Student Who Released Code From Assignments Accused of Cheating

Death Metal sends in a story about Kyle Brady, a computer science major at San Jose State University, who recently ran into trouble over publishing the source code to his programming assignments after their due dates. One of Brady's professors contacted him and threatened to fail him if he did not take down the code. Brady took the matter to the Computer Science Department Chair, who consulted with others and decided that releasing the code was not an ethical violation. Quoting Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing: "There's a lot of meat on the bones of this story. The most important lesson from it for me is that students want to produce meaningful output from their course-assignments, things that have intrinsic value apart from their usefulness for assessing their progress in the course. Profs — including me, at times — fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students, a model that fails when the students treat their work as useful in and of itself and therefore worthy of making public for their peers and other interested parties who find them through search results, links, etc. But the convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience — especially now, with universities ratcheting up their tuition fees and trying to justify an education that can put students into debt for the majority of their working lives."

Comments

Re:Teachers wrong here

[DNS-and-BIND]

Oh, that's rich - the Communist criticizing others for being incompetent.

Re:The Professor is an Idiot

[petes_PoV]

Recycling the same assignment from year to year doesn't say much for the prof

So wrong, my friend.

The very best lecturer I had when I was taking my physics degree always had the exact same first question in his finals paper. He also told the class what it was: verbatim before the exam.

His take was that this question (regarding the structure of the hydrogen atom) was so fundamental to the course, and the students' understanding that if they couldn't answer that question, he would fail them - no matter how well they answered any other Q.

Similarly, if a teacher wishes to compare one year's class to another, either to see if they're getting brighter or to evaluate changes in the teaching methodology, then assigning the same test or assignment is one very reliable way of doing it. Since you've been a teacher, I'm surprised you didn't know that.