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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.
Profs â" including me, at times â" fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students
For a first year course entitled "data structures and algorithsm" isn't this kind of unavoidable?
I mean, consider some of the projects on this student's website; things like sparse matricies, longest common substring, recursively solving an occupancy grid map, and so on.
How much variety can you put into an assignment to implement sparse matricies?
Of course, even without this student posting his assignments online, students could still google the problems and probably find working solutions, so taking down this one student's assignments isn't going to stop those who feel so inclined from just copying implementations they find through Google, so I'm not sure the teacher would have achieved much even if he had got this stuff taken down.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
And threatening to fail a student for reasons other than poor performance in the course is somehow not an "ethical violation"?
Depending on your metrics, cheating would result in excellent performance, but is a valid reason to fail a student.
The ethical issue here is whether publishing your schoolwork is enabling cheating.
The answer is that it is, but it's still not an ethical violation, because (to borrow a term from the land of law) there is substantial non-infringing use.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Someday I hope to be a professor, teaching my own classes. The one thing I would like my students to do is respect me as someone who contributes strongly to their development as a person and as a professional. It surprises me that the teacher in question would rather claim idiotic copyright policies just to be able to avoid having to come up with new assignments. I can not think of any purpose this would achieve other than helping him be a lazy ass.
Even if there was a valid reason for him to ask the student to remove the code, I would expect a teacher to keep the student's intent in mind and try to be as accomodating as possible; clearly the student is taking his homework seriously enough and that is already a good thing that should be encouraged as much as possible.
Yup....
I used to teach comp sci back when.... I had a single assigment that the students worked on all semester. We started out with the basics, and then added more and more features until we had a full-featured program.
While the assignment never changed, you really couldn't cheat as it would be really difficult to fake your way through months of ever more complex code development.
The class was typically small enough where I could talk to each student once in a while and probe their understanding of what they were doing.
Not only is the prof an idiot, he's a lazy bastard as well.
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.
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)
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.
...especially insufficiently clueful screeners in human resources departments.
This is absolutely true. If that HR wonk doesn't have that "degree requirement" checkbox marked, your resume takes a one-way trip to the trash can. With degree inflation being what it is, you'll need a Phd to work at McDonalds in ten years.
For that eventuality, I'm still working on my thesis titled: "Recidivism in McDonaldland: A Restorative Approach to the Hamburglar Problem".
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Yeah, instructors who reuse assignments and expect students to pay the price for that suck. On the other hand, those instructors are just as much the victims of circumstance as the students.
Simply put, instructors are not paid to develop courses and assess work in any manner that can be considered pedagogically sound. On top of that most professors (heck, even most school teachers) have responsibilities that extend beyond classroom teaching. So most of them are expected to use curricular materials that were developed once and used many times over, while reading at a speed more appropriate for an entertaining novel than a serious academic discourse. Instructors who go beyond that are virtually always sacrificing their own personal lives in order to improve the quality of education.
Teaching at any level is hard. Teaching in over crowded introductory university courses (that are often used to fund smaller upper year courses) is among the most challenging jobs that a professional can do. And, unfortunately, I doubt that battles like this one are doing anything to address the issue of the quality of education.
Nah. In the US - and everywhere else, for that matter - all you need is more money than your opponent.
The university has more money than the student. Therefore, whatever the university says is the law.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Lets go the other direction then. I've been studying the works of Edsger Dijkstra and Kurt Godel, getting heavy into the theory and logic behind Computer Science. However, schools seem to be "dumbing down" degrees so to speak and aren't teaching this heavy theory stuff that would be highly beneficial.
Heavy theory or heavy practical would be quite useful in most applications, or even an even mix, but they're really trying to pump out too many people with degrees they shouldn't have. Here's an article from Harvard itself denouncing the grading systems of most universities.
I honestly think the problem isn't that colleges have lost touch with reality, so much that they've become too much like companies themselves. Colleges are largely supposed to teach the subjects to greater or lesser degree but they've become so wrapped with bureaucracy and Dilbert/Corporate-style inefficiency that we end up with this mess that we have today.
I started working on GCC and getting a copyright assignment from my school in order to work on it was like pulling teeth from a pissed off tiger during mating season. It was wrapped with college "policy" and reiteration of common knowledge while being thrown from department to department while no one actually helped. It was only after involving the FSF's lawyers did anything get done.