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

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was in school I would release the source code to my programs before the due date. I would suggest that to do otherwise is often if not always unethical. Even a badly written program can be useful to others in their learning endeavours. This is one reason I hate institutions. I recall my professors talking about how we should all join the Association for Computing Machinery. What really bothered me was the ACM's Code of Ethics. Has anybody else read them?

Here is one line that I utterly object to on EHTICAL grounds. It is just wrong.

5 Honor property rights including copyrights and patent.

I will not uphold software patents nor "property rights". Maybe I'm just more of a hacker-than an institutionalized professional. I suspect allot of people here are offended by my thoughts on this given their own situation demands being employed by those who I believe none of us should respect or abide. Of course I'm sure the other half of Slashdot would agree though.