No one talks about the fact that current CS curricula are fundamentally flawed. Too much time is spent in class, and on homework and one is left with little time to do "real" work.
What's "real" work?
Whatever you want it to be.
As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
41–50 of 303 posts
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#42What's with the obsession with student assessment over student learning? At the end of the day the student has to perform, and there are plenty of opportunities to build up a network of people that will assert you know your stuff. Why is it that grades are still a thing at this level?
The student can go a long way without "performing". They are ultimately given a passing grade to show that they have learned things adequately. The cost that we bear as a result of lax certification is that no-one will trust your grades, and that you'll have to do endless whiteboard exercises at every employer to independently verify what might have been otherwise inferred from a single, rigorous qualification proces…
> It also creates a prestige problem for whatever university graduated some nitwit who can't code from a CS degree. Over time, it will be harder for other graduates from that university to find work.
Coincidentally, this is being discussed in another thread today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14440780
Companies need to filter their applicants because some colleges don't do a good job filtering their graduates.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#43At my university, most of the profs that teach our entry level programming courses use MOSS. One prof I had said that it's really good at detecting plagiarism and he automatically refers any infractions to SJA.
I always work alone so I've never been caught, but looking at the grade sheets, it seemed like almost 25% of the students were referred every assignment. I can understand the desire to catch cheaters because as I've progressed into my more advanced classes there's always a few students that really shouldn't be there because they didn't learn anything in the prereq classes.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#44What's with the obsession with student assessment over student learning? At the end of the day the student has to perform, and there are plenty of opportunities to build up a network of people that will assert you know your stuff. Why is it that grades are still a thing at this level?
An undergraduate degree demonstrates to you what the characteristic activities of a field are like, and to observers that you can do those characteristic activities to some minimum standard.
Almost no one proceeds under the illusion that it's a comprehensive education. At best, you'll master a subfield in graduate school.
Continuous grading provides a valuable signal when you need to step up your game, transition to a different field, or drop out. I know several people whose poor CS grades sent them to tracks where they're now much happier and more successful.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#45What's with the obsession with student assessment over student learning? At the end of the day the student has to perform, and there are plenty of opportunities to build up a network of people that will assert you know your stuff. Why is it that grades are still a thing at this level?
For various reasons, people want to be able to evaluate students against each other, which requires a total ordering ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order )
For example, I didn't want to go to grad school or work for a megacorp, so I didn't have to worry about my grades. But a lot of my classmates did want those things, which require large scale impersonal evaluation, so they had to sweat about their grades.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#46I've been a TA for a couple CS classes at Iowa State University. Cheating here at least is pretty rampant. I would guess 1/3 or more of the students cheat in some capacity. Some of it is really easy to detect too. For a first semester freshman class, I tried using MinHash to cluster student submissions together. Maybe 10% of the assignment have near duplicate pieces of code. More comprehensive methods like MOSS (Meas…
In germany, what you call cheating isnt even considered cheating.
On homework, we openly collaborated and handed in near duplicates without trying to hide it. Some students would just copy the work of others. None of this mattered. Nobody "went after" it. It just gets graded, you get your points and you move on.
Most people accept the fact that grades don't matter, but you need them for your resume. For some reason, universities have moved on from being institutions of knowledge-production to being diploma mills, and grades are their way of succumbing to societies need to make shit measurable. The way we cope with this is to just hand out grades that are utterly meaningless, but keep the system alive.
In the meantime, people carry on with their lives. Some people in university want to learn things, some are just enrolled because its a cheap livestyle choice.
In the end, nobody cares about grades. Whether I actually know my stuff is my problem. Not my professors. No company hires you based on your grades, but a lot of HR personnel will reject you based on them. So you need good grades. But good grades alone wont get you shit. We live in this weird limbo of grades being a necessity but beyond that, dont mean shit. They are the shittiest heuristic known to man.
If grades were a scientific theory, those who came up with them would be ostracized crackpots. Neither meaningful nor in any way falsifiable.
A written exam on quantum field theory can only test so many things. Since its written, you have to ask for things that can be produced in a given timeframe. That leaves you with memoizable calculations. Any professor will tell you that such an exam will tell you nothing about whether the student actually understands the subject matter. A 2 minute discussion of the topic in very high level terms is probably more useful to assess actual aptitude.
Professors KNOW that they cant possibly measure the ability of individuals in classes of more than 15 students. Why would they care about cheating? They are part of a system that doesnt make sense just as much as everyone else.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#47This is hugely important as a lot of people see programming as a ticket into higher-end jobs and will spend as little time as individual contributors as they can. The idea that "oh, they'll get caught in the workforce" is not correct - quite often the plan in the mind of these folks is that they will try to fake their way through and be moved up into project management, technical marketing, etc. and never have their…
Here's the trajectory:
Fake your way through basic CS courses.
Find your way into group-work heavy projects in later years, possibly doing enough ancillary aspects of the work to be semi-useful. It will be likely that your other group members will find it easier to grin and bear it.
Optionally: do a Masters or PhD. Plagiarize your work, or potentially hire someone to do it for you.
Continue into the work force, focusing on office politics, group projects, putting your name on things that you weren't really a contributor to, etc. Write a lot of reports.
This is why we're not a profession, folks. I'm amazed at the number of people who got on here to theorize about every goddamn thing ('grade inflation!' 'what are marks good for anyway?' 'I use the web all the time to remind me of things I've forgotten!') aside from the content of the article, which is that there are tons of people going through coding classes who are apparently aiming to get through without learning any code and want to cheat.
Every time you get dragged through some pointless, patronizing and degrading interview process that assumes that you don't know your stuff - you can thank the cheaters and fakers, and the fact that our industry doesn't have the will to root them out.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interviewing someone who will not pass is more expensive than not doing so.
Its a sunk cost. You won't know if they pass or not until you interview them.
What part is the sunk cost? Interviewing applicants takes time out of a lot of peoples' busy days. They don't have to spend that time if the company doesn't bring the applicant in for an interview.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#49Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#50This is hugely important as a lot of people see programming as a ticket into higher-end jobs and will spend as little time as individual contributors as they can. The idea that "oh, they'll get caught in the workforce" is not correct - quite often the plan in the mind of these folks is that they will try to fake their way through and be moved up into project management, technical marketing, etc. and never have their…
The solution is effective hiring. Work sample or project based hiring methods get people to demonstrate their skill-sets. I once had a candidate refer to resume/conversation based hiring as 'ritualized lying'. I think that's bang on.
This isn't directly in response to your comment, but...
There's an elitist under(over?)-tone within HackerNews that asserts any less-than-engineer technical role is inferior and attracting of undesirable character. There's a particular disdain for project managers, often for good reason. Few things are more aggravating than a poor non-technical PM. But, in many organizations they're essential and valuable members of a team. Skilled people can have an immense degree of technical talent and no interest in programming or engineering culture.