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How Easy Is It To Cheat In CS?
Pinky3 writes "The New York Times has an article on cheating in CS at Stanford. Here is a classic quote from one student: 'I wasn't even thinking of how it [sic] easy it would for me to be caught,' he said. One interesting strategy discussed is for the professor to make the final count for more of the final grade each time cheating is discovered. Share your experiences as a student and/or as an instructor."
He/she who cheats discovers later why this is a bad idea.
I cheated and copied this post from another article.
It's easy to tell who cheats in life. Those who are successful and do little work cheat while those who do all the extra work to take up the slack do not.
From TFA: Mr. de la Torre was taking the computer science class for a second time in his junior year when he cheated. After he was disciplined, he resigned from his position as student body vice president in November
He shouldn't have resigned, I think he has the makings of a great politician...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
yep... easy to cheat in Counter Strike.
...decompiler.
Just make the punishment for cheating sufficiently harsh. You cheat.. you get kicked out. Simple.
I dunno about Stanford but when I went to school my CS classes (especially the earlier ones) were huge. I never met most of my classmates. I would be *extremely* pissed off to have my academic standing affected by someone else's cheating.
Wall hacks and aim bots, that's how...
... but also cheating in CS:S is not that difficult.
Valve should really stop those nasty cheaters.
Now that I've posted a reply, I'm going to RTFA.
It's much easier for people to cheat in group projects than on any particular assignment. Nearing the end of my undergrad I specifically choose courses that didn't involve group projects because I got tired of doing other people's work (while they went to class).
Cheating is laziness by the student but also the teacher who allowed it to take place. Cheating is very easy to avoid but it does require educators to be willing to create assignments that they themselves didn't download or buy from a teaching website. The fact is that when you use the same exact assignment year after year you're going to make cheating both accessible and profitable.
I would also like to add, that cheating is far worse in the US since the teachers grade the students instead of third party independent testing organisations who are contracted to create unique material for each test.
When you get into a corporate environment, "cheating" is actually preferred. No reason to re-invent the wheel when there is existing code that gets the job done.
Need a report that's "like this one except for..."? Take the code for that report and add some mods and there ya go. Your manager would consider you an idiot if you started each project from scratch, re-writing all the functions and methods that already exist in other applications and have perhaps already gone through rigorous QA.
Besides, how many ways can you write a QuickSort?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Well the professor used Valve anti-cheat and temp-banned him. :)
I am wondering what exactly they are calling cheating here, since the code says they "will not plagiarize, copy work or get outside help."
Plagiarize and copy are obvious, but I never heard of asking for help on homework being cheating. How else does one learn ?
If you didn't get the concept in class, you are out of luck, that's it ?
I was in an Engineering program (Stevens Institute in Hoboken), and I would venture that at least half of homework was done in study groups, sometimes just to bounce idea off each other, sometimes as a collaborative group effort. This was part of the learning process.
You can obfuscate someone else's code such that the prof won't notice. OTOH, if you don't know what you are doing, you will make some dumb mistake that will lead to your detection. My favorite was the student who left in all the inline comments (probably because he didn't recognize them for what they were).
Students who can successfully disguise someone else's code could probably write their own code and are just being lazy. As such, it isn't a complete disaster if they pass the course somewhat undeservedly.
If the school has any number of gullible/inexperienced Comp. Sci. tutors then it may be very easy. I tutored Comp. Sci. for a while and there was no lack of students who thought they could get me to do their homework for them. It always started off with "I have this assignment and I'm confused about this part of it.... can you help me?" Of course most of them understood when I only gave generalized answers that didn't have anything to do with the assignment, but there were always a few that thought I was simply being unhelpful. I know some Comp. Sci. tutors though that simply went along with the students and practically did their assignments for them, but it didn't really bother me because I knew the cheaters would either get caught in school or (worse) it would come out in their work if they ever got hired somewhere.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
Oh, wait.
It isn't as if Computer Science is extremely challenging.
Buckle down and study. Sheesh.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
This is how AND why computers work.
Simple and exact reproduction.
Another way to look at it:
There are only so many ways you can type:
10 print "Hello World!"
20 goto 10
(Yes folks that is the limit of my programming knowledge. I busted my cherry on a C64.)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
When stealing code, you should at least be able to discern whether it's good code or not. Seriously.
Most undergrad-type computing courses tend to have homework or test questions that have one really super obvious working answer. "Obvious" at least after you know it! There often really is a single best way to do something. Obviously local variables and order of initialization don't always matter.
But there are lots of suboptimal approaches and some really wrong ways to do things too. You have to give them some credit for trying. But if half the class tries to do a suboptimal approach and they all used the same local variable names and forgot to initialize the same thing that should've been initialized, it really is painfully obvious to the graders.
Stealing good code or at least learning from good code should be encouraged. But stealing bad code, or even worse code that doesn't actually work, really is a crime. Not just from the academic-honor system standpoint but from the "Crimes against nature" standpoint.
How can I reach theeese keeeeeeeds???
Why people would even try cheating in a CS class at a decent university is a mystery to me. At my school in Cambridge, Mass. (not MIT, the other one), every line of code turned in for intro CS classes was run through a code analysis and similarity detection system. The system was very good, I am not aware of any false positives, and it would be more work to re-engineer somebody else's code to avoid detection than to just write it from scratch.
This system was in place somewhere in the early to mid 1990s (I was a freshman in 1996, and it had been used for at least a year). This was explained to everybody the first day of each of the 2 intro CS classes. There were several people in my freshman class in '96 who were expelled as a result of being caught cheating in CS 50. Oops. Anyway, this is now old technology - if you don't know it exists or don't believe it's so easy to fingerprint code, you are an idiot.
Furthermore, if you were the "cheatee" and there was reason to suspect you willingly provided the cheater with your code to copy, you would both be subject to expulsion. Ouch.
If you are too stupid to realize that when you hand in plagiarized code, you aren't taking a *risk* that you will be caught, you are engaging in the certainty that you will be caught, then you don't deserve to be at a university of this caliber.
but the class was LISP, and we had to write a program to play the card game "go fish". our algorithms would compete against each other (the winner and runner up algorithms were both claimed by a high school student auditing the class, but that's another story)
i took the class along with my physics TA
he came to me and offered a good physics lab grade in exchange for me writing a separate "go fish" algorithm for himself
i took him up on the offer. the algorithm i wrote for myself did ok, but the algorithm i wrote for him sucked. problem was, i wasn't doing that bad in physics lab to begin with. so i think i actually wound up putting my grade in jeopardy by disappointing my physics TA
just do the work, because any schemes you concoct will wind up backfiring in ways you don't intend and don't foresee. good cheating requires control of too many variables, so to cheat successfully, you often wind up stressing yourself out more than just slogging through the work
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The story is usually aimed at why students are cheating instead of going through the work and learning. Well, that is partially the story. As others have commented, course instructors are also to blame. I did my bachelors in CS at Illinois a few years ago, and this "cheating" issue popped up in almost every course I took there. Typically, it went like this: First day of class, the professor will threaten damnation and hell on earth if students are caught cheating (in assignments, programming projects, etc). Then, after the first homework is graded, the professor will show up and claim that he is disappointed in about a quarter of the class that ripped someone else's code/solution and submitted as their own. Lastly, the professor asks those students to formally apologize to him and re-submit the homework again. (In fact, only two courses did this, the rest just stopped at step #2). Did students learn anything? Of course they did not. They always got a second, and third, and fourth chance. As if that were not enough, professors would typically recycle both assignments and exams. While this point could be argued both ways, it does not take much to find solutions online and just rehash them. With this approach, students typically do very well in assignments and take home exams, do terrible in closed-notes exams, but still manage to pass and graduate - from supposedly top notch institutions. Interestingly enough, these are then the same persons that take a job (mostly because they come from good CS programs) and can't handle simple 101 crap.
When the GPA there keeps going up and up ?
http://www.gradeinflation.com/Stanford.html
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Where i come from, cheating is a potential criminal offence, or grounds for expulsion from school.
I did many years in grad school and discovered several cheaters. The lack of punishment for such was part of what caused me to abandon a career in academics. Part of the discovery that academics is a very very political space. A system that tolerates cheating perpetuates cheating and rots itself from within.
1) Crowded class writing mid-terms. There are 2 copies of the exam with minor but significant variances handed out in a checkerboard pattern. Am proctoring and see a student looking at another paper get another to proctor to witness it. Make a note on the exam when collecting it. Sure enough they guy has the right answers to the wrong questions. No way that would happen without copying. Have to write a formal description of what happened, it goes up the chain. Nothing but a "formal reprimand" on the record and zero for that exam.
2) Programming lab is scheduled 1/2 the class every other week. They are supposed to write code during the lab and have the help of the tutor to explain things. On second week I have people handing me a program "how does this work". I reply "didn't you just write this?" It takes me a couple of minutes to get them to admit they did not write it.
This is university, they are paying to learn. Yet they are unwilling to work at it. I wonder what they are looking at getting out it?
The number of taxi cab drivers with university degrees does not surprise me.
Cheating in CS is terribly easy to detect. We had programs we could use to pick up anything suspect, but I never actually used them - at the entry-level I was teaching at, it was pretty easy to catch someone out. In fact, often you can complete the assignment in the time it would take you to modify your stolen/plagiarized code so as to be undetectable. Half the time you just need to google the code they submitted before you find a forum/Yahoo Answers post from the student in question, and once you've been coding a student for a while you get a good feel for what exactly is and isn't their style and their code.
As to preventing it: there was a very simple policy at my university. You cheat, you fail. In most cases, it was rarely followed. We tended to be far more strict at the Summer School sessions, but then again, we also tended to get considerably more problems, mainly because the high school students and foreign exchange students attending didn't know better. The university also didn't really have a problem showing them the door.
Undergraduates were more of an issue. A lot of the time, we would let them know we'd discovered it, and let it slide. Repeat offenders were usually dealt with by using some kind of grade penalty. Very rarely did students get referred for academic discipline (although this is partly due to the entry-level nature of the courses I taught. Something high-level, or with a substantial amount of original research required, would be another story).
Finally, and perhaps most importantly - why were these students cheating? Well, honestly, I suspect because of the academic pressures placed upon them. I'd be extremely interested to compare the rates of detected cheating at somewhere like MIT, where grades are rounded up/down for GPA (ie, get a B+ and it's recorded as a B in your GPA, get an A- and it becomes an A) and at my university. Given the vast number of emails I used to get at the end of each semester from students desperate for a grade boost to help their GPA, I can see how some might have convinced themselves it was 'ok' to cheat. And maybe....just maybe...people are cheating because they're not getting the support they need. The article says the guy was taking the class for the second time. Sounds like maybe he wasn't getting the one-on-one help and extra support teaching staff should be giving him. Just a thought.
Man, I thought this article was about Counter Strike...
The new method is to be declared a criminal before entering politics.
It has been adopted because it is much more efficient and sets the standards lower.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
>One interesting strategy discussed is for the professor to make the final count for more of the final grade each time cheating is discovered.
I don't teach CS but I do teach college-level history, and I think that would cause some problems. For one thing (if I understand what they're saying), essentially everyone's grade changes whenever even a single student is caught cheating. If you aced the midterm that was 40% of the grade, well, sorry, now it's only 30% of the grade and you'll have to make it up on the final. While cheating is, obviously, a bad thing, I don't think the entire class should be made to suffer because of it.
It requires a personality trait. If you don't have it, then you shouldn't be taking that course. The last thing the workforce needs is another cert chaser who has no talent and no skill in that line of work.
And frankly, if you have that personality trait, then cheating is far from necessary. CS isn't so much about memorizing as it is about understanding the material. There are often many correct answers in CS.
Always easy to cheat in Counter Strike ;)
Be or ben't
...back when I was in college. Part of my CS studies included classes that involved coding for the AS/400, the VAX/VMS and COBOL. I had the good misfortune of being at a school that was rather relaxed in terms of security and almost everyone left their "password" the same as their user ID, which just happened to be the same name used for their personal directories. It didn't take much time to sort thru every possible directory and copy every possible file you could to "learn from example". During the next semester, I managed to finish all the labs for my first course of C programming in 3 weeks, and I got a "B" on the final. Did I cheat? Yeah, I guess you could call it that. Did I learn anything? Sure did. Take security seriously.
To avoid corruption, one must remain dishonest.
You dont fail students for cheating. You fail them for getting caught.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I TA'd for an Intro to Java course. (Say what you will about Java being a crummy language to start with, or early classes being slow--our second-year-plus classes were brutal.) For a fair chunk of the first quarter, programs were basically identical...but after the point when we WANTED you to write identical, correct code, cheating sticks out like a sore thumb. I don't know the details of our cheating detection program, but it operated partway into the compilation step so it sees through superficial changes. Change a comment? Wouldn't matter, it wouldn't notice. Change your variable names? Same thing. Declare your variables in a different order? Yeah, it'll spot that too. You have to actually start changing the program flow--in significant ways, no less!--before it stops tripping on your program. And even then, it'll often flag similar programs as "hey, a human should check these out". Cheating happens a lot more than you'd think in CS classes. And in my department, at least...I know that we sent every last one of them to the Dean.
are you marked as a cheater for reusing your own code?
Under that coding checking system?
How does the code checker not flag common parts and it's up to the professor to know that and you just hope that some dumb TA or sub knows as well or you may be marked as well.
any ways pro codes reuse code and copy and paste others work all the time and most of the time there are no 1 man coding out there for a lot of software.
also some times part of the job is working off of some old code based and adding to it / hacking it to work with newer stuff.
oh, this is not about CounterStrike?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I've been TAing every semester since I got to college, and every semester we tell people that we run their submissions through MOSS (the canonical code plagiarism detector, hosted at [and perhaps developed at?] Stanford). We exhort that it's really not worth their trouble to try to get their code past it, and that they really ought to just contact the course staff if they're in a bind, as there's really nothing worse for them than getting caught cheating. And every semester, we find several pairs of students who have copied each others' code. Sometimes it's a literal, word-for-word copy (comments too) with the name changed (or occasionally without!); sometimes it's the same structure with different comments, suggesting they just sat side by side and wrote the lab together.
I'd really like to see the penalty for cheating to be an immediate failure in the course, if not expulsion. The idea that honest students spend hours working on an assignment, and then someone who didn't plan their time well, or doesn't get things as well, or is too lazy to ask for help thinks they can just not do the work and get the same grade is offensive, and cheaters should be punished accordingly.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
I was an undergrad at a small state school at a time when CS was the ticket to a guaranteed well-paying job. The department at the time was growing in the tens of percent per year due to the rate of people joining the program. Unfortunately, cheating rapidly became so rampant that when I graduated, as few as 10% (by one professor's estimates) of those graduating could actually write a compiling program in any language. The department was set up from the start in a way that encouraged students to copy code. The introductory class in Java consisted of copying a professor's code off of an overhead and running it for credit, so that only students that started with an understanding of Java actually left introductory CS with an idea of how to write a Java program. Fast-forward to my senior year to see just how bad the problem actually was:
One professor, upset with rampant cheating, suggested that a second-year competency exam should be given where students are expected to write programs to do something basic like a sort or search in an environment where they were supervised in order to prevent cheating. Professors more concerned with the growth in the department and with the influx of funding were so angry about this suggestion that they nearly came to blows.
In a senior-level assembly programming class, a student came to me for help because he didn't understand it. Looking for an analogy he'd understand, I started going backwards through everything we'd ostensibly learned in the program asking, "Do you understand this? Can you do this?", and the response to each question was no. Finally, I came to, "Can you write a Hello World program in Java?" He responded, "No." At this point I told him that there was no way I could help him and that he'd probably want to consider retaking the introductory courses to CS. He started crying. It is really pathetic to see a grown man with a wife and kids cry. I asked him to stop, suggested that he reflect on how this came to be, and consider a different career since he'd never survive as a programmer. He asked me if he could make a copy of my notes and I agreed. The next day, he and about 12 other foreign students handed in photocopies of my notes (which weren't even a functioning assembly program) with my name still on them. They all got an A on the assignment, which the prof had obviously never even looked at.
For a larger sample, consider our senior project. We were assigned groups of four students to write a complex program over two semesters. Each group had to meet with a faculty advisor every week, and I was usually the only one of the four that actually showed up. Incidentally, I was also the only one actually working on the program since the rest of my group simply wouldn't respond to e-mails for months at a time. In the last weeks, desperate to show that they had done some sort of work, the rest of my group came to me begging for something to do. I told one to write some HTML for the web front-end of my program, and asked the other two to work together to use the API that I'd developed in a user-friendly GUI. The results were hilariously bad. The HTML I was handed was the department web-page with some images and text changed. The GUI was the e-mail I sent them with some random pieces of Java and C++ sprinkled in here and there. When I brought this to the attention of the prof, he agreed that my group had done essentially nothing and passed them all. The major observation here is that out of four randomly selected students, the only one that could even provide something that worked had copied it from the department web page. Further, most of the other senior projects that I saw that day looked like something I could have slapped together in a couple of hours.
The moral of the story is that, at least in the early 2000s, cheating had become easy due to the easy availability of code, apathy on the part of the faculty, classes built around a fundamentally bad premise, and that the department was more interested in funding than producing qualified students. I don't know if this is still the case, but this article leads me to believe that it may still be.
There are only so many ways to write a Las Vegas Algorithm when the teacher counts off for not following the algorithm as stated in pseudo code in the book.
Then he wants you to structure it a specific way. Then he wants a certain input. Then he wants a certain out put.
By them time your done, the only part of your program you get to "write" is the gui to display the output.
Oh and it has to be in the prof's preferred language, java.
So you end up with alot of remarkably similar programs, especially when the teacher has all these style demands and the same prof teaches students 2 or 3 classes in and everyone starts naming classes and methods the way he does.
You mad
I was working at a major investment bank around the year 2000 or 2001 and my manager and I interviewed candidates from your school, Stevens Institute in Hoboken, for a summer internship that year. We came back with three male interns for a Windows Server Administration department who I worked with personally. Their internship was pretty good for us but kind of boring for the kids as we'd see them spend more time on the Internet browsing than learning how to do real work, then again I don't blame these kids since corporate server work is pretty dull from their perspective. We took the interns along with us on all the interesting projects and support cases and even gave them long term design and coding projects to do during their term. We got some help out of their internship and they got a taste of what it is like to work in a major corporation over a fairly easy summer.
I have taught several introductory CS courses and to be honest, I was not interested in playing policeman and checking whether students are cheating or not. Instead, I have established a two tier system: - For homeworks that had to be turned in, these were corrected by the students themselves. I did some spot checks to warn those who were cheating and to ensure that the corrections are up to par, but didn't really put much effort into chasing cheaters. The homeworks were primarily a feedback for the students and an opportunity to learn. However, to give them an incentive to actually do them, they could pass the exam orally in advance instead of a practical programming exam if they had 80% of homeworks right. That was strong motivation for many of them, because they perceived the oral exam as easier (even though in reality they had to do much more work over the semester for it). Now, the purpose of the oral examination was simple - to establish whether the homeworks were actually done by that student or not. In my experience, if someone was cheating, he didn't have a clue whatsoever what the code he has handed in does. At best, he could memorize some superficial stuff and do some hand-waving over it. One or two targeted questions over the details of the assignment has always uncovered this. No need for any computerized code comparison tool (which would be always gamed) or tiresome reviews of the homeworks. - For the regular exam which was always written, practical programming assignment on a computer in the lab (CS exam on paper?? WTF?), I have allowed the students to bring their own code snippets (e.g. from homeworks), use their books, even internet. This essentially makes all what would usually be considered cheating allowed, lessening the burden on me - I did not have to spy on them whether or not they are cheating. My reasoning was that the students should demonstrate practical knowledge how to solve problems, not whether or not they have memorized stuff (which is what the exam would be about if the books were forbidden). Now, of course, if the student didn't learn anything, the books will not help - they would spend most of their time searching for information and run out of time. One disadvantage of this approach is obvious - it puts a bigger onus on the examiner to prepare meaningful exams. Assignments like "Implement quicksort" are useless, because the students can find them ready made online or in the book. On the other hand, I do not think it makes much sense to examine whether or not a person can implement quicksort - it is not a real-world problem. Better give them an assignment where the quicksort needs to be used - the clueless one will not find it online so he cannot readily cheat and the smarter one will see the similarity and solve the assignment without problem. To conclude, I do not believe in the various software to catch cheaters. Especially not in CS - the students are very smart and will be always able to game it. If the teacher is doing their job, this is not needed.
A - You're talking about CS students here. No need to include the possibility of "she."
B - Is that you, Tiger?
It was easy to cheat if you were an Asian, and you cheated using a foreign language. In one egregious example, some students were sharing a graphing calculator with study material loaded on it. The professor kicked them out of the exam, but was brought up on charges for racial insensitivity and the students were allowed to retake the test.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
One interesting strategy discussed is for the professor to make the final count for more of the final grade each time cheating is discovered.
Another interesting strategy is to fail them out of the class. There's no excuse for cheating. The punishment should be severe. Especially if it's something obvious. For example, when I was in school, some moron managed to get a copy of my code for an assignment (possibly a copy I left on the hard drive). They were so stupid, they didn't even remove the comments from my code, including the ones with my name. Given that I was getting an A in the class and the other person was doing pretty poorly, the professor had no question about who wrote the code. His only question was, how was I connected with the person. I was like, "Who are they?" I didn't even know the person and fortunately the professor believed me.
But the point is, they could have hurt me by their cheating. If the professor thought we were in cahoots, I could have been punished for merely being thoughtless and leaving a copy of my code on the hard drive. The cheater should have been failed out of the class, as far as I'm concerned, if not suspended or expelled. I busted my butt in college and never cheated and I observed a great deal of cheating. It's completely unfair to the rest and I have no tolerance for it.
We had the case of redundant solutions in our 101 classes, where everyone came up with the same solution to the same problem even though we didn't copy off each other. After that, the professors didn't seem to care because they decided the homework problems were so simple that anyone could code the same solution without collaborating. I certainly was honest, but when comparing solutions with classmates, it became pretty apparent how easy it would be to cheat.
I am a student at GT, and the MATLAB class that all the Engineering majors have to take is rampant with cheating. Out of a class of 100 people maybe half that do the assignment, they just get some 'smart' kid to do it and they all just submit the exact same code (minus changing their name) - the instructors don't even bother to look for cheating. However, in the CS dept, in the classes, the TA's often will read your code, so you aren't really able to get away with it.
FTFA, I understand the argument of, "Your friends want to cheat, great. Good luck on my uber-weighted final worth, now, 102% of your final grade", and I am personally not a fan of it. I've seen that type of methodology applied at the 101-level and gen-ed classes but I just don't like it at any level as it applies to college. IMHO, I paid for my schooling with the G.I. bill and the rest of it in loans and of course it would piss me off when I'm putting in hard, valid work in a class and not cheating to be punished for what others are doing. If people cheat and don't take the class seriously, the Mr/Mrs Professor should deal with that student accordingly and make sure it qualifies for an automatic failure of the class. I had professors in college that has a very low threshold for that type of behavior and the student would learn (or mom and dad fronting the college bill every semester would learn) that taking classes over and over will only make you either a 7 year senior or a drop out. Furthermore, I don't like how the professor gives up his authority and puts a layer of discipline on the students by punishing them. Is he looking for a militaristic approach? Does he think all the kids in the dorm are going to gang up on "the cheater" and give him/her a blanket party? Absolutely not.
However, when I started working in the real world in the Information Technology field, I never knew that this "group-punish" methodology would apply at most of the jobs I've been at with substantial perks (e.g. Work-from-home a good portion of the week, very flexible and accommodating work schedules with the option to make up time whenever).
To me, it just reminds me of being treated as less as an adult and more like a 2nd grader having to lay their head down on their desk for someone talking in the back of the classroom during teacher instruction time.
I thought VAC was pretty decent in preventing cheating in CS and Valve has been banning cheaters left and right?
i encouraged collaboration in my programming assignments, but i was very clear in that the final work was an individual effort. in programming, it was rather easy to find people that were cheating, even if they tried to mask it by changing variable names. when the blocks of code line up, the formatting is identical, it's not hard to find the cheater. in the real world (of which i am now a part of) programmers do collaborate, but in the end, some individual needs to produce the end product, and if all they learned in school was to copy their friends work, they will be useless, IMHO. schleprock
As a college student cheating in any programming class is the dumbest thing you can do. Sure you get your homework assignments in but the exams your screwed. I knew people who near the end of the semester couldn't even create a new class in Java. And these are the same people with Java programming on their resumes
The problem with cheating is NOT reuse, but dishonesty; the right analogy is not to reuse *your company's* code or report, but *somebody else's* report or code, which leads to lawsuits against your company and firing. In many (most?) programming assignments in school, you are given starting code (like this one except for ....)
Although I never saw it in action, my professor told us in our compilers class that they use a piece of software for the intro classes which compares the parse tree of the Java apps the students submitted and could show commonality between the programs.
Of course, you would see similarity because everyone was writing a similar program, but it would catch someone just renaming a pile of variables and changing comments.
There's many talented and hard working people (much more talented and much harder working than myself), but only some of them are gazillionaires; the external environment (that I summarize as luck) counts a lot; both who are your parents (which heavily influences how you develop your talents, which schools you go to etc) and being at the right place at the right time.
If you think about it, Bill Gates was probably going to be a millionaire (his parents were very well off, he was (is?) driven, very smart and an SOB :), however, if IBM hadn't messed up, the timing hadn't been right etc he'd probably just be one more millionaire.
Here in Germany, it would be pretty hard to pass the class, if you are cheating.
The final exam is 100% of our grade and we have to succesfully solve the problems in the assignments to be even allowed to take that exam. Of course you could just copy every assignment, but you will definitely fail that final test. I dont know if that will provide better test results overall, but it sure as hell motivated me to do everything by myself.
I apologize for the long post. The issue of cheating is very dear to me. It was the single most frustrating part of my education, and I often felt as if I were the only honest student in my undergraduate program.
As another poster mentioned, blame can be pinned on both instructors and students. But "blame" is only useful when it can be used to fix the original problem, and this problem is too big to fix by pointing fingers and admonishing each other. It's a cultural shift toward the worst, and we're powerless to stop it.
You can only deal with cheaters when cheating is uncommon and has an attached stigma. We've come to the point where cheating is so common that accusations of plagiarism are just met with "so, lol?".
Really, what we have here is a failure to take life seriously. In school, everything is a joke, a show. Nobody earnestly attends class, or does homework. People who ask questions in class are either trying to delay the lesson or merely stroke their ego by one-upping the professor. (I've been accused of both.)
At least in my experience, the typical student doesn't even seem to consider the idea that someone might want to actually learn. Learning is a chore, class an ordeal, and the professor the enemy. As a result, shameless, rampant cheating is rampant in the "I can haz degree nao?" generation.
My favorite example involves a project to build a userspace filesystem "driver". It was simple enough, and the professor even gave us interface specifications.
The reaction was catastrophic. Students complained that the assignment was too hard, that they didn't know the algorithms, and that half a semester was too little time. They talked in the hallway in hushed tones of outrage and asked whether they could appeal to the dean.
The real issue behind the complains is that the assignment would make them think, and most of them had no idea how to do anything beyond compile code fed to them with a spoon. The assignment involved analytic thought, which my fellow students appeared to consider Herculean.
"Poor students whine about having to do real work for once," you might say.
Except that the TAs for the class shared this adversarial, anti-intellectual mentality. In recitations, the TAs provided "sample code" sufficient for the whole project. Crisis averted, right? A grades were handed out to people I personally knew had no idea of when to use a loop instead of a function call.
These people graduated with degrees in CS, but they're completely unable to develop original software. Tasked with an assignment, they'll just copy code from the internet or ask on IRC, laughing about it the whole time. They'll choose systems based not on their technical merits, but on "documentation" --- meaning they'll choose the system that has the easiest-looking introductory tutorial. Their code will have bugs because they have no idea how to code, and their programs are chimeras of copy-and-pasted examples.
We're all worse off for these imbeciles running around, and those of us who consider this profession a craft, and who take pride in our work, and impoverished by having to share a degree with people who want to avoid thinking at any cost, and who laugh at the idea of serious work. The laughter is what bothers me most. It's how I know we're doomed.
*Never mind that the "operating systems" class never involved leaving ring 3.
Some people did some pretty dumb cheating. Dumb as in easily caught. But it was a intro class that was mainly taken by non-CS majors, so maybe that's to be expected. One guy submitted a programming assignment that was identical to another student's except for the variable names. Actually, now that I think of it, maybe he didn't even change those. Then he had the gall to argue with me about how it was legit.
In many of the engineering courses I took, there was a choice to get a sold A or to learn the material. Those wanting the best grade got the old tests from student organizations or friends. It's difficult to compete with students who already have the full test. Granted, they don't learn much from the course but they end up with the better GPA. Now, this could have been helped had the professors not been so lazy as to recycle material and/or if the professors had given out all their old material at the beginning of class, which some did.
There were whole areas of EE in which I didn't even take classes because the professor who taught them gave the exact same test every semester and only graded the answer in the box. This is for both undergrad and graduate courses.
And what's CS is?
Have you ever worked on a significant project that reused a lot of code? I don't mean a subsequent version, either. I mean a totally new project, with a totally new set of requirements, but trying to use as much code as possible from existing projects.
It's not a pleasant experience. Chances are that you'll spend far, far more time working out integration issues and finding obscure bugs than you would have spent writing the code from scratch, and testing it.
Talk all you want about the reused code having undergone "rigorous QA", but the moment you change even a single character in that code, or even just integrate it as-is with other code, you need to retest your entire system.
These days, the only people I hear spouting your "reuse Reuse REUSE!" chant are the Indian outsourcing companies who just churn out huge amounts of code, rather than usable software. So of course they want to throw the same crap at you that they just threw at some other poor sucker. It makes them good money.
But for the rest of us, those of us in America or Europe or Japan, we need to write software that actually works. The method you propose has shown time and time again to lead directly to failure.
Make it count for ALL of the final grade then I don't have to do any homework! Thanks cheaters!
While some cases are cut and dry some are not.
I know in my CS program, we are not supposed to ever see any of our classmates code.
Now I know I have been in situations were I did not understand this new language they were trying to teach us (mostly because they left the learning up to us) and have asked for and received someone else code to learn from and write my own code, not to copy.
and i have shared my code on a few occasions with people i knew were not going to copy it.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I was being forced to hand over my research work to some friend of my bosses that was completely clueless so that he can finish his Master's Thesis on time. I quit instantly; the bosses cannot forgive it to me until today and don't understand why did I even object... And listening about arguments that the code I wrote is a property of the company had forced me to get deeply familiar with intellectual property law to defend myself. Just unbelievable...
You can only cheat yourself. Do you really want a job you're not qualified for? Do you really want to go to a school you're not qualified for. There's no reason to cheat unless you want to end-up in over your head, which is foolish if you ask me.
When God goes to war, He drops big bangs.
He said that
1. it’s not cheating that’s the problem. Getting caught is.
and that
2. cheating takes a considerable effort. Who says that that isn’t a worthwile strategy? ^^ (After all cheating is a popular strategy amongst lifeforms on earth.)
The best moment was, when a friend of mine dropped one of his five (!) small notes he wanted to use to cheat. (Bear in mind that he was the best student in our whole class level!) :)
The teacher noticed it, picked it up, and told him: “Well, this contains nothing that is useful to cheat on this test. So I can’t punish you.” Then he handed him the note back.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I'm sick of wall-hackers, aim-botters, and speed-hackers. I'm glad Stanford is finally looking into this, because cheating in CS has made the game thoroughly unenjoyable.
New webcomic updated on Sundays: HERE
It's so much easier to believe successful people must cheat then to accept the truth that there are people out there that are actually smarter, more motivated, and more clever
...at cheating. Bill Gates built Microsoft on cheating and got caught. See United States v. Microsoft.
Fuck you. You are what's wrong with this profession.
bound to increase the smartness of the nation, isn't it?
carrot and stick, which makes greater results?
Our professors were pretty cool. You could hand your program in at any time as long as it was timestamped by a certain date and time from the computer lab. Each program printed would print with a banner page (line printers and VAX'en).
One time, the programs were due on a Friday and I didn't have it done. When I finished the program Saturday morning, I realized I could just create a fake banner at the top of my code. I'd print out the program, tear off the original banner, and my fake banner would look like the banner from the computer lab. It worked. The teacher never questioned it. I didn't get docked points for being late.
It is easy. You cheat, it is proven, you through their ass out of school.
Why is this issue so complicated?
I was a TA for a year and caught numerous cheaters. Two guys would would always cheat, the problem was they always handed in their assignments one on top of each other. I would see some strange construct and then see it again on the very next paper. Sometimes I would have to go up and look something up in the manual as it was something I had never seen before, so they cheated with someone knowledgeable and then see it on the next paper. Happened week after week. On the final assignment, I caught half the class cheating and suspect another 10% or so. Teacher put the programs in two piles on the desk in front of the class at the final exam. One for cheaters, one for honest folks. Not one single cheater picked up their program and several "honest" people didn't either. Teachers was approach was to say, "I caught three people cheating, take the lowest grade and divide by three." Seemed to work. I guess I have "cheated" myself. I couldn't get an assembler program to run and it was getting an exception. In our university, this gets a big, fat zero regardless of how well you did the rest of the program and output was on a third of the grade. With ten minutes before the program was due, instead of branching over the memory area where the registered were stored, I changed the standard linkage and branched to the register which exited the program. So a "BR R14" --> "BR R15" So basically the program started, stored the registers, and immediately exited. The TA never noticed and I got a 65%, better than 0%.
"The number of honor code violations have prompted Professor Roberts to implement a new system. Describing this method as a “collective incentive” for students to maintain academic standards, the professor said he will add 5 percent for every honor-code violation in his class to the weight of the final exam, which is currently 15 percent of the class grade.
In other words, if one person cheats, the whole class will face more pressure on the final exam, because it will make up a greater portion of a person’s grade. Whether the scorn of fellow students is a bigger deterrent to cheating than being personally disciplined by the university remains to be seen."
Punishing the innocent because some cheat is the very definition of an evil regime.
I did CS at a major Australian university known for taking in lots of foreign fee paying students, and they had a TERRIBLE problem with cheating.
The trouble with the fee-paying students, is that quite a few of them don't speak English natively and thus struggle, lots are just as dumb as dogshit, and many are really desperate. Result: cheating.
I couldn't put down a printout or it would get swiped. I had tutorial workbooks stolen (I was a good student, so my stuff "grew legs" quite often). Copying of assignments was rife. The tutors I got to know quite well detected it more often than not -- they would just mark the assignment as normal -- and then divide the mark by the number of cheats. But in the end, the cheating, and general lack of ethics by the fee-payers got so bad, that the school simply abolished assignment work completely, and did all assessment in final exams and vivas.
The university system in Australia is underfunded (partly for ideological reasons; the rightwingers despised the universities as a hotbed for leftism and dissent), so they rely heavily on fee-payers. As a result, standards have plummetted, and several soft-marking and corruption scandals have been uncovered.
when I went to school, cheating meant expulsion/banishment if you were caught.You mean this has changed? It certainly explains a lot...
If so my colleagues and I cheat every day on a professional basis. We have even taken this cheating to an even more efficient level by using things we call "libraries" where we simple re use code written by other people.
I came up with a simple scheme: I would do the assignment, make a copy, go to the bathroom and leave a copy there. But the word spread that I would do that, so after I dropped my copy and came back to my seat, one, two, five, fifteen people started to get up to head for the bathroom. After a while the teacher grew suspicious and went to check and caught something like 15 student fighting over my few lines of assembly...
Now get off my lawn!
Non-Linux Penguins ?
At the University of Maryland, penalty for cheating was supposedly being expelled from the college (the College of Math and Physical Sciences). You would also fail that class.
Personally, I never even worked on any homework with anyone until my senior year, and by that time they actually didn't care. But I know of many people who would go to the labs and work on their projects together, which always made me mad because I always did everything on my own (and I liked it that way).
Usually makes sense to establish what CS is in any article headline to establish defined context.
So it used to be a lot easier to cheat in CS. I used to use an old wallhack that I hex edited and was able to use for years without detection. When they switched from WON to Steam, it all became harder.
You meant computer science?
It's been nearly 25 years since I taught CS (BYU, 1985-87), and I taught at the peak of CS enrollment, so I had large (200+ students) "Intro to Programming" courses; also, these same classes counted as general education. I'm sure a lot of 'sharing' went on as far as the programming assignments went, but I was never concerned, because (a) that's true in real-life programming as well, and (b) it wasn't going to help them (and actually hurt them) when it came to tests. As a side note, enrollment demand was so high at that time that if you wanted to be a CS major, you had to complete this class, apply to the CS department, and be accepted as a CS major. Ah, those were the days.
The other classes I taught (assembly language, data structures, computer and society) were for CS majors only. The first two required programming, and again I wasn't concerned due to the same programming vs. test performance check. I also wasn't concerned because I knew (from personal experience) how tough the upper-division classes were (compiler design, OS implementation, comparative languages, not to mention the lower-division 'algorithms' class taught using Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming: Fundamental Algorithms"), and I knew that if someone cheated their way through the earlier classes, they would crash and burn eventually. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
I didn't even know professors were paying attention!
For every honor code violation by an individual, the entire class gets to enjoy an additional 5% increase in the value of the final exam.
That's simply wrong. Do they do prof evals at Stanford, tied to salaries and tenure? I suggest that when innocent students get screwed that those evals take the injustice into account. Sauce for the goose, Mr. Saavik.
CS is soooo 1999. Since Source, it is called CSS now.
* use your own source. buy Source on steam.
* don't do everything in HTML.
* cheat for IE.
* ???
* Stanford Degree.
Cheating is easy in almost all videogames (PC or Console) these days, let alone ones from 10years ago...
I taught CS at a major University for 27 years in the evening. I ended up weighting the midterm and final equally and 50% of the grade. I gave 2 quizes between and a number of assignments. That set was equally weighted and represented the other half. The first quiz was the wake up call for the format and difficulty of the Midterm and final.
The 50% was because that was much harder to fake, you at least in class have to show what you know, and given descriptions of problems to solve you get to see organization, approach, problem solving, knowledge and understanding at the same time.
The issue is that CS is a technology and I would tell classes this formula.
Plagerism + Royalties + Proper Attirbution = Productivity
and that if you missed either the necessary Rolyalties or Attribution you would get kicked out of school.
As a technology you build off the knowledge and work of the past to extend the idea's into the future. And for most programs you are implementing a known common algorithms, which should mean that your code should be very similar to others if you are being efficient and following common coding practice.
If you give a varied set of difficult, conceptually programs it is harder to get code to copy. I did however give an assignment that did have a variation in some text books. I would warn that the text book version did not implement the same idea, but invariably I would get a few that pulled not only the algorithm but the code from the book, and no attibution.
One time I got two programs for an assignment, neither worked, both had identical code portions with the very same bug. That one was easy to spot, for god's sake copy working code!
I had a professor mention how he catches people cheating:
1. Their english stinks and they cheat from someone with perfect english. Or they cheat from someone with bad english. If two people have the same writing style/spelling errors in an essay question it is usually a clue that someone cheated.
2. Two people have exactly the same wrong answer. This depends on the exam, but for an essay exam to have the same wrong answer is usually a dead giveaway.
So to cheat:
1. Pay attention to writing style/spelling, if something is a radically different style from your normal one, it is a giveaway.
2. Make sure your answer is right, otherwise that is a giveaway as well. Of course if you know the answer is right, then you could just answer it on your own......
It's easier just to study if you ask me....
I have some really stupid cheater stories, of course. Like the guy who handed in verbatim his buddy's assignment, including his buddy's name and student number at the top of the comments, and still kept denying it. Those are the easy cases to deal with and, while kind of funny, not very meaningful. If they fess up and apologize and co-operate you give them negative 100%; if they don't you give them an academic offence (which means automatically failing the course and automatically getting expelled from the university if they get a second offence).
There's definitely a lot more cheating going on than I can find evidence for, which I've come to accept is mostly out of my control. My only two real strategies for combatting it are to make the assignments as exciting/interesting as I can so that students don't mind doing them so much, and mandate that you need at least 50% on the exams to pass the course so that you can't get through just on the assignments.
The one that still affects me is a girl I had in a first-year course in my first year of TAing. She was one of the "cool kids" (a little slow transitioning out of her popular high school kid days, you know). Her friends sort of lived for partying and never took any of their courses seriously: most of them ended up failing the CS course. It was a lab scenario where it was scheduled for 2 hours, but if you finished your work in an hour (which many did), you left early. After all her friends had finished the bare minimum and had left, she would stick around, though, for an extra half hour or hour, asking questions and redoing the work she'd already done to make sure she understood it at all properly. She wasn't doing insanely well--I think she was carrying a mark in the course somewhere around the high 70s--but definitely better than her friends and she was putting a lot of work into what obviously didn't come naturally for her.
Then came her final assignment of the course. It was gorgeous! It was their only assignment where they had to incorporate object-oriented design (the course was taught in C++) and she did everything perfectly. It was definitely the best assignment out of the entire class, and we had a lot of really smart cookies in the class. I wrote glowing praises all over it. I ran into her at a bus stop a month or so later and gushed about how impressive her assignment was and how much work she must have put it into it and she just quietly smiled and didn't say much beyond "thank you".
Then about a year later I ran into one of her friends and the topic of her came up again. I said again how impressive it was and said "either she found someone else to write it or she put a lot of work into that". He got awkward and said "I don't want to get her in trouble, but let's just say she didn't put a lot of work into it".
It really did a number on me. I was at the end of my Master's degree at the time and it through me for a loop, wondering if I even wanted to come back for my Ph.D. Research is okay and all, but really the only reason I was in grad school was for the teaching. I eventually did go back and things have gone well, but it surprised me what effect one (previously) good student cheating can have on you :\
Finally, someone is talking about the real problem with that article: Group punishment. I thought that was outlawed somehow. If I were in that class I would summarily drop and file a complaint with the dean. Group punishment is a lazy professor's choice. It forces the responsibility for preventing cheating down to the students, many of whom have now power to change the behavior of others. But the lazy professor can sit up there and smugly say, "You should have policed your peers better." WTF!?
But when I did my Comp. Sci. studies, back in the early 80's, I was almost expelled twice by having someone cheat off of my work. It was only because the professor pretty much knew that it was me who did the work that I didn't have to go before the academic board. Still I had to settle for a D while the cheater was given an F. He was on the NCAA winning basketball team, which is probably why he didn't get expelled. The next semester it happened again with a different student, but this time the professor just admonished me and sent the other student before the board.
I was disgusted by the cheating I saw during my time at CMU. This was in the days before it was possible to get help on the Internet. The web was still a curiosity. What was available, however, was unlimited of free "help" for any female who wanted it. Lonely and desperate CMU guys were all too happy to spend hours doing whatever it took to curry favor with women. It was all available, everything from homework copying all they way to entire engineering/coding projects done for them and then explained afterward.
It wasn't even like this was hidden. You could see it everywhere. There were guys who would toll the computers labs (few people had personal computers then) for damsels in distress. My girlfriend at the time couldn't work in a lab without a constant streams of Zephers asking if she needed help.
The whole thing made me sick. There were people who would have killed to be able to attend a CMU engineering program and these were people shitting all over it. They could care less about learning.
That was the beginning of my introduction to The Real World.
"Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."
Thankfully there are a massive collection of terrible students with money. It's easy to sell trivial assignments for 100 dollars or more, which is nice in this economy. Even better, you can "tutor" which is really just doing the assignment in front of them so they know you didn't sell it to anyone else and at double the cost.
In business it can be considered "lazy" or efficient, depending on how it's presented. If a person uses the time saved to do more work, it's called "being efficient". if they spend that time goofing around, they're called lazy. Now it might be that the really lazy people who never do y work have simply discovered that the things they are asked to do aren't that necessary - and that nothing bad happens it they therefore don't do it.
Expending the least effort to meet your goals should be recognised as an asset - setting dumb goals that are unnecessary or wasteful should be punished.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I RTFA and I agree that a big incentive to cheat is when your project doesn't work. When you still can't find that nagging bug at 3 AM, cheating seems like a good option. But I think honesty is the better way. Once, I turned in a project that didn't work ; I had an oral exam a few days later to defend my code, and one the professor actually congratulated me on the code. Turns out he had just read the code and liked it, because I followed his specs to the letter and used all the OOP patterns that he taught in his course. The one bug that made it crash was a missing call to an ancestor's constructor, undetected by the compiler (this was in Turbo Pascal)
Cheat if you must but remember that cheating is not going to work when you are competing against me for that job.
Got Code?
I let people cheat off me in school. The way I saw it, it reduced the amount of real competition I'd have when companies came to campus looking to recruit soon-to-be graduates for jobs. Call me shitty, but if you're still cheating at the COLLEGE level (when you're supposed to actually be interested in the classes you choose to take), then you deserve what you get in the long run.
but.. how do you define a Slashdot cheater?
A - someone who reads slashdot and RTFA
Thus, having an unfair advantage over the other posters
or
B - someone who reads slashdot and do NOT read RTFA
Thus, doing like he knows what he's talking about
Seriously?!
My CS department had a very simple rule:
If you can find code to do the assignment online (or anywhere else for that matter), feel free to use it, but you must cite your sources. As CS revolves around the re-use of code (and a huge part of CS teaching is dedicated to learning how to write re-usable code), they put the onus on the Professors to create assignments that required more then just copy and paste.
In my 4 years I only had 2 of well more then 100 assignments where the entire solution already existed online.
One of my best friends form high school and I went to the same college. We had the same Comp Sci teacher all throughout high school and we had the same class our first semester.
Well, we had a simple little assignment in class and our code looked exactly the same. We had to explain to the teacher our background and how our identical training produced the same exact code given his requirements.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Am I the only one who jumped to the article expecting to read about massive CounterStrike tournaments at Stanford ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
One of my classmates is a prof there and uses the pattern matching software. The policy is pretty clear. So are the results. The prof sadly confesses the dean must suspend a couple students every year from his classes.
When I went through my CS course the rules were pretty simple: You get caught cheating, you get kicked out.
Granted, the profs were happy to help people who got stuck and most of the students helped each other. If someone came up with same small clever trick, others would borrow it, but give credit for the borrowed code. Some people couldn't get through... many actually, but those who made it to the end of the year learned to balance writing their own code with sharing ideas and functions with others.
In the university of applied sciences that I study at, it would be very hard to cheat during most programming courses.
I especially liked the first two Java courses that I took. They consisted of weekly coding assignments and two exams.
You had to show the finished assignments personally and the teacher would usually ask questions about the code. Why did you do it like this? What does this do? etc. It would become obvious if you didn't understand your own code
Then there were the two exams, one in the middle of the course, one in the end. They were done on paper. They included around five partially done programs that you had to finish. For example, in a course teaching object-oriented programming, there might be a small card game that you had to finish. The game logic would be there, but you'd have to write all the object-oriented code and a main function where you make it all work. The exam would also include printouts of the relevant API documentation.
Cheating would have been hard. Not everyone passed the course, but those that passed, with good grades, really did know how to program.
This all requires a very good teacher who actually cares how his students are doing, though.
Where I work that is what we tend to do as well; while loops are harder to prove to actually finish.
When you are dealing with large numbers of programs running in a testing machine, ensuring that all of them WILL eventually finish is important.
Then again, here it is a conscious decision, not because we don't know anything else.
I used to work in the Computer Science Lab at a university in Illinois - Students would print extra copies of their programs to give to their friends, and I would literally watch them cheat right in front of me.
As a computer science student myself, I took offense to this. I'm was going to be competing for a job with this person, and we have the same degree. Hell, he/she might have a better GPA than me, and can't write a C program to save their life, yet THEY would get a job, and not me.
When I was the one pulling printouts, I would just shred them and tell them to GTFO.
Oh, and just in case your listening, unamed university in Illinois (I won't name names...EVERY university should learn from this)...you can't count on your students to chmod their files properly. Do you know how many of your "Brightest" students were chronic greppers?
I can't tell you how many times I watched someone type: find / | grep cpp > OtherStudentsHomeWorkICanCheatFrom.txt
Interesting observation. It is generally accepted that work is not original when it has been previously submitted by anybody, to include the author, for academic credit. While I understand that some code has the potential to be identical, it won't be generally. This becomes much more critical the higher one goes up the academic ladder. A student working toward a Ph.D. who plagiarized would almost certainly be dropped from the program. That’s a lot of years down the drain, especially if they are dropped as the result of plagiarizing their dissertation.
This is funny -- as its called "cheating" in the CS world, but in the EE world it's "working in a study group."
Of course, having impossibly hard EE homework at my university probably didn't help. It was not uncommon (and actually, quite frequent) that I encounter midterms/finals with average grades of 40% or less.
But that being said, most of the people who didn't learn the material didn't stay in the EE field after graduation.
The troll with karma.
I just recently finished my time at UIUC where I was about a B+/A- student (most of the time). However, I had a friend who was just about a genius who at least at this time had a 4.0 GPA. I don't know exactly how, but somehow another student in his class had gotten a copy of his code that was using on an assignment that they were both doing separately (I know for sure that my friend didn't give it to him). This particular class required that you show off your program in front of a small group of students and a TA and explain how it works.
This person was showing off his stolen code, and another student in the class noticed that the guy didn't really seem to know how it worked. Then later on in the presentation, he noticed that at the bottom of every page was a comment that said "Copyright 2008 by My Friend's Name." The guy had stolen the code straight up and either didn't notice the comments or just didn't bother to change them.
The student who noticed the comments told me friend who looked at it and then realizing that it really was his code, notified the staff of the course. The person who stole the code was forced to retake the class the following semester. However, this wasn't the first time that he had been caught cheating, and he didn't even receive a failing grade on his transcripts but was simply told that he would have to retake it. I thought that such a lenient punishment was ridiculous, especially for a repeat offender. Anyway, that's what happened and my friend and I had a nice, although slightly aggravated, laugh at it.
... Castle Wolfenstein was created.
I was a TA / Lab Technician while a student at university. Assignments were submitted electronically over the network where my master grader would attempt to compile the code and run it through several test cases before notifying me to grade the source code.
One of the first assignments was a program to print the first x Fibonacci numbers. One student included the comment "Who's Fibonacci?" Another student had the comment "I don't know". Another student hard coded the first 10 Fibonacci numbers and just timed out after that.
I rarely start from scratch. I plan the project, figure out what I'm likely to need and start raiding old code libraries on the net, or on book CDs (Hint. Best "starter" code is usually available from book publishers). By the time, I've gotten all that together, what's left is usually some interface design and what I call "lego" work where I fit it all together.
For a lot of us, It's not about being the best programmer. It's about being the guy who gets a task accomplished in a reasonable timeframe and cost.
As for long term maintenance. I comment everything. I clean it up. I start with good ingredients. The company is still using code I created 7 years ago. You?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Random personal story time:
(1) I (teaching college) have never been so angry in class as last semester when half of my computer literacy class cheated on freaking fill-Excel homeworks. Apparently I scared the crap out of them the next day, because some of the girls started crying (not that I'm proud of that). I'm hoping I never teach CS anything again... the mindset of students in introductory classes is just too often droolingly stupid.
(2) Prior college, probably the craziest interaction I ever had. I think I gave an assignment to command-line FTP into the RFC archive for a particular article and summarize one's findings. Of course, one student just copied the text, so I gave her an F. I had a 20 minute argument with her: "S: I didn't copy it, I re-typed it. All my English teachers allow that. T: That's the same thing. S: No it's not. T: Yes it is... etc. etc."
(3) I worked at a small game company where the two principal engineers gladly admitted that as a pair they'd cheated all their way through their college CS programs. The company was fairly successful, too (sold for some millions while I was there). That said, the one guy's code was semi-unmaintainable by anyone else (completely Lovecraftian mangled naming that even he couldn't remember, etc.)
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Most of the comments here seem to be talking about code copying/sharing/theft.
However this isn't the only way to get code. When I was doing my CS degree I was know as being someone to ask for help when stuck, and people frequently did. This lead to me being asked several times if I'd accept payment to write the assignment for them; of course I declined. These people clearly didn't have the first idea how to construct a program, yet several seemed to pass the course, which always amazed me. That was a few years ago now, and I expect it's only got easier with sites like RentACoder, for people with money to buy their way through courses. A very talented and poor friend of mine on an english course got offered alot of money to write someone's dissertation.
The only way people get caught is if someone grasses them up.
Years ago I worked as a developer for a subsidiary of Fujitsu. One day a colleague asked for my help.
The crux of the problem was that he was unfamiliar with the concept of a 'while' loop. Not the specific implementation in the language he was using, but the actual concept itself. He had some kind of computer science degree and he'd been working in the same team as me, as a developer, for at least two years.
It took me a while to realise what the problem was, as it never occurred to me that he might be unfamiliar with basic control flow. He sheepishly explained that the bulk of his degree was coursework (presumably he got some 'help') and that he'd been hammering square blocks into round holes for the last couple of years. From what I recall, whenever a while loop was appropriate he'd instead use a for loop with an extremely high upper limit and a break condition.
I'm sad to say that I've encountered the same situation several times where someone that is supposed to be a CS grad (or what should be a junior/senior CS student) is lacking in something fundamental. Sometimes it is in things that are not so obvious (but should be) such as not knowing what an interface or abstract class is for or thinking that procedural programming means "programming with GOTO statements", or simply not knowing what structured programming really is.
In other cases, the deficiency is graver, like, as you pointed out, not knowing basic control flow structures, not knowing what the structured program theorem really means (or even heard of), or not knowing how to decompose problems. I recently had an e-mail exchange (trying to help) with someone who supposedly passed a data structures course (a mid/upper level 300x level course) but didn't know he could call the "pop" method of a stack in a loop n times after having called "push" on it an equal n amount of times.
And now, and just to picture this, it's not just that this poor guy didn't know that he could call "pop" n times after having called "push" n times as well. He didn't know he could call pop inside a loop even though he knew he could call push (or any method for that matter) on a loop. How the hell can confusion possibly occur!!!??!! This was a guy who supposedly passed data structures and algorithms with a B.
All I can think off is that a professor (or several professors) at his university should be kicked out and forced to flip burgers for a living. Because it is not only one person like that, but many, across the board. People like that have to be made to fail or offer a wider curriculum containing a larger number of mandatory 100x/200x programming courses (hopefully using procedural or multi-paradigm languages.)
Too little time is invested in too few 100x/200x programming courses where instructors try to shuffle as many OO-fashionable concepts they can think of - superficial coverage interfaces, GUI programming, polymorphism, generics and what not - when they don't even make sure their students understand the basics - structured programming theory, control structures, modularity on the small, problem solving, divide-and-conquer strategies and so on and so on.
Students that are not qualified or who are not obviously talented on the mental skills required for programming either need to be flunked out or forced to take more programming courses at a lower, more fundamental level. Then they either get the sufficient practice and knowledge to continue or they flunk and try something else. We all have skills at one thing but not other. Schools make a serious disservice to students by watering down requirements just so that they can pass.
Not excusing mediocre students (who don't necessarily cheat), schools and instructors that let them graduate are the bigger cheaters of all.
My junior year there was a CS lab that was particularly tough at the end of the semester. I turned it in (a few days late) but managed to complete it (first true all-nighter I pulled in school). I was taking the final in the CS labs (they put 6 bugs into your program and you had to find and fix them) and a student next to me was escorted out into the hallway where the dean, a sysadmin, and another student were waiting for him.
Apparently, he couldn't pass the course unless he turned in that lab on time. So, when a student next to him got up to get a course TA to verify his program (without locking his screen), this student scp'ed a copy of the student's program over to his account. But he didn't stop there, he then deleted this students program and replaced it with a copy of his incomplete program.
The student whose program was stolen met up with the sysadmins and they were able to determine what happened by looking at logs.
Needless to say, the student cheating was expelled.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
At my University, one of the last classes we take before graduation is a Senior Seminar class, at the time the class was about ethics. Well, the class was assigned a paper to write about ethics. The professor actually read the papers, upon reading one girls paper he said.....'Hey, this girls English isn't this good. There is no way she wrote this. He googles the first time of the paper, bam, this 25 page paper pops up. Turns out she had copied and pasted 14 pages of the 25 page paper and turned it in. Well, she was kicked out of University one class from graduation. I thought it was rather funny. She ended up moving back to India, who knows what happened after that.
Before college, I always got A's in Calc 1 & 2, Geometry, Algebra, etc... I was a regular Charlie Epps.
As a freshman with programming experience, I took my required calculus courses taught in Wolfram Mathematica. I aced them both - not because I understood the math, but because I could make Mathematica do what I wanted it to. I could find the appropriate formula, copy and paste, and replace the variables with specifics from the word problem. It was so easy, I didn't even have to write the formula out so I never understood why they worked.
Senior year, I'm taking a Stat course and sure enough, I had no clue how to apply the calculus I was supposed to have learned in the previous courses. I nearly failed the class which would've prevented me from graduating. It did drop my GPA down below a 3.0. The employer that hired me wouldn't have looked at resumes below a 3.0 so luckily I landed the job prior to taking that class.
When you get into a corporate environment, "cheating" is actually preferred. No reason to re-invent the wheel when there is existing code that gets the job done.
Need a report that's "like this one except for..."? Take the code for that report and add some mods and there ya go. Your manager would consider you an idiot if you started each project from scratch, re-writing all the functions and methods that already exist in other applications and have perhaps already gone through rigorous QA.
Uh dude, that is so wrong in so many levels.
First, cheating =/= reuse.
Second, being measured for competence =/= being paid to implement cost-effective, efficient solutions by reuse rather than by reinventing the wheel.
Anyone who pays attention to this in school and in real life knows that difference.
Besides, how many ways can you write a QuickSort?
First, there are several ways, believe it or not. Second, non-sequitur. Most of the work done out there is not about implementing new and radical, novel algorithms but on intelligently engineer solutions that maximize re-use as much as possible. This can only be done by have a degree of competence, the one which we get tested for... and in which losers and incompetent people cheat.
Sure, go to Yahoo Answers. I answer questions there. Can I get credit for it?
The whole "no women study computer science" thing isn't funny, it's just insulting. Women in CS are given a hard enough time without you belittling them too.
You don't need a specialized parser lol. Just strip out variable names, comments, and whitespace, then just use zip. zip A, zip B, zip AB. Compare sizes.
The technical term is Normalized Compression Distance, and, on source code, it works even better when you tokenize the programs first (so that whitespace, identifier names and comments cease to be a factor).
Here is a program that does just that, and has pretty graphs showing who is way more similar to whom than chance would have it: http://tangow.ii.uam.es/ac . It is in active use in several courses at Spanish universities.
From the article: "Programs are idiosyncratic as sentences and no two are alike," he said. "They are not even comparable if they are independently generated. It's particularly easy to detect if they've been copied."
While it is extremely hard to independently produce duplicate programs at the 3GL level, it isn't impossible. The problem space will have only one optimal solution. The semantics of the problem space could easily lead to a common choice of classifications. The higher you go in abstraction, the more likely it is to produce identical programs.
Back in my first college programming class (in the mid 80's) we were given an assignment which involved some simple graphical pattern matching (a don't break the ice game). A friend of mine in the class and I had both studied graphics programming on our own so the first thing that came to mind for both of us was picking the basic patterns and rotating them to find matches. But I knew that for a first programming class most people wouldn't be thinking that way, so if both of us turned in code that did that we'd be accused of cheating. Of course we weren't cheating, it was the fact that we both thought that way that we were friends to begin with. So I chose to instead code the program the less sophisticated way to avoid any accusations. I'll admit it did bug me a little to hear the professor comment on his unique approach to the problem.
I won't say where, but a couple of times I did someone else's college computer programming assignment for them, making sure I 'dumbed down' the quality of the work so that it wouldn't be too obvious that someone who has a considerable amount of experience (over 5 years, then) did it, as opposed to a new student. What can I say other than I was broke and needed eating money, and as with today, it was just as hard then to get a job programming without a degree as it is now. At least it's over 20 years ago so the statute of limitations applies, presuming I did anything illegal. I can admit, however, I think I actually learned a few things from having to do the assignment.
"About the things I've done in the past, I hope either they've been forgotten, or if not forgotten, covered by the Statute of Limitations."
— Robert A. Heinlein
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
In Predictably Irrational [0] Dan Ariely shows how reminding people ('priming') about honour, about ethical rules before doing a test reduces greatly the cheating. In fact he shows an experiment in which he makes people take a test, first reminding them of the 'MIT honour code' (in the book he says there isn't one) and compared to the control group the average of correct questions answered is the same. I think there is a TED video [1] about this. Maybe they could try it in Stanford.
[0] http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?page_id=6
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html
Cheers
The professor who teaches operating systems at my university runs people's code through an automated cheating detector. The first operating systems project ends up being around 8 lines of code to complete a stub he provided. In a class of 30 people, there will inevitably be a couple of people who produced similar enough code that they get a zero on the assignment even if they may not even have talked to the person who had similar code. After the first project everyone gets scared and writes the most obscure code they can to avoid being accused of cheating.
On another note, I was a teaching assistant for a lab last semester, and caught a few students cheating. Most often I could hold the two assignments up to the light and see that each line lined up exactly. I had a couple of students who would hand in the same assignment in different fonts, but I nailed them for having the exact same typos.
There were some other people I suspect might have been cheating, but they changed variable names and switched around lines if the order didn't matter to the point where I wasn't confident that the similarities weren't just because they were solving the same problems.
Think of it as a lock on a door. The door can still be opened by somebody who is motivated enough, but the fact that there is a lock raises the bar, and makes the trade-off less favorable to the would-be cheater. Leaving the door unlocked, on the other hand, punishes those that are honest, and can make them re-evaluate their honesty (hey, look, everyone is doing it!).
Asking questions on how things work in your code is another measure that raises the bar. As a TA, I applied both: an automated plagiarism detection program (http://tangow.ii.uam.es/ac - GPL'd and entirely client-side, unlike MOSS) and individual, written exams with very concrete questions regarding the code (eg.: "describe the data-structure you used to implement feature X" or "which of your methods would you need to alter to implement feature Y"). The exams were very short, and intended to be filled just after the code had been turned in, so that there was not a lot to memorize.
It was still possible for someone to cheat -- but, hopefully, it would have required so much effort as to be not worth the trouble.
I used to live with a female compsci major. And she was a normal person. Probably the most normal person in her class by a long shot, male or female, and perhaps the most normal person I've ever shared a house with. So what you ask? Yes, so what?
I would offer help to other students at this one college I would visit, and this one guy had a problem with his Turbo Pascal program (version 3) that it wouldn't compile and he couldn't figure out why. This was a fairly long program, say on the order of 20 screens (about 1,000 lines) so it wasn't clearly obvious. So I ask him if I can make a few changes. I go in and I find a point where the code should be complete, e.g. no pending procedures, and I insert a 'BEGIN END.' I exit and compile and the compile works. So I remove this and I go further down, insert BEGIN END., exit and try a compile, and this time it faults with an error, the same one he's getting. So I go upward and try again, and eventually - meaning in about 3 minutes - I find the problem and it was a very subtle bug even I didn't spot, he had left an open brace { in his code, so, it ignored everything to the next close brace, or the end of the program, (I forget which), because it treated everything from that point on until the brace was closed (or the end of the program), as a comment.
The guy was absolutely amazed that I found the bug as fast as I had. He had been spending something over 2 hours trying to find it, and not succeeding. I found it in less than five minutes. It could be that I was a fresh pair of eyes, or it might be I'd had over 3 years (then) experience doing programming didn't hurt either...
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
when I took BASIC on Apple II in HS (for easy A since I'd already been doing machine language on Commodore for 4 yrs) we saved our work on 5 1/4(s) kept in a holder on teachers desk. I knew several people were taking my disk (since I completed every assignment in the book for the quarter in 1st week), loading my program then saving to their disk. by accident I discovered that you could include a "beep" (ctl-g IIRC) in a file name so a saved a file called "a-{7xBEEP}", copied it as [b-z]-{7xBEEP}, put it back in the teachers holder and waited for the next person to take it. it only took about 5 min before I saw someone take it, got back to their desk and do a directory listing which caused the machine to beep for ~2 minutes straight. :D amazingly, just like in your case rather than trying to make an alibi for their obvious guilt this in-DUH-vidual stood up, pointed at me and yelled: " DID IT!!!"
I never cheated in CS, but I tried to in Accounting. All the laws/rules were a pain in the ass to remember, we were allowed to use calculators on our tests, so I would program tons of notes into my calculator... end result was me actually learning the crap while I was typing it in on that stupid little pinpad keyboard.
OH noes.
I worked with a guy who had been a software engineer for so long that he used to be a cobol programmer. He had been with my last company for almost 10 years doing C++ work. He didn't understand that if he updated a C++ class to add a new function anything that used that class had to be recompiled so it would "know" about the new version of the class. I mean literally, he was stuck for days and couldn't figure out why he was getting access violations. What's worse is he had no idea how to tackle the issue. He started thinking that his system was screwed up completely and wanted to use memory management tools to figure out the problem. He didn't even bother to see the time stamp on his various files to see if they were old and could use a recompile. (Let alone use a program to check dependencies.) I helped him and figured it out fairly quickly and then started talking to him about recompiling the other stuff. (Since I've done that before. Updated a class and then missed recompiling another class or 2.) He had no idea what I was talking about or why this made a difference. Of course the absolute worst part is he thought he was a very good coder and wouldn't listen to what anybody else said about his code. (After that I avoided working on things with him. Clueless and essentially unteachable.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I thought VAC was pretty decent in preventing cheating in CS and Valve has been banning cheaters left and right?
I'm not going to rise to the bait and think you were serious in believing they were referring to "CS" as Counter Strike as opposed to Computer Science. But I have my own story of people intentionally confusing others.
Over 20 years ago when I lived in Southern California, KABC radio in Los Angeles has a (white) gentleman with an English accent as one of their talk radio show hosts, whose name is Michael Jackson. So me and another guy on a BBS were going on with this back-and-forth conversation about how he sure sounds different on his show on the radio, and so on with other comments, clearly "wrong". Eventually one guy took the bait, and pointed out to us that it's two different people. That's when we pointed out we already knew this, we just wanted to see how long it would take before someone noticed.
When the much more famous singer died, people went to the Hollywood Walk of Fame to look up the star for "Michael Jackson." Unfortunately, it wasn't his; it was the one that was given to the radio personality.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Seriously, the time wasted interviewing these know nothings pretending to know something costs the industry, let alone when some dumb fucking boss actually believes their credentials and gives them "work experience".
If you cannot pass the bullshit tests at Uni, I guarantee you the world will rip you several new ones you will need to explain if you blag your way into a job.
Do us all a favour, go get a job in sales, at least then no one will complain when we beat you up and flush your head down the toilet. Oh, no one told you the dumb guys are the dorks in the real world? Consider a job in door to door. That way you'll rarely meet us.
>:)
TFA cites a few techniques like "adding a few keystrokes".
Come on, folks. With global search and replace on names, one click source reformatting and refactoring, only the idiots will get caught.
Have gnu, will travel.
If each person caught cheating increases the weight of the final by 5% then he might have a problem. The article says the classes are large, so assume 40 people get caught cheating. The final is now worth 215% of the final grade.So if you get a 42 out of a 100 on the final you final grade is a 90 for an A. The hard part is arranging to have 40 of your classmates caught cheating.
I'm a postdoc at the uni where I took my undergrad physics degree getting on for 10 years ago. Last year I found in one of the teaching labs a badly degraded, presumably many generations old copy, photocopy of a listing from one of my 1st year programming exercises. It was definitely mine as it still had my name in the comments block at the top. It made me wonder quite how many people have handed in my solution.
At public universities in Florida you simply get an FF (not just an F) for the course. Doesn't look to good on the resume - kind of like a dishonorable discharge - yes, you served, but you don't want to broadcast it. I've only had to give a couple, always in the large first or second year lectures, never in upperclass coursework.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
Your goal in University undergrad courses is rarely to produce anything usable. It is instead to understand the subject you are studying and get some practical experience applying that knowledge. Copying here with the aim of avoiding having to understand and avoiding getting practical experience means you never grasp the concepts.
In contrast your job is about producing an end result that will be used. Copying here isn't cheating at all. It's reuse.
In other words in university your goal is to understand quicksort. At work your goal is to use it. Implementing quicksort is perhaps vital to the first and not required for the second.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
When people post homework questions on comp.lang.c, I often provide them with answers. For instance, someone posted asking for help writing a program that, given a number, would print out something like "the first digit is one, the second digit is two", etcetera.
My solution started out:
struct {
double lo, close;
int d;
} digits[] = {
{ 6.80183905339058814121, 6.80239476332431092231, '\x39' },
{ 6.68398653227400885157, 6.68461172766792710576, '\x38' },
{ 6.55036579410553621017, 6.55108033504340436792, '\x37' },
[...]
Here's the main loop:
for (i = (d >= 0 ? 0 : (hit = 1, 20)); digits[i].lo == digits[i].lo; ++i) {
if (d > digits[i].lo) {
printf("The %s digit of the number is %c.\n",
names[di++], digits[i].d);
d = log(exp(d) - exp(digits[i].close));
hit = 2;
}
if (digits[i].lo == 9) {
if (hit == 1)
printf("The %s digit of the number is %c.\n",
names[di++], digits[i].d);
if (hit)
hit = 1;
}
}
I sincerely hope he handed this one in.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Which is what we need. It is going to happen anyway, because the USA will not be able to fund Universities at the level we are right now for very much longer.
(We are within 10 years going to lose our reserve currency status. I figure half of the cities will look like Detroit in about 15-20 years from now, unless we have a complete revolution of some sort.)
This idea, that you can take an exam to memorize facts and then apply them to contrived problems, and then if you do not do well, for the rest of your career or any career for that matter automatically prevents you from learning further, is really at fault here. I would like to point out, all of the major players in science and technology from Newton (who at Cambridge was the most unremarkable student of all time.....C maybe even a D student....as well as Einstein which both where shut outs of the establishment.)
The whole test/exam to determine ones ability is just incidental argument, if you "cheated" or not. The whole thing has to be thrown out.
Besides, the way science works, is you "cheat" by looking at nature or others work and you build off of others work with your own ideas. Which, I would like to point out come from YOU, not anyone else.
Nothing ever in life will be a set of facts, from a contrived problem sitting there waiting for you to solve.
What we need is to get rid of test and exams, and replace them with peer review works or work based on merit on the college level so that your peers, your combined works on a topic of field, are recognized as a body of knowledge produced and of high enough quality for you to be granted a degree, by your peers.
In this context, you will be given projects to do, or work on with your peers, and then you will defend them with questions from your peers about your work. Typically these would be projects that look at unsolved problems in computer science (if you think your really above average.)
It is INCREDIBLY HARD to cheat in a environment like this, much harder than the test memorize exam crap we have now.
Besides, that is how the world works and that is how good science and learning actually works.
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
So.... this is not about Counter Strike after all.
We had a build system. So you check your code into your branch in source control and request a build. The system would then rebuild everything from scratch in the right order and put it on a server where you could just copy back to your local system. (All of this was automated.) The guy didn't even try that. (I mean all he had to do was check in his code at the end of the day, request the build when he left and the next morning it'd be done.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
tax returns?
New Economic Perspectives
At Tallinn Technical University where I do my postgraduate in CS, the policy on cheating and plagiarizing is quite strict. The minimal punishment is zero for grade and the student has to take the course again next year. The maximum punishment is expulsion from university.
A good rule on plagiarizing was written down by one of my professors. Quote: "Using diagrams, source code or text in unchanged or changed but recognizably similar format without citing to the original source is plagiarism. Presenting plagiarized work means automatically grade zero". When citing the sources, it must me clearly stated, what part originates from original source and what is the contribution of the presenter. External but quoted are considered not done" or partially done", depending on author's own contribution." Sorry for bad translation, it sounds almost as bad in its original language (Estonian).
In my opinion, when you cheat at university, the place is definitely not for you.
The real problem here is the idea that a college degree is treated as a certification. The right thing to do is to get rid of that idea and treat college as a private matter, with the degree being awarded for completion, not competence. Any employer will grill you on an interview anyway, and will know if you know how to write code. Anyone who doesn't deserves the quality employees he will get.
I suppose we all know the "drill" - to steal from many sources is "research".
1. I look at the assignment, I read the materials, I don't understand it.
2. I look at the examples - I see going from step 7 to 8, seems like magic. WTF?
3. I reckon I never copied from another student outright. But there are sources, anyone can use Google.
3a. You say you can detect cheating if the indenting is the same, variable names are the same, braces are the same? I guess it's a good thing I'm a bit anal about my coding style. . .
3b. I take my source, and I kind of run it through my mental clipboard, I copy it line for line, but if anything can change, or be done "my way" - I re-write it. I indent it to MY style. I use MY bracketing style. I use MY way scheme of variable and object naming. I comment - copiously. If I have to come back to this code in 3 months, and read it, and try to figure out what the hell I was thinking, I'll explain it to myself in detail. I'll write a novel in comments. Especially, if I had to do any trial-and-error to get it to work, and if I had to do anything freaky. Sometimes, I'm hoping a better coder will come along, see what I did, and why I was confused, and then send me an email, and explain what I was doing wrong. (never - in 15 years - has that happened).
3c. At the end of this process - maybe I didn't come up with the solution to the problem creatively. But I learned how it was done, and how to do it on my own the next time.
4. At the end: what I turn in, or compile - you probably can't run through any automated means of detecting plagiarism. But the algorithm is probably the same. The logic is the same. I'd bet the bytecode is probably pretty similar.
What is the purpose of the class?
To learn how to learn how to do task X. To understand that step 7->8 "magic".
What is the purpose of the professional project?
To get task X done - while still doing due-diligence in respecting intellectual property, and perhaps, making a small-time investment on behalf of your employer, in improving your own future productivity.
If I were ever doing anything earthshatteringly innovative, (not likely) of course, I'm citing ANY significant use of someone else's code. That's how my parents raised me, that's how my ethics professor trained me, it's what my peers, my employer, and our customers expect.
But with the crappy little "ten million feet have trod before you" tasks I'm usually doing, it's just not a concern. And if there are a hundred other script monkeys out there copying and refactoring my code the same way, I don't really give a crap.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
any ways pro codes reuse code and copy and paste others work all the time and most of the time there are no 1 man coding out there for a lot of software.
Pros do reuse code, but they do so by modularizing it into libraries and abstracting its functions into well-defined APIs. Pros do not copy and paste. If your idea of code reuse includes Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V, you're not a professional.
The least subtle example ever given to me was the student who produced a program late, but fully functional. The executable ran well. I was suspicious since this student had never done a tap of work. Maybe an older friend had written it?
Of course having source code in Java when the course was on C was a bit of a give-a-way
I've only cheated twice in my life. Both were accidental viewing of the answer. The second time, I intentionally didn't answer the question, so as to get no credit for the cheat. Cheating hurts the person cheating, and indirectly hurts everyone else. A number on a piece of paper is not worth hurting people.
"He/she who cheats discovers later why this is a bad idea." - by menegator (539434) on Friday February 12, @08:15AM (#31111862)
You're absolutely correct, & especially in something like writing code (or maths, or any subject you're going to be into for a living that's complex, changing, & never really ever "absolutely the same thing twice" exactly either). In fields like those, & I am sure you all know depending on what it is you do for schooling but mostly those of you who later used it to make a living, that you're always better off doing the work yourself.
You may not always get to "polish it down" to be what I like to call "110% bulletproof & bugfree", especially while you're in academia because you're just learning really, but, you learn by DOING imo, in this "Art & Science" by far more than any other possible or potential way.
It's the best way, so cheating is only cheating yourself of learning new & valuable tricks that will help you get paid one day, if not already.
(I think that's what you were leading to here, & mainly so you understand what's being done (in academia, just like on the job, it's building your toolset/foundation of "hands-on know how" as well as the toolkit of code you'll probably use for the rest of your life, in part (because you DO learn "on-the-job" too, & all the time imo @ least))...
APK
P.S.=> Ever heard the saying "Don't EVER throw away your old code"? It's true - you constantly BUILD on that, your whole time you're into this field imo, & by having done it yourself, you really learn "where the rubber meets the road" is why, but... I wager MOST of you KNOW this to be true anyhow! apk
We're just finishing a project in which image data (RGB and YUV) has to be blended together. The SoC we were working with had blending libraries that took advantage of blending hardware built into the processor.
Unfortunately, the blending was of poor quality and very slow.
The solution was to have an engineer write routines that would perform a custom blending algorithm that could be tweaked to provide the best image. In this case, he did a superior job and not only provided better image quality than the manufacturer's library but also ran faster.
I agree that management will want you to use existing code wherever possible, but when it comes down to it, if the existing pieces don't meet requirements, the coders have to know how to replicate the functions.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
This is how I hunted copycats in my tutorial groups:
I wrote a little program that removes comments. If you are serious, you might also rename variables and functions so they are uniformly (that's not SO bad, if you use lex & yacc)... then run a diff on all pairs of codes (no, use a BASH script!), that ignores whitespace differences (-b -B) and pipe the result through wc -l to count how many lines diff wrote.
pairs that have a small number are suspicious and should be compared manually.
pairs that have a 0 are pretty much guaranteed to be copies...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
You punish them for getting caught. Unless you're into Theology, that's just the way the world works.
Just what is your point, if any?
Regards;
There's a couple of guys out there who owes me a favor or two. In their defense, these were guys who had no intention of working in CS and were only studying it cause their parents made them.
'I wasn't even thinking of how it [sic] easy it would for me to be caught,'
That's why you need sleep.
"It forces the responsibility for preventing cheating down to the students, many of whom have now power to change the behavior of others."
Really? If the most common way of cheating is copying another students work, I'd say other students are mostly responsible for the problem. This also provides an excellent way for a student to say no to peer pressure. It also provides punishment when cheating occurs but cannot be traced to a single person (identical papers, no one admits to copying).
"If I were in that class I would summarily drop and file a complaint with the dean."
Good luck with that. Don't like the syllabus, don't take the class. As long as it doesn't violate policy and is written in the syllabus, a professor can pretty much do as they like. And complaining about a policy designed to enforce the honor code isn't going to win you much sympathy. And might get you some unwanted attention.
Even if the most common way of cheating is for some students to let other students copy, this does not mean that ALL the students have any means whatsoever for preventing that. Only those involved should be punished. Not those who had not way to stop it or even know about it.
I feel another reason the teachers may be more willing to spread that punishment around is that it causes grumbling but no lawsuits. One of the reasons many teachers are hesitant to fail or expel a student is that it often results in a lawsuit. Even if the teacher or school wins it is costly and time consuming.
How many time have you known what was going to be on the syllabus before enrolling in a class?
My point is that collective punishment should be against the policy. I certainly wouldn't want to attend a university that endorsed it.
I was a TA for my university's CS department for a few years. There was this one semester where two students decided they were going to cheat off each other in Intro to Programming.
They might have pulled it off since they were in two different classes and had two different TAs doing the grading.
Except one of the berks decided he wasn't going to change anything in the copied project, not even in the file headers where the other student's name sat staring at me...
yeesh
Enjoy! -Excalibur
I graduated from a 4 year university recently, while they specialize more in engineering, they kick out a good number of CS degrees. I could knock out code all day long (or all week long in the case of that damned b*-tree), but when it came to the upper level theory classes...turns out I'm more of code monkey than a mathematician.
I went through tons of trouble to obtain answer manuals and used Google extensively to find my answers. Many book publisher websites offer a student and teacher side of their site, the teacher side offering the answer manuals for download. You'd be surprised, or maybe not, how many of these sites are open to SQL injection attacks. I think I cheated my way through my whole senior year, I didn't do it for the GPA, I did it for the degree.
A lot of the C++/Java coding is done on netbooted Fedora machines, at least while I was there. Some people knew enough about the Linux command line to be stupid, as they left their home directory open to all for reading. You could find entire completed projects from people who already completed the class. I always wondered if I were caught, if the owners of the unsecured home directory could be held liable or not, probably so with the 'use a bomb to put out a fire' mentality.
interesting read... but please use paragraphs and whitespace next time! my poor eyes.
I tell my employees I'm lazy - they only half get it. They see me in the office 50-60 hours a week, and wonder how I can be lazy. I just don't waste effort. I reuse what I can, I sketch solutions quickly, I don't make anything more complicated than is needs to be. Perhaps efficient would be a better name, but efficient just doesn't wuite fit me - I'm lazy. And I get a lot of work out the door. And it's done correctly the first time, because it's too much damned work for me to have to do it twice. I'm not in CS, but the concept still applies.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In the late 70's, one of my high school classes was a vocational IT study, located on a local Community College campus. I was lucky, being in the 2nd year of the program; the 1st year the building trades class was still assembling the structure, and there was no link to the UI mainframe so the IT students just had bookwork.
One part of the class was learning punch cards, so we had to re-type existing code. That was really boring, so I'd figure out ways to fit song lyrics into the 80 available columns.
Though I didn't like all their tunes, "Godzilla" by Blue Oyster Cult was a favorite, so that's one of the ones that got entered.
Of course I could never turn that work in. But when grading time came, the teacher got all flustered, said he remembered seeing me tap away with all the other students, couldn't imagine what happened to the work, he must have lost it, really sorry, here's an "A" anyway. OK?
OK.
So, did I cheat? I really did learn to operate Mr. Hollerith's machine (and even got to use that skill later, after enlisting in USAF). I just didn't actually push the same buttons as did the rest of the class.
I was a TA for a few CS classes. One method we used was to compile everyone's code and look at the size of the object file. If two programs produced the same size object file, then it was most likely a case where someone copied code, but then changed variable names and comments. Another easy method (which only works with smaller classes) was to have everyone come in to "demo" and explain their program. The folks that cheated were not able to explain their work.
In my day cheating in any form == expulsion. I can understand giving a second chance, but any student who is a repeat offender should be lucky to get a community college degree.
Fuck you. You are what's wrong with this profession.
I couldn't agree more. With a name like 'Joe The Dragon' the guy's obviously an Asian, probably Chinese.
Says it all, really.
Go on, do-gooders, call me a racist - and miss the point entirely. This is about culture and social norms and nothing at all to do with race.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?