A non-trivial programming assignment is difficult to write, and a good, robust marking scheme is even harder. At the university where I work (I'm what Americans would call a TA) we give our first years a supervised programming lab every week. It usually takes two or three semesters to get the bugs out of the task specifications, and that's with the lecturer and two to five TAs working together.
Programming tasks that have never been assigned to students are like software that hasn't been beta-tested: even if the designers and implementors are top-notch, there's still likely to be some unforeseen interaction with the environment and the users.
If cheating is worse in the US, it's unlikely to have anything to do with who does the grading; detecting cheats is really not that hard. It's more likely to be a combination of, firstly, a perceived disconnect between the task and the student's personal goals, and secondly, the general devaluing of intellectual skills that seems to be endemic in Anglophone culture.
I teach an introductory CS/intermediate Java course, and we use pair programming for most of our lab work -- it's not so much about saving marking time as about getting to give students better-quality feedback. We mark all our labs in class, so we get to quiz the students in person and let them tell us the reasons behind their design choices, but that means our marking time is fixed.
So what we do is mark each student on his or her comprehension of the solution, as demonstrated in the marking interview. Weaker students get little benefit from riding on the coattails of stronger students. We do find the odd strong student who's not willing to let his or her partner touch the codebase though. Pairs like this we either counsel or break up.
We also don't let students have the same partner more than three times during one semester, so they get practice at working with programmers of different skill levels.
In Australia, at any rate, there's no great shortage of people with qualifications in IT. There is however a desperate shortage of people who can actually function in IT jobs.
We've had University-level computer science courses since the seventies or so, like everywhere else I guess. During the dot-com era, loads of institutions started up so-called "information technology" courses, mostly aimed at vocational programmer training. These courses do *not* teach anything about algorithms, because (and I quote an IT lecturer) "they're never going to have to worry about that in the real world". Now fair enough, they probably won't have to worry about algorithmic complexity or do a formal proof of correctness after they leave uni. But these guys aren't learning *anything* about algorithms -- including how to develop or test one.
What most IT graduates have learned how to do is translate algorithms into Java. Someone else has to come up with the algorithms for them and write them up in detailed pseudocode -- and if you've got someone on staff capable of doing that, it's not that much extra effort for them to learn Java syntax. If thirty years of research into learning how to program has told us anything, it's that learning the syntax ain't the hard part. Unless you're learning INTERCAL, in which case all bets are off.
Meanwhile, CS programs that still teach all that stuff are still copping flak because of a general perception among undergrads that it's irrelevant, and that what employers REALLY want is someone who knows the Java libraries backwards. I reckon that's nice and all, but a) that's the sort of think you can pick up from a reference book after you've taken second year Algorithms and Data Structures, and b) what the employers I've spoken to really want from a programmer is someone who, after a reasonable training period, doesn't need to be told how to do everything they have to do.
I can honestly say that sexual harassment in CS is very rare, at least in my experience, and the bias that's manifest in most CS courses is nowhere near as overwhelming as CMU researchers would have you believe. But I can also honestly say that anyone who believes there's no discrimination against women in CS is either outside CS, working in an all-male environment, or unperceptive to the point of delusion. It's not (always) institutional bias, it's social in nature. Its effect is to undermine esteem and self-esteem rather than to deny access outright.
I can also say, as a CS teacher and researcher in CS Education, that there are very few systematic differences between male and female CS undergrads. Females tend to have lower self-efficacy (i.e. they are less likely to believe in their own ability to develop skills); they also tend, on average, to outperform males. Men outnumber women by nearly ten to one in the CS program here. The fact that male-female ratios are much lower in institutions in non-English-speaking parts of the world, especially in south Asia, tends to militate against the gender disparity being due to biological constraints.
If you want to hire a software engineer, hire someone with a Software Engineering degree. Don't hire a computer science graduate and then complain that you didn't get what you wanted. Programming is to software engineering is to computer science as manufacturing is to mechanical engineering is to physics -- if you want someone to fix your assembly robot, you don't hire a physicist.
It's dangerous to assume that any web-based service is secure. As a parent, I'm really unhappy about the idea of random strangers being able to track my children at all times. I don't think the small amount of extra security I would feel from being able to track them myself is worth that kind of risk.
My husband's been a game developer for twelve years, and believe me, playing games is the *last* thing he wants to do when he comes home of an evening. He just can't stop thinking about work. Even when he's watching the kids play on the PS/2, he can't stop picking out TRC violations in the interface.
A better reason to work in the office rather than at home is that the typical software developer in *any* industry needs to communicate with their colleagues. You can go the whole formal weekly meetings route, but life is more relaxing if the contact is unstructured. Meetings feel like work. Chatting in the tea room does not.
Actually, a lot of cheating comes from paper mills and using old papers (yours or others'), not Wikipedia.
They're not mutually exclusive. Most of the plagiarists I've spotted in the last couple of years have drawn from a range of sources. Few units in our course keep the assignments the same from year to year, so people using old material usually have to supplement it anyway.
The main reason these people get caught is they don't have enough knowledge to glue the pieces they find into a coherent whole.
Oh, man. I can just imagine the reaction if my University tried to bring in something like this. It wouldn't just be the Software Libre lunatic fringe objecting -- we have a lot of fairly technically-capable students who like to read and store their mail on their laptops, and they'd howl the place down. Even the relatively technically unclued around here do their browsing with Firefox.
Mac users would particularly hate it, especially considering Microsoft's recent statements regarding IE on OSX.
My University has a student-run Co-op bookshop that sells stationery and resells textbooks (and fiction, and other books) for students. If you want to sell a book, you set your own price. If your institution has a problem with overpriced textbooks, and a student organization, consider setting up a similar system -- it works really well here.
'The music industry is broadly unhappy with the fixed pricing and lack of subscription options at the market-leading iTunes Music Store and likely to support alternative services.'
Oh, really?
Well, I'm broadly unhappy with the music industry's desire to charge like wounded bulls for mediocre content and infest their media with single-platform proprietary DRM. I just *wonder* what sort of 'subscription models' the music industry is hanging out for. Guess what? I'm usually pretty supportive of google's enterprises, but if if I can't listen to the music on my iPod *and* my daughter's el cheapo MP3 player *and* my PowerBook *and* my work linux box *and* burn it to a CD so I can show it to my non-MP3-player-owning friends and relatives -- I'm not interested.
Oh, and I like Celtic folk, Afro-Celtic world music, blues, prog, electronica, choral and a bunch of other minority genres. I spent about A$70 on music last month, almost all from little indy labels. The Big Names of the music industry can take their overproduced teen manufactured product and stick it where the sun don't shine.
I work in higher education, and we mostly prefer to focus on doing what we do really, really well rather than maximizing market share willy-nilly. (There are some exceptions, of course; pointy-haired bosses seem to insinuate themselves into any management structure.)
These people aren't talking like educators or researchers, they're talking like corporatists. I smell a vendor shill.
...it's only tracking your phone. As such, it's pretty easy to avoid "surveillance": just leave the thing behind. Of course that means people can't ring you, but if you're really worried about your privacy you maybe don't want to be connected 24/7 anyway.
Me, I lose the damn thing all the time anyway. "Where's Mama today? Oh look, she's been dropped behind the couch again."
To me, the study is already flawed. You've dropped a load of information onto her lap, while a complete "newbie" doesn't have that same luxury. How can a usability study be unbiased in this manner? Who's to say you didn't provide her with REALLY good links to KDE information, while giving half-assed links to Gnome?
The researcher won't be a subject. You can't do a usability study that way. You need to recruit a bunch of people who match the kind(s) of user you're studying, get them to do a range of tasks, and observe various aspects of their performance. If you're your own subject, you're not doing research. You're just airing your opinion.
Speaking as a PhD student, one of the most important things we are expected to do is a literature survey. That means we have to go out and read studies that are relevant to our research topic, and critique them. If the researcher fails to discuss them, her supervisors should ding her for not having done her reading. If she can't judge the worth of the studies for herself, she's not working at PhD level yet. She should have a good grasp of what constitutes good research by now.
I know I'd be thrilled to have a load of pointers to relevant studies dropped in my lap. I'll judge their degree of assedness myself, thank you very much.
Honestly, what's the real difference between the gaming PC and the console now?
Independent games studios can write and publish PC games without either having to shell out for $50K+ dev kits and without having to get publishing approval from a big corporate behemoth. When development costs are cheaper and there's fewer layers of seat-polishing bureaucracy between the developer and the consumer, you're more likely to see innovation and risk-taking.
Well, thanks for sharing, but I don't think your drinking habits are news that will interest many nerds.
There are a wealth of music programs out there (which these people are apparently using). Most of the pay for networks give you the ability to preview music right?
Pay for networks? Not in Australia. We've got fairly restrictive copyright laws here. We don't have a fair use provision for personal use, so ripping a CD so that you can listen to it on your iPod is technically illegal. I guess you're supposed to purchase the digital copy, but we don't have an Australian iTunes store -- even Denmark has iTunes! We've only got three music download providers, and their range is spotty to say the least, even if you're only looking for Top-Forty stuff.
So you can't pin the blame for illegal downloading exclusively on the pirates, at least not in this country where there effectively is no legal option.
Opera is nice, but the Opera execs should realize already that they can't sell their browser when their customers can download a perfectly good one for free.
You can download Opera for free, too. The free version is ad-supported.
If glasses wouldn't have been invented, everybody would have perfect eyesight etc...
I doubt it. The current existence of people with impaired vision, combined with centuries of testimony about such people, indicate that the tens of millennia that the human race existed without the ability to ameliorate such deficits did not wipe out these genes.
I keep hearing similar arguments from evolutionary psychologists: behaviour X exists because at one stage in our evolutionary history it must have given a survival advantage to people who practiced it. This ignores the fact that the survival advantage has to be quite pronounced to overcome the background noise of random chance.
The dime a dozen Ameritrain, cram all you possibly can about pointing and clicking the night before the test Miscrosoft Certified System Engineer's?
Hey, if Microsoft was willing to certify them, Microsoft can keep them. Maybe then Microsoft will get around to learning the meaning of the word "accreditation". (Hint: the "credit" in "accreditation" is related more closely to "credibility" than to "credit card".)
All that is needed is a lay giving the FCC the explicit authority.
Oh, ick. I thought it was bad when the entertainment industry were using actual *money* to get legislation through. You're telling me politicians are demanding sexual favours now?
Slashdot Mirror
A non-trivial programming assignment is difficult to write, and a good, robust marking scheme is even harder. At the university where I work (I'm what Americans would call a TA) we give our first years a supervised programming lab every week. It usually takes two or three semesters to get the bugs out of the task specifications, and that's with the lecturer and two to five TAs working together.
Programming tasks that have never been assigned to students are like software that hasn't been beta-tested: even if the designers and implementors are top-notch, there's still likely to be some unforeseen interaction with the environment and the users.
If cheating is worse in the US, it's unlikely to have anything to do with who does the grading; detecting cheats is really not that hard. It's more likely to be a combination of, firstly, a perceived disconnect between the task and the student's personal goals, and secondly, the general devaluing of intellectual skills that seems to be endemic in Anglophone culture.
I teach an introductory CS/intermediate Java course, and we use pair programming for most of our lab work -- it's not so much about saving marking time as about getting to give students better-quality feedback. We mark all our labs in class, so we get to quiz the students in person and let them tell us the reasons behind their design choices, but that means our marking time is fixed.
So what we do is mark each student on his or her comprehension of the solution, as demonstrated in the marking interview. Weaker students get little benefit from riding on the coattails of stronger students. We do find the odd strong student who's not willing to let his or her partner touch the codebase though. Pairs like this we either counsel or break up.
We also don't let students have the same partner more than three times during one semester, so they get practice at working with programmers of different skill levels.
In Australia, at any rate, there's no great shortage of people with qualifications in IT. There is however a desperate shortage of people who can actually function in IT jobs.
We've had University-level computer science courses since the seventies or so, like everywhere else I guess. During the dot-com era, loads of institutions started up so-called "information technology" courses, mostly aimed at vocational programmer training. These courses do *not* teach anything about algorithms, because (and I quote an IT lecturer) "they're never going to have to worry about that in the real world". Now fair enough, they probably won't have to worry about algorithmic complexity or do a formal proof of correctness after they leave uni. But these guys aren't learning *anything* about algorithms -- including how to develop or test one.
What most IT graduates have learned how to do is translate algorithms into Java. Someone else has to come up with the algorithms for them and write them up in detailed pseudocode -- and if you've got someone on staff capable of doing that, it's not that much extra effort for them to learn Java syntax. If thirty years of research into learning how to program has told us anything, it's that learning the syntax ain't the hard part. Unless you're learning INTERCAL, in which case all bets are off.
Meanwhile, CS programs that still teach all that stuff are still copping flak because of a general perception among undergrads that it's irrelevant, and that what employers REALLY want is someone who knows the Java libraries backwards. I reckon that's nice and all, but a) that's the sort of think you can pick up from a reference book after you've taken second year Algorithms and Data Structures, and b) what the employers I've spoken to really want from a programmer is someone who, after a reasonable training period, doesn't need to be told how to do everything they have to do.
That is their business model.
"You're only doing maths and science to meet boys, right?"
"Why are you applying for Computer Science? You got an A in English!"
"Chicks always pass IT subjects. There's always some guy they can get to do the work for them."
"Uh, I'm sorry, our prac group's already got someone to do the writeup."
"Everybody knows you only got first class Honours/your PhD scholarship because you're a woman."
"What you're researching isn't *real* Computer Science."
I can honestly say that sexual harassment in CS is very rare, at least in my experience, and the bias that's manifest in most CS courses is nowhere near as overwhelming as CMU researchers would have you believe. But I can also honestly say that anyone who believes there's no discrimination against women in CS is either outside CS, working in an all-male environment, or unperceptive to the point of delusion. It's not (always) institutional bias, it's social in nature. Its effect is to undermine esteem and self-esteem rather than to deny access outright.
I can also say, as a CS teacher and researcher in CS Education, that there are very few systematic differences between male and female CS undergrads. Females tend to have lower self-efficacy (i.e. they are less likely to believe in their own ability to develop skills); they also tend, on average, to outperform males. Men outnumber women by nearly ten to one in the CS program here. The fact that male-female ratios are much lower in institutions in non-English-speaking parts of the world, especially in south Asia, tends to militate against the gender disparity being due to biological constraints.
If you want to hire a software engineer, hire someone with a Software Engineering degree. Don't hire a computer science graduate and then complain that you didn't get what you wanted. Programming is to software engineering is to computer science as manufacturing is to mechanical engineering is to physics -- if you want someone to fix your assembly robot, you don't hire a physicist.
It's dangerous to assume that any web-based service is secure. As a parent, I'm really unhappy about the idea of random strangers being able to track my children at all times. I don't think the small amount of extra security I would feel from being able to track them myself is worth that kind of risk.
My husband's been a game developer for twelve years, and believe me, playing games is the *last* thing he wants to do when he comes home of an evening. He just can't stop thinking about work. Even when he's watching the kids play on the PS/2, he can't stop picking out TRC violations in the interface.
A better reason to work in the office rather than at home is that the typical software developer in *any* industry needs to communicate with their colleagues. You can go the whole formal weekly meetings route, but life is more relaxing if the contact is unstructured. Meetings feel like work. Chatting in the tea room does not.
They're not mutually exclusive. Most of the plagiarists I've spotted in the last couple of years have drawn from a range of sources. Few units in our course keep the assignments the same from year to year, so people using old material usually have to supplement it anyway.
The main reason these people get caught is they don't have enough knowledge to glue the pieces they find into a coherent whole.
No POP? No IMAP? IE only?
Oh, man. I can just imagine the reaction if my University tried to bring in something like this. It wouldn't just be the Software Libre lunatic fringe objecting -- we have a lot of fairly technically-capable students who like to read and store their mail on their laptops, and they'd howl the place down. Even the relatively technically unclued around here do their browsing with Firefox.
Mac users would particularly hate it, especially considering Microsoft's recent statements regarding IE on OSX.
My University has a student-run Co-op bookshop that sells stationery and resells textbooks (and fiction, and other books) for students. If you want to sell a book, you set your own price. If your institution has a problem with overpriced textbooks, and a student organization, consider setting up a similar system -- it works really well here.
'The music industry is broadly unhappy with the fixed pricing and lack of subscription options at the market-leading iTunes Music Store and likely to support alternative services.'
Oh, really?
Well, I'm broadly unhappy with the music industry's desire to charge like wounded bulls for mediocre content and infest their media with single-platform proprietary DRM. I just *wonder* what sort of 'subscription models' the music industry is hanging out for. Guess what? I'm usually pretty supportive of google's enterprises, but if if I can't listen to the music on my iPod *and* my daughter's el cheapo MP3 player *and* my PowerBook *and* my work linux box *and* burn it to a CD so I can show it to my non-MP3-player-owning friends and relatives -- I'm not interested.
Oh, and I like Celtic folk, Afro-Celtic world music, blues, prog, electronica, choral and a bunch of other minority genres. I spent about A$70 on music last month, almost all from little indy labels. The Big Names of the music industry can take their overproduced teen manufactured product and stick it where the sun don't shine.
The Alliance for Higher Education what, now?
I work in higher education, and we mostly prefer to focus on doing what we do really, really well rather than maximizing market share willy-nilly. (There are some exceptions, of course; pointy-haired bosses seem to insinuate themselves into any management structure.)
These people aren't talking like educators or researchers, they're talking like corporatists. I smell a vendor shill.
Me, I lose the damn thing all the time anyway. "Where's Mama today? Oh look, she's been dropped behind the couch again."
To me, the study is already flawed. You've dropped a load of information onto her lap, while a complete "newbie" doesn't have that same luxury. How can a usability study be unbiased in this manner? Who's to say you didn't provide her with REALLY good links to KDE information, while giving half-assed links to Gnome?
The researcher won't be a subject. You can't do a usability study that way. You need to recruit a bunch of people who match the kind(s) of user you're studying, get them to do a range of tasks, and observe various aspects of their performance. If you're your own subject, you're not doing research. You're just airing your opinion.
Speaking as a PhD student, one of the most important things we are expected to do is a literature survey. That means we have to go out and read studies that are relevant to our research topic, and critique them. If the researcher fails to discuss them, her supervisors should ding her for not having done her reading. If she can't judge the worth of the studies for herself, she's not working at PhD level yet. She should have a good grasp of what constitutes good research by now.
I know I'd be thrilled to have a load of pointers to relevant studies dropped in my lap. I'll judge their degree of assedness myself, thank you very much.
Honestly, what's the real difference between the gaming PC and the console now?
Independent games studios can write and publish PC games without either having to shell out for $50K+ dev kits and without having to get publishing approval from a big corporate behemoth. When development costs are cheaper and there's fewer layers of seat-polishing bureaucracy between the developer and the consumer, you're more likely to see innovation and risk-taking.
Any intelligent life form that eats farts should be feared. That is all.
Any Slashdot poster that farts acetylene is to be feared. From as far away as possible.
damn, how many times you gotta BOMB people to make 'em stop HATING you?
The RIAA hate us because we are free. No, wait. The RIAA hate us because we get our *music* for free.
I am going to get hammered [...] I like gin.
Well, thanks for sharing, but I don't think your drinking habits are news that will interest many nerds.
There are a wealth of music programs out there (which these people are apparently using). Most of the pay for networks give you the ability to preview music right?
Pay for networks? Not in Australia. We've got fairly restrictive copyright laws here. We don't have a fair use provision for personal use, so ripping a CD so that you can listen to it on your iPod is technically illegal. I guess you're supposed to purchase the digital copy, but we don't have an Australian iTunes store -- even Denmark has iTunes! We've only got three music download providers, and their range is spotty to say the least, even if you're only looking for Top-Forty stuff.
So you can't pin the blame for illegal downloading exclusively on the pirates, at least not in this country where there effectively is no legal option.
Opera is nice, but the Opera execs should realize already that they can't sell their browser when their customers can download a perfectly good one for free.
You can download Opera for free, too. The free version is ad-supported.
If glasses wouldn't have been invented, everybody would have perfect eyesight etc...
I doubt it. The current existence of people with impaired vision, combined with centuries of testimony about such people, indicate that the tens of millennia that the human race existed without the ability to ameliorate such deficits did not wipe out these genes.
I keep hearing similar arguments from evolutionary psychologists: behaviour X exists because at one stage in our evolutionary history it must have given a survival advantage to people who practiced it. This ignores the fact that the survival advantage has to be quite pronounced to overcome the background noise of random chance.
Ah, but all Microsoft has to do in order to take advantage of this new, cheap labour supply is... open-source Windows. :)
The dime a dozen Ameritrain, cram all you possibly can about pointing and clicking the night before the test Miscrosoft Certified System Engineer's?
Hey, if Microsoft was willing to certify them, Microsoft can keep them. Maybe then Microsoft will get around to learning the meaning of the word "accreditation". (Hint: the "credit" in "accreditation" is related more closely to "credibility" than to "credit card".)
All that is needed is a lay giving the FCC the explicit authority.
Oh, ick. I thought it was bad when the entertainment industry were using actual *money* to get legislation through. You're telling me politicians are demanding sexual favours now?