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

How dumb can students be?

[bradley13]

I see this among my students as well.

First, on the side of the students: It is perfectly fine to copy code snippets. How do I safely hash a password? Unless it's a computer security course, students shouldn't be reinventing code like that. That's when you go to StackOverflow and find the canned answer from an expert. Some students (and professors) are confused about this.

Ok, with that out of the way: When plagiarism does happen, it is generally pretty blatant. Two solutions submitted, identical except for the renamed variables. It's almost insulting, that they think I won't notice. Alternatively, they pay someone else to write the program, and then cannot answer even the simplest questions about how it works.

But even if they manage to sneak a plagiarized solution through: how stupid can you be?!?! If students aren't writing the programs themselves, they will fail the exam, where copying isn't an option any more. Or, even worse, they manage to scrape through the first year exams. If they get into their sophomore year, they are allowed to fail a course and repeat it a second time. This is horrible, because they drag out the pain for 3 or 4 or 5 years before failing out of the program.

What a waste of their lives. If they can't handle the material, they're only doing themselves damage by dragging things out. Plagiarism in a technical field, where ultimately you either have the skills or not - and this will be discovered - is just unbelievably dumb.