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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.
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).
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.
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.
...huh?! If we're talking about university classes, the idea that anything other than perhaps the intro courses would use materials provided by some company (say, the textbook publisher) is absurd. Also, what kind of a professor would outsource their tests to an independent organization? How can they possibly know the course material well enough, and adjust for what's been covered during the semester, and such?
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
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. I've known a few people who are multi-millionaire's ... and they are all far more talented in those categories than I am.
My ego is small enough that I can accept that I'll never be able to match their talents, nor do I want to work that hard to be that successful.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
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
Yup, good programmers are lazy. Good programmers will write the smallest amount of code to solve the problem at hand, because the more code you have, the more potential for bugs. In general, 50-90% of development time is debugging, so a lazy developer will write code that is easy to debug (short, simple, well-structured). If this cuts debugging time in half, it can double or triple productivity.
Unfortunately, students seem to not be learning how to be lazy very well. One course I taught had a URL at the end of the coursework sheet which pointed to a site that had code that did around 90% of what you needed for a passing grade. A lazy student would have copied this, changed a few things, and then spent some effort on the things needed to get from a pass to a first class grade. Only two of my students actually did this. In another course I taught, the back page of my hand-out notes had the complete solution to one of the questions in the assignment that I set. Only 10% of my students even attempted that question, and of those less than half got it right.
I think I blame schools giving grades for effort. It reinforces the idea that putting in a lot of effort is laudable, even if you don't achieve anything.
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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.
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.
Harsh punishments don't work. Because the punishments are so drastic, instructors become reluctant to give them out to "good kids" who made "one mistake." Lax punishment becomes to de facto standard, and of a rogue instructor tries to apply the penalties as written, his students and his peers look at him as a monster and exert considerable pressure to loosen up.
They are unwilling to learn because University wasn't really their choice. Students are told, in no uncertain terms, that they will be miserable failures if they don't seek higher education. Since society feels justified in propagating this stupidity, millions of students each year head to universities and colleges in order to grasp that golden vine, and they'll do whatever it takes to grasp it with as little work as possible. Only the students who actually want to be there know that the golden vine doesn't really exist. And they are the ones who suffer.
I have nothing to say.
This is university, they are paying to learn.
That's a misconception on your part. The vast majority of kids at university are there to do whatever it takes to get that piece of paper. The goal isn't to get educated; the goal is higher earning potential by virtue of a better job.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it