As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating (nytimes.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: College students have flooded into computer science courses across the country, recognizing them as an entree to coveted jobs at companies like Facebook and Google, not to mention the big prize: a start-up worth millions. The exploding interest in these courses, though, has coincided with an undesirable side effect: a spate of high-tech collegiate plagiarism. Students have been caught borrowing computer code from their friends or cribbing it from the internet. "There's a lot of discussion about it, both inside a department as well as across the field," said Randy H. Katz, a professor in the electrical engineering and computer science department at the University of California, Berkeley, who discovered in one year that about 100 of his roughly 700 students in one class had violated the course policy on collaborating or copying code. Computer science professors are now delivering stern warnings at the start of each course, and, like colleagues in other subjects, deploy software to flag plagiarism. They have unearthed numerous examples of suspected cheating.

Comments

Nothing new here

[Anonymous Coward]

Borrowing, or reusing code, has always been the norm and is the basis for libraries of routines and procedures. Blatant ripoffs should be obvious but smaller scale plagarism (your word) is hard to determine.

Re:Nothing new here

[XxtraLarGe]

Borrowing, or reusing code, has always been the norm and is the basis for libraries of routines and procedures. Blatant ripoffs should be obvious but smaller scale plagarism (your word) is hard to determine.

In my classes, the students are expected to complete the assignments using the techniques covered to date. That is because what we learn in the next class often relies on understanding what we covered in the previous when. So when they use a solution that is beyond what they have already learned, they are putting themselves even further behind the curve.

You can't imagine how many times I've had students make a hamfisted attempt to insert something they found on Stack Overflow that uses techniques not yet covered in the course. Since they don't understand what that code is supposed to do, it often doesn't work correctly, or crashes because they thought they could copy & paste without even compiling. I have no problem giving those students a 0 on their assignments.

Re: Nothing new here

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone can code, it just needs to compile. Almost no one can program. Crap code is breaking in odd ways because of huge amounts of undefined behavior. Most of the time the programmer can't even tell you why their code worked in the first place, yet alone make it work against once it breaks. Large amounts of determinism allows most to plow through their lack of understanding by throwing code at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Name and Shame!

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

Any student caught cheating should have their name announced/posted in a prominent location so all of their classmates know who the cheaters are.

The rest of the students work too hard to allow cheaters to remain anonymous. They deserve to know who's trying to screw them over.

India anyone?

[yodleboy]

If these schools and profs want to get an early look at the kinds of problems they can expect when a massive swell in IT courses happens, look no further than India. What problems do they have? How do they address them (or fail to)? Seems there are regular articles on mass cheating in Indian IT curriculum. For the sake of fairness, they could research the MSCE schools in the early 2000's. I guess my point is that as surprised as they seem to be, there is still time to get ahead of the most obvious problems if they do some research.