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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."

8 of 684 comments (clear)

  1. Who cheats who by menegator · · Score: 5, Insightful

    He/she who cheats discovers later why this is a bad idea.

  2. On The Other Hand by sycodon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

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    1. Re:On The Other Hand by dkh2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But, to be successful over the long haul you have to be capable of producing the report from scratch in the first place. Cheating your way through school does not promote that skill set. Sure, you know how to copy and paste the right code but... can you tell why it's the right code in the first place? Can you optimize a/o improve the copied code?

      So, I agree on your point re: reuseable code in the workplace but, you still need to do the work up front.

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    2. Re:On The Other Hand by edittard · · Score: 5, Insightful

      How is a person able to "add some mods" if he's spent four years cribbing everything and never coded anything himself?

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  3. No outside help ? by ccandreva · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Cheating is laziness... by ThinkingInBinary · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    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.

    ...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?

  5. Talent PLUS luck by curri · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:I caught several cheaters by TheDreadSlashdotterD · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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