning no tuition fees and the possibility to try again a year later with no additional costs.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
spring 00, unix class at another 'southern school' our department's most stubborn, self-absorbed professor taught unix, at the time, my first unix exposure. anyway, I could go on about how horrible the teacher and how he taught unix, I'll just say that there was no legislation that specifically say we couldn't work together [abstractly] on a project with different code. all involved were suspended, including me. after a calendar year, I withdew [this semester] because the grade I got in the class was a double-weighted F which prohibits me from getting a decent GPA. so whatever the person did, do NOT take it lightly, involve as many of the dept faculty as you can... and hope they don't suspend you.
Many schools around the countries have similar policies. As a 3rd year CS student at Michigan Technological University our CS department has a similar policy. We are not allowed to discuss our programs with anyone other than professors and the lab instructors. Some professors allow students to discuss their code but it's still very strict. There are usually one or two cases a year of students getting caught discussing work and are put on probation. There has been a lot of dissension among students on the points of making it very difficult to learn and not being very realistic to what people will be doing at a job. Many off the professors have now ok'd collaboration as long as no code is exchanged and you wait a while after discussion before you being coding.
-Eric Dalquist
<body>
Hello, World.
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why do you even bother posting these? you're affecting maybe 1 in 20 people who load the page. Christ, you've been getting first posts with this stuff for days now. Don't you have a job? How pathetic is your life that the most enjoyable thing you can do is hit the reload button all day?
My theory: first posters, goatse trolls and wide posters are all quadraplegics on disability. This would explain why they never type more than a few words because they have to blink in a pre-arranged sequence to get their letters translated to the screen. For this reason, they typically only do copy/paste because it's much easier on the eyes and gives their nursemaids more time to clean the feces out of their shorts.
I can speak first hand as a 3rd student that many, many students would indulge themselves in "checking", "comparing" or "proofing" other peoples code in 1st year. We only had Teaching Assistants checking over the work, so most of them got away with it. Many nights just before an assignment or project was due, there'd be one rez room which had 5-6 compsci students in it, working away at the code and then forwarding it off to each other to alter.
Now, there are only so many ways to do certain tasks, and that's why our profs told us the only way to prove we didn't just copy the code was to DOCUMENT it all properly. This was a pain for all of us that did it on our owns, but made us better for it and the heaviest offenders were caught (try explaining exact code and documentation).
But this activity isn't just in comp sci classes. I switched over to finance after the first semester, but kept a minor in CS. Same activities can be seen in the group study area of the library 2-3 hours before an assignment is due. I know I'll be walking away with something more than a piece of paper after spending 50K+ canadian on my education.
GVSU's CS policy if you want real fun, read the part where it says,
"You are guilty of academic misconduct if you....."
the wording is poor, and there was a dissent among the CS majors which almost resulted in an ugly scene...
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I gotta ask... if I forget to flush the toilet, is it an Honor Code violation if somebody else flushes it for me?
Don't be too quick to answer - maybe I need a stool sample for one of those 'blood in stool' tests and forgot the test kit until the deed was done.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
As a University of Georgia graduate (Go Dawgs!), I can tell you firsthand that this isn't the only instance of Tech's dumbassedness.
"Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and I'll give you somethin' to cry about!"
Went there, had a couple of run-ins with the honor code, where I observed someone cheating. One was theft of a project where the project was "re-branded" with a new id number and re-turned in, the other was outright cheating on a final exam (the ol' notecard under the hat trick). Both the same guy...
Basically, an honor code, like the GPL or similar licenses, is given most of its strength by those who care to stand behind it.
If the rules say, "Do not discuss," then it is that simple, no exceptions. If a take-home test with a two-hour timelimit is given, taking 121 minutes is wrong.
At HMC, in a case like the one in the article, where this is a point of contention over "discussion" vs "collaboration," and in fact in all cases where cheating or other honor code violations are alleged, the accused gets a hearing before the judiciary board, which is made up of students and faculty. It would seem the guy in this story is getting a similar shake.
So should we feel bad for him that he has been accused, or should we wait for the verdict? I personally think he was informed in a cold-hearted fashion, but we can hope cooler heads will prevail. In our honor code, an honest mistake or misunderstanding would probably bring a firm slap on the wrist, real guilt would get real punishment.
Like I said, the honor code is as good as the people willing to stand behind it...
1. The student did something expressly forbidden.
By reading this ROT-26 encoded comment, you are doing something expressly forbidden (by the DMCA).
2. Students' excuses in such matters are always pathetic and disingenuous. The student wasn't trying to learn, he/she was trying to cheat.
Hackers' excuses are always pathetic and disingenuous. The hacker wasn't trying to help secure the system, he/she was trying to steal confidential data.
3. I am appalled by the attitude of the submitter in this matter. This is serious and should be treated as such. Can we get a responsible update to correct this?????
Okay, into serious mode (and I'll try to avoid any comments on the number of punctuation marks there): First off, there are no direct quotes from the submitter in the article, so blaming the submitter is irresponsible. Second, given the information in the article, I see no real problem, and certainly no indication that it's not being treated seriously, in the story text. The issue, in case you missed it, is that Georgia Tech's rules regarding at least this particular course are overly strict and ought to be changed.
That said, another poster who attends the same university says that the student was found to have actually copied code, so the issue may not be as one-sided as it originally appeared.
This seems ridiculous. I help my friends with programming all the time, never outright code sharing though. Another person can often see little errors that are causing bugs more easily than the coder. Helping my friends likes this has made me want to TA an intro-CS class next semester.
I have a shitty sig!
The student enrolled in a class. The class had a contract (a syllabus is a binding contract). Providing the syllabus did indeed mention the honor code, the student is wrong--not the school. Examples like this are ideal for showing our future technology generation the importance of standards and ethics. In short, the student was wrong, the school simply enforced its policy. Georgia Tech is an excellent school with a high reputation. If you want it on your resume, you have to earn it.
(just for the record, I am not a GaTech alumni, student or associate--I am actually associated with a competing school)
From the Engineering Analysis 3 homework page
"Collaboration is encouraged. Groups of 2 or 3 are best. Collaboration is encouraged only to the extent that it is useful in furthering your understanding. Please take this limitation seriously. In any case write up the problems independently and make sure you could do each problem alone by the time you are done."
Working with other students, I find rather beneficial, so long as you aren't the lagging one just writing stuff down..
"GATech has one of the top engineering schools in the country"
Perhaps. Which country do you mean?
Certainly not the united states.
Perhaps the best school as compared with guatemala?
Tech has a strong tradition of trying to cause as many freshman and sophmores in engineering fields to fail out as possible, partially to reduce class size for upperclassmen, but mostly because many of the profs are bastards (some of them would consider that description a compliment). Getting "the shaft" is an old Tech tradition, to the point that the bastards openly acknowledge that their policies aren't fair, and if you don't like it you can transfer to another institute, since most of the colleges (especially the College of Computing) are overcrowded anyway at the underclassman level.
It sounds like a freshman got his first session with the shaft, and went whining to a reporter. He was wise to remain anonynmous, since most of his classmates (male and female) would, upon learning what he did, ask him if his pussy hurts.
I am a university professor in computer science who recently had a major plagarism incident in my graduate introductory AI class. The class is designed to teach grad students not only to do AI but to really hack. It's in Lisp, and it's nontrivial but the assignments are fun. At any rate, I had four programming assignments, a midterm, a final, and a final project.
The programming assignments are NOT just "preparation for the final", no matter what the dufus at the Washington Post says. This is computer science. You have to be a capable coder. That's what programming assignments do -- they move you out of book/exam knowledge and into the intricacies of actual usage. This means that if a student is cheating on the programming assignment, he's not hurting himself: the midterm covers issues, not code samples. Instead, he's cheating the rest of the class by making it more likely that he'll get an A and others won't.
Over the course of the past semester I caught almost a quarter of my class plagiarizing (literally copying each other's programming projects), this despite very stern warnings that it would not be tolerated. Those students were all sent to the Honor Court and received a full grade drop or worse (in some cases, community service). Cheating is now listed on their transcripts as well. I also nailed a student who had downloaded code from the web, and then had the audacity to anonymously ask the original author (at CalTech) to de-link his code temporarily so I couldn't find it. Bad move.
The fact of the matter is that computer science is a vocational study. You are learning to be a computer scientist. That includes a combination of skills, both pragmatic ones (knowing how to code and get up to speed with new languages and systems rapidly) and conceptual ones (understanding what O(n lg n) means). Only the second category can realistically be graded via final exams. The first category must be graded via projects. Students cheating on projects are just as bad as students cheating on finals.
Georgia Tech had its requirement for good reason: large numbers of introductory students just go to their friends and say "hey, can you show me how to do this" (e.g. "hey, can you give me your code"), rather than taking the time to figure it out themselves. We don't want students to give us code. We want students to work through the painful process of figuring out how the stuff works. SEEING someone else's solution is next to worthless compared to piecing it together yourself. Just like you can't develop chess-playing skills only by watching someone play. You have to try playing. A lot.
We're not locking students down. If students can't figure it out, they still have a recourse: talk to the TA or the Professor. At least in my classes they do. I'm always here to help students, giving them hints and ideas.
I can only assume that with the rising salaries for CS graduates and increase popularity in the program, the situation is only getting worse. It would be impossible for a professor to know who did what work. And since it is impossible to completely test CS in a traditional way, I do not find the policy unreasonable.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
For the record I'm currently finishing my degree in mechanical engineering in a Canadian University(and I mean CURRENTLY, taking a break from finishing up my end of degree project right now). I cannot believe that a place of learning would discourage helping others out. Where I go to school people help each other out constantly. If somebody has trouble with a course, for example a tough pure-math course, you help him out and try to explain to him what he doesn't understand. If somebody has trouble using certain softwares for some courses you help them(I'm personally a Matlab Guru). Hell for the last four years I was part of a student commitee that gathers past exams to help people study up for future tests(amongst other activites, most of which involving beer). You don't go through your degree hoping the others will fail, you hope that everyone will be able to succeed.
This is the difference between teaching people to be team players and teaching them to be back-stabbing office jerks that everybody hates. Hurray for Georgia Tech...
what is this class thing you speak of.... this must be where all my friends go between using BNETD for legitimate purposes and slumber.
The Air Force Academy has a very strict honor code, but also recognizes reality. Homework (on which you obviously can't enforce a no-collaboration rule effectively) is not allowed to be part of the final grade. Tests (on which you can enforce a no-collaboration rule) are part of the final grade. Faculty had to treat testing material by the same rules as those used to protect classified material (although the tests were NOT classified).
The idea was that homework was for learning the material, and if collaborating with your peers helped, then go for it. Tests were for determining whether you learned the material and were a major part of your grade. Classroom participation was also a major part of the grade, depending on the individual faculty member's approach. Correct grammar and spelling were also a major part of the grade - in ALL courses - not just English!
(Note - this was the state at the Air Force Academy many years ago when I was teaching there - don't know what their rules are today.)
Of course, in the REAL world, developers always keep all the code to themselves.
This makes it more challenging for coworkers.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I absolutely have to agree. Not only is this an extremely biased editorial (not an unbiased report), you must not take it at face value. So the school didn't want to talk to him...we don't have any idea how he approached them about the issue or why they turned him down. Did he ask if they'd like to talk about their dumb-ass honor code in front of a bunch of gawking internet slackjaws? I'd probably turn him down too. It's much more difficult to take my statements out of context if I don't say anything.
I'm also not sure what people think the school's motivation for instituting an overly harsh policy towards cheating would be. These policies aren't put in place by a bunch of fat Nazis that want students to fail - they're put in place by professors and department heads together. If this policy is so bogus, how come no professors, who you'd hope would be more liberal than the bureaucrats, have come forward in defense of this student?
I go to the University of Minnesota, and from my estimation, this guy got what he deserved. If you outright copy a bunch of code from a classmate to complete your assignment without proper attribution, then you deserve to get shafted. The excuse that "everybody cheats" is invalid - because it's completely untrue.
What about you open-source advocates? Would you be happy if Microsoft, feeling the GNUoose tightening around their necks, decided to wholesale rip code from GPLed projects and claim it was their own? Would you stand by and say "Oh that's ok, everybody cheats?"
Should we rewind to the poor fellow who "accidentally" found a hole in a local news site's web using FrontPage and "accidentally" downloaded code for their pages and a password list or two, that Slashdotters so gallantly defended? This (the Post article) isn't news, it's an inflammatory editorial by a misinformed sympathizer.
I am a physics major at Cornell University and the atmosphere is totally different. Students are very much encouraged to work on problem sets together. I even had one professor who set up a BBS on the class website for this express purpose. I can't imagine getting through some of my problem sets without working together.
I meet with my physics "support group" at least once a week. In fact, what little social life seems to revolve around doing physics in groups. Uh...I'll stop talking now...
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
Harvey Mudd College In Pamona Has the same policy for all students. It has a lot of other things that are backwards about it too.
He should have gone to the teacher like he was told. The real problem is that there was a schedule issue with availablility of TAs or teachers. It seems like the way the Georgia Tech found out the problem was through lines of similar code. This is an obvious infraction of the rules and he should have gone and attacked the real problem - lack of available teachers/TAs to help him. It seems like this is a very damaging article to the name of Georgia Tech. As a Georgia Tech alumni, I am aware that there are some scheduling/availability problems on campus sometimes. I think this should be the crux of the problem. I think that the Washington Post article was crafted a little bitterly for some reason or another. I'm sure it got the attention of many readers - keep in mind, that's how the Post puts its bread on the table.
I go to Ga State which is literally across the street from Tech... We hear about this kind of crap from over there all the time. I just wanted everyone to know that all Georgia schools are not that F'ed up. Only close...
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Just FYI, here are a few facts.
The Intro to CS class in question is a required course for ALL students at Georgia Tech, even the Architecture, History, Psychology, etc persons.
It is (now) Scheme, with the 2nd intro class (required for Comp E, EE, Industrial E, CS majors) in Java. Last semester (Fall 2001) 187 student were brought up for academic misconduct.
The actual policy for the course reads:
All assignments must reflect an individual effort, and must be completed "from scratch." It is a violation of the Honor Code to copy or derive solutions from text books, internet resources, or previous instances of this course unless specifically instructed to do so in assignment directions. When instructed to do so, all material not created by you and its source must be clearly identified. Copying solutions from other students, including those who previous took the course, is prohibited. A good guideline is that you must be able to explain and/or reproduce anything that you submit for any assignment.
Yes, reading a textbook and deriving a solution is a violation, talking to your roommate is a violation, I've talked with Deans about these issues, it's a poor way to learn, but when you have ~800 kids/semester going through the course, lines must be drawn.
--
J Boylan
Luckily for me, I went to a school that encouraged collaboration, and sharing of ideas, even in the comp. sci. dept. The professors had heard of Linux, and how its development was the act of many, many individuals working in a colaborative effort.
Thus, they encouraged collaboration in programming projects, but to discourage cheating, homework was weighed less than the examinations were. If you understood the assignments, you would pass easily. If all you did was copy what was on the board, or what your classmates did, you would fail miserably, because you would not understand how to do it.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
At Virginia Tech the policy is pretty nice. Students are allowed to discuss concepts for homework and programming projects, as long as no actual code is shared.(whether copy-pasted or just letting someone else look at your code)
the idea of graded homework has always bothered me anyway, since the real point of homework is supposed to be to learn it. Quite often if a teacher has only lectured, it takes the practice problems of homework to actually teach me how to do it. So grading homework is often grading prior knowledge without ever letting a student practice what they're supposed to be learning.
I went to art school at R.I.S.D. If they had this sort of policy there, I would have had to spend four years with my eyes shut. Not to mention my mind closed.
Most of you are misinterpriting the idea behind this type of rule. Yes, in the real world collaboration is increadably important, infact it is so important that we actually take classes in software design where the entire class is in groups. Learning how to interact with people and function in teams, methods of interaction and teamwork, dealing with problem members and managment, these are REQUIRED classes, and yes, groupwork is a required part of them. We even cover different philosophies of team interaction, the ancient methods and new concepts such as Extreme Programing. However, these rules are for the very begining, we are talking CS1 and 2 here, collaboration is not permitted. Yes, when I was taking the classes, I complained about the very constraining rules, and I did say that "In the real world, collaboration (and while I'm at it, not re-inventing the wheel) is important." However, it is also important to learn the basics yourself. Everyone in the entire university must take CS1 and most CS2, these are just intro programing classes to get people familure with coding and thinking on there own. That is their point, and to accomplish that, they must seperate the students out. Some of the strictness is misunderstood. The java API is not looked down upon, we are told to print it out and sleep with it under our pillows, to use it so much that by the end of the year it looks a bit the something from the 12th century. Granted that is in jest, but the point is, documentation, man pages, that type of stuff is encouraged. It is just the first few classes need to focus on the individual, not the team. You must first build yourself before you can build on yourself, and in order to assure that, rules must be in place. The CS majors know, or eventually realize once they reach the 2000 and above CS classes, that they benifitted from the artificial division. Maybe they knew everything going into CS1 and 2, but now all (or most) of their peers are strong on their own. So when it comes time to work together, each programmer could stand on their own, but together their skill is greater than the collective sum. In addition, it goes to teach the true value of working together, they know first hand how hard it can be to stand alone. Maybe it is difficult to see looking in, but there is a good concept behind the rules. Yes, they might not need to be there if everyone was honest, but unfortunately this is not a perfect world, and the restrictive environment helps in the long run.
My school's CS department recently published a "clarification of our [the college's] Honor Code as it applies to computer science course work". Most of the restrictions make sense: for example, it prohibits "incorporation of material from a passive source without proper acknowledgement or citation". But I have issues with the last restriction, "comparison of solutions between or among students for the purpose of possible revision" (unless you have received permission from the instructor). First, it doesn't specifically apply to looking at source code, so it could apply to verbal comparison or discussing solutions to written problems, both of which are encouraged in most classes. Second, it prevents me from discussing homework while it's still fresh in my mind, rather than a week later when I get it back graded.
The "clarification" also states that one of the possible penalties for infringement is a "required public letter of apology". Forcing someone to write a public letter that they disagree with is just screwed up. Last year, a group of students was forced to write such a letter even though the majority of the student body thought that what the students had done was a harmless prank.
I didn't want to waste time and make myself look stupid by asking every CS prof whether it's ok to discuss homework, so I just didn't sign the clarification. Nobody has seemed to notice...
The shareholder is always right.
I am a Senior CS Student. In my years I have seen that huge percentages of my fellow CS students regularly cheat and plagarize. This is a systemic problem with i assume all large CS departments, especially at public Universities. Too many CS students are in it for the money and can't hack it.
The solution is having a professor who cares and who knows enough about you to make accuarate decisions about what you are learning. The diploma mills that these huge CS departments are turning into are the source of the problem.
That's why you attend Southern Polytechnic State University instead of Georgia Tech. ;)
python >>>
reduce(lambda x,y:x+y,map(lambda x:chr(ord(x)^42),tuple('zS^BED\nX_FOY\x0b')))
in my experience.
An example from the 70's:
A friend of mine graduated from Cornell in engineering and went on to Tech for a masters in nuclear engineering. I visited him there a few times and got to know the flavor of the place.
The graduate student dorm had no private bedrooms and the one bathroom per floor had no toilet stalls. The shower was a large tiled room with no partitions or curtains.
My friend expained that the Tech adminstration wanted to be sure that none of the students had a chance to do that thing that might make them go blind!
(This sig intentionally left blank)
Good, now that we have finally dispelled this horrible myth that school was about learning, we can finally get down to the true importance of schooling, which is, of course, indoctrinating childeren and young adults so that they don't think for themselves. After all, it would be dangerous if we actually encouraged cooperation, thinking and bettering one's self. Everyone should just sit down, shut-up and eat the crap that is feed to you everyday, without question. Moreover, you need to be properly prepared for a life of mindless repetative tasks doled out to you by the corporate heads.
Don't think, don't learn, and don't even try to do anything we haven't told you to do. It is this doctrine that you are going to school for. the sooner everyone accepts this, the better.
Oh, and by the way, while we are on the subject of not learning, please remit all of your books to the central bonfire for burning, we don't want you looking in those. Seig Heil!
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
i'm a tech student and i agree... our draconian rules and regulations are just idiotic. the idea is to learn, not to be passively filled with data and numbers. the CS department has got to get it's act together and find a way to reduce free rides without keeping people from learning.
on a side note, what kind of CS department doesn't teach C++? yet another reason to transfer. sigh.
I puzzled as to why a school would even implement this policy. Back when I was in college (we learned on rock punch-tape cards like the Flintstones) we used to get together to work through our homework all the time. (I remember calling it quits for the night after I went through few pages of calculations and ended up with a negative resistance.) Is this type of policy common these days?
I am an educator in computer science. Although I do not agree with GIT's policy, I can see why they have adpoted such a policy in CS. Remember, the article says that this is only for a entry level CS course. In such a course, students are likely to copy answers off each other. In CS, a major portion of marks is allocated to assignments. I have had students that got a passing grade simply copying assignments and bombing all exams.
By having a no-discussion policy, they ensure that students are all doing their own work and learn as much as possible on their own. In more advance course, I am sure they would not have such a policy.
Having said all of the above, I still don't think that the policy is sound. Maybe some modifications to the policy is needed.
Wow, I can't believe the first thing I saw when I hit the comments list was someone discussing about VT's honor code. Goooo hokies! :-)
:-) (LOL! Sorry for the plug)
On the more serious side... let's think about this...and perhaps someone has a better view of this:
The act of discussing homework is probablly in my opinion the oldest form of 'Opensourcing.' Though you are not 'copying' code 'copying' word for word, but when you discuss the approach of how to approach a problem that is at least in my opinion the fundamental spirit of open source. Take a look at the Debian dev team. (Sorry if love for debian shows through) These guys are by far one of the most dedicated guys that I've seen in terms of sharing ideas and helping each other out. Even if you are sick and bed ridden...
If we can't even have an 'open' discussion, I say if you are smart, you take your parent's well earned money and go to a better school like Virginia Tech
A better title for this article could have been "Kindergarten Policy". Remember, especially early in school, when the whole class would get punished because someone did something bad? Not only does the punishment (the honor code) affect the people who did the improper/bad/incorrect deed it goes so far as to restrict valid thnigs/deeds the class is doing.
Wow. Made them look stupid, inept, and ignorant. All in about 100 lines of english.
Not bad.
Power of the Press!
The Pen is mightier than the Honor code!
It might hamper your ability to properly indoctrinate.
You can find a lot of his stuff here, and I would recommend starting with The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher.
A computer science student having trouble just passing the intro to CS course that everyone in the school had to take is probably not going to last long at Georgia Tech.
I'm an CS undergrad at Columbia University in New York and I can at least say that from my experience, college ISN'T for learning.
What I mean by that statement is the following: CS professors here assign homeworks but don't give you any guidance or assistance on how to do them. At least at Columbia, CS homeworks are essentially depth first searches using trial and error as a heuristic. Googling for answers is not a frequent method of finding answers, but often the only method. Professors are essentially useless. It's nice to know that all my money has gone to the free teachings of Google. Sigh...
As far learning from others, I personally would argue that two minds are better than one. Of course the problem lies among students who aren't trying to learn, but trying only to get a good grade. Professors claim the line is too fine to allow learning from other students. My claim is that if students want to copy, it's their own loss. When it comes time to actually do something on their own, they will be completely lost. Try proving P=NP by copying an answer from a friend.
Perhaps it's analagous to the seatbelt law. If people don't want to wear seatbelts, it's their loss, yet wearing seatbelts is still a law (at least in my hometown of NJ).
Such are my experiences here for anyone deciding where to go.
I'm a graduate student in CS at Georgia Tech, and I recently graduated from their undergraduate program.
Georgia Tech is in no way against teamwork. In fact, in many LATER courses, it is not only encouraged, but required to pass. In the introductory course, however, students are expected receive a firm foundation in the BASICS of programming and computer science like recursion, searching, sorting, algorithmic complexity, data structures, trees, graphs, etc. If a student cheats his way through ANY of these concepts, and expects to survive a later computer science course, he will not only damage his own grade, but the grade of his teammates as well.
I'd also like to point out a couple things either pushed aside or conveniently not mentioned in the article. First, the student in question was NOT accused of discussing his assignment with another student. To my knowledge, regular discussion of assignments is a very commonplace occurrence--especially on the four newsgroups available for the class. He was accused for CHEATING. No cheatfinder, however good, is going to find out if people DISCUSSED anything. It's only going to find people who have VERY similar, copied, code. Secondly, I'd like to mention that the person in question is also, apparently, the son of a Washington Post editor.
Sigh... what bullshit. Straight from the class syllabus we have:
Cheating your way through high school? Then don't expect to pass an intro CS course at Georgia Tech without getting caught. You're an adult now, and Georgia Tech treats you so. If you *do* get caught, though, I'm sure you can find some columnist to whine too, especially if you're from a liberal metropolitan area.
Besides that, the guy's just stupid (or so I would believe, seeing that the article doesn't describe what he did in any detail). When I took (and later TA'ed) the intro courses, we were given a clear idea of the difference between "discussing high level conceptual design" and "copying somebody else's code, even a snippet". In addition, we got a couple of thou-shall-not-cheat lectures from both the professors and the TA's.
Great way to drum up news with an old story, Slashdot. Stop sensationalizing some bitch and moan piece about a poor kiddy who got caught and get back to stuff that matters.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
wow, when i was at school every CS course had a class mailing list where students were _encouraged_ to ask questions to each other.
if GT knows anything about CS they should recognize that the majority of programming involves building on someone elses work, either as part of a team or maintaining a previous coders work.
being able to discuss your code/ideas effectively is probably one of the most important workplace skills i can imagine gaining.
i know it happens to me every day where me/fellow employee each have our own way of approaching a problem and need to (gasp) discuss it to find what we consider the best solution.
Get a good lawyer who works on contingency, and sue.
It's the American way!
I attend Purdue University's computer engineering program, as well as co-op as an embedded applications programmer for one of the top 10 companies on the Fortune 500. This problem is something you have to deal with. Professors run all kinds of cheat finding scripts, and the TA's in the lab are listening for any kinds of cheating. It is needed, as I am sick and tired of all my peers sharing answers, while I work to learn them. In my opinion, cheating lowers the quality that is assigned to the piece of paper that I earn.
As far as curves, in computer engineering we all choose our little groups of 3 or 4 people. Beyond those people, you don't help anyone, because in the end it only hurts you. Teachers here stick to a solid bell curve. In EE201, the first real circuits course, about 1/3 of the 500 people in the course will fail. This is after 2 semesters of prerequisites that have similar failure percentages. 1 out of 2 engineers are gone in the first year. You fight for every percentage point, and it can be very stressful, you don't want to make in any harder on yourself.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
Without a bong and a handle of Gordon's $5 Vodka, what would there be left to do at college?
- A.P.
"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?"
I found a copy of the course-specific honor code here. Here's the relevant excerpt:
It actually looks pretty reasonable. I'd like to direct people's attention particularly to the last "good guideline" sentence. Now, what did the student do? From the original story:
Now, "chatting" is obviously vague; there's a big difference between "what are they asking us to do" and "how do we do it". However, it doesn't matter. According to the "good guideline" in the honor code, the student would be in the right even if he discussed answers with the other student, so long as neither was looking at or copying from the other's actual code and both could explain independently how their solution worked. If anything, the honor-code standard as stated in the referenced link seems a little too lenient to me.
It's entirely possible that the student did something more egregious than what's mentioned in the article. It's also entirely possible that someone's being a little overzealous about enforcing their own interpretation of what is really a pretty lenient standard. Assuming either to be the case would be premature, based on the information available. All of the political rhetoric, on either side, seems just a little bit misguided in the absence of anything but the most fragmentary and incomplete information.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
I've seen a lot of posts suggesting two defenses for the university:
a) he can collaborate, but he has to CITE his references
b) he can't collaborate because they want to weed people out that can't do the work on their own.
(A) isn't really applicable in this case because of the university's anti-collaboration policy (as far as I can tell). If it were the case, I'd agree with the university, citations are important.
But (B) is bullshit.
There is this pervading attitude that if you didn't put in the EFFORT into solving the problem, then you can't have learned it or somehow your learning experience is "diluted".
Results are all that matters. Excessive effort is for masochists and bleeding hearts ("but boss, I worked all weekend!").
If I ask someone a question, and they explain to me how they got the ansewr, and I incorporate that experience into my skills & knowledge, then I:
- probably can solve similar problems on my own
- solved that problem
- got what I needed out of the assignment (i.e. immediate answer and long term thought pattern to reach that answer).
The problem usually stems from people that just ask questions for the immediate answer and then refuse to incorporate that into their knowledge, they just want the quick grade.
That's unfortunate, but it's more indicative of the failure of examinations to catch such losers than of the evils of collaboration.
Once you leave university, you're going to be judged on what you produce -- not how you got there. If you leverage the knowledge of others, you're going to go farther. That's why design patterns are so popula -- so you don't have to solve things from first principles unless the situation is truly unique and warrants such an analysis.
If universities are institutions of higher learning, I really don't see a much in the way of modern pedagogy. As one person already said, they're more about indoctrination than learning. And for that reason (among others) they're not going to last much longer in their current form (give it a few decades).
Picasso once said: "Good artists borrow -- great artists steal."
-Stu
Seems the syllabus itself has some disagreements with the author:
f al l/syllabus.html
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2002/cs1321_
such as:
1. Talking about assignments IS allowed
2. Outside sources ARE allowed but must be documented
What is not allowed is copying 30 lines of code from a program of only hundreds (blatantly enough to get caught). Also his punishment could have been much worse.
Under the Academic Misconduct section:
"The homework assignments and labs in this course are not intended to be collaborative exercises, but on the other hand, we don't want to discourage discussion between students about ideas pertaining to this course. So, if you incorporate ideas into your homework assignment or labs that did not originate with you, or did not come from the obvious sources your instructor, teaching assistants, textbooks, lectures, or supplementary reading materials provided in this course you must give credit to your sources. Furthermore, at no time is it acceptable for you to share your solutions to the homework assignments with other students, whether these solutions are complete or partial, nor is it acceptable to compare your solutions with other students. You are not to work on these assignments in groups, whether on paper or at the computer. Of course there is to be no collaboration whatsoever during exams. Students who fail to follow these rules will be charged with academic misconduct. The likely penalty for academic misconduct in this class is to fail the class, and you could even be declared ineligible for a degree in computer science."
Wouldn't it be nice if universities concentrated on teaching, rather than ratings...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
So, for example, 45% of the grade could be the final, 10% for participation/attendance, and 45% for a project written by the student alone in a restricted environment (e.g., a proctored computer lab). Problem solved.
I used to attend Georgia Tech and was a TA for what is widely considered the "weed-out" class in the Computer Science curriculum.
When I took the class as a sophomore we had to implement a reasonable facsimile of GNU make as well as a Lisp to C interpreter in a two week period for about 20% or 30% of our grade. I finished the make project but only did about 80% of the Lisp to C interpreter. However, the knowledge I gained in doing so has helped me all through my programming experience since then. Now I write parsers for fun
However, due to a massive amount of cheating that went largely unreported the powers that be decided to convert the class to the format that you suggested. Programming assignments were primarily optional homework assignments that contributed little to the overall grade.
What ended up happening is that students left the class with little over basic programming experience (a 2 hour coding quiz does not a l337 h4x0r make) and many people failed the class by simply not doing well on a single test. Considering that test taking is in many cases and excercise in rote memorization, I have significant problems with making it worth anything over 50% of a students grade.
Eventually, I believe someone realized that it was better to let many people cheat and turn out a few decent students than curb cheating via proctored exams but turn out primarily half-baked students even among does that didn't cheat.
PS: The class I am talking about isn't the one that has been getting in the news. GA Tech will probably never run CheatFinder on that class' students (or those in higher classes) because the cheating ratio may be even higher than what is being reported in the Freshman classes.
The easiest way to discredit grading by bell curve is the fact that if you turn in mediocre work, and the rest of the class turns in bad work, you recieve an A.
And that is patently stupid; mediocre work should recieve mediocre marks, period. Thing is, grading technical work is quantifiable, and thus one can give a more or less objective grade. Not doing so is foolish.
Plus of course there is the inverse. Say you hand in good work, but you're in a class of genii...result is you get a bad grade. If however you were in next years class, you would get a better/worse one. The inconsistency here is the real give-away that grading by bell-curve is rediculous.
The true "hello, world" is:
#include
main()
{
printf("Hello, World\n");
}
I find it interesting you refer to 30 lines as a substantial amount of code. The article suggests the program was a rather large one, and that 30 lines was a small fraction of the overall code. My own computer science experience in the past suggests 30 lines probably was a teeny fraction of the code.
Of course, the pureist will say, copying is copying, and even if it was 2 lines that's cheating. The problem is I see no proof he copied from another student. You may scoff, how else would the code be the same, well, that's easy.
I remember more than a few times sitting in the lab working next to 5-10 of my classmates. A common activity was to repeat the problem to each other to be sure we understood it. "The assignment said the program should output the data in sorted order case insensitive, one on a line, right?" "Yes." That's not cheating. Then someone else might pipe up "Didn't the GTA give us a handout with a sorting example on it?" "Yes," another would pipe up, and a third would produce the class handout for all to read. Again, no cheating yet. Of course the GTA example was case sensitive, so it had to be changed to be case insensitive. It also worked on plain strings, and the data was stored in structures (which were all remarkably similar due to a similar process) so that change had to be made as well. Those two changes were done independantly.
In this case I proport no cheating has happened. Students conversations were limited to the problem statement, not the solution. Materials "shared" by the students were class handouts that all had, although perhaps not at that moment. The probability code ended up the same, high. Identical, moderate.
Several times after assignments were returned to us (graded et all, even after the course) I would then compare with a friend to see how to do the things I got marked down on, and vice versa. Several times I found whole functions that were only a few characters off of being identical, even though we never colaberated at all. Everyone uses x, p, i. "print_sorted_output" is a common function name choice. Add to the copied GTA (course) suppied code and you get a lot of similar programs.
We don't have enough facts to determine if this student is guilty or innocent. The fact that 30 lines are roughly the same, or even identical does not, in my mind, prove he cheated. There must be other evidence to help lead us to that conclusion.
As for Georgia Tech, there is a root problem here. They have a separate computer science college,so it's hard to tell where they fit. Most schools put computer education in the College of Arts and Science, or in the College of Engineering. This is important. If you look at other Arts and Sciences, students are encouraged to work together. If you are majoring in dance, and another student views your "final project" (a dance, of course) and suggests "hold your chin up higher while you spin" that's not considered cheating on your homework. If you write a book, and let another student read it before turning it in, and they say "you should be more emphatic in chapter 2" that's not cheating. On the other hand engineering has right and wrong answers. If you show someone your calculations on the load capacity of a beam for homework that's cheating.
So what is CS? Is it a creative discipline, like dance, or painting, or writing? If so the root of improvement is working together, public performance, peer review. On the other hand, is it a hard science. There is a "right" program, and everyone should get the "same" answer, so any sharing would help a student leap to a conclusion without doing the work?
Sorry, real URL here:
Class syllabus
But it's an interesting article all the same.
Essay on UNschooling.
One: This is the same story thats been posted to slashdot before, at least twice. 187 students were caught cheating. whoopie.
Two: As was previously pointed out, every student at gatech has to take cs1321 (the course this kid got caught cheating on). I think we accept about 2000-2500 new students a year, so assume Most of them will take this course.
Three: You can "talk" as much as you bloody want to anyone about your homework, how they did it, etc. As long as you HAVE YOUR OWN SOLUTION, then you're fine.
Four: I am highly suspicious of this kids assertion that no one could be found, this being the most taken cs course on campus, and hence, having the most ta's for it. Maybe he didnt know to check the class newsgroup, which would be full of posts that he could learn from.
Five: Its not like we have TA's pouring over code checking for similiarities, its a program that does it, and doing little things like changing variable names, adding comments, etc, doesnt fool it. From what I understand, it's been in the works for a long time, and it's pretty damn smart. And even then, any instance it pops up is looked at by a living person to make sure it really is cheating, before there is a call to the dean of students.
Six: This "news" article is a total rip, by the reporters own admission he couldnt get any comments from the school, yet he flamed us as being against learning, and other venemous comments about the school.
A kid got caught cheating, go cry to mamma you no-skill management major. Maybe next time you'll do the homework by yourself. I've gotten idea's about how to do soemthing from friends but i've always coded my own solution. I dont think it's a barrier to learning to require the same of everyone else. jesus, every student has to take(and pass) this class, how hard do you people think it is ??????
He obviously didn't just "discuss" code as he had 30 lines of code (out of probably a hundred which had been written for the assignment) which closely corresponded to another student's code. Even if he had a good idea of how the algorithm worked, there should not have been such a similarity unless he had actually read the other student's code. I applaud Georgia Tech for having the balls to impose an ethical standard on its students. But then, I would expect nothing less out of a respectable university.
Most of the dumb-shits I went to school with could only take, not give (I was too kind in my youth, probably helped launch way too many wonderfully mediocre comp-sci careers...)
It was like that when I went to college also... You know, god forbid that students might learn code re-use, or teamwork. One of the big problems in the software development world is programmers who can't work as a team. Can't read or debug other people's code, or write code that other people can understand.
The whole concept that code re-use or teamwork are cheating is just plain brain damaged.
I was in several classes in which work was assigned to "development teams" of 4 or 5 students. We were expected to hold "development meetings" and discuss "development strategies" whilst constructing the piece of software we'd been told to create.
A noble idea, right? Work together, just like in the real world? Get help from your peers, everyone does their share, all that happy horseshit?
Did it ever work that way for anyone? The smart kids in the group (if there were any) ended up doing all the work. The stupid kids hung around for one or two meetings and maybe sent off the occasional email asking when the next meeting was, but never contributed line one of code. The worst part came at the end of the semester, when we were all asked to rate our fellow teammates. What can you say? "This stupid retard was too busy fucking around and getting drunk to write any code, and when we asked him to debug this function, he sent it back exactly the way he received it"? Well, you can, but it doesn't seem to matter, as everyone always got the same grade.
Come to think of it, group work is exactly like working in the real world, because it's full of people who don't do jack shit and make you wonder why they're still hanging around like a festering boil on an unwashed butt cheek. Honestly, I don't know how some kids in my class got their degree.
- A.P.
"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?"
I took a fairly pragmatic view of it - people copy code for one of two reasons:
- they can't understand it
- they don't want to understand it
So I was fairly lenient insofar as I only reported extreme cases (because if the students were under the impression that they could get away with copying, the weaker-willed among them might be tempted not to try to understand the subject matter). My hope was that the people who didn't fully understand what they were doing would come to understand over time and that the assholes who just couldn't be bothered to do their own work would be caught out come exam time.Different people have different aptitudes for both understanding and learning: some people are good a memorising, others are good with concepts. I've seen people memorise entire assignments in the hope that something like it would come up in an exam and they might get some credit for answering a question that merely resembled one one one the paper. Some of the people I met who were totally "at sea" when they began studying CS are professionals now and know what they're doing. Things come to different people at different rates. Others are glad to have survived the experience of having to study it.
When that college accused this student of "trying to learn", I presume that they meant "learn by heart" (or memorise), rather than "understand". But when you don't understand anything, it's a bit hard to know which bits of code are the important ones. This kind of understanding comes to people at different rates (I believe that everyone can do it, in time - but will they do it in time for their exam/assignment deadline?). A lucky few people only have to look at code for a couple of minutes to get the gist of what's going on.
I think the college (and any other implementing a similar policy) would be better off taking a more pragmatic approach: if the course is mandatory (which this one was, if I recall correctly), make it relatively easy to pass (the exposure of the student to IT concepts is a benefit in itself) but difficult to do well. This should sort out the people who are willing to work hard and the people with natural aptitude from the people who can't be bothered trying.
I would say that the student in question was looking forward to never having to study Computer Science again. Now it looks like he's going to have to do it for another while...
This is not a ZT policy. If you read the article, he got an email saying he *might* have cheated. whether he did or not would be up to review by the dean of students.
In no way is this policy ZT, because every case is reviewed by professors and the dean of students, each case is heard and judged separatly.
I go to GT, i am a CS major, and i have no gripes with the system.
Next time do your research before blatently assigning a rationalization to things that you have no first hand knowledge of, and that your second hand source was an extremely biased article fed by someone who broke the rules and cried all the way to the press.
This
Learning starts at a young age. If a person doesn't have the thirst and desire to really understand the material, no school, teacher or system is going to fix it. Universities stopped being about education and inspiring students a long time ago. It's pure a vocational environment, without the vocation part. Atleast in europe, vocational schools actually teach the practicle skills needed for a particular profession.
I'm always ahead of my class... During a lot of the period, I'm walking around the class helping people [mostly the 2 girls we have in there, (= ] I do this with the teacher's blessing, and I also enjoy the _group_projects_ that we do, because in the work world, group projects happen.
I'm not going to do CS in college, but I would have imagined that college would have been _more_ like the work world than high school, not the other way around.
-------
I'm lucky enough to be a senior at the Advanced Technologies Academy in Las Vegas for CS
This is something that high school seniors might want to keep in mind when selecting which university to attend.
Yeah. You should keep it in mind because Georgia Tech is respected by employers from coast to coast. One of the reasons for that is it doesn't put up with a lot of cheating bullshit.
Employers know that if you've gotten through a Georgia Tech curriculum that you didn't skate through unchallenged.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
The student enrolled in a class. The class had a contract (a syllabus is a binding contract). Providing the syllabus did indeed mention the honor code, the student is wrong--not the school.
Right.
"Examples like this are ideal for showing our future technology generation the importance of standards and ethics.
This example tells us nothing about the importance of standards and ethics... For that, you would have to claim that the standards involved were important, or that violating them would be unethical. What does that have to do with whether the standards were violated or not?
In short, the student was wrong, the school simply enforced its policy.
I agree...
Georgia Tech is an excellent school with a high reputation.
Does GA Tech have a good reputation? I'll leave this question to another discussion; likewise with any comments you may have on student drug use there (after all, as you're not an alumnus, I can't make fun of bad grammar and remain on topic =)
If you want it on your resume, you have to earn it.
Truer words were never spoken. (That's why I always use plain paper, and leave the scented paper to the other guys. =)
Well, I'm a Computer Engineering student at Georgia Tech, and as such, I was required to take CS 1311 (what is now known as 1321).
One thing that I noticed about the class was that discussion was rampant, and so was cheating. I openly admit to discussing general points of certain programs and concepts with my best friends. Did I get caught? No. Was I guilty of something? No.
Everyone's code is automatically scanned and then the suspect programs are then checked by an undergraduate assistant. At some point, someone decides that there is enough evidence to point the finger.
If anything, the system doesn't catch enough cheaters.
I struggled with this when I was a prof teaching intro courses. I never figured out a good solution. Perhaps one approach might be to just rely on coding tests, in addition to the normal "subject" tests.
The coding tests would specify a problem, the students would get two hours to solve it. No computers, everything handwritten, exam conditions. The problems would have to be relatively simple, and could be taken from the programming assignments. Anyone who has really coded an answer already for an assignment should have no problem. Those people who copied are out of luck.
It is just you that is lost.
The real truth is that students are at fault for policies such as this even existing. Students CHEAT an unbelievable amount! I see this _every_ day, and with graduate students it is even a bigger problem. Students will play games, pretending to know one language not another (never the one required for the course) and seek pity from and pester thier TA or teacher until they just get sick of them and give up. This is espcially true of foriegn students. They are not interested in learning. They want a grade and I have no idea what they plan to do if they get a degree. I just taught a graduate level and the students spent several days trying to set thier PATH! I havea mailbox full of email asking me what 'command not found' means. Graduates!
The whole fiasco was sorted out months ago...
/. :P
Most of the kids were found innocent or accepted the option of retaking the course.
Thanks for tarishing our schools image one last time
Tim Dorr
Owner/Manger
A Small Orange
Maybe I'm missing some important assumption. Why should a broader definition of academic misconduct be put in place just because the class is bigger? If the broader definition is used as a compromise to make it easier to run the class, how does it do that? If talking about a solution with your roommate is considered unacceptable when the solution is for a class of 800, should it not also be unacceptable when the solution is for a class of 30?
(In fact, the only relationship I can discern is the opposite one -- cooperation would be encouraged more in larger classes, as there is less teacher/TA time to go around for responding to questions.)
While the circumstances of this particular case seem a little harsh, the fact is, cheating is a HUGE problem these days in university.
Where do you draw the line between another student discussing the homework, and a student asking for the answer? How do you distinguish between academic inquiry and laziness?
There must be a strict rule that everyone abides by. In this instance, why didn't the student ask the instructor, or the TA for help? Those are the officially sanctioned channels for asking questions. ESPECIALLY if the honor code forbids students consulting others, why did the student do otherwise?
The problem is, cheating is undermining the integrity of many student's degrees. This is becoming a huge problem at my school - how do you detect the cheaters? Where do you draw the line?
While this case may be a bit extreme, the fact is you have to look at the overall picture. If the student was forbidden to discuss with other students, then he should have asked the teacher/TA.
In many ways modern day universities are still
... are all but a few
stuck in the Middle Ages.
Their elaborate hierarchies in the administration
(chancellor, dean, provost, etc.) with titles
more fitting of the British royalty, the infamous
5-10 year graduate student advisor-advisee
relationship that reeks of indentured servitude,
and the undergraduate Displinary Boards that are
run like Inquisitions,
reasons why.
Anyone know of any schools that treat their
students more like customers than like children?
Look, I know people who have MASTER'S degrees in CS, who did it simply because they had root on the machines. Cheating in CS is no different from cheating in any other major. The profs are right for being hard asses and I would be damned if I would hire a kid who cheated (if I could prove it). That being said, a university is a place of open discussion of ideas. I question GATech on this and I question their commitment to liberal education.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
For most people, the purpose of going to college is to get good grades in order to get into a good job or graduate school. This is not the optimal way to go about learning, just as concentrating on pumping up short term stock prices is not the optimal way to build a healthy company.
I say the whole grading thing should be scrapped until you are ready to graduate. With no grades, cheating is irrelevant, and you can do whatever you need to learn the material. At the end, you spend two days in isolated testing, the first day for testing on all the core fundamentals your degree entails. The second day is spent writing a paper detailing the roles and responsibilities of someone with your degree, and a writeup on how you would handle a certain scenario as presented to you on the day of the test.
If the results of the two days of testing are satisfactory, you've proven that you deserve a degree in your speciality. If not, well, study more and try again next year.
The bit about a new policy saying students will not being allowed to look for answers anywhere other than course material or Georgia Tech staff?! That's what research and learning is all about: using any resource available to you. This doesn't directly map to plagiarism and cheating. For example, using an alternate text book often helps more clearly understand a concept not well explained in the assigned text. Lastly, how on earth did they manage to write down "He was trying to learn it" in any context that makes sense?
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
After all, if it was really cheating and not just talking about a problem, the other party must be equally guilty. When I was in college, if you did someone else's work for them you were equally guilty if they turned it in as their own. Also, most cheaters are VERY unmotivated and not at all creative. The semester before I graduated (mechanical engineering, not comp sci) I was called into my advisor's office about a case of "academic dishonesty". Needless to say, I was worried as all hell, especially since I didn't cheat. The previous year, he had assigned me a really dumb lab partner that he was afraid wouldn't finish the course. Half the grade was a thermal analysis of the professor's house... you had to do half by hand, half with a program. The professor told me to help the guy (unpaid tutor?) but not to give him the answers. I spent god knows how many hours trying to explain HVAC to him, and I gave him the printouts from the program, but included obvious errors... 2+2=1000000. I wanted him to at least wonder why a nuke had gone off in the professor's heater. Anyway, a year later the guy gave the lab (which he had turned in with the errors) to two students a year behind us. They used in their project too. They didn't even retype it, they PHOTOCOPIED it. Crooked. The pages stuck out like a sore thumb. Even worse, I had helpfully added fields for my name, address, and home phone number at the top of each page. They copied those along with the rest of the page; never even READ it. Anyway, the professor had a good laugh at my expense making me sweat it out... he knew I hadn't cheated and hadn't had anything to do with it. But, what if there were a zero tolerance policy and I hadn't rigged the data? If collaboration is cheating, then it takes two to cheat in that way. I wonder how GT would have handled my case. BTW, no one got expelled over that one... don't ask me why.
The act of programming is to take something complex, though made up of simplers things and to automate it's use, so as to take the task of creating the complexity away in order to move forward sooner. As has been the way of human advancement since forever!
It seems clear that Computer Science has gotten entrapped in itself for the sake of itself and the sacrifice of advancing technology.
Do you really need to teach students how to re-invent or would it be better to teach students how to advance by putting things others have done together in order to advance?
Perhaps the focus should be on identifying the action constants of Virtual Interaction so as to be better skilled at building new and advanced things like autocoding.
see lower part of page and do a search on "autocoding" in groups.google.com
That's because all you people hermitize in the dorms and play Counter-Strike all day. About the only time I've seen dormers outside of class is when there's a fire evacuation or the Internet is hosed (most wired school... right). Cross the street over to Rutgers and you have no problem. The girls at NJIT all have ego problems because they're so coveted, you wouldn't want them anyway. I know. My sister goes there.
Did you even read the message you just quoted from? It even says the person's grade has been held, and that their name has been submitted for investigation. How are they supposed to investigate if they don't know the person's name?
Hint: We do lock people up on suspicion of a crime. A person is arrested. If appropriate, bail is set. Then, the person can leave if they post a sufficient bond, until their trial.
University of Aarhus, Denmark, where I got my Masters, almost enforced teamwork. We were split into study groups (though you could go alone if you wanted to) and expected to do all homework together. Projects were turned in as a group. I learned *so* much more from discussing the problems with my friends that from any other part of the education. Forbidding teamwork is just plain stupid (as is the curved grading that promotes selfishness).
-Lars
Geesh, I've always heard what a backwards place College Station was. I guess that explains this email I recieved.
You have just received the "Aggie Virus"
As we don't have any programming experience, this virus works on
the honor system. Please delete all the files from your hard drive
and manually forward this virus to everyone on your mailing list.
Thanks for your cooperation,
Texas A & M Computer Engineering Dept
but it's accurate. I took this class last semester (here at GATech), and the entire CS department seems to be organized against learning. Maybe this is just another example of getting too wrapped up in one idea; the university needs to have the smartest students, so they must be competitive, so they must flunk as many people as they can. This kind of logic results in clinic bombings in the name of life and other senseless acts.
On a more likely note, this is probably due to miscommunication and the general unwieldiness of the CS dept here at Tech. TAs do all the work here in the into CS classes, and most of them are far more interested in just getting their credit than actually helping people learn. It's not uncommon to simply be insulted when posting suggestions or certain questions on the newsgroups.
By no means to I mean to say that GATech isn't extremely strong in other areas of engineering. It's just the opinion of this student that the CS dept is by FAR the worst organization here on campus, and by worst I mean most unorganized, un-thought-out, and simply lacking in common sense.
If the artice had said "GA Tech CS Dept Cracks Down On Learning" it would have been entirely accurate. I would really enjoy reading an article from the side of the CS department that wasn't just political garbage and excuses and statistics regarding how many people "cheat".
And I don't care what anybody says, communication with peers is a vital part of the learning process. If you don't have basic abilities required to write basic programs after you get out of these classes, you won't get through the rest of Tech anyway, so anybody cheating gets punished one way or another. This way just hurts more innocent students.
Disclosure: I am a Tech alum twice over (BSCS '95, MSCS '97).
Disclaimer: The Honor Code was put in place after I graduated.
Background:
- At Tech, the classes in question are required of almost all freshmen, not just CS majors. The classes contain several hundred people, just like calculus, chemistry, and the other required courses. The idea is that no science or engineering degree is complete without some exposure to the basics of computer science, a significant nod to the times we live in.
- The class, unlike calculus and chemistry, is oriented around online activity -- writing code, compiling, electronic homework submissions, etc. Students fresh out of high school are taught the basics of interacting with this computing environment if they don't already know it.
- Compared to the effort required to share work in traditional disciplines, it is utterly trivial to obtain and share completed labs and homework. Unscrupulous students do not even have to risk being seen copying each others' papers -- they can just copy files to/from an accessible sharepoint or web page.
Observations:- Suppose you had the opportunity to design an introductory CS class. But also suppose that you had to design it for several hundred students, most of whom are not there because they're interested in the subject but because it's required for their degree requirements (think about one of your own hated freshman classes). Would you take any special steps regarding cheating? I would.
- Checking for cheating is extremely time-consuming and expensive, even with the much-discussed "cheat detection" programs in use at Tech. The Tech CS department simply would not spend the resources on it unless they had evidence that there was a problem. Believe me, they're tough as nails about what they spend their money on.
- Many kids coming out of high school today see absolutely nothing wrong with downloading MP3s they haven't purchased. In fact, many of them see it as some kind of absurd "fight the power" underdog-rebellion thing. What's the difference between this and cheating on your homework?
- The author of the article attempts to draw a parallel between cheating and parking illegally (or speeding, etc.), and asks which of us has never done these things. This is a ridiculous parallel. Here's a better real-world analogy: Adam and Bob work together on a project at work. Adam does substantially less work than Bob. In private discussions with the boss, Adam implicitly claims equal credit with Bob for the success of the project. Hey, it's all about perceptions, right?
- As has been pointed out elsewhere, I'm interested in hearing the details of this case, from both sides. But I'm not holding my breath.
-- BandannaramaBandannarama
Write a java applet that does x with y functions using a hashtable. You can consult any paper materials you have on your person. No talking to anyone in the classroom except the teacher. You have an hour.
In my CS courses, tests in this format are given all the time. The Chairman of the TCU CS Department, Dr. Richard Rinewalt, has been head judge of the ACM programming contest-THAT programming contest-for several years. He supports this format and knows that it works. I believe it's reasonable to trust what he is doing.
Tech does not forbid discussing assignments with each other. I did it all the time, almost every Java program I had involved me talking on AIM with fellow students, and having friends critique buggy code. However all the code used in my programs was my own. Even today, I meet with friends and give detailed analysis of what must be done to implement the solution. Go over syntax etc. However it's up to the student to code his/her own assignment. Furthermore, the author of the article says that 30 lines of code was copied. Come on now 30 lines of verbatim code. It's fine to share ideas, it's not fine to copy code, and it's impossible to have 30 lines of verbatim code without some sort of cheating going on.
You guys are a bunch of morons. For one, the policy spoken of only applies to this class and maybe a few others like it. Different departments and classes have different policies. This was for a introductory CS class. You should not acquire any help in such a class. Everything should be done on your own or with the help of a prof. This isn't some community college. It's Georgia tech and CS is very competitive here. If you don't have what it takes to complete the first CS class here on your own, then you aren't Georgia Tech material. When something is so competitive, there is only room to extract the strongest. If you aren't smart or strong enough, you'll do bad. Some of you may think that this is bad. However, it makes my degree much more valuable when I graduate this semester with a 3.8. If you're weak, go to another school.
Having taken several undergraduate CS courses at Tech as well as having earned a Master's in CS there ('95), I read the editorial with a very self-interested eye.
Frankly, I've got mixed feelings.
On the one hand, as many have persuasively pointed out almost no one can defend the notion of prohibiting general conversation and interaction involving course material/ideas/concepts as a good thing for learning in the long run. And I agree with this -- for obvious reasons, engineering as well as literature students should be encouraged to discuss technical as well as philosophical ideas and approaches.
On the other hand, this is an introductory course meant to intellectually test (both figuratively and literally) the capabilities of the students, and it is by design meant to generate a gradient/differentiation of the students' skill sets. This is perhaps the one course that may demonstrate to non-CS majors the work involved in understanding a problem set, designing a solution, and implementing the solution via a programming language -- this is a good thing, and the fact that it's challenging to many doesn't mean that the assignments are patently unfair.
As far back as 1993 (and probably before) Ga Tech was submitting programming assignments to "similarity/copying detection programs" which aimed to detect, and thus deter, near verbatim occurrences ("copying") of code in students' submissions. Students were told UP FRONT that this was being done, and that they would be caught if they cut-n-pasted even a portion of their friend's (or classmates' whose directories/file permissions were a bit too lax allowing visibility to group/world users) assignment.
I think we need to be careful about indicting an entire university or department based on an editorial. At a minimum, we need the cold, hard facts (ie, the likely verbatim similarities -- variables, spacing, comments, etc. -- involved in the code submissions) before getting too one-sided either way.
Yes, you could use this "details unknown" case to condemn Ga Tech's College of Computing of being too much of a nit-picking hard ass, but you surely can't use it question the integrity or individual accomplishment of those that successfully completed their curriculum -- and in the technical fields of CS and engineering, this is a Very Good Thing.
Andy
I mean in the real world you're never allowed to consult with co-workers on projects.
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
Isn't that discouraging cooperation among programmers? I mean, in the real world you have to work together to solve a problem. Professors here at PITT have no problem with students discussing homework problems and programming assignments, as long as there is no cheating/copying. That adds to the educational experience in my opinion, and is evidently the PITT professors opinion. Hell, it's less work for them if you can go to a classmate to get help rather than go to the professor himself who is busy with research work. PITT is a good CS school, even though we are a shadow to Carnegie Mellon. Just a PITT CS student POV.....
How on Earth are we to judge if we can't see the code?
In case you missed my next sentence: "Still, I'd want to see the code in question before saying whether the student's in the right or not."
is what was this guy's major?
Requiring CS1 for everyone, irregardless of their major, is a bit extreme for me. (I fail to see why a Civil Engineer would need to know how to program in Pascal.)
I was a physics major and took an intro programming class for fun about 10 years ago. They never taught anything, including the debugger, so my first assignment didn't compile but I turned it in anyway. I was subsequently threatened to be expelled from school by an idiot professor in the CS administration. He didn't have a clue. I went to the instructor and explained, and he immediately understood. Computer Science as an "academic" discipline needs serious help. I've since learned programming on my own over the years and have done professional simulations and consulting work. Learning programming in a class is a total joke and a waste of time. Don't be a CS major.
Jay Mathews is a bit of an extremist when it comes to the education articles. He usually takes the side that would have the public's sympathy on their side but goes too far with it. With that being said, he makes an interesting comment...
"But the freshman was accused of similarities on 30 out of hundreds of lines of computer code, and his accusers--by their very words on the official form--admitted that he was just trying to solve the problem."
Ignore the part that he was trying to solve the problem, 30 lines is a substantial amount of code, and in an intro level computer science course it very well could have been the entire assignment. Or maybe it could have been from a book, or code given from the teacher! We don't know, Jay Mathews doesn't know, he probably doesn't want to know.
There are procedures for this, the student did something against the rules and wound up with a C in the class instead of a B. If the student did something which was against the rules, but not really "wrong" than I don't see how this was an injustice. But we don't know.
The article is woefully absent with real quotes from the school in context, but at one point it mentions about 30 lines of code in common with someone else. As I'm sure all of us coders here on Slashdot know, 30 lines of code is not a coincidence. In fact, it's extremely likely to be copying one way or the other. If you had 30 lines, or hey, even 30 words the same with someone else's English paper, it wouldn't even be a question whether plagarism occured. Assuming this is the case, it's not even debatable. The student should consider himself lucky for not getting a XF (failure due to academic dishonesty).
Cheating is a problem, and copying someone else's work should result in immediate explusion but this is just blatently ridiculous. The first thing they need to teach CS students is how to work with a team of programmers. To share ideas, not hide ideas from one another. Learning and teaching from another is something that I love about being a programmer. And for godsake what we don't want to encourge is the M$ attitude on our future software developers.
Later,
Phil
As a student at a school where collaboration is the only method of survival on homework sets, I find this to be a rather stupid rule. Often, the only way I've learned my lessons is by asking other students - the professor is not often available, and TAs tend to be of less help than one would hope.
Without collaboration, Techers would be dead. I'm even more glad than ever, now, that I didn't decide to go to Georgia Tech.
The beer, drugs, sex, and parties just help you deal with all the BS and the "I haven't slept in 3 days" projects. Do not let the loud mouths fool you into trying to get through 4 years without partying and mates. Listen and burn out after a semester or 2 and end up on anti-depressants.
About the only knowledge you will get from them after 4 years is what the diploma looks like. The rest is all you. They hype that college helps you land a job. I know a EE major that excelled through and is a TA at the moment. His garenteed job is a sales representative for an electronics manufacturer. Geez...what would I get for finishing CS? Telemarketer for accounting software?
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Secondly, after a major incident of mass cheating in intro comp sci, they didn't make the enforcement stricter (like wandering TAs through the isles during tests), they instead changed the honor code. Tests remain same, requiring students to write and sign a testament they didn't recieve unauthorized help, but programming and lab assignments are a different matter. As long as you physically type in the code, you're all good. Next, if you talk with someone else or use a site, book, etc as a reference, you cite it at the top. Note that if you do either of these, there is no penalty against you.
The moral is that if something is wrong, maybe you need to change the laws, not hire more cops. Unfortunately, in gigantic institution like G. Tech, this policy might not work. Our intro CS courses are only about 250 per....
Honestly, I am greatful that at least the CoC here at Tech is trying to get rid of all the gold-brickers. I've seen it, people. I sit in classes with these people every day. Many of them simply do not want to learn. I would be willing to bet the student in question did not attend every lecture, did not attend the weekly two-hour recitiation in which teaching assistants give authorized help to students, and did not seek special or attend regular office hours with his or any of the other TAs. I almost know he didn't. TAs (there are a lot of them, each being paid a minimum of $7.50 to $9.50 per hour) are often only sought out to complain about a grade they gave, while not usually encountering the question, "What did I do wrong, and how I can fix it?" Oh, I failed to mention the class newsgroups teeming with TAs answering questions at pretty much all hours of the night (for unknown reasons).
Anyone who is caught by the College of Computing here simply does not belong at Georgia Tech. Their complete and utter lack of judgment and/or time management skills is a definitive sign of their imminent failure. This school is hard and, yes, extremely stressful at times, and unless it stays that way, it is utterly worthless.
Honestly, I have talked to friends about homework assignments, but I never "show them how" to do anything, as some people on this forum think necessary. Nudging someone in the right direction by recounting for them what was covered in lecture in my opinion is not a violation of my honor, because it still leaves them laboring in front of their computers for hours on end, discovering for themselves the solutions. *That* is how true learning occurs--not memorizing for a test, not just knowing enough to plug something into the right formula, but true learning. And I, as a student of integrity and one who recognizes that cheaters devalue his own hard work, simply have the judgment to know when enough is enough. If the other student can't cut it, tough. Not everyone should get an A. The student in the indident in question certainly did not deserve even a B. The ruling against this student was necessary, no, vital.
Georgia Tech requires its students to learn. If you want to "learn" by your distorted definition *please* go somewhere else. We don't want you here. We want people of character.
Most of you are missing the point. It is irrelevant that a problem is something easily solved through a conversation. The answer is not what the university is trying to teach in this case. What they are most likely trying to teach is a process for independently solving problems.
...". Yes in the real world people talk, but that should be reserved for the non-trivial things. Example: to bother someone who is thinking about their own work over something that can be looked up in a manual or reference.
Other posters have commented that "in the real world
Finally, another thing a university may be trying to teach is that sometimes you have to follow a specific process irregardless of it being less efficient. Consider classified work or work done under intense legal scrutiny. Example: reverse engineering. A causal conversation between two people can destroy a clean room effort.
In other words there are often lessons within lessons, and you may not really be aware of what people are trying to teach you. Don't jump all over the university so quickly.
So, what's so bad about this? That idiot you're always complaining about at work... the one who can't code? Yeah, that one. If TAs would have cracked down on people like this cheating in school, you wouldn't have to work with people like that.
Now, I'm NOT saying that GTech was right in what they did. They aren't. They're morons. The first thing they do when you get out of school (most of the time anyway) is throw you into a group situation where you have to work with other people. Being able to consult with people effectively is something you need to know how to do in the real world.
I've posted this same issue before on slashdot. At my university (Mississippi State) they practically cram the academic honesty policy down our throats. What they have said to me, in very clear terms, is this.
If your code is seen by another, that person must cite you as a reference.
If you look at anothers code, that is (point blank) plagiarism.
Discussing an assigment is OK, provided you do not talk about actual implementation. Which, IMHO, is the major POINT of CS, but who am I to say)
This is wrong for a number of reasons. First of which is that the university should encourage cooperation, not discourage it. In the workforce, you're expected to work in a team, not alone. We have a couple of classes which *force* us to work in teams, but wouldn't be nice if we could actually come up with our own?
I don't have time for more details, but I think this whole policy is detrimental to the CS field in general. I'm pretty certain that I've "plagiarized" a number of times no matter how hard I tried not to. There is a common feeling among student that this is just some form of big joke. No one takes it seriously because of the scope of the specification.
-- I have fans? Wow.
Welcome to University
Its much different then you think it is supposed to be. You are not here to actually learn material or gain knowledge, you are here to become our slave, and learn how to follow our instructions. If you can follow our schedule, and live a life the way we want you to, you will do fine, as the actual material is easy enough for monkeys to learn.
You will be given way too many assignments to actually complete without cheating, and they will all be due within a three day period, as to not screw up our marking schedule.
Our web servers run IIS, and we've picked a failing student to administer them. The uptime isn't good, but at least we can pocket more of your money. p.s. emailing your files to your home computer can take 2 or more days
plus a hundred other stupidities
Isn't the whole idea about "COLLEGE" to learn with peer support? I mean, if I wanted to learn by myself, wouldn't I just buy a book?
It seems to me that the professors at this school have gotten so far ahead of themselves in trying to prevent any sort of "cheating", that they've gotten intoxicated with the "game" of catching students. They've create scenarios where it will be more possible to catch cheaters. They've actually made study groups illegal. Whee! We'll catch 'em now!
The professors no longer care that study groups are the best method to learn and reinforce what has been learned. It's just like every other aspect of society. We're all no longer looked upon as innocents in need of protection. We've all become possible thives/cheats/lawbreakers in need of some serious thumbscrews. Pathetic.
Coming from a dual tech-language arts background, you just don't know how encouraged I am to see such a quality turn of phrase like this posted on slashdot. I feel better about the whole ordeal already. :)
More seriously, I think the above post is likely much closer to the truth than the "nuanaced" slashdot summary. But that's just my opinion.
The best part is, he was on topic, because he was replying to your post, but he lost more karma than you. :P
slashdot!=valid HTML
I can't tell you how many times I seeked help on assignments from teachers only to be told "Read the book, that's what it's for...I'm here to lecture you, not to teach you how to program." One day I recieved a graded assignment, saw the grade on it, and, without a seconds thought, walked to the english department and changed my major to Technical Writing.
Haven't regretted it since, either. Kids, when you're going to school for a major that actually involves lots of highly technical BS, shop schools. Just because a school has a highly respected program doesn't mean it's a good program...in all actuality it probably means it's just an extremely hard program with lots of weed out classes. Weed out classes = a higher number of sucessful grads. That's how you build a name for your program. If you're not going to be taught you might as well sit at home with a book and learn yourself.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
...would've failed if they hadn't been able to discuss the assignments with a few of us students that had a brain for programming.
I'm not trying to brag, if I'd wanted advice on how to be an idiot I'd have asked them for advice.
(kidding on that last part)
Click here to read too much about my personal life
This is completely absurd. I'm a relative beginner at programming, but I've spent 20 years in other kinds of engineering. Engineering is collaborative by nature. Teaching new engineers how to work with others is just as important as getting them to learn the material. In fact, given the typical engineering personality, teaching collaboration may be the bigger challenge!
If all you want to be is a code monkey, you can go to trade school. Universities are supposed to be training engineers.
If collaboration isn't designed into the teaching of the material itself, this is a second rate school.
Around the turn of the century a famous mathematician named Robert L. Moore introduced what has come to be known as the Moore method for teaching.
In this method the students are asked to solve certain problems but given very few resources and stricly forbidden to discuss problems with other students or using the library etc. Students caught doing so were immediatley given an 'F' in the course.
The Moore method is very good at producing thinkers, people with excellent problem solving skills.
Perhaps the Department is using a similar aproach for its introductory courses.
Actually, it's not that backwards, just small. Also, that email was a joke. Yes, we can make fun of ourselves.
Just like with weapons in schools. Sure, nobody wants people bringing guns to school. Yet the guy who accidently leaves a butterknife in his truck doesn't need to get expelled. Yet it happens. Because its much easier to follow simple zero tolerance policies than to actually think.
And it appears that this is being applied to cheating as well. If a line of code is similiar to someone else's, then we must take the stand that this must be cheating and go forth with guns blazing.
The article said that 30 lines out of a hundreds of lines long program "were similar". Since its not any more specific than that, I can only assume they mean that more than one person had
x=0;
x++
etc..
I mean... seriously.. Its VERY possible to have similar individual lines without it being considered cheating. If the entire programs match line for line, thats a different story.
And yes, tests should be the way you grade. Homework should be for practice. Sure, you can count it if you want to, but if people want to collaborate on it, LET THEM. That's how you learn. Geez.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Its Gandhi not Ghandi. sheeeesh.
>get ANY coding done, you are a liability when
>you finally make it to the workforce.
This is such a lot of steaming BS, that I can't even hope to express myself elegantly enough.
what were your group projects like in undergrad? If they were at all typical, they were probably pretty frustrating. Either you did all the work yourself, and felt like you were carrying freeloaders, or you were swamped, and felt like you were dead weight to the team.
well, or you were a freeloader, and hopefully, aren't a coder today.
anyway, what's your experience with collaboration today? it's a pretty powerful technique, especially when utilized to take advantage of specialized knowledge or experiences.
i'll take a half-dozen journeyman coders with the guts to admit that they don't know it all (and the willingness to collaborate) over a dozen hotshot cowboy coders any day! Want to re-invent the wheel and scale all learning curves on each project? Teach students that collaboration is evil.
Look... in any situation in which you put a student (or employee!) under duress, one of the side effects is the creation of an esprit de corps and an "us vs. them" mentality. You breed a desire to collaborate! Think back to your most difficult CS course... didn't you band together with fellow students to gain mastery over the material? Damn straight you did!
All the facts in this particular case need to be understood before passing judgement. But, of the facts available to us today, it seems that the student here asked directed questions about a portion of the assignment. Once he got answers, a small part of his code looked like someone else's.
did he cheat? i dunno. but you can bet that both of the students were asked about collaboration, and one (or both) admitted that the student in question came to the other and asked questions about the assignment. Yeah; and correlation implies causation. uh huh.
in any case, i'd take the student who has the drive to ask questions, find solutions, and solve problems hands down over another student who was willing to submit an inadequate solution just because "that's the way it's done here".
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
My college is currently ranked #1 in the nation for undergraduate engineering, which includes the Computer Science department here. And in fact, I've had several final exams which were completely open hard drive. That's right...you can bring a laptop, and anything's fair game (no net access, though). Cheating here is barely ever mentioned at all. Better to give students the benefit of the doubt and have them prove it with their work then to go after them with witch-hunts.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
It's good to see that even a semi-literate like yourself can find gainful employ "teaching" others. Let's see if you can manage clicking on the following link to see how is name is properly spelled, you fucking half-wit.
Georgia Tech's policy in this course is "don't discuss homework."
The student in question discussed his homework. Furthermore, he admits that he did so, and argues that he should have been allowed to do so, and therefore is justified.
Now, you can argue that allowing more collaboration is appropriate for this course. (The equivalent course at my university requires all work to be done in pairs.) You can say that it undermines the educational process to forbid students from seeking help from each other.
You may even be right. I'm likely to agree - this course sounds like it's taking the idea of noncollaboration to an excess.
But the fact is, at a university with an honor code, when you're told that a certain level of collaboration is cheating, then that amount is cheating - you are on your honor to understand and follow the policies of the course. If the policies don't make sense to you - make a stink! Complain to the professor. Complain to the department. Write a scathing end-of-semester evaluation.
But if you turn in work that you know falls outside the bounds of what is allowed under the honor code, then you've crossed the line.
Remember, though: under most honor codes, you haven't committed a violation until you've turned the work in. It's always your choce not to do so. If this student were really interested in learning the material, then he could have collaborated with others, produced a solution set, refrained from turning it in, then looked at the published solutions and seen where his differed. Instead, he chose to submit work he knew to be in violation.
I have very little sympathy for this very poor choice.
i go to gatech, and i must say that the article only gives part of the story. in reality, it is much much worse................
I can only speak for my umich experience. gatech's honor code may suck, or it may not.
When I was at the University of Michigan as an engineering student, our honor code was (and still is) something my fellow students and I were proud of. I didn't know of anyone who cheated, and wouldn't have associated with them if I thought they were.
For the curious, here's the umich honor code
It looks like it's changed slightly since I was there: when I was a student, instructors were required to leave the room during an examination (now it says "the instructor need not monitor examinations in engineering classes.") We were required to write "I have neither given nor received aid on this examination." and sign it.
We didn't have proctors. We could talk to each other if there was a reasonable need to (e.g.: "my copy is blurry...does this say 6.7 or 8.7?") We could get up and leave the room, get a drink, go to the bathroom...
...and we didn't cheat. I failed more than one exam when I could have cheated and passed, and had friends that did the same--I recall one who wrote the pledge "I have OBVIOUSLY neither given nor received aid on this examination."
We had take-home exams from time to time. Same rules. Some homework was teamwork, other required you to do it yourself. But we played by the rules, and I think I'm a better engineer and person for doing so.
Of course, all of our classes weren't in the College of Engineering. In other colleges, there was no such honor code. Proctors walked up and down the aisles. No talking. No leaving the room. And far too many of them (the lesser non-engineering mortals) cheated like it was nothing.
If the gatech student in question knew and understood the rules and broke them anyway, then I have no sympathy for him. I didn't graduate U of M with a spectacular GPA, but I earned every 0.01 point of it.
That being said, if the article is correct in stating that gatech is now forbidding students to do any learning for the class from any sources than officially sanctioned Georgia Tech course materials and instructors, then I suggest he either get together with other like-minded students and faculty to change this system, or find a better school where he might learn something. Most of what I learned was a result of group study. Anything worth learning won't be comprehended totally the first time you read it or hear it in a lecture.
-- Remove the BOING from my email address if you don't want it to bounce.
its called Tech Bitch Syndrome at gatech. and the ration is 2 to 1
Check out this Intergity thing, he even catches grad students talking about code. Snicker...
Well I guess if I was stupid enough to fail out of Poly then I might as well be Stupid enough to post with my real account. Justin Dearing EE major Fall 99-Spring 2000 CS Major Fall 2000-Fall 2001
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Those freaking self-righteous hippies in the media. You want to know the people who got caught cheating in CS? The cheaters. If you honestly talked to other students, and that was it, you were not in violation of the honor code. I talked with others about the logic behind many assignments. I got an A in the class. The people I know who got caught cheating were the people who either collaborated with others in WRITING the programs, or simply stole the code. So everyone can rest assured that you will not get screwed if you come to Tech. Especially if your male... but I diverse. The point is, whoever this kid was who the Washington Post guy talked to was lying his ass off to get published or not be scolded by mommy. End of story.
They're using the intro courses to weed out all of the non-programmers. If a student can make it through by relying on copy-coding, they will have more trouble later on. My school did the same thing, only they did it by making the intro courses more challenging than many of the higher level courses (in terms of workload). Still there were some people who managed to get through the intro class and move on to higher-level stuff where they realized that they had spent two or three semesters pursuing the wrong degree...one that they would never be able to earn on their own. The operative mindset is that "true programmers are born, not taught". I'm honestly not sure how I feel about that.
I teach university computer science courses as part of my job. Yes, I agree, it looks like GATech went way overboard here, but unfortunately this is burying the root problem.
Computer science programs are LOADED with cheating. Not just a bit. A *lot*. The faculty at my institution didn't think we had a problem... until we looked. And what a problem it was.
It was, of course, inevitable. Lets face it.. CS is a hot program these days. Mom and Dad see lots job ops and strongly push junior to go into CS. Perhaps junior isn't really that interested in it; perhaps junior can't do math, but Mom and Pop are paying the bill, so...
Now you have a problem. Junior needs to pass (lest his winter vacations of beer drinking, etc. be untimely ripped from him).. but junior could care less about the material. He doesn't want to bother learning it.. and there is a *lot* there to learn.
How does one pass, yet do the bare minimal amount of work? Doesn't take a genius to figure this out... does it?
The trouble is that, in general, computer science courses (especially 'systems' type courses) usually heavily weight assignments. Sure, you could just do exams... but I believe that seriously cheats the students. Being able to parrot back 4 solutions to deadlock on a final exam is a world away from being asked to actually think through and then solve these problems IN CODE.
So we need assignments... but they are OH so easy to cheat on. Much easier than exams.
Net result: Every year thousands of people graduate with CS degrees that can not: explain the sleeping barber problem; do OMT diagrams; define a Turing machine; give an example of a non-computable function; demonstrate even the remotest knowledge of what the "NP" means in 'NP-complete', use structured programming concepts, comment code, apply even the most basic software engineering techniques, etc.
There seems to be a lot of people against these heavy-handed measures to weed out cheaters. I'm a libertarian at heart, so I agree in a lot of ways. On the other hand, do YOU want to graduate from a school that cranks out CS majors who go into a coma when someone says "Scheme" or "LISP"? Do you want people in industry to have experience with graduates from *your* university that can't even apply a simple waterfall model of software development?
If you don't take measures against cheating, the people who will lose (and lose big) are the good students. Think about it.
Is told the professor that the code he copied was licensed under the GPL, so it's all good.
It's total trash.
I'm telling you that yes, this jouranlistic asshole that's never seen a line of code in his life got the story wrong.
I also go to GT.
---- http://www.opedog.com/
Virginia Tech has the same policy toward discussing class concepts in ECE-2984/ECE-1574, Intro to Computer Engineering. Does it prevent students from learning? Yep. Is it strictly enforced? You bet.
I'm a huge believer in honor codes. Systems like MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity) are highly effective and deserve credit and usage - but when students can't help each other learn material (The course policy is so strictly written that I can't discuss basic class design concepts with my peers... which is a problem, considering that the teaching assistants hired for the course do not understand the entire range of course material by their own admission...)
Kudos to Slashdot for highlighting such an important issue.
As a computer science student at Georgia Tech, I believe I'm in a pretty good position to comment on this, rather than pointing fingers and yelling loud like other have in this thread.
Georgia Tech has a very good CS program, and I have learned a *lot* since I've been a student here. Tech is fairly tough, especially in 1XXX and 2XXX classes, to weed out the kinds of students who just can't cut it, despite how good their intentions are.
The fact of the matter is that, while in early classes *some* hand-holding may be necessary, every professor in the College of Computing expects students to do their own work. The journalist for the Post made this kid sound like a victim of some kind of conspiracy, and not the cheater that he is/was. Here at Tech, if you do your work, learn how to dig for resources, learn how to think for yourself and not beg for answers when you could get them yourself, and keep your nose clean, you'll be fine.
The main point here is that we are being presented with one side of the story: a poor kid, striving to do his best, and getting the shaft. The CS department at Georgia Tech is quite good, in my opinion, and is very well-respected, which doesn't come easily. Anyone who thinks otherwise should find out the facts for themselves first before pointing fingers.
As a current undergrad at gatech I can say that this class is not _that_ bad. The hardest CS class actually doesn't come until the 3rd one where the real weed out begins. Although, 1321 is commonly referred to as a 'shaft' class (Alot of things at tech bear that name thank you 7:3 ratio). This is because it is used to weed out students who cant hack it. In fact the same class has had 4 different numbers in as many years (CS1501,CS1301,CS1311, and now CS1321). The suspected reason is that the local community colleges also offer a class with the same number. Since they are all part of the University System of Georgia, the class would normally transfer. But, due to the change course number the course does not. This way _every_ student going through gatech must go through it. The cheatfinder may have had its sensitivity tweaked a bit last fall, but it is still just an extension of the normal crap that gatech makes its students go through to get a degree.
I go to ITT and here I am about to graduate and those other students still cannot format a floppy. Now they are bitching because i am not "being helpful", or in other words carrying their weight and doing all the work. Fuck me.
"When I was at Georgia Tech, my graduate student housemates would joke about the credit (or rather, lack of credit) they received for writing technical papers. These papers were presented, usually, with three names on the front. The advising professor's name would come first, followed immediately by the name of another professor. This other professor, we joked, had nothing whatsoever to do with the paper but needed to publish (or perish). The lowly graduate student, who did all the work, had his name printed last, almost as an afterthought..."
page xv, "Inside COM" by Dale Rogerson, (c)1997, Microsoft Press, ISBN 1-57231-349-8
I attended Oklahome State University, and our CompSci department's policy was that you were not to discuss homework at the algorithm/function/line level unless it was a group assignment. If a professor found homework that was too similar s/he was to give both students zero credit for the homework until one could prove that theirs was the original and that they didn't share with the other student(s). They didn't take too highly to the 'cooperate and graduate' motto.
Come on, how hard can it possibly be to
THINK FOR YOURSELF?! Especially considering that
this was an intro to programming class.
In my career, I am surrounded by tons of
wankers who never *learned* how to think on their
own, working through a problem using only the
gray matter between their ears.
Did it ever occur to any of you that these rules
were set in place, NOT to keep students from
finishing the assignment as effortlessly as
possible, but to teach them HOW TO LEARN?
Does it sound like I'm being condescending?? I
certanily hope so. We had these kind of rules
when I went to school, and I took them very
seriously. Did I fail to learn? No I did not.
I give my school 100% credit for beating the
s**t out of me until I could succeed at the top
of my field... With or without the help of anyone
else.
Wanna take the other path?? That road leads
to sCr1pt k1dd13, baby.
One also has to query his programming prowess, in that it has taken him over two weeks to come up with this latest workaround of the page widening filter. I would expect a bright person to work it out in no more than a day.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
...and people wonder why Comp Sci students aren't known for social skills. Obviously they're self-selecting for people who prefer to work alone.
Compare that with most business schools, where they recognize that group work is crucial to learning how to function in the real world, as well as being an effective way to learn.
Incidentally, most of my software engineering courses have involved group work, and tested the abilities of the individuals through exams. It encourages interaction, which can help people to learn, and it also gets you used to collaboration.
I don't think they're helping students or serving any useful educational function by restricting the students' ability to work together. They're just filtering to exclude people who like working with others, or who don't cheat intelligently. If you really want to test someone's individual understanding of a subject, give them an exam.
byroniverse
Enby in Waltham
A) Make sure that everyone in the group participates and at least understands all the components of the project. Of course, this general means you'll get a crappy grade.
or
B) Divide the key tasks among the one or two skilled people and send the outhers out to buy coffee or to make the poster for the presentation.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
As a CS undergrad at Tech myself, I think the policy that they instituted was very necassary. Cheating in the lower level courses has been rampant and what they are trying to do here is not punish students for trying to learn but to prevent slackers from just getting the answers without thinking about the problem. From my experience the types of concepts presented in these lower level classes are very simple to figure out if one puts any thought into them (Linked list structures, Iterating arrays. etc).
I am a CS student at San Jose State:
For a University in the middle of Silicon Valley our CS department is in a sad state. Students cheat like crazy!!!! Many students don't learn here IMHO they just turn in code and projects that others submitted many semesters previously. But I feel the professors bring this upon themselves:
-They give the same projects every semester
-They give the same test every semester
The end result can be illustrated by this example:
I was sys admining for a software engineering class, I was running two unix boxes with resin, mysql, etc. installed. About 80 students had access to the machines for their use.
The term project was to build a web based integrated office package. during my duties I pulled up one groups portion of the project which looked an awful lot like my groups except for cosmetic changes. I took a look in the WEB-INF/classes dir and they were using my groups classes, they did not even bother to change one of the class file names which was called "MyFirstName"CalendarClass. I made the mistake of informing the professor before they turned in the project. He just made them throw out what they had done. In the end their project sucked, but some of these people have gone on to get good jobs.
On the same note I know of at least two SJSU Students who have taken up positions which require BS degrees at LTX here in San Jose, before even graduating! LTX asked them if they had degrees and they said sure. But LTX never bothered to check. They still are employed and opnly one of the two has since graduated. So the cheating is not limited to just to school.
Did Georgia tech go to far, most likely. Is there a serious problem. Yes!! I think however it is an attitude in our society that lying, cheating and stealing is ok. For instance it is ok to download full length movies over the internet, it is also ok to use pirated software, it is also ok to sneak into that second movie you did not pay for. So why write your own code????
Today anything goes look at Enron!!!
It seems then that the faculty, at leasty at SJSU, is to blame. Many faculty members here are either two busy with other projects, or too lazy to even write a new test, or come up with a new project.
The idea of putting draconian rules such as those at Georgia Tech to stop cheating seems like a knee jerk reaction of people too lazy to fix the source of the problem, the writers of the policy themselves.
It is much easier, and less counterproductive, to do that with good, well-supervised tests, rather than try to ban cooperation on homework.
Before we start bashing (which has already begun for a long time) the writer of this article, I would like to know whether he can write code.
For example, I have difficulties design a test question that will let me to know whether a student can use a debugger. Similarly, it is no way to test their ability to write program of decent size in a test.
Due to some dept politics, my EEE dept need to substitute homework-based to largely test-based assessment for the 101 programming paper. The results is shocking. The lecturers and tutors suffer a lot in the following semesters as many student cannot actually code afterwards...
I go to SJSU in San Jose. Just a warning to potential employers if a student says they took a networking class at San Jose State in the CS department try this test:
Show them a nic card and a video card. If they can tell the difference hire them.
Better yet try the above with a router or a switch!
I was there. I graduated about a year ago. I TA'ed for CS1312 and its many other prior names. I can tell you, at least from what I saw, that this guy probably did more than just "talk to his roommate" to be charged with cheating (at least per protocol that I saw before I graduated).
I am an enrolled freshman at Georgia Tech(CS major), and as the school year draws to a close I am increasingly more convinced I will not be returning here. As someone who actually knows what they are doing I am constantly accosted by people who lack the knowledge to complete the assignments for CS 1321 or 1322, the Scheme and Java courses, respectively. This is largely through no fault of their own; the classes themselves are of the "cram everyone in a room and show them slides" variety, with easily two hundred people to a room. Which wouldn't be a problem, but in denying students the ability to discuss code among themselves, they are denied the chance to discuss it at all. The teachers are generally unwilling to assist students on any regular basis, and the TA's for the courses are chosen from volunteers who made A's in the course previously -- the only requirement -- resulting quite often in TAs that lack a true knowledge of the subject matter. The end result is a lot of people who don't understand what they're doing, barely hanging on...and cowering in fear of even mentioning it to each other, lest the much-lamented "Cheat Finder" seize upon you with unforgiving teeth. It is not a healthy learning environment; it is not even a healthy work environment. It is reminiscient of the type of "Big Brother" mentality that we are fearing on other fronts, these days -- except here it's already in our back yard. People who say that perhaps the student was actually cheating, maybe the school wasn't in the wrong -- I'm here, and maybe the student did copy something directly, maybe not...but there is something very wrong with this so-called 'Honor Code' and what it is supposed to represent. It does not encourage learning, it does not encourage efficiency, it does not even encourage work -- for it discourages understanding. In fact, the only thing it encourages is fear, and I am very lucky to be one of the (maybe three) freshmen here interested enough in programming to have taught myself enough to already know all of the course material. That's going to have to carry me through these four years, if I do stay... because I, and everyone else, will learn nothing. It's that bad.
The problem with automated plagiarism tests is that they can only work with things where there are a lot of possibilities to express the same thing with the same quality with no real preference for some particular expression. But CS is one of things where it's not the case. How many ways there is to maintain, say, a set of multiple structures? Actually, a lot. But in most of cases a programmer can almost immediately decide if, say, having an array of them will be preferrable to a list, or array of pointers to them.
But after such a decision is made, the implementation is almost completely predefined -- there is one way that works well, very few variations that make things slightly worse or better, and a shitload of ways how to do it inefficiently or plain wrong -- say, if someone is maintaining an array of structures, he should better do allocation using
/* no memory for you */
/*do something */
/* no memory for you */
/* do something while all the data is lost in the formerly allocated but now impossible to access array, and crash horribly in the process */
mystructarray=(struct mystruct*)malloc(sizeof(struct mystruct)*n);
and not anything else. And if he will ever need to add more of them he should better do
tmpptr=(struct mystruct*)realloc(mystructarray,sizeof(struct mystruct)*new_n);
if(tmpptr){
mystructarray=tmpptr;
/* possibly do something between n and new_n */
n=new_n;
/* do something */
}else{
/* no memory for you */
}
. With "plagiarism checks" in place it's possible that people will try to be "original", will find the wrong solution, and wouldn't even notice that because they will be worried too much about plagiarism check to be concerned about program working. I don't think, writing things like
saveptr=mystructarray;
saved_n=n;
n=new_n;
mystructarray=realloc(mystructarray,sizeof(struct mystruct)*n);
if(mystructarray==NULL){
mystructarray=saveptr;
n=saved_n;
}
should be encouraged, even though it's harmless, and certainly
n=new_n;
mystructarray=(struct mystruct*)malloc(sizeof(struct mystruct)*n);
if(mystructarray==NULL){
}
is terribly wrong, but this is a kind of "creativity" that this practice will encourage.
Even the names of variables aren't likely to be different -- there are a bunch of traditions -- use of i,j, m and n as indexes originates from mathematical use of them, and use of k and l for integers is an old tradition that originated in Fortran, and a lot of people that follow it aren't even aware of its origins. Microsofties love hungarian notation, and even though I believe that it's hideous and counterproductive, it certainly is responsible for a lot of similar (hideous) names.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I'm a Georgia Tech student. I've even been a TA for these classes. And I turned in a huge number of students for cheating.
In basically every CS class after the two intro classes, there is a lot of group work. Many classes are entirely group work. BUT since there is such a large variation in experience and knowledge in intro CS students, you can't let people work in groups in the first class. They can't slouch on any of this. It's the foundation to everything to come.
Every student needs to know how to write a linked list. Every student needs to know how to write a for loop. This isn't hard stuff. There are TONS of undergraduate TAs available for PERSONAL scheduled help (students are even required to attend weekly one-on-one help time). Between those PERSONAL help sessions, there are TAs who answer posts on class newsgroups in a timely manner.
In short, Tech provides an army of help. Students just need to not be lazy and take advantage of it. And once you know how to write some basic code, then you can do all the group work you want in the following classes. Don't blame the school. These policies are explained clearly and repeatedly. It's not like they are saying "Hey, you have never written code. Now write a compilier with no outside help". It's more like "write a linked list based on lectures and if you have any questions, go to your TA for individual help or ask in review class".
Do you want to work in a group with someone who doesn't know what a while loop is? Do you want this person to -graduate with a degree-?
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
Seriously, I always thought the way to find out if a person was cheating on their CS projects/homework was to actually give them a test.
Ya know, like write a routine that does x y z given a b c.
When I was learning programming in college, I only had 1 teacher that did it right. ALL others did not know how to test students.
--Begin rant--
Getting offtopic, but CS tests should not be:
1. "Adventures in syntax."
2. Misleading to get the student to make a mistake.
3. A math class.
4. Multiple choice.
My assembly class consisted of 3 tests on converting numbers and adding/subtracting in binary and hex. Honestly, if I need to add and subtract in binary, I have a computer or calculator to do it on. And on the off chance I'm not near a computer, then why the heck am I using binary?
(Not to say that you shouldn't learn the foundations, but don't dwell on them for weeks)
Geez, cheating on CS 1321?! All I can say is that this kid better not be a CS major, or else he's going to have a very painful 4 years.
CS 2340 - Because it's not too late to change your change.
*Sniff* Good times, good times.
Here in Germany Comp. Sci. students are ENCOURAGED to discuss and solve their exercises in groups!
Off topic, but AUTOMATONS are exactly what the public school system is designed to produce. The American public school system is remeniscent of industrial revolution factories--it is designed to produce a product: adult bodies who do work. It just covers it up with the word "education."
Public schools (besides certain gifted and talented programs) do not teach children to think for themselves. They do not teach children logic. They do not teach children the orgins of language.
What do they teach? American patriotism. Basic math. HYGIENE. Obviously America has bigger problems than we think. But, for the average Joey, who's going to grow up to work construction or be a mechanic, why fill his head with nonsense like the latin root of hygeine?
So, let's face it: if you want your kid to be intellectual, you are going to have to teach him/her yourself. That's good. That gives you a choice in the matter. But make sure you let him know that most of the kids in Public school are going to be automatons, american robots, and that he will one day be their boss.
Cheers.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I've been working in various parts of this business since 1969 and there are many shops whose entire code of honor revolves around whether they'll get caught ripping off the code they've stolen and if they are caught whether the company will have already been through a sale or IPO so that they can grab the proceeds and run elsewhere. Astounding the number of places that have wanted to hire me not just for my skills but because they assume I'll bring along a backup of the last iteration of the complete source for every project I could scrum off the old company's servers. (I don't, and I've never had trouble getting hired anyway)
But Lord, there are some weasels out there.
Students should strive to isolate themselves. It is the best way to prepare them for getting a real job at a real company when they graduate.
I mean, did you ever hear of a job where you actually had to cooperate with others? Where you could knock on some colleagues door and ask a simple question instead of spending an hour digging it out of some book? Come on... get real.
K. N. King is the author of C Programming: A Modern Approach and Java Programming: From the Beginning. He received the Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980. He was a faculty member at Georgia Tech from 1980 to 1987. He joined Georgia State University in 1987, where he is currently an associate professor of computer science. You'll find his GSU Web page here. I wonder if the students professor is him?
I agree. As someone who's had difficulty with math, having someone with a different perspective on a subject, has made it easier to understand and subsequently advance.
it's about teachers making money.
If students aren't allowed to use anything but pre-approved materials, then they are cheating if they use another teachers books; of course the neat side effect of this is, that you are forcing your students into buying your books, thus proving to various publishers, that "my books are much better, because none of my students use any other books".
Geez.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Here's an idea, that a teacher I know uses.
:-)
He has 52 students (no, it's not a college) and for each assignment he has 52 different tasks. They may not vary by much, but more than enough to prevent people just copying stuff from each other.
There are enough similarities between the tasks, that people can collaborate on the same things, but if that's all you hand in, you fail, because it's mostly between 25 and 33 percent of a given task.
Of course, doing this kind of thing when you have 200+ students is difficult if not impossible, but at least it weeds out the cheaters
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Provide references. Define cheating. Quantify the cost of it. Explain why it is an increasing problem "these days". This is a lazy, slack assertion.
The law prohibits professionals from running abusive monopolies, from lying on securities filings, or for taking bribes. Strangely, it still happens. All the time. We know that's the way business is done in the real world. Employees of a shareholder company have a fiduciary duty to ignore what's "right" and to do what's "profitable". If that means the likely cost of breaking the law is less than the likely benefits, then so be it. That's the cost of doing business.
Now, at what point exactly does a course designed to churn out grist for the corporate mill say "All that stuff we told you about playing fair? Forget it, it's time to enter the real world." ?
Honour systems (and spel it rite) are viewed as a joke outside of the USA. If you have to codify "right" behaviour (as in a Constitution), you're already doomed, because you're abrogating the responsibility of the culture to police itself. You're sending the very clear message that if you're not convicted, you haven't done anything wrong. This is the standard that's now applied in the business world (which is where most students end up) and it's horribly twisted and destructive.
Here's a better system for colleges. You say "We have no duty to educate you. We have a contract that can be terminated by either party, at any time, for any reason. If you don't like the course, stop attending. If we don't like you, we'll stop teaching you."
Frankly, we could do with a fewer people who worry about the letter of the law and more who accept the spirit of it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
If there's one thing I remember from my CS classes was that using someone elses code is time saving. Just look around you everyone does it, even Microsft! Who has'nt allready found a cool snipet of code somewhere and said "hey that's cool, I could use that" ?
Don't lie or start blurting out comments about license agreements, lots of programmers do that.
That's part of CS.
how does one change his
OK, I've read the article. It still doesn't make any sense. When I was at university we practically relied on group efforts to learn the stuff. How can you not have people discuss project work?
I can understand not having people who merely turn in duplicate disks of someone else's work, but sharing ideas and gaining from that sharing is what a university is supposed to be about. We used to share lumps of code all the time: not the important parts of the projects, but report generators and stuff like that, nifty functions for working round a bug in this compiler or that interpreter...
I don't get how having them all able to do the actual thing is not the goal of them learning.
You watch: in a few years time, the places won't have research students that know how to work properly - they'll not be able to come up with anything they've not been taught, because they'll never have got into the habit of having conversations where the end results are more than the sum of the inputs.
Group learning is a VITAL part of educating people. In industry you don't turn up, get told how to create the solution to this problem and then left to implement it: you have to solve the problem. And you don't have someone who already knows those solutions to tell you them. There is no expert in solving that problem: or you're it. Without the experience in group problem solving and co-operation, those students are going to be useless as productive employees.
I hope at least now you feel sorry for what you did. Breaking rules like that must be hard on you, but there are no excuses.. If you suck at math, you should not steal a grade or two like that..
:-)
*giggle* Repent now!
(Just kiddin' with ya)
Well, that about wraps it up for Georgia Tech. I used to have some respect for that institution.
I know that I sure want programmers who are trained to never ask for help! Yeah, sign me up for that!
If they want to ensure that the kid can write the code, they can just administer a test during a class period.
One guy I know got canned from a contract gig because some pointy-haired moron saw him reading a manual, and decided that he must not know what he was doing if he couldn't wing it.
This reminds me of other asinine policies showing up in our schools, such as "zero-tolerance" drug policies that get kids suspended for taking their asthma medication.
Oh, and I also heard of a kid getting expelled for "taking a gun to school". The "gun" in question, was a 2" long toy rifle that came with his GI Joe.
When an adult is unable to distinguish between a firearm, and a toy facsimile of a firearm in 1/12 scale, he's simply too stupid to be in the business of teaching anything to anyone.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Well, I don't remember anything draconian in my Computer Engineering program. Engineering was shared stress, collaboration, pond marches, and a high drop-out rate; CompSci was acres of NeXTStations, pizza, and videos on Fridays.
Probably it will be stricter for the first year, especially Calculus, as they separate the wheat from the chaff. They'll want to prove you didn't just wander in by accident on your way to the pub, and can actually create homework answers with your own brain, quirks included. Hope you get Dr. Ryeburn or at least a prof with an understandable accent.
Of course, there may have been changes. I got my Bachelors of Engineering in 1995. I had to *elect* to take a C programming course rather than the Modula-2 they used in the CompSci classes.
Cheers
Duckman
So you're one of those fuckheads with the superiority complexes. Its obvious that you know better than everyone else, shame on them for trying to "keep you down!"
I once took 132 cans of soda that a machine mistakenly dispensed to me (yes, really). I guess I woulda been kicked outta there, and rightfully so.
I teach a junior-level computer science class at the Univ. of Michigan. The class, in 3 sections, has about 300 students enrolled.
We run a computer program which tries to detect cheating cases. We then review by hand the top 10-20 of those identified by the computer. For our final project we have identified about 25 people who seemed to have copied code (either as the source or the destination. It is usually really easy to tell which.) We still need to have those teaching the other sections look over the code to see if they agree, but in most cases it is VERY obvious. (Identical code other than an if/then/else structure changing to a switch statement and a few variable names changed!)
A student sent me a link to the article. Here was my response (slightly edited for slashdot):
(I've CCed a few of the faculty I've discussed cheating with recently.
You all might find this article worth reading.)
Neil,
It is interesting.
I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about this. The trick, I
think, is that we _do_ encourage people to learn the material, and we
don't nail people for
"similarities in a few lines of computer code on a very complicated
assignment which he discussed with a friend."
We look for code, in quantity, which was clearly copied. I don't think
we have every had the defense "we just talked about it a little" in our
cheat cases. We have such a high bar for cheat cases that such an
argument is almost impossible to pull off with any degree of
believability.
Finally, I'm somewhat familiar with what is taught in that G.T. class. I
seriously doubt that the program in question was "very complicated"
I believe this class is the equiv. of ENG 101.
Thanks for sending the article, it is useful to have some
perspective.
Mark
As Nietsche famously said, "If you stare too long into the Abyss, 1d4 Tanar'ri of random type will attack you."
All the more to be said for more traditionally structured courses where everything depends on the final exams. When the work a student does most of the time is being marked, but those marks do not count towards the final grade, issues of plagiarism matter much less and the student is free to learn however they like.
I was on a course like this and I noticed that some groups of my acquaintances would divide up the work assigned each week, do a few questions each and then copy each other's answers. These people tended to do poorly on the final exam. Other people I knew would simply do the work together, bouncing ideas off each other, and each hand in their best take on the ideas they generated in these sessions. These people often did very well. Since I didn't know many people on the course at all well and lacked the confidence to push myself into those groups, I did most of the work by myself, researching from books. I got a middling grade. Other factors contributed, of course, and my evidence is anecdotal, but draw your own conclusions.
That place is full of dichotomy. It's the same place that had a "well-respected" head football coach whose resume read that he had a Master's degree, yet he didn't. This school has been the focus of so many investigations (such as one documented twice on 60 Minutes) for faculty hazing and discrimination. How can an institution like this ever, EVER be classified as "well-respected?"
It's a joke of a place that whores itself out to Philips and to Coca-Cola for money that they use for everything but the advancement of learning and the benefit of the students.
They are aptly named "Yellowjackets": just a big pain in the ass.
Mass College of Art
Male Female ratio was 1-2 when I was there
PLUS
higher than average percentage of the guys were gay
You tech types really bummin in the booty dept...
As a person that understands the value of honesty, I think that the "administrative" error in the report has little to do with the story.
I recently missed a discrete math test because of the "Spring Ahead" clock change. My professor offered me the chance to retake the exam at a later date. I was offered answers to the test questions within 5 minutes of being given that gift from the professor. If I had taken those answers, I would have felt like a piece of shit, and eventually would have had to make good anyway. I can't live with cheating and lying.
Lying causes pain... Pain causes people to search for relief...
In college many search for relief in drugs, alcohol, and sex...
Cutting down on cheating cuts down on these other issues (or at least, I believe, that is what Georgia Tech is trying to accomplish)
But, he was caught cheating twice. (10 years ago, cheating involved copying someone elses course work, and submitting it as your own.)
You were encouraged to communicate with your peers, just not collaborate with them.
These times, they are a changing
Hey, a Slashdot story I can comment on. I know personally the guy mentioned in the story, which is why I'm posting anonymously. Can't say I didn't see this coming, but I'm still embarrassed and disappointed that a blatantly one-sided summary of an already blatantly one-sided story was posted on Slashdot. Well that's typical I suppose.
Basically, trying not to go too far here, I'll say that Progoth's version of the story, above, is pretty accurate. The "anonymous student" waited until the last minute to do the assignment. There were few staff to help because this was around Thanksgiving time. Instead of using the newsgroups (an excellent and often-ignored source of help), he copied code. Then at the end of the semester, when he was called out on it, he freaked out. But rather than have the integrity to fess up to his mistake, he got defensive and told everyone he could his blatantly one-sided story. Called a lawyer. Called other universities and asked them to write letters. Called papers.
Did I meantion his father works for a Washington newspaper? How else could such a lame story get into an otherwise respectable publication?
I could go on, but let me simply reiterate that Georgia Tech has an excellent computer science program. There are many sources of help:
- Staff: Professors and especially TAs are underutilized by students of the introductory courses. The students rarely visit their TA's office hours. The ones who do are generally the ones who do well. (Coincidence?)
- Newsgroups: Reading of the newsgrups is encouraged, because they are an excellent source of help. TAs, professors, and students all collaborate to find solutions on the newsgroup. I wouldn't have been able to survive without the newsgroups. Many students, however, are too lazy to read the newsgroups as recommended -- they're doomed to fall behind.
- Other students: Contrary to popular belief, students in the class *can* discuss *higher-level concepts*. Thus, say I told somebody that a simple, unoptimized bubble-sort on a list can be performed by iterating over the list with N passes, where N is the number of elements in the list, swapping where necessary at each pass -- that'd be *absolutely fine*. I didn't cheat -- those kinds of things are right there in the lecture anyway. The problem occurs when students are chatting and the conversation breaks down into "Man this stuff's hard; I just don't get it -- can you explain it in more detail/tell me how you did it/tell me how to do it/let me see your code?" It happens more often than I'd like to admit. Should Tech be frowned upon for encouraging some integrity and discipline? I don't think so. I succeeded at the introductory course without being accused of cheating, because I followed the rules, and I'm proud of that.
I seem to remember from my computer science class (actually any class) that we were told if you need help ask for it, from anyone. The point of a university is to learn, not inhibit learning.
----- "It's all fun and games 'til somebody puts an eye out, then it's just funny."
Cheating is an intregal component of learning. Today's student will be eaten alive in the real world if they don't develop sucessful cheating skills. I think every University should develop an academic program focused on cheating. It would be a prerequisite for law school and MBA programs.
PegQuin--I've got a sneakin' suspicion
Does it really matter? Georgia Tech offers a degree in Computer Game Design!
It reminds me of the reason my handwriting is so horrid. In my small-town school (Allegan, MI, USA -- nobody will recognize that), we were apparently scheduled to learn cursive handwriting in 3rd grade. Well, when I was in 2nd grade, there was a cursive alphabet banner up along the top edge of the blackboard. Being too clever for my own good, I was bored during a spelling test and decided to write all the answers in cursive -- which I'd learned from staring at that banner every day.
As you might guess, I wasn't rewarded for my curiosity and intuition... when asked who taught me to write like that, I replied that I'd taught myself from that sign up there. The response to that was an encouraging "You're not supposed to know that yet."
I have to wonder if my handwriting might be better if I'd had some supervision in learning how to join the letters... but then again, maybe not. In any case, that seems one of the main problems today. The school systems are so rigid in terms of when you learn what, any innovation on the part of the students is discouraged -- as it throws their schedules off. I can't possibly learn cursive (a level 3 spell), unless I'm also ready for all the other 3rd grade activities.
This happened to me about 3 semesters ago. We were given 6 weeks to code up an assignment (A rather huge assignment). I finished VERY early. My "friend" Jay didn't start on it until VERY late. I also came to find out he is NOT a strong coder at all.
A few nights before the due date, he claimed that he was stuck on some areas and wanted me to help him out.
Since he has been in the same classes with me for the last 3 semesters, AND since he has never been known to have "plagiarised", AND since I was busy studying for other classes, I just sent him a tarball of my source - my whole source (big mistake).
I thought nothing of it since I assumed that we were "classroom" buds and he would never plagiarise my work. A few weeks later the teacher caught me right before class and told me Jay had copied my program. She also told me that Jay AND I were subject to University policy which required her to automatically fail BOTH of us, even though I did the work.
Luckily, it was a small class, and since she had seen previous work from Jay and I, she deduced that it was Jay that had cheated and not me. Her solution, confront Jay, and if he fessed up that he copied my work, then I would get an A, and he had a chance to resubmit the program (with a lot of penalties). As undergrads, I felt that was the best decision the teacher could make. She kept the problem confined in the classroom and solved it within the classroom instead of yelling "FIRE" and getting EVERYONE involved.
The result, I got an A, and Jay had to recode his program (I think he got a D). But two things came out of the situation, Jay learned his lesson about cheating, we are still friends, and nobody got dropped from school. The problem got solved, Jay learned his lesson, I learned my lesson (not to give out my full source to classmates), and nobody got canned from school.
This reiterates the point that problems should be kept confined and solved within the classroom, if it absolutely cannot be handled within the classroom, then bring in the cavalry.
Oh yeah, Jay is no longer a CS major, he is now a business major.
On a sidenote:
I asked to see Jay's code right after I was informed of this "problem", so that I could refute the teacher's statements, I figured I should defend Jay's work (since arguning for Jay, and refuting my teacher helps ME out the most). But, when I got to her office and saw his code, I was aghast at how it was actually an exact copy of MY code, HE DIDN'T EVEN CHANGE THE VARIABLES! All Jay did was put some tabs in and make it look different. All I could say was "wow, I can't believe this." From that day, I never held Jay in such a high regard.
However, it is also important to learn the basics yourself. Everyone in the entire university must take CS1 and most CS2, these are just intro programing classes to get people familure with coding and thinking on there own. That is their point, and to accomplish that, they must seperate the students out.
... there is also an LAS compsci program which I know little about). These rankings change from year to year (and source to source), so I don't know where the U of I stands currently, but I'd be surprised if it had slipped all that much.
... reinforcing the very lessons they are to be learning. And if you choose to be a lazy bastard and let someone else do all the work, then try to rewrite it so that it is sufficiently different, you'll either learn despite yourself, or screw it up sufficiently to get the grade your laziness has earned you.
... so there is a disincentive for people to be too free with their solutions built in. In short, the complexity and demands of the assignments coupled with the grading model (bell curve), and a systematic check for plagorism, were sufficient to prevent and punish cheating without resorting to draconian absurdities such as disallowing any discussion of assignments amongst students.
What utter nonsense. Please keep in mind that you are being taught that your University is right and its critics are wrong in each lecture you attend, if not overtly, then certainly on a subliminal level.
I attended the University of Illinois at a time when it was considered the 2nd or 3rd best university for computer science (Engineering College
In any event, that particular university had an impeachable reputation in computer science. They never had such an asinine rule that students could not discuss the subject and their homework assignments amongst themselves. Not only would such a rule have been unenforcable, or led to the kind of absurdities you are defending here, but it would have precluded one of the most important facets of education, through which people learn any subject, at any level, rudimentary freshman level through advanced post-doctorate: studying, discussing, and digesting the material.
Instead, the homework assignments were made to be sufficiently challenging that, even if you were to collaborate with others, you would learn the material and your grade would reflect how well you learned it. Keep in mind if your work resembles another's too closely you'll get nailed for cheating, so even if several people solved the problem together they'd essentially have to reimpliment it differently from one another
Then there is the bell curve to contend with
Georgia Tech is simply wrong on all counts, and probably too arrogant to recognize and fix the real problem, which isn't their students, but their approach to education.
Maybe it is difficult to see looking in, but there is a good concept behind the rules. Yes, they might not need to be there if everyone was honest, but unfortunately this is not a perfect world, and the restrictive environment helps in the long run.
Now it becomes clear what Georgia Tech is teaching its students. Obedience, and the sublimation of one's intellect to the authority of others, without question. The fact that you would write something like that with a straight face (and for your sake, I truly hope this was a clever troll and not meant in earnestness) is indicitive of the kind of education you are receiving at your university.
I humbly suggest you start shopping around for a more sensible university to transfer to, one that concentrates on teaching science and technology rather than obedience.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Well, I took this damn course back in the mid 90's, and sounds like I had the exact same probs this kid had
I aced all the program assignments up until the last two. I tried my damndest to write programs that worked...or at least compiled...cause compilation back then was what at least earned you partial credit.
I had about 90% of the prog correct, but it was about 10% of the code I could not get to work properly. I saw the prof numerous times as well as the TA's. I begged for them to at least show me where my logic was wrong..or provide an analogy that might shed some light on why my prog was not working. I didn't want the "answer", but all I wanted was to be assisted in figuring out the correct path.
but neither would help in that respect. They said they couldn't/wouldn't cause then they would have to help all the students that were having trouble...
although, we couldn't seek outside help from students, another student, who was having trouble as well, and I did get together and worked on the assignment for days, almost figuring it out..until time ran out
I did turn in what I had and received partial credit because the prog did not work properly.
and guess what? I never ever did learn what I was doing wrong...or why my logic was incorrect. The prof never would go over with me even after the assignment
I wanted to know why...I believe students should know why they did something incorrectly so that they learn. So for me, I did not do the last two assignments correctly and never learned why I was doing them wrong. There seems to be something inherently wrong with this attitude at Tech and with others who lambast this kid...I can feel for the student who says he wants to Learn. And I seriously doubt if he really "cheated", that he would go to such extremes by getting his parents involved...and trust me, he should not be reamed for doing this...who the hell should he trust to turn to?
anyway, this reeks of the whole Zero Tolerance fad that seems to infect School Administrators from Grade School to College....
I am so glad I am out of school now....I could not imagine going through this constant BS
I'm a sophomore CpE at Virginia Tech and I was recently given quite the scare by my OOP (CS dept.) professor when I told him that I had inadvertently neglected to include an "honor pledge" in my first two programming projects. This honor pledge looks like:
// PLEDGE
// On my honor:
//
// - I have not discussed the C++ language code in my program with
// anyone other than my instructor or the teaching assistants
// assigned to this course.
//
// - I have not used C++ language code obtained from another student,
// or any other unauthorized source, either modified or unmodified.
//
// - If any C++ language code or documentation used in my program
// was obtained from another source, such as a text book or course
// notes, that has been clearly noted with a proper citation in
// the comments of my program.
//
// - I have not designed this program in such a way as to defeat or
// interfere with the normal operation of the Curator System.
(the "Curator System" is the automated online submission/grading system)
The reason I got a big scare is because the policy that I had overlooked stated "Failure to include this pledge in a submission is a violation of the Honor Code." There are many problems with such a policy. The first: at Virginia Tech, the signing of honor pledges is meaningless under our honor system because every student is required to sign a general-purpose pledge that applies to everything at VT before they take a single class. That is, it's redundant to sign or agree to further agreements pertaining to the honor code. The other problem is the guilty-until-proven-innocent nature of the statement. As if a student would cheat, and then say, "hmmm, since I cheated, I guess I won't be needing this honor pledge up here in my comment header... no siiree." Give me a break. Further, the CS dept. here is very anal, requiring students to sign a page-long course agreement form stating that we have read, are familar with, and have agreed to pages and pages of policy for the course, the CS department, and the Curator System. Also, one of the professors teaching OOP is exceedingly disrespectful towards students, and is the closest real-life comparison I have to Saturday Night Live's "Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy," with a true superiority complex.
-------------------------
Stupid people suck.
***I think that the writer just kinda gave everyone the wrong idea...my opinion is here anyway***
Hello,
I'm writing you in response to the editorial that I saw on the Washington
Post website today entitled: "Class Structure: Shaping the Learning Curve
Through a Code." My main reason for this email is to get an idea of what
background information you have about the CS program at tech, and how much
of your article came completely from the unnamed person who was prosecuted
for cheating.
I am currently finishing my sophomore year at tech as a CS student and
while reading your article became a bit outraged at the way the program was
portrayed. I'm definitely a proponent for everyone having their own
opinion so don't take this personally, I'd just like to make you aware of
what I feel is really happening here.
When I first came to Georgia Tech for a college visit I was lucky enough to
stay with a friend who was already a year into their studies. I got to
hear and see the way that the University operates, and I got somewhat of an
idea as to what to expect in the level of difficulty in the coursework. CS
in particular, the course of study to which I was heading, I found out was
one of the hardest majors offered. It takes an extremely large amount of
dedication and hard work, but quite honestly, I'm not some kind of genius.
Last year I took CS2130, a class that was once the hardest CS class in the
nation, and I passed it, along with the other %50 of the original class
that hadn't dropped the course or failed.
I understand that everyone must take at least the intro CS course at tech,
no matter what their major. As you mentioned in your article, the first
day of that class is pretty much spend on explaining the code of ethics to
which the CS department adheres, as well as telling of the consequences of
cheating. The fabled cheatfinder program exists, and %90 of the time works
well, however there is still some room for debate with the dean in the end.
What really irritates me, is that so many people were caught cheating
rather stupidly. For many it was a matter of not even caring enough to
make the code that you copied look different, not only with whitespace
(this is ignored) but structurally. I'll admit, cheating happens, but code
borrowing never should because it is simply stupid. You mentioned that the
student in the article was caught for matching about 30 lines in several
hundred. This seems very trivial, yet as in many of the projects, the
truly difficult concepts of each really are only contained in a few lines
of code. The rest is just coding datastructure and all the necessary
functions in order to allow that core concept to be utilized as a program.
To quote a friend of mine who was a TA at one point for this class
explaining the projects and homework of 1321: "If you "seek answers on the
internet, you're really just cutting and pasting code...(what he) has
failed to realize that gt is only limiting students from discussing
answers. when your homework is thirty problems, each of which have
five-line answers, there's not really much to talk about, other than the
answer...the students, however, aren't prevented from making up examples,
reading the text, or *gasp* talking to a TA! good god, at this school, no
one comes to see their TA. it's ridiculous."
The computer science program at Tech is ever evolving and rest assured the
events of the last year have shaken things in the department up a bit.
There will be changes, but in the end one should realize the way that Tech
operates. This school is not the greatest or the worst to attend, but I am
certainly thankful to be here. Coming from a good high school, where I
excelled with little or no effort, I welcome the fact that Tech, at times
is needlessly difficult. It puts you in your place, and while my grades
certainly aren't Dean's list, I've learned a lot about self-reliance and
work ethic. This place isn't simply about learning material, you could go
to a community college and learn to program, its about learning how to work
within the real world, and take all the bad that comes along with the good.
Thanks for you time,
-Travis
I'm not sure it is so simple. I belive many cs people at ga tech are pretty strong on collaboration -- or at least that is how I interpret their widespread use of swiki and their very active participation in open source squeak . I wonder if there is more to this story because some of the squeakers are hyperactive open source people.
Not at Georgia Tech though. I love how many people here pretend their school didn't have the almost exact same rule. I transferred colleges and BOTH had this rule. All my friends at other schools has the same rule. EVERYONE HAS THIS RULE!
Why? Because it works. As someone who has graded thousands of lines of code in a single night, it you know the language and the material, and you known the students, it is obvious who copied from who. Despite the example someone game, it is rare to have a 30 line block almost identical, even in a 600 line program. I know, because I had to look at those programs for three years.
The real moral of the story is that if the students don't understand and don't ask the TA then most of the time, not always, but most of the time, you need friendlier or better TAs
Never confuse volume with power.
I'm a C.S. faculty, and in general I like to think I'm on the side of the good students. In order to provide good opportunities, I have to try to consistently distinguish between good computer scientists/students and weak ones. I'm responsible to both the good students and employers/graduate schools who recruit our students. While I try to be conservative in assessing a cheating penalty, I'm finding cheating is more prevalent than one might think, including people getting partial solutions from past students and getting solutions off campus.
Group projects provide hiding places for weak students and don't allow me to see just how good the best students are. Weak students can be hidden for many reasons (international students are sometimes carried by their friends to avoid bad grades or flunking out which can mean losing funding or their visa). After discovering this in one of my courses, I have decided not to give group projects. This is unfortunate, since many students would benefit from working on larger projects than can be accomplished by individuals. over a semester.
On a side note, I often find that when I'm programming, the amount of work to solve some part of a problem may not be measured in number of lines (say I'm writing a timing dependent loop for a device driver or a tricky algorithm). The fact that only a few lines match between 2 or more submissions does not mean that the important ideas were developed independently.
GT has long been regarded as the best CS school in the region. Unfortunately the University System is becoming a whipped-dog shadow of its former self, due to encroachments from the State bureaucracy doing an end run around the Board of Regents. Specifically, things like the Georgia Dept. of Adminstrative Services. You pretty much can't even requistion so much as a box of paper clips without forms in triplicate approved in Atlanta. When you can be fired or jailed over fucking office supplies people shut up real quick about substantive matters.
The id-driven petit-bourgeous political establishment in the State, which is allowed to exist as a proxy for interests with the real money and power, thoroughly distrusts and despises
intellectuals and academics, or anyone else who exercises independent judgement. They of course desire a prestigious appearance, but they're quite content to terrorize the University System into just shutting up, doing as told, and resting on its former laurels.
Somebody isn't happy with this, given the spate of negative press about the State in the last year or two. Understandable, but the risk is that this will only make matters worse and foster further dick-headed stupidity. Frontal assault is sometimes the only thing the cretins understand, much less respect.
Doubtless the "no discusssion" rule arose in some context which makes it seem appropriate, but that context is nowhere to be seen here. They're lucky this kid hasn't blown up a dorm or something for slandering him this way. You could understand it. Hopefully he will hire a lawyer and sue the State, instead, though. Slander, breach of contract, malpractice, incompetence, something. I'm sure he has grounds.
--rgb
N0 P2P CHATTING ALLOWED
Rumor has it the kid in question's father is an editor for the Washington Post. That might explain the tone of the article...
I was a CS at GT myself, but while I was there the entire student body did not have to take those intro CS courses. I can imagine there are quite a few engineering majors who could care less about programming that would have a motivation to cut corners.
Regardless of whether or not the College of Computing is handling this correctly, it's obvious they are getting a black eye from this.
GTWreck
When I was at GT, the final lab project in Automated Test Equipment (EE class) was a two-person thing. And, I wound up doing just about all of the work. However, it wasn't because my lab partner was a know-nothing; he wasn't. In fact, he was quite sharp. It's just that I had a big jones for the lab project and the whole class, for that matter. It was my lab partner who wound up getting screwed out of the experience, but really, I just don't see how I could have sandbagged for his benefit. My point is that pairing or grouping up on a project just doesn't work well unless there is a specific reason to have multiple people, perhaps because the people have different specialties that have to be made use of to achieve success.
I guess one thing that is really good about group/pair work is that it's about the only way you can get a shot at the hotties who otherwise would just look right past you.
Bah, when I went to NJIT, it was 12:1 men to women. You just had to look elsewhere. NJIT has a nice program with neighboring Rutgers university for taking classes, you'll find it much different. Or other neighboring colleges.
I head a story (don't know if it's true) about an incoming freshman at NJIT who asked "Where are all the girls?" Told they were in architecture, he changed majors, and five years later graduated with a degree in it.
=Blue(23)
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
But learning heres against the rules
This here schools just for fools
Frankly, I find physics majors make better programmers. They take a much more applied approach instead of theoretical and they get more experience trying to get their equipment to work where as CS majors just blow off practicing algorithms or get happy with "power programming" that is unmaintainable. CS majors do it cause they want to (and won't when they don't) while physics majors do it because they have to. Those that will take the time to figure out what they need to learn, learn what they have to and how to apply it to the real world make better programmer employees.
we all need a bit of time with certain problems, and i really do not think that this should be any issue for the general student population. most of them aren't going to become programmers, and i do not think that the goal of the university it strictly to create professionals. its to educate and to teach the methods for approaching problems. you work together in an office. you discuss problems which you may not get. the real problem is our focus on grades at all costs, as opposed to learning.
.. this story made me think of a old Georgia Tech joke I found very funny. Here it goes:
A Georgia Tech student and an MIT student are talking to each other one day. Very proud of his school, the Georgia Tech student says, "You know, at Georgia Tech, we consider ourselves the MIT of the South." The MIT student turns to him and replies, "You know that's funny, because at MIT we don't consider Georgia Tech."
Here at University of Maryland at College Park, I'd say our policy is pretty good. "For academic honesty purposes, projects are considered comparable to an extended take-home exam. That is, any cooperation prohibited on the exam is also prohibited for the project. Students are welcome to study or solicit help in learning course and C++ language concepts from any others. Once you've received a numeric grade for a project, you are welcome and encouraged to compare it with any classmates who have also received a numeric grade for that assignment." In other words, you are perfectly welcome to go open a book and teach yourself whatever you want. You are 100% within your rights to go ask someone how C-style pointers work. I'll never understand how people at some schools can graduate without learning to code properly (as some people have claimed happens at their schools)... here at UMCP, you're either a code ninja or changing majors. The good part is that engineers can't make fun of you for being dumb :).
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
You can't write 30 lines of code on your own? Go to UGA (ask a Tech man "what's the good word," and without thinking, he'll respond "to Hell with Georgia").
While I've not made nearly as much as Gates in my career (and besides, it's Woz that's my hero anyway), I can say that my GA Tech ICS degree prepared me for a VERY interesting career, and I don't regret a minute of it. I don't have a bit of a problem separating the wheat from the chaff...
On a lighter note, I remember when I was in school and the folks asking for the help were the freshman EE majors who had to pass EE 1010 (Fortran programming) as a required fresham course. Always did their programs on punch cards and always bugging the CS majors for help. Inevitably it would be something like their cards were too short, backwards (the line numbers go DOWN not UP!), or needed a good shuffle...
"When I entered GA Tech I couldn't spell engineer and now I are one."
If this were easy, they wouldn't need us to do it!
'Computer science programs are LOADED with cheating.' Actually, I think it is all college programs, not just CS, at any university.
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
I attend Georgia Tech....in fact I am graduating from there in two weeks.
It has taken me 5 years of straight classes to get here. And in that time I've discovered a few things about Tech.
First it is extremly competitive. THe AVERAGE GPA is around a 2.5!
However, this schools admissions are fairly lenient, due to the fact that it is a state school.
To reconcile these, Tech has several Weed Out courses. The purpose of these are to be as difficult as possible. For most of these corses a C is an excellent grade and a D is adaquate.
This CS class is exactly that. The intro CS classes are easily the hardest classes the major offers. This is to encourage thoes who are not interested or capable in the subject to change majors before a great deal of time and energy is expended on them.
The short answer is.....just because you were an A student in HS, don't expect to be one here at Tech. People pass these classes all the time and if you can't then....tough luck, change majors or study CS elsewhere. But I for one am sick and tired of everyone whining about these classes. Thousands of people make it through them each year so suck it up and do the work.
Clonan
asdf ada ww w ww qwe,
oijoiji!!!
kjn.,
nn
I went to school for computer science in Michigan, at a small regional college. All I wanted to do was learn to program, and at first, most of the professors had the right attitude -- we were there to learn, and their job was to teach us and help everyone pick up the material. For a year or two things were pretty ok. Then they hired this asshole who hailed from Michigan State, where things are considerably different, I suspect. Suddenly, he took over the assembly language course, and a course on low-level computer organization, and the networks course, which were basically required courses. He immediately turned them into "weeding-out" courses. You know the type -- the course with the tests so hard they "weed out" everyone the professor feels isn't worthy of a CS degree. Keep in mind, this is a small, regional college, not an MIT or Caltech. Not that I would have approved of such crap anyway.
So, everyone did pretty well in assembly, and networks went pretty well even though I was one of only five people to get the final project working (i.e. write an ftp client and server which is capable of transmitting an image without screwing the image up -- this was so ironic because the prof later got caught with a huge porno archive on one of our servers, but we warned him in time to wiggle out of harm's way; in retrospect, this may have been a tactical error on our part). But, the computer organization class was horrible. It was a bloodbath. It delved into all this ridiculous stuff no one ever uses in a computer programming job, and the tests were as tough as he could get them. It was Michigan State snobbery taken to extremes! And, he didn't care at all whether his whole class failed. As far as he was concerned, if you didn't pass his class, you didn't deserve a degree, period.
Now, would you think they'd replace this goober, and find someone who actually wanted to teach? Nope. They made him the DEPARTMENT CHAIR!!! Sweet Jesus. Then they started offering everything except what the seniors needed to graduate. The last straw was when they offered a course in microchip design instead of an advanced programming course we needed, effectively forcing us to choose between postponing graduation for a year and taking a useless course we were guaranteed to hate. All to help out some Dow Chemical employee who wanted to become an adjunct. Fuck, I'm lucky I have a degree at all, I almost dropped out like six times out of sheer pissed-offedness.
The worst thing of all is, it's easy enough to pick up most computer science related material if you've got a good enough reading list. Want theory? You can read "The Art of Computer Programming" by Knuth. Want to know about network programming? Read Stevens. Want to know about Unix? Buy the Lions book. The material they teach in college is nowhere near as good as that which you can pick up hacking around by yourself in a dark basement or attic.
Yes, I have a degree in computer science. I also have student loans to pay off. And, I've learned a hell of a lot more on the job than I ever did in school. So, why did I have to put up with all the nonsense of a crummy degree program? You'd think the government would catch a clue and create some kind of computer science certification program to replace college with, wouldn't you? Some kind of standardized testing group. Anything.
Ok, done ranting. College sucked, guys. It was a long, drawn out pain in the ass, and I didn't learn anything I'm currently using. Fucking sad.
At the University of Toronto at Scarborough there was a rather enlightened professor in this matter - My first year comp-sci professor Nick Cheng.
His philosophy was this: Discuss an assignment all you like! It's how you learn, but take away no notes and compare no code then watch an hour of boring TV.
Anything you still remember, you've learned. Anything else is plagiarism. It worked quite well actually.
There should be a big difference between learning from someone's code and just copying it. There would be a big difference in any sensibly run system. That's a subjunctive and a conditional, not an indicative. However, according to the GT code, even discussing problems outside of class is cheating. Therefore, GT official policy is that there is no difference. They made the rules; they deserve to be judged by them. They even run a piece of code to detect "cheating" and automatically send students to the dean without a review first. They made the rules; they don't deserve deliberation.
There's one thing you have to understand about Atlanta, which you can't understand unless you're used to another culture but have to spend some time in Atlanta. I also think that, if you're here too long, it spoils the perception. For mercenary reasons, I've been in Atlanta for two years, and I have to deal with GT weenies all the time.
The thing is this: In general, people in Atlanta do not care about substance. At all. To Atlantans, Atlanta is the Jewel of the South. It does not matter that the cultural facilities are almost at the bottom compared to cities of similar size and Atlanta lacks facilities quite common in University towns one-eighth the size. It is the Jewel of the South, dammit. Everything is about who you know, what family you belong to, and how well you can bullshit others.
There are no really good restaurants in Atlanta. I know; I've looked for them. I've even asked chefs, who got defensive and then told me places to go. I went there. There are only Fabulous Restaurant Concepts. Every other city that you can name has restaurants that are primarily for Being Seen There, but they also, usually, make good food. Not so in Atlanta.
A completely accurate summary of Atlanta is this: Yeehaw, Lemuel, let's make one of them city thangs. Ain't it purty.
Similarly, GA Tech is the M.I.T. of the South. It doesn't matter whether they do things to support this. What matters is that enough people believe it. I doubt it even occurs to any of the faculty or administration that teaching well and effectively is important. They'd just blink and say, "But We're The M.I.T. Of The South."
Yeehaw, Lemuel, let's make one of them tech university thangs. Ain't it purty.
OK, maybe there are a few. I'm not entirely poisoned, and so there are probably some others. You can't have four million people without having a few that don't spend all their time licking navels. Yet I feel the creep in my bones. I'm trying like hell to get out of here and will eventually make it. Same for the others, probably.
Simple solution to this problem. Hit 'em in the wallet. Until they fix this policy... Future students go somewhere else. Current students, transfer.
"The only way to catch tiger cubs is to go into the tiger's den."
rue the day? who talks like that??
i could live a little longer in this prison
This is the kind of micromanaging idiocy that the USSR was famous for. Sad to see how popular it's getting in what used to be the land of the free.
I used to supervise the CS labs at the University of Waterloo and boy the stories I could tell of stupid cheaters.
Unlike these idiots however, we only busted someone when we had something to present as
evidence of cheating. Homework only counted for
10% of the final mark, and only one person 'Fast Eddie' ever tried to cheat on a final or midterm (he tried to change his answers after he got it back then say we marked it wrong, but we had photocopied it becuase he as trouble all term long, he got kicked out).
I am SO glad that I got out of that place before they went straight to hell. However, in Georgia Tech's defense, the College of Computing is the only really screwed up entity there. The problem is that CoC is run by "BOFH" types who care more about inflating their egos than teaching. They want to inflict pain, not knowledge, so that they feel powerful. It's your standard insecurity complex I guess. Now, as for the honor code, it needs to be completely done away with. Any rule that forbids students working together is not only impractical, but completely contrary to the normal mode of operation at just about any company in the world. Nobody wants to hire a student who has never worked on teams. I know my company doesn't.
Yeah, here in the real world I was nearly fired when I asked a coworker about the syntax for substr().
Schools really need to prepare people for reality more, in the real world collaboration is a GOOD thing.
Travis
Here's my response to the columnist:
Dear Mr. Mathews,
I read your recent column about the Georgia Tech College of Computing,
and it made me recall my recent experiences there as a graduate
student. I have to say that I strongly recommend against Georgia Tech
for anyone considering trying for a computer science degree, especially
an undergraduate one.
I was excited to find out in the summer of 1999 that I had been accepted
as a master's student into the computer science program. I had only
minored in CS at my undergraduate school, and my acceptance letter
stated I would need to enroll in some undergraduate courses to make up
the difference. I e-mailed my future advisor, Mike McCracken, to talk
about what I needed to take, and he suggested we meet during
orientation.
During orientation I found out Mr. McCracken was at a conference for the
weekend, breaking our appointment to meet without notice and leaving me
without any formal advisor during registration. There were also no
course catalogs, which detail degree requirements, available during this
time.
This proved to be my downfall during the fall semester, as I sought
advice from others that turned out to be misleading or false. First, I
was informed by a student volunteer during orientation that I could take
a course pass-fail for credit toward my degree, which turned out to be
wrong. (Plus, once the registration period is over it's impossible to
change this designation.) Second, without any proper guidance, I
mistakenly registered for an undergraduate CS theory class on a
letter-grade basis. As a graduate student, I did not think the class
would count against my GPA, and thus did not do all the work; when I
found out it did count (only after the semester ended), I had a D on my
transcript and was put on academic probation.
(Incidentally, this class' professor was replaced halfway through the
semester for doing a poor job of teaching and for giving failing grades
to a vast majority of the students, but the grades at the time remained
in effect.)
Desperate to rectify the situation, I sought the help of several of
Georgia Tech's faculty and staff members, only to be rebuffed at every
turn. The Georgia Tech Dean of Students was indifferent to my
situation, and Kurt Eiselt, the associate dean of the college, replied
to my e-mail with a very rude message stating that it was solely my
fault, that the college was not at fault, and that I was trying to blame
my own failures on the faculty.
I was shocked that a dean would use that kind of tone towards a student
with a problem. Granted, I'm sure they deal with academic problems
rooted in laziness or cheating several times a year. But I wasn't just
some undergrad going to college at his parents' insistence. I had
voluntarily chosen Tech to get my master's degree because I wanted to
learn. I already had a degree in English and film studies from Emory,
where I had also served as the newspaper's managing editor. I knew how
to balance an above-average workload at a quality school better than
almost anyone. If the problems I had performing the simple task of
registering for classes had tripped me up so badly, they could trip up
anyone; and yet, the associate dean of the college felt the need to
berate me just for telling him about my situation.
Fortunately, I was able to turn the convoluted registration system and
lack of faculty oversight in my favor. I registered on a letter-grade
basis for a freshman-level English class, despite the fact that I have a
B.A. in English. As you might expect, Tech's classes in English are
pretty much a formality, and I was able to cruise through it and two CS
classes to earn three A's toward my GPA (pulling it from probationary
level to over 3.5). Exploiting the registration system the same way it
had hurt me gave me some sense of satisfaction, but it was annoying
having to waste my time and tuition dollars on a semester of high
school-level reading to ensure that I wouldn't be expelled (or
"dismissed" as they call it) for my mistake.
My story does have a happy ending. I studied the college's course
catalog as carefully as I could to avoid getting in trouble again,
overloaded during the summer, and with virtually no help from Mike
McCracken (who could barely be bothered to return my phone calls, let
alone advise me), earned my master's degree with flying colors. (I now
work as a software engineer in the Washington, D.C. area.) But as you
can imagine, if I ran into these kinds of roadblocks as a graduate
student, it would be even worse for an undergrad.
The workload I witnessed being assigned in the undergraduate classes I
audited would make it nearly impossible not to collaborate or cheat and
still earn a B or better. (I have to wonder if the students who do well
in these classes have simply found better ways to cheat or get around
the college's detection system.) When you're in a situation like this
as an honest student, it makes learning frustrating. It's no
coincidence that a higher than normal percentage of Georgia Tech's
students are "dismissed" from the school for poor performance, compared
to other colleges. Were these students really not ready for college, or
did they fall through the cracks of a faulty system perpetuated by an
indifferent faculty and staff?
As you can see from my story and the one you wrote about earlier, the
College of Computing is more likely to hinder, distract or attack the
students than help them actually learn. I strongly urge potential
computer scientists to look elsewhere for their education.
You can argue that the guy should have waited until school was back in session to ask a TA, but maybe the assignment was due on the first day back from break (that's not unheard of). Since "many" other students in the class didn't turn in the assignment at all, it seems he wasn't the only one who had a problem and wasn't able to get answers using the permitted resources.
I help other students, as long as it's not discouraged by a school. I do think he should have paid attention to the rules of the school. Really though, this guy is still in school, and it might turn things for the better.
I hear good things about gatech, so I don't think you should outrule this school just because of one mess-up.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
>And if you think I'm dumb enough to post using my real account, you're even stupider than you look.
you pussy.. grow a pair so that i may reflame you properly. my email is posted, if you dare
I recall a night at 2am about 22 years ago trying to find a bug in my freshman Intro to Computing homework at Georgia Tech. I was an ignorant 17 year old at the time. Rich (my dorm hall advisor), where ever you are, thanks for helping me find it.
I teach mathematics at a university now. I encourage my students to work together (except on exams).
As a mathematics and computer science professor, I understand this policy. It all has to do with what you define "learning" to be. Is learning the acquisition of information (I hope not - or else I will soon be out of a job)? Is learning developing a certain skill set? Is learning understanding how to solve problems? Is learning understanding how to ask the right questions? In the mathematics (and to some degree in CS), the latter is the most important.
If learning is just acquiring information, then this policy is, of course, ludicrous. How do you help a sutdy gather information by cutting down on his available sources?
If iearning is acquiring a basic skill set, it becomes a little less clear. Perhaps they need someone to explain something they did not understand from the professor. We get a little concerned here, because we do not want someone doing the student's work for them. And how do we do this without a complete lockdown? So in this regard, the honor policy is more a quality control mechanism than a principal. Flawed yes, but what do you do?
If this is all you think education is, then these honor codes probably make no sense to you. And the greatest crisis our schools are facing today is the that so many people believe this is all education is.
In mathematics and in CS design, learning is all about problem solving. What can you do with the resources at hand? There is no single right answer to learn. There is no unique proof, no unique computer program. What matters is figuring out how to get there with what you do know. If someone shows you how to do it, you learned nothing. It is for these type of assignments that these honor codes are written.
Yes, sometimes it is useful to learn how to solve problems with other people. We create special assignments for those situtations and let you know when it is okay to work with others.
Oddly enough, in one course where the cheating got out of hand and I had to pick up in mid-semester and finish the class and bring the problem under control, the real fussing came not from the cheaters, but from a spoiled brat who objected to assigned seating on exams! He squealed like a pig under a gate, and ultimately had to be squelched by the dean of students. He was a bright kid, too, and didn't do himself any favor with that nonsense.
Most of the business majors have NO mathematical ability, NO mathematical preparation, and no real strong points in any other areas which would help in an econ course. It's sad to see people with no problem-solving ability trying to stagger through life. They have no desire to learn, either. I suppose that's how they get into such a sad state.
...But it was in middle school, my reading teacher had to tell me to stop reading. It was time for me to take my test. Then I showed her I had already take the test, graded myself and gave myself a hundred.
Hmmm, I have 5 mod pts, its time to metamod, and on top of that I have to meta-metamod? When do I get to read slashdot?
Part of the byproduct of the dot-com craze is that a lot of really shitty people (the "leftovers") have been hired by the universities. Only the incompetants were left over by the dot-com bubble and the universities panic'd, sensing a faculty shortage, and they bid up bozo PhD's to levels never before seen.
...)
So, this misbehavior by Georgia Tech Faculty is not even the tip of th iceberg - its the start of a new and bigger trend.
This is just what happens when you staff a university with idiots. We are at the dawn of a decade of mediocrity in academia. Meanwhile, even an Einstein couldn't get hired today, because of budgetary discipline (which is probably a good thing if you're an Einstein, since today's university job is probably really, really dull - because of the colleagues
Hmm, sounds like Georgia Tech works at least a little like the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology (or SDSM&T), a top-5 engineering college when I went there 12 years ago. I was given an F in two classes one semester in my Sophomore year (Calc III and Comp Sci III) even though I had a B average in one class and an A average in the other. Why? Because each of the professors didn't feel that I REALLY KNEW or UNDERSTOOD the material of the class. Even though I had received A's and B's on all their tests.
... If anybody reading this is (unfortunately) already going to SDSM&T and wants the names of the professors to avoid, e-mail me and I'll let you know -- they're still there, and I'm sure they're still the same a**holes.
I was so shocked, but didn't realize until later when I left that the university actually had a policy that final grades were at the sole discression of the professor -- they have no checks and balances. So, if the professor has a problem with you, you have no choice but to take a class with another professor and accept the impact on your GPA. The Math professor probably didn't like my getting B's in his class while sleeping half the time and the Comp Sci professor probably didn't like the fact that I always got perfect scores even though I put practically no effort into it (these classes were THAT easy). So, their response was to flunk me.
Needless to say, I tried to work it out one more semester, couldn't (because, as noted above, there WAS no way to work it out -- they said "F" and that was the last word), and took the opportunity the next semester to move to California and finish my Comp Sci degree in a REAL university (Cal Poly). I honestly didn't know any better when I was at SDSM&T and thought it was my fault, but every prof and student I've known since then were very surprised that an American university had this kind of problem -- most universities would fire professors immediately for this kind of bizarre prejudice.
I don't think its a coincidence that, 12 years later, SDSM&T isn't even in the top 100 engineering colleges/universities in the U.S. The moral of this story is: talk to people who go to the university before you decide to go there, and you ALWAYS have the right to be treated fairly.
P.S.
It makes you wonder if the cheat programs are just detecting a narrow range of instruction. If the students are only taught a limited amount of problem solving techniques, how many possible variations can they employ in their homework?
people complaining about grades on introductory courses are pathetic.
introductory courses are designed to help you find out what you are good at. if you do not enjoy the class or pass it painlessly you will hurt yourself by going on with that discipline.
L
Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
After reading all the comments, it looks to me like this is Tech's passive/aggressive response to some boneheaded politician who thought to manufacture 'leet cadres of tech literate employable assets in the state by fiat, by requiring everybody to take intro CS.
If wishes were horses...
--rgb
I, too, attended GA Tech, and find this article rediculous. If the staffer had attended the opening day "cheating is evil" he would understand a lot more about the policy.
First off, more than a thousand students take the introductory CS class, speaking with the teacher directly is pretty much impossible. You are assigned a TA, who in general does nothing more than grade assignments. If a student does have issues with an assignment, there are newsgroups you can subscribe to and ask questions.
Now as to asking questions, you're welcome to ask a fellow student "Could you explain recursion to me?" but you're not allowed to ask "How do you program question 4?" or "I can't get my for loop to work, how did you finish yours?" That's what this student was busted for, and I fully support GA Tech's actions. He wasn't expelled or given a failing grade. It's a lesson learned. The GA Tech CS department is murder on drilling these things into you (Don't get me started on CS2340). The whole point of their strictness is once you've graduated, you don't have someone beside you to guide you in those problems you don't understand. You can't tell your boss "I don't get it" and ask a coworker how to do your job. It's up to you to learn. What did you expect from one of the top technological schools in the country?
That go to show why GT has a lame ACM programming team
and why some lame college like Univ. Central Florida can
beat them regularly in the regionals.
I got nailed for this back when I was in college. I had been in the physics department at Arizona for a couple years and decided to pick up a minor in CS. During my first CS course, I collaborated on a homework assignment (no coding - hand analysis of some data structures) with another student.
A week later, the instructor called me in. She asked if I had collaborated with anyone on the assignment. I said I had and we were planning to meet again tomorrow to discuss the latest assignment. She went ballistic, accusing me of academic dishonesty and threatening to throw me out of the department. I protested my innocence, that we had merely collaborated, not copied. She said that even collaboration was forbidden, that what I had done was wrong and not condoned by any department at the university.
Furious, I produced no less than three sylabii (sp?) for my 400 level physics courses. Each one went into great depth about the need to find other students to study with and collaborate on the homework. If a student cound not find a study partner, he or she could go to the physics study room any time between 7am and 7pm to discuss problems with the resident graduate student and find other students to work with.
The instructor backed down somewhat. She stated that any collaboration in this department was forbidden and I would take a failing grade on that homework assignment. She also said I could appeal this to the department head, but if I did, she would make every effort to get me thrown out of the CS department, and possibly the University.
I really should have fought her. This situation is absurd. I have been a professional programmer for over six years now (fininshed both physics and CS with bachelor's degrees). I have yet to work on a project where I was not to collaborate with anyone.
In the physics department, peer review and collaboration were seen as necessary to the instruction of students. Tests and cirricula were designed with the idea that some students would exploit this system and not do their own work. These students were always shown up on exam day and seldom passed classes.
CS, by comparison, buried its head in the sand, trying to legislate a problem away, rather than rethink their appoach and build cooperation into the system. I think this is a strategy that ultimately will not work. CS departments need to apporach classes with the idea that the students will and should communicate ideas with each other. Assignments and cirricula should adapt to that situation. This, I believe, will lead to better prepared students able to work effectively in groups.
What I wouldn't give for some new hires like that.
The cost of cheating is the loss of integirty of honest students' degrees. That alone is reason enough for me to care. My school does not publish numbers on academic dishonesty (I suppose for the same reasons as GATech). However, I have been informally told by professors that perhaps 10% of students are caught cheating, but it is widely believed by students, faculty, and administration that the actual number of dishonest students is much higher.
It is an epidemic at my school; so much so that some area employers srutinize graduates especially carefully. It seems in the past year many students have graduated with a good GPA but absolutely no understanding of the material.
It is a huge problem - educators and students recognize this. But how do you combat it? Cheating detection programs are one way, but unfortunately they do generate false positives (causing more work for the teacher and administration) and they certainly don't catch every instance.
Your suggestion that business has to skirt the law to make profit is absurd. The business does NOT have a responsibility to go beyond the law for the sake of the bottom line. Clearly, its duty is to maximize the value of the investment for the shareholders, but that must fall within the bounds of acceptable legal behavior.
As for the notion that an honor code is a joke, I disagree. What's wrong with upholding a basic system of values? We do that every day when we educate our children not to murder, not to steal, etc... I believe that the value to do your own work instead of copying others is just such a basic value. To do otherwise suggests that individual effort should not be rewarded. What sort of message does that send?
So I took both CS1(Scheme) and CS2(Java) at GaTech. I strongly believe that the strict rules enforcing individual work is there for these two classes because there is NO NEED to discuss the material with your classmates. It is NOT at that difficulty level yet. There's a really strong feeling of the "survival of the fittest" concept here, and if you have to talk to your classmates in these INTRODUCTORY courses to stay in the game, you've already missed the boat. They designed these courses so that there should be absolutely no need to work on the codes in groups. Get it?
Well, it might appear to the untutored that the falling-off in the teaching of Greek and Latin is a sign of "dumbing-down" in our classrooms. That rather than turning out bright, capable people who can deal with a wide variety of things on a number of different levels, we're just turning out more grist for the mill of the workplace. I say "to the untutored," that it might appear that way. To those of us in the know, however, the picture is far less gloomy.
Sixty years ago, we were in the middle of World War II. We were pitted against Adolf Hitler, who in addition to troops and machines of war, had sizable occult resources as well. Not only did our boys have to contend with enemy guns and knives, but mostrous Things from beyond the depths of time. Entire platoons vanished without so much as a sound, sucked into nothingness. We needed brave men with a thorough understanding of those classic languages, in which so much of our occult heritage rested, so that they could summon Things of their own, things to combat Hitler's dark summonings. Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided a visible end to the war. However, it was the invisible summoning of He Who Must Not Be Named that made certain the Axis powers would never unite again under Hitler's banner.
Nowadays, we neither need nor want that kind of magickal muscle. There's too much danger of an educated inner-city kid going rogue, and calling down Shoggoths and the get of Cthulhu on us. Thank your lucky stars that our kids don't know or believe that.
Pope Felix the Scurrilous.
Computer Geek by day, religious Icon by night.
i'm an alum and took the class. i think the system is fair and does make you learn the material. the guy's obviously just a wimp who couldn't finish his assignment and cheated.
I graduated in 1988 (yes, an old fart in the technical world.) I am saddened, but not terribly surprised, to hear this.
I can't really say we put any effort into trying to catch people cheating. There may well have been people cheating madly when I was there, but I wasn't aware of it. The honor code was something that us arrogant engineering students were proud of. If that's no longer the case, that is truly sad.
The whole point of the Honor Code, IMHO, is that most people, when expected to act honorably, will do so. It sounds like you did. If it's now considered an anachronism that nobody believes in anymore, then nobody is really expected to follow it...just to not get caught. Also, it's worth mentioning that in my day, the honor code was a point of pride not just with the students, but faculty as well--and not just as a power-trip tool.
Don't let the bastards get you down. You're better off for doing it the right way, even though those around you didn't. The lame fucks who cheated their way through the program will have their karma cashed in when they go to work and suddenly don't know how to solve a problem on their own.
You really don't learn shit as an undergrad per se...what you get (if you do the work) is a toughened analytical mind that can later be trained on learning what you really need to know and solving real-world problems. I've run into graduates from other engineering/CS schools who, when confronted with a problem, couldn't solve it, then came back to me looking for the answer. They were then surprised to hear me say, "I don't know the answer. If I knew the answer, I would've already solved the problem. You're not in school anymore. You're an engineer now. It's your job to provide the answer."
If fixing the COE honor system is at the bottom of the to-do list, then it's already dead.
I think I'm going to drink heavily now. *sigh*
-- Remove the BOING from my email address if you don't want it to bounce.
At the heart of this issue is a student who struggled through a tough course, possiblby cheated and got caught, and whined about it. The journalist who gave this whining a public outlet is irresponsible and immature. There was a similar article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution a while back, but shoddy journalism is nothing new for the AJC. I was surprised to see a supposedly reputable newspaper run the story. My guess is that the journalist who wrote the Post story had a bad experience with cheating when he was a student and is simply using this case to vent his own frustrations. He certainly doesn't have all the facts. Ga Tech is an excellent school with high standards and a student body taken from the brightest high school graduates in the country. In this environment many high achieving students are somewhat dismayed at the difficulty after having a relatively easy time in high school. This was my experience at the Air Force Academy, and Ga Tech is a similar caliber school with similar caliber students. This student simply needs to learn that he won't always get As, especially at this level.
Having said this, I must admit that the CS1 course at Ga Tech is experiencing growing pains. The College of Computing (CoC) at Ga Tech recently revised the course and students and faculty alike are adjusting to the new material. However, it is important to consider the fact that the CoC revised the course after conducting research in CS education. The CoC is trying to make its CS curriculum as good as it can be. The execution of the change has been rocky, but the underlying reasons for it are sound. Note also that the CoC is well aware of the problems with the new course and started actively working to improve it long before any blow hard journalists blew the rather typical stories of college students out of proportion in order to create fodder for their columns.
Now, for anyone considering applying to Ga Tech , let's inject a little reality into this discussion. Ga Tech is the number 4 engineering school in the country behind M.I.T., Stanford, and Berkeley. Computer Science is ranked 12th, but the ranking is based on reputation, which always lags actual performance. By my own observations I would place Ga Tech's computer science program in the top ten, and Ga Tech is definitely headed there. Ga Tech is a very competitive school and is constantly growing and improving. Tech is so serious about making its computer science program a national powerhouse that it has its own college within the university, not just a department of another college as in most universities. I could go on extolling the many virtues of Ga Tech, but the bottom line is that it's an excellent school and should be on your short list if you want to attend one of the nation's top institutions.
I guess one thing that is really good about group/pair work is that it's about the only way you can get a shot at the hotties who otherwise would just look right past you.
I made the mistake of picking out the hottest of the three females (of a class of about 80) in CSC100 (ASU's equivalent) for a "lab" partner. BZZZZZZZT.... ERROR. I doubt she'd _ever_ programmed so much as a VCR, let alone a hand calculator, in her wildest dreams, and here she was in a pascal class. I think she had driven a motorcycle once, but that was definately the limit of her technological competance. The lectures went clean over her head. I'm not much of an instructor, and my attempts at clairification did the same thing. On the bottom line I ended up doing 100% of the software authorship, and she changed her major to business (and I _hope_ NOT MIS, either!).
Never one to be convinced by a singular bad experience, I tried pretty much the same thing with an even prettier ornament in CSC101. This was about 1983, and the drug of choice on campus at the time was that coke shit. The "programming partner" was, as before, highly decorative but, despite having survived CSC100, innocent of anything that could be even remotely regarded as software development, and preferred to get wired on that coke shit before showing up for collaboration sessions. Needless to say, her concentration was shot by that, her less-than-laughable skills were NOT supplemented either, and after a couple of complete failures at even getting _started_ at writing her first line of code she decided to just buy a working program from somebody else in the class. (I wouldn't sell her mine, and I think she was proposing to pay for it with that coke shit anyway, in which I was uninterested.) The next year she, too, was in the business school.
Some years later, I had an opportunity to discuss the level of difficulty of CSC100 & 101 with one of my favorite instructors of the department - the guy who taught me COBOL (years before the fetish for pascal and requirement for CSC100/101) and at the time the department's chairman. My remark was that if you didn't walk _into_ CSC100 with, at the very least, understanding of what an indexed loop, an array, and a read statement were, you weren't going to pick up these concepts from that class. His response was that CSC100/101 were the CSC department's "weeder" classes, which served to weed out the business students. They certainly accomplished that, and I would seriously suspect that this is also the purpose of GT's CS1321 (and its second-semester successor, if any).
Just to _really_ grind my point home, I wound up with another female programming "partner" in a 400 level class. I did not choose this one on the basis of her appearance, we just happened to be sitting at the same table when the professor told everybody to pair up and collaborate on the next project, because it would be too much work for one person. I figured there was no way this little chica doll (she was from Venezuela) could have advanced to senior standing in CSC without the ability to actually _write_ code. I was wrong. She was able to come up with about 5% of the actual work, which amounted to the easiest 20% of the code. The complex work was mine alone, she never understood it, even as she was linking her stuff into it.
In "the real world", the situation is no better. When I started my present job, my immediate supervisor was a striking blonde, whose resemblance to a former girlfriend gave me the willies. I was able to set aside my emotional upheavals long enough to dig into her perl code, where I quickly discovered that she had no concept of variable scoping or inheritance by subroutines, and only the vaguest notions about variable typing (which, in perl, is a bit wierd, but spelled out well enough by Wall & Christiansen, which she gave me to read). There were several places in her code where it failed because she had inadvertantly and obviously unknowingly inherited variables from the _wrong_ places. She's gone now, and her perl code has been largely rewritten by me.
Now I realize that my statement so far has been a sexist generalization. I'm deliberately trolling for one of the couple of female programmers I _know_ are out there (I've seen your comments) to prove me wrong. All this would take is a page of deep, elegant code and a photo that isn't frightening. Even anecdotal evidence from a guy who _knows_ a competant and attractive female programmer would be appreciated.
DON'T MODERATE ME... FLAME AWAY!!!!
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
WTF is a flash-in-the-pan trend-of-the-day like C# doing in a CS class requirement?!?
If it's still around in 20 years, ok, that's fine. But right now, that's like having NSYNC and Britney Spears in music education.
Make the students write code in class, on a test or a quiz. You don't need rules like GT has if you do that. The ones turning in their homework assignments from cut and paste code will fail the class if you count homework as no more than 50% of the class.
I got a shildt book, it's w00t. It doesn't use void main() very much though. Main should be int.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Perhaps none of you realize this, but the program didn't catch the cheaters for talking to one another. The program went through and selected specifically identical lines of code!!! This means that somewhere in the program the cheaters used EXACTLY the same code, line for line (whether the students would like to publicly admit it or not). And for those of you who don't know anything about Programming, such cheating can be related to two students who 'just happen' to have the same paragraph in their essay. Even if the students had talked about it before hand, the only way they would have been flagged for cheating is if they used the same code - and that is cheating on the most basic level.