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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."
The student released the source after the release date, which prevented any of his peers from cheating. In the computer science classes that I take, it's allowed to share the source code for your assignments as long as it isn't for a pending assignment and/or test.
The only reason that comes to mind for the teacher wanting the code to be taken down is because he was going to use the same assignments next year (Which is fairly common among teachers). Regardless, in this case it's his code and he has the right to do whatever he wants with it.
Unfortunately schools have become more about preparing you for standardized tests and such rather than giving you a real education with the information you actually will use in life (Which is why teachers always have to cover their asses). What Brady was trying to do was help his peers and kudos to him for doing so.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
When I did my undergrad at the University of Minnesota in 2000, they let us know that they took our code that we submitted and stored it in a program with a database. Whenever a student submitted new code, it went through this program. Essentially, some really fancy Hamming Distance that I think might have been similar to FASTA or BLAST algorithms for genetics were employed to score assignments against all the other ones.
:)
If it was common for students to write assignments -- say they had been given a design template -- then all of the scores would come back rather high. If the TA noticed an outlier, they would investigate. If two submissions came up sufficiently similar, they would investigate.
It was (of course) never explained in detail how it worked but I bet that today one could take this to many new levels with things like ANTLR that might allow the program to check the inherent structure in code to avoid something trivial like different comments or variable names skewing the results.
Was it me who was in the professor's situation, I would bite the bullet and code the very basic above application using a web form submission for TAs and Professors. Then I would ask for help from other members of the department and make it a customizable growing project to protect the academic integrity of my school and students. Then I myself would put the opened source on there and run all my students assignments against it.
Problem solved, you can keep all your assignments static, you lazy bastards
My work here is dung.
FIRST POST!! Oh, dear, you must have all had a good Friday night.
There's an old practice of fraternities at my college, where they kept file cabinets filled with old homework and course notes of all the classes their members took. I had wondered how some frat boys coasted through so many classes and got so much more sleep than those of us who struggled working to pay for college, paying for food, etc. Then I found out this was one of their most important reasons. It was a known practice, and one of the less publicly mentioned benefits of joining a fraternity.
Since small-scale publication of old hoomework and course notes, such as what I describe above, has been going on for centuries, it seems completely reasonable that larger scale publication be permitted.
The specific case (covered heavily - check Techdirt for one) in question has actually brought in a much larger problem to light. How should students treat code written as part of assignments or as part of their course-work in terms of licensing? Is there a precedent for licensing? Most research activities conducted by universities have already adopted licensing framework. Here's an example. There has been debate whether such licensing should be free. Just check Medical Research and you can open Pandora's box. One more example is Singapore's A-Star which is more of a group focused on preparing research for industry adoption including licensing and legal usage terms.
How about code released in books on Data Structures, Algorithms, Fundamental C programming? To my knowledge (do correct me if I am wrong), the code is usually licensed under the same copyright notice as the book itself. In some cases, the author changes this licensing and makes it available. One example is "Numerical Recipes in C" where the licensing terms of the code from the author(s) of the book is explicit and can be found on a google search.
When it comes to university assignments, it is no news that the same template (if not the same course material itself) tends to get recirculated over a periodic basis. In some cases this period is annual and in others, the frequency is different. The debate raised is ages old. For most data structure or standard assignments of programming, you could find most of the code online. You could use this as a starting point or choose to write your own and learn your fundamentals. That's up to the student and the professor who is teaching and grading.
There is some truth in the statement (IMHO) that the Academia is shielded from the real commercial world. It works positive in some cases and is counterproductive in fields like Engineering (not Theoretical Computer Science.) In this specific case, if the University were to read all the fine print they have on students sharing course material (for which they pay for) and lecture notes and assignments, they would find the right solution. Bringing this (issue between a student and the professor) out to Open forums seems more of a publicity stunt that is going to get someone infamous for some and noticeable for a few others.
Focusing on the larger issue, a Varsity must be clear on how course-work and assignments from the students will be licensed and treated. They already have set legal precedents for most research work (which in some cases is funded by commercial bodies.) Hopefully this issue raises a flag and lets varsities understand and embrace Open Source, encourage students to use it particularly in programming assignments. At the very least they should at least reserve procedures to let a student obtain due permission for displaying his/her works online under appropriate licensing. In the absence of a precedent and clear guidelines, such confusion and unnecessary nerve wracking experiences between a Professor and a Student are more likely to surface. I hope not.
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)