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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."
.. for when their jobs are outsourced. It's pretty much the same thing.
Never, ever, testify against yourself. Even in the case of a college, it's foolish.
If they know you did it, they know you did it. Leniency? What a joke. If they had the evidence, they wouldn't be offering a deal.
What's more likely to happen is that you admit it, and in the same email or further interviews you'll confess to other violations that they'll nail you on. Furthermore, in cheating, you are almost guaranteed to have broken state or federal law. By admitting to copying someone else's code you could be confessing to a real crime that could result in time in prison.
If you doubt this, see the video in my Sig. Never admit to wrong doing to a public official or law enforcement. Assume any email you send will immediately be turned over.
I'd like to know what type of assignment this was. If it's small and specific, there might be only a few basic working solutions. That is, the similarity stems from being correct.
If it's a larger project with creative design decisions, then I'm less sympathetic.
-Dave
Back when I was coding as my primary job, we never copied, we might have drawn inspiration.
We'd look at a tutorial, but we sure as heck wouldn't have looked at, say, code from Linux we planned on cribbing. Whereas if we had the FreeBSD or Apache source code, we just might.
Part of being a contemporary coder is knowing who you're legally allowed to borrow from, and who you're not.
But, part of getting your education involves not cheating. So, if "making use of available code" turns into "plagiarism and not meeting the school's academic policies" ... well, you're pretty much screwed, aren't you?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I think you're using very negative words for a very normal part of the coding process.
For example, about 20 minutes ago I needed a function to measure password strength. Could I have written it from scratch? Of course. Did I? Hell, no. That would be a needless waste of time. I used the Interwebs and had a choice of 3 or 4 perfectly good functions within about a minute.
That's how coding works today. And if you're not making use of other people's code you're not doing it right.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
The difference being that you could have coded it from scratch - and you don't learn how to do that just by copy/pasting code.
The brother admitted to it, and was held back. The sister stayed quiet and moved on to high school.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
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.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The problem isn't necessarily that code was copied directly from the Internet, it was that it was passed off as the students' own work. Coding assignments can only be done so many ways in lower-level CS classes, where the problems have to be small enough to be easily testable. The problem I see is that allowing it encourages the practice among CS grads in later life.
I work in systems integration, and I can't tell you the number of times I've seen crap software, even software from vendors, that is horribly inefficient. I think a lot of that software has a fair amount of copy-paste code in it simply because the goal was to get something that compiled and sort of worked.
That brings up another very important point -- the level of abstraction has gotten so high in software development that it's very hard to see what's actually going on behind the scenes. If you're calling some massive database access library to do your data entry from a web form, you really can't tell how bad the SQL that your particular function uses is for the database. (I've seen packaged applications that will tie up the CPU of a server for 30 or more seconds just to make a database change.) If students don't learn at least some of the fundamentals in CS classes, who will design the next generation of lower-level stuff? Code reuse and libraries are good, but you need to know what's appropriate to use. So if you don't have a good grasp of algorithms, data structures, etc., how will you even know whether you're solving a problem correctly?
Same thing goes for my field -- systems admin/integration. If you don't know at least the basics of how TCP works, a few of the application protocols and something about how your OS manages resources, it becomes very hard to troubleshoot anything to any degree.
The brother admitted to it, and was held back. The sister stayed quiet and moved on to high school.
That's school working as it should: it taught th brother a very, very valuable lesson he'll never forget. The point of school is learning things, right?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Exactly. The purpose of the assignment wasn't to get some code to work. It was to learn how to develop an algorithm.
I'm not a CS person, but rather a chemical engineer. When I was in college, we learned, and had to do, all sorts of distillation designs using McCabe-Theil diagrams and other hand and graphical calculations. Would we ever do this at our job? No, there are all sorts of computer programs that figure these things out. However, going through the process of doing the work the hard way, and more importantly redoing the work that other people have already done, makes us understand the principles behind the logic. It also helps for giving insight if and when we want to extend the thinking to some new area.
Talking about how things are reused in one's job is completely missing the mark.
Of course. But when doing a course on data structures, kids are expected to develop the skills needed to write pieces of code that might seem trivial to you — But in practice are the result of tens of years of work. I quite enjoy reading 1960s computer science papers precisely because of that.
I teach Operating Systems. My course depends on Algorithms and Data Structures. Believe me, even though the students just finished the course mentioned in this note (of course, in a different university, different country even), it is obvious in their assignments they have not yet interiorized many of the things they are supposed to have learnt. I could probably fill a book explaining the different implementations of lists or trees I have seen, or the myriads of antipatterns I read on a regular basis. And that's what university is for.
In "real" works, of course, they can answer open-book to all exam^Wsituations. They can copy code from teh intarwebz. They can compare code. But first, they have to understand and interiorize the concepts.
Saying in your comments that you found a 'method for neatly measuring password strength and reimplemented it' would, however, demonstrate that not only can you find code that you would need but CAN code and implement the solution.
I always cited sources in my source code when I took programming courses in college. More often it was implementing a solution from a different language into Java. The instructors never had a problem with that.
I once wrote an English paper on calculating a parabola curve, looking at 30 math books to see how other people described calculating parabola curve, and doing my best to write my own version that wasn't much different from anyone else's. The instructor accused me of copying. I challenged her to write an original description. She couldn't and give me an A anyway.
What annoys me about McCabe-Theil diagrams is that they are not fundamentally the way the theory works for designing distillation systems. They are basically a way to solve problems using huge approximations before we had the computer power to do it correctly. I much prefer the rate models for distillation column design and think that mccabe-theil should be scrapped. HOWEVER, I think that students need to understand how that stuff truly works and since the algorithms are simple they should write a basic rate equation based solver for distillation column design. Then they would truly understand how the stuff really works and be better equipped to use it.
I just don't like the idea that you learn one method that is supposed to give you the idea of how things really work but then the actual systems you used are based on entirely different theories and assumptions.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
many of the "international" comp sci / engineering students prided themselves on beating the system (less time in college == less living expenses) by taking 24 or more credits per quarter. The way they did this was cheating their asses off by copying homework. Most of the work for comp sci / engineering was done in the labs so they'd rummage through the trash cans and look for other student's printed off drafts. :/