Slashdot Mirror
10 Percent of Harvard's Popular 'Introduction To Computer Science' Class Accused of Cheating (thecrimson.com)
theodp writes: The Harvard Crimson reports that more than 60 of the 636 students enrolled in last fall's CS50: "Introduction to Computer Science I" course appeared before the College's Honor Council in a wave of academic dishonesty cases that has stretched the Council to its limits over the past few months. Former students and course staff, though, said course policy was unclear about what constituted cheating, creating the potential for unintentional violations. Consistently, one of the most popular courses at Harvard, CS50 is known for an unconventional atmosphere, complete with flashy promotional videos and corporate-sponsored events.
Come on. Zuckerberg copied - and he's a billionaire now.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Of course they won't though, Harvard is already trying to redefine cheating to sweep this under the rug.
This begs the question, if people there need to cheat at an intro computer class, how many of them are cheating for actually difficult classes? 20%? 50%?
If Harvard wants to truly save face, they'll expel these losers. But they won't.
I don't see how a course that encourages collaboration between peers can then turn them in for cheating when they come up with the same answer. You can't collaborate without often coming to the same result using the same methods.
While coding, in its purest form, is a creative act the same is not so of most 'coding 101' problems. They are often rote mechanical pieces, intended to highlight a particular software concept, with little room for creativity (especially if, like any sane student, you're trying for the simplest and shortest solution).
Unless they are monitoring the entire typing history for students, and they only brought students up on charges where their submission was created with a single keystroke (Ctrl+V), I don't see how this is a fair system.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
It's CS, not an MBA.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well, yes? Institutes like this are places than where the wealthy launder privilege into credentials. Anyone who thinks otherwise has bought into the propaganda. Get a good look at your elected representatives; in a few decades we'll be arguing over which one cheated the least.
In my day you wouldn't get into Harvard if you used commas like that.
Not even to look around.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I taught myself to program on a Commodore VIC-20 reading magazines. No internet. No BBSes. I slept through my CS101 class and aced it.
In this day and age, if you need to cheat in Intro to CS, you probably shouldn't be in CS.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
In going through Engineering Calculus and Engineering Physics, it became fairly obvious that some of the students were collaborating in team homework sessions, and labs, borrowing text and illustrations from each other. Apparently this is considered normal nowadays.
I'm not saying that working in a group and "hey I'm stuck on 5, this is what I get, what did I do wrong" kind of thing, but more of a "from our twenty people, two each work on 1,11,21,31 and so on, and if we agree, pool the answers and randomize the text you write it down with" and a "here are the six sections of the lab, you four redo this graphic differently for each team and write down this text in a different order" kind of thing.
Sad.
The easy way to tell was many of them would skip the class sections.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I've heard that argument before. The student caught copying someone else's work first denies, then pleads, then goes into "lawyer" mode, trying to argue that what he or she did wasn't really cheating because the syllabus was either badly worded, or didn't specifically say not to do it.
I recently had a situation where a student taking a lab course did not attend several labs, and then tried to turn in lab reports and have the TA grade them. This student was shocked ... shocked ... when told that this was academic misconduct. After all, the syllabus said that data could be shared between lab partners, and the person he got the data from was his partner from one of the few labs he did attend. Furthermore, he argued that the syllabus did not specifically say that lab reports would not be accepted for labs that the student did not attend. I kid you not.
Anyone smart enough to get into Harvard knows exactly when the line between collaboration and plagiarism is being crossed. Unfortunately, some of them also have learned that denial, pleading, "lawyering", and then threats of legal action by their parents are quite often sufficient to avoid the consequences of their actions.
Don't worry... Ellipses are a...renewable resource...
This is also the august institution where, in 2012, nearly half of students taking 1310 "Introduction to Congress" (~125 students out of 279 in all) were investigated for cheating on the take-home final exam. (The jokes practically write themselves.) "Somewhat more than half" were forced to withdraw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's CS, not an MBA.
I work in CS, and I grab code from Stackoverflow everyday and copy-paste it into my own work. I also regularly get other people's code from our internal git repository as well as Github. I very rarely write anything 100% in my own. I get paid for getting stuff done, not for originality.
When I was in college, I worked on projects with classmates, and we shared code and ideas all the time. There was no auto-cheat-detectors back then, but I wonder if today that is considered "cheating". We certainly didn't see it that way. We collaborated to learn from each other, not to avoid learning.
Yeah, don't speak about what you know nothing of. This class is actually pretty tough - not a walk in the park by any means, and someone without some CS knowledge would struggle. I have a Harvard CS degree, and it's not a joke, and don't even get me going on how hard the courses are, because they are very rigorous. I earned my degree, and I think everyone who makes it out of that program has too.
C
}#q NO CARRIER
A few months back, Slashdot was united in their agreement that a similar incident of cheating that was exposed in some Indian school was confirmation that Indian education is of low value, Indian degrees meaningless, and Indian programmers lack basic understanding of CS fundamentals.
Interesting to note that the arc of discussion in this case is completely different.
What, we are not willing to consider the possibility that this indicates that a significant % of `US programmers' may lack an understanding of CS fundamentals, which may be the reason why US multinationals like H1Bs?
@ShanghaiBill
Exactly.
Show me someone who has written an original sorting algorithm in the last 20 years, or made non-trivial improvements on a double linked btree list.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!