Duke: No Mercy For CS 201 Cheaters Who Don't Turn Selves In By Wednesday

theodp writes: The Duke Chronicle published an e-mail reportedly sent to hundreds of Duke students who took Computer Science 201 (Data Structures & Algorithms) last spring, giving those who copied solutions to class problems until Nov. 12th to turn themselves in for cheating. "Students who have violated course policies but do not step forward by November 12, 2014," warns the e-mail, "will not be offered faculty-student resolution and will be referred to the Office of Student Conduct for disciplinary processes without any recommendation for leniency." The Chronicle adds that CS Prof Owen Astrachan, co-director of undergraduate studies, admitted that there is a fine line between collaboration and cheating in computer science — online and in person, although Astrachan made it clear in comments that "Students who copied code from the Internet are in violation of the community standard and course policies."

Comments

Re:yea no - happened in Middle School

[Havokmon]

Same thing happened in my Middle School science class. One kid got a hold of the teachers copy of the final, and a bunch of kids cheated - including twin friends of mine. The administration did the same thing - "Tell us if you cheated, and it'll be ok".

The brother admitted to it, and was held back. The sister stayed quiet and moved on to high school.

Re:Or just practicing for an actual job

[XxtraLarGe]

Just out of curiosity are there any professional programmers out there who don't regularly copy functions from the Internet?

The whole point of the course is to try & figure out how data structures and algorithms are implemented. It's as much about problem solving as it is coding. Sure, you could always just use std::vector in your C++ programs for vectors, but do you really understand how they work? What about binary trees and linked lists? That's the type of stuff they're teaching in these classes. Copying code & modifying it for your own purposes is fine for production, but if these students don't understand how the underlying code works, then their chances of successfully using it greatly diminishes.

I see it all the time in my courses. I emphasize to the students that they should only use methods currently covered, so they get a 0 if they go out on stackoverflow and find solutions that give them shortcuts. They fail to use critical thinking skills and gain a deep understanding of how programming works. Most of the time, their ham-fisted copy/paste code doesn't even do what the assignment requires.