Why Computer Science Students Cheat

alphadogg writes "Enrollment in undergraduate computer science courses is at an all-time high at colleges nationwide. But this trend that's been hailed by the US tech industry has a dark side: a disproportionate number of students taking these courses are caught cheating. More students are caught cheating in introductory computer science courses than in any other course on campus, thanks to automated tools that professors use to detect unauthorized code reuse, excessive collaboration, and other forbidden ways of completing homework assignments. Computer science professors say their students are not more dishonest than students in other fields; they're just more likely to get caught because software is available to check for plagiarism. 'The truth is that on every campus, a large proportion of the reported cases of academic dishonesty come from introductory computer science courses, and the reason is totally obvious: we use automated tools to detect plagiarism,' explains Professor Ed Lazowska, chair of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. 'We compare against other student submissions, and we compare against previous student submissions and against code that may be on the Web. These tools flag suspicious cases, which are then manually examined.'"

Comments

My opinion:

[butterflysrage]

Enrollment in undergraduate computer science courses is at an all-time high at colleges nationwide. But this trend that's been hailed by the US tech industry has a dark side: a disproportionate number of students taking these courses are caught cheating. More students are caught cheating in introductory computer science courses than in any other course on campus, thanks to automated tools that professors use to detect unauthorized code reuse, excessive collaboration and other forbidden ways of completing homework assignments. Computer science professors say their students are not more dishonest than students in other fields; they're just more likely to get caught because software is available to check for plagiarism. 'The truth is that on every campus, a large proportion of the reported cases of academic dishonesty come from introductory computer science courses, and the reason is totally obvious: we use automated tools to detect plagiarism,' explains Professor Ed Lazowska, chair of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. 'We compare against other student submissions, and we compare against previous student submissions and against code that may be on the Web. These tools flag suspicious cases, which are then manually examined.'"

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[fucket]

for (indexnt index=1;index=10;index++) { System.out.prindexntln(index); }

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[Normal Dan]

I have a similar question,
If someone asked me to (in Java say) print the numbers from 1 to 10, I would probably do something like

for (int i=1;i=10;i++) {
System.out.println(i);
}

So would most other people. Would this flag me as a cheater?

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[Mike Buddha]

If someone asked me to (in Java say) print the numbers from 1 to 10, I would probably do something like

for (int i=1;i=10;i++) {

    System.out.println(i);
}

So would most other people. Would this flag me as a cheater?

No, the system would flag you as being wrong. "i=10" would give an error either in compile time in a strongly typed language, or in runtime in a loosely typed one. FAIL.

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[natehoy]

But we didn't wirk togehter you isnensitive cold!!

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[Khisanth Magus]

One of the more amusing moments of my time as a Graduate Teaching Assistant was when I caught 3 students working together in a class where no collaboration was allowed. The sad thing is that in this particular class, there was only one correct way of doing the assignments, so anyone who did it correctly could not be caught. These three had such a horribly wrong answer that there was no way that 3 independent people could have gotten that answer.

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[Asclepius99]

But we didn't wirk togehter you isnensitive cold!!