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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."

21 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.

    1. Re:Who cheats who by dkh2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Absolutely. I've actually had to work with someone I knew was cheating in school and they couldn't code their way out of a pile of leaves, let alone a wet paper sack.

      They got the grades because they cheated. They got the job because they got the grades. Eventually, they were among the first to get the layoff because B and C students like me just plain outperformed them day in and day out on the job.

      --
      My office has been taken over by iPod people.
    2. Re:Who cheats who by terjeber · · Score: 5, Funny

      Some times not even later.

      As a CS student my buddy and I (we were working as teams) were tired of people copying our stuff. We shared with anyone who wanted to, and had full read access for anyone to our code, so we didn't make it hard for them to copy. Still, it was annoying to do the work and then have others just copy and hand in.

      Our assignments required print-outs delivered with the software (yes, this is before there was even an internet) and we suspected people just copied our software, compiled it (which incidentally at the time could take hours) and ran it without even looking at it. So, just for fun, we inserted into our own code the equivalent of a system call to "rm -rf $HOME/*" (yes, this is before we got our Pyramid Unix boxes, so it was not exactly that). We did this two days before the assignment was to be delivered. It took less then an hour before we heard the first "WHAT THE F#CK HAPPENED???". Five teams were unable to deliver their assignments.

      Interestingly two of the teams complained about our behavior to the professor. His only reaction was to ask if they had some serious mental problems (or the polite equivalent). I am sure today we would have been sued and the morons would have won since we "hacked" their accounts.

    3. Re:Who cheats who by WombatDeath · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Who cheats who by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 5, Funny

      When I took CS101 I was well beyond the level of the class, so, in order to make the programming assignments interesting, I added extra functionality on top of what was requested. Little stupid stuff mostly, but I tried to make it clever, and since the testing was automated, it didn't matter as long as it was to spec.

      The last project was to write a program to simulate one of those stupid "digital pets"; it had to have a pet object, and various, feed, cuddle, punish, methods, etc.

      One of the boundary conditions was that the pet had to starve if you didn't feed it, but the program was set so that you could have as many pets as you wanted at the same time...Well, I decided to put a little rock 'n roll in there, and if one pet hadn't been fed for a certain amount of time, he had a chance to start a "pet deathmatch", and try to eat another pet.

      The code for the combat and the actual fight was massive. Most peoples code was a couple of pages...mine was closer to 50.

      I printed it out at one point, so I could take it to dinner and work on some bug, and someone swiped it off the printer, and subsequently copied the WHOLE THING and turned it in for the assignment.

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
    5. Re:Who cheats who by kangsterizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I am sure today we would have been sued and the morons would have won since we "hacked" their accounts.

      That's funny you actually mention that!
      approx 8 years ago, I was at university. We did have internet and decent computers. I did the same kind of trick as you did.
      My trick wasn't as bad, I only made my program modify their login scripts so that they wouldn't be able to login anymore (it would ask the password in loop via a fake login program, always denying them access). No data deleted.

      One single guy got caught, it was funny, except that everyone knew if someone was able to do this at the time, it was me. Thus they inspected my code, and my account, and shortly I had to see the director of the university. I was asked to leave the university for "hacking" and that there would be no repercusions on my scholarity. If I had chosen to ignore and try to stay, I would have to deal with a trial instead.

      I left this university and went into a smaller school instead. yep it kinda sucks i suppose. Nevertheless.. the guy never got punished for cheating. Best part of the story I guess.

      I'll mention this university was in the French riviera.

  2. first post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I cheated and copied this post from another article.

  3. He has a great career in front of him by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  4. CSIt's easy... by Nomaxxx · · Score: 5, Funny

    yep... easy to cheat in Counter Strike.

  5. 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?

    --
    When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
    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.

      --
      My office has been taken over by iPod people.
    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?

      --
      At the bottom of the /. main page it says 'Yesterday's News'. Well they got that right.
    3. Re:On The Other Hand by Ngarrang · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

      You've never worked with COBOL in a mainframe environment, have you? At Cincinnati Bell Information Systems, there are billions of lines of COBOL, APL, PL1, Assembler, Forth, FORTRAN and God knows what else. You didn't write any NEW apps from scratch. You took what was written, modified to do "the new thing" and you were done.

      And people were paid big money back in the 1990's for this. A buddy of mine still codes in Assembler for 5/3rd on their mainframe, because the speed of the code is so much faster, by several orders of magnitude. He occasionally gets to write a new program, but rarely. The majority of his job is modifying 40 years of accumulated code.

      --
      Bearded Dragon
    4. Re:On The Other Hand by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Depends on the cheating. If, for example, you decide to cheat by taking some code from outside and incorporating it in your product, I doubt that your manager will be happy when your company is later sued for copyright infringement.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    5. Re:On The Other Hand by steltho · · Score: 5, Interesting

      In university my friend and I worked together on the same assignment. We were in different tutor groups so we believed it wouldn't be detectable. Indeed it wasn't but he got 80/100 and I got 40/100!

      Actually, it sounds to me like you were caught. Giving different grades to people who "worked together" is a way for the teacher to punish people for cheating, if he or she doesn't want to go through all the bureaucracy involved with making a formal accusation.

  6. 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.

  7. I caught several cheaters by RichMan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. 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.

      --
      I have nothing to say.
  8. 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?

  9. 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.

  10. Journalism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?