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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."
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 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
"When he found himself with a homework assignment he did not understand, and no teaching assistants or professors available on a campus off-week, he convinced himself that just chatting with another student would not violate the rules"
----------
I sig, therefore I was.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Regardless, if he would have just *cited* what he had borrowed from other people, he would not be guilty of academic misconduct. The graders may not have given him credit for creating that portion of the code, but he would have been honest about what was his own original work.
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 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 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."
in a perfect world, all professors would have absolute and complete knowledge on every topic they teach, and a firm grasp on any topic they might come across in class.
however, this is not a perfect world.
at my lovely college(GVSU), most of the professors I've had are incompetent, can't teach, or just plain don't know the subject matter.
One of my Profs has went so far as using ANOTHER Professors code to teach his classes(IRONY) while not even understanding it. When my classmates asked him for help because none of it made sense, he admitted he only know what it was SUPPOSED to do, not if (or how) it actually worked.
so yeah, I'm disenfranchised with the the entire college situation. there are only a handful of Professors in the CS department who 'have a clue.'
I'd say that I seriously spend about 80-90% of my time working on classwork with someone else because it just doesn't make sense(with the rare exception of Prof. Wolffe- his classes are difficult, and you learn a ton).
I personally learn better having a colleague explain it to me than a professor, simply because I either have a hard time understanding my professor(I can't comprehend accents very well) or the professor just doesn't have a clue.
and don't even get me STARTED on Gen-Ed's!
but then again in CS, it's all about the degree- I occasionally forget I'm supposed to teach myself everything.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
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 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.
I've actually found that your notion does not hold up in practice.
For one, most "bell curves" are not true bell curves but are the prof's personal interpretation of a curve, as statistics require. That your distribution is not necessarily a bell-curve of intelligence is another issue entirely.
Plus, most people who screw over their grades do so in other ways. Like not allowing enough time to complete an assignment, not turning something in, showing up to the test hung over, etc. etc. etc.
Furthermore, discussion is a two way street. If you are solely distributing information to a classmate, you are tutoring them and will probably require some compensation. But most of the collaboration I've seen at universities has been more two-sided, where each person comes out of it with a better understanding of things.
Gentoo Sucks
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 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.
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.
Right, so for that portion of the code, write a comment, "This part really confused me, so I asked Billybob for help and he gave me some advice."
I can imagine the Gestapo saying the same exact things about a person hiding jews.
That he broke a rule isn't in question, but rather the ethical foundation of the rule (or lack thereof).
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.
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.
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.)
Considering this occurred in Fall 2001, "off-week" must have meant weekend or a holiday. Assignments are posted at least seven days in advance. Hence, if you start early, you will *always* have a chance to talk to TAs or the professor. However, if you wait till the last minute, you may not be able to get help: TAs are not on-call paramedics.
What's so hard about starting an assignment early?
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.
You, Sir, are a narrow minded Troll.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
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
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.
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
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.
You obviously haven't read any technical research papers. You always cite other work you borrowed techniques from.
And I remember specific classes at Georgia Tech where I was either told (as a student) or I told students (as a TA) to write down in their HW the names of people that they discussed it with.
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.
So there's no way that he could have gotten the assignment, read it, thought he understood it, and worked for a few days. He couldn't have, after hours of banging his head against the desk in an unproductive manner, decided that it was beyond his immediate ability? There's no way that he could have realized this in the middle of off week?
funny munging
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
But it's an interesting article all the same.
Essay on UNschooling.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
This actually means that you have lost your right to vote "with the entire colleg situation."
I'd say that I seriously spend about 80-90% of my time working on classwork with someone else because it just doesn't make sense
No problem, it takes all kinds, and learning styles do vary. I personally need to transcribe everything, as my long and short term memory banks are, let's say, unreliable.
(I can't comprehend accents very well)
Make foreign friends, if possible. Don't be surprised if many of the people you find worth listening to are not native English speakers. Same goes for people of any origin and language: the world's getting global-er.
or the professor just doesn't have a clue
It happens, but in these cases you should be light years ahead of the professor. If your professor's a moron and you don't even keep pace with him, well, you're in trouble.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
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.
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
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 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.
Bull Shit.
From the sounds of it, the repeated stories of various schools are using a simple method to deal with a problem: If it looks similar it is, toss the student.
Do they actually do ANY investigation?
Or do they start threatening first?
Why not monitor that student for future violations before even talking to the student. Simply getting help on an assignment may result in some of the work being similar, or the same. I've seen it happen. I've seen people that didn't talk to each other and come up with exactly the same solution using the same variable names. Complicated algorithm? no, but then, there arn't any in Intro classes anyway.
Why? Because you get into a pattern of choices and sometimes they match. (tell me how many people here use 'i' as an Integer variable generally used for a generic loop?).
No, copying code is not acceptable. Using code without including its source is unacceptable. But it shouldn't be any more acceptable for a school to toss a student for getting enough help to do an assignment. There is a difference.
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.
Just because you were never caught does not mean you were not breaking the rules. Granted, you know more about GT than me, but from everything I can see, the current no tolerance policy says that what you describe (talking with others about assignments) is against the rules. The fact that you post AC means you might not be so sure of it yourself.
Whether the guy actually cheated or not is unclear to us (the average /. geek), but the rules do seem to be written in stone and they seem to limit the colloaboration you say you enjoyed. And that's messed up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Hey Clonan (or is that Cluelessnan???) and others of your ilk,
Universities are supposed to be "learning institutions". A most crucial aspect of learning is learning how to learn. What does that mean? It means first learning how to formulate the problem in question into understandable terms. Then once the problem is understood, formulating how you'll go about solving it. How do you do that? By ASKING QUESTIONS!!! Sitting in a class with your pen glued to your pad furiously writing everything the prof says teaches you how to be a good stenographer, but teaches you nothing on how to learn.
The essence of learning and being able to continually learn throughout life is being able to ask questions, both rhetorically as well as of others, like "Hey, John, have you ever heard of this problem? What kind of approach was used to solve this before? What are the most effective approaches?" When this particular GA Tech freshman couldn't talk to his prof or his TA, he did the next best thing, he discussed it with someone else. The best minds in the world work better through collaboration, not isolated in their dorm rooms reading books from a limited list sanctioned by The University (remember Orwell's 1984? Reading anything but Sanctioned Material is double plus ungood!).
I've been a practicing engineer as well as an IT consultant for over a decade, and the major thing I've learned is that there is no possible way in the universe for anyone to KNOW all that they need to get the job done. Especially in this age of hyperspeed information change, the three best skills that anyone can have are:
1) The ability to learn on the fly
2) The ability to network (i.e. COMMUNICATE) with others
3) The ability to take what information you need and apply it to solve the problem at hand and discard the rest, and hopefully remember how you did this in case the problem comes up again in the future.
None of this is accomplished in a vacuum of self. Oppenheimer worked with Einstein and a team of several dozen engineers and technologist to build the bomb, he didn't do it alone; Linux was developed by Linus Thorvald acting as the leader of a worldwide team of professional and amateur programmers working and collaborating together.
GA Tech's CompSci methods are outdated and oldschool. The method is good for producing jar heads who can follow orders, not people who will be able to collaborate and innovate.
I can no longer read Dilbert. It's too depressing, because it is too real. -- Hyperhaplo
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
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?
An excellent post, Pope. I am a bit disappointed, however, that you provided the actual names of such powerful entities. To name a thing is to have power over a thing, and now there are several more Slashdotters who are frantically searching Google for Cthul... whoops... almost made the same mistake!
My favorite latin reference still comes from the Simpson's Halloween episode spoofing Freddy Krueger. Martin is joyfully conjugating in latin when giant Willy says, "Ach! Yeuv mahstirred a ded tonng, let's see yeu handle a live one!" (Paraphrased, by the way).
In case anyone actually thinks that I believe that the reduction of Latin classes in public schools will result in the decline and fall of western civilization, I don't. I do, however, think that we should spend more time teaching kids how to think and less time figuring out how to get more of them to pass a test so the state can get more money.
Slashdot comments... splitting hairs since 1997.