Slashdot Mirror
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."
Simply put: professors do not own their students' coursework.
Professors may not own their students' work, but you may want to check your facts. Many Universities lay claim to the work done by their students in an academic setting. IANAL, but typically the qualifiers for a school to own your work begin to appear when the work you do is done using significant university resources (namely doing work under the guidance of a prof, I know you'll say that many students don't get help from their profs other than the class...but sometimes to some schools this doesn't even matter). It's not that I necessarily agree with this practice, I don't. I've been "victimized" by my own university after it laid claim to a group project that my group had been working on for a school contest. Through a web of legalities the school considered us "students" to be "employees" (albeit employees who paid ~15-20k a year to 'work' at the school) and all employees were required to render IP they had developed in their respective programs to the university. Our app was fundamentally flawed and incomplete, so we opted not to fight the team of lawyers for something that was broken. The whole experience was rather disheartening. All these rules we'd "agreed" to were essentially a part of the shrinkwrap rules you agreed to/were bound to by being a part of the university. The school acted as though this was the modus operandi for a lot of schools, and I couldn't really be sure one way or the other. I recognize that my experience may have been unique, but I've seen similar stories like this, even on slashdot.
Back to what you were saying, professors probably aren't going to own a student's coursework. Universities, might, however, like in my case if they've set up a rats nest of rules to capture student IP.
jplag is software that does what you describe (not sure about the technology behind it, though). It compares all student submissions and detects similarities. The site seems to be down currently, but this page gives an overview of what it does.
A professor is someone with a PhD who is tenured at the university in question. Cory Doctorow, if I am to believe what I have read (blessed and purified by The Man Himself), doesn't have so much as a bachelor's. The fact that he has been allowed into the front of university classrooms does not make him a "prof." That being said, we can't really hold that mistake against him as he does have all the education of a glass of water.
Me, I've been teaching university in the US and Japan for 6 years. I, too, am not a "prof." I was pretty stoked when I started this job in April and moved up from "Senior Lecturer" to "Assistant Professor." My former boss in the US runs an entire state university's Japanese program, and has done so for 20 years. Her title? "Lecturer." Why? No PhD, just a master's.
This right here is the core reason I loathe Cory Doctorow. He constantly blows himself up to be things he clearly is not. The moment my opinion of him turned for good was the moment in the talk he gave to Microsoft, wherein he described himself as a "half-lawyer." My buddy who just finished law school but hasn't found out if he passed the bar yet is a "half-lawyer." Some Drew Carey lookalike who writes about as well as you would expect from someone who graduated from a "free school," and who likes to pontificate endlessly about legal issues is not.
I would post this on Boing Boing, but I was banned for posting something similar.
Prevented them from cheating this semester. I'm sure the reason the prof wanted it taken down is so he could easily just copy-n-paste next semester's assignment. This is a lazy instructor working to maintain his laziness.
Unfortunately, this is not uncommon - I see it somewhat often in our university department. I am not sure it's always laziness, though. There appear to be a significant number of faculty who think teaching is beneath them. Their research is all that matters, and they'll do what they can to minimize the amount of time they have to spend on teaching - or to get out of it altogether.
Personally I think universities should abolish practices like course buyouts and TAs doing the actual teaching, and strictly require faculty to spend X amount of hours in front of a classroom every year. Faculty who think teaching is a waste of time (and I have heard exactly those words!) should be working in industry, not qualifying for tenure at a state-supported institution.
#DeleteChrome
If kids learn whether it's OK or not to beat up weaker kids that's one important lesson they'll learn about the society and culture they are in.