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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.
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.
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.