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."

Comments

Re:He has a great career in front of him

[TrancePhreak]

He'd be better suited to working with Dan Rather.

Re:Who cheats who

[Atrox666]

Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs got where they are today by cheating other people.
I wish I had cheated more in school..it's one of the few life skills you can learn there. Your morals don't seem to have much bearing on real world success.

Re:I caught several cheaters

[Rhys]

I had a couple students cheating in an intro to C class I was teaching. How did I know? Let me give you a hint: neither I nor the book were teaching the K&R C style their program was in. I searched the net but couldn't find any chunks of it. So I pulled them aside when I handed it back and said, "Look, I know you cheated on this. You don't know K&R style C. But I can't find a copy of this code on the net so I can't prove you cheated. You have full marks for this assignment. However, next assignment will have as a requirement the code to be written in ANSI C style, just like the book and I use."

And yes, the next assignment had as a ANSI C style as a requirement with a note that failing this failed the assignment. Said students also were no longer in the class after it came out.

Pretty sad when you can't even do minor formatting editing to cheat.