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As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

nytimes.com

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Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#61

Post by Buge »

goodroot wrote: post #50
glangdale wrote: post #23

This 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 attracti…

Is the work sample done in person or take home? If it's take home, then they can just cheat on that by hiring someone else to do it.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#62

Post by openasocket »

adamnemecek wrote: post #51
openasocket wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to expand? This isn't exactly a helpful answer

You should be provided enough time to explore things you are interested in. Better?

What's that mean? As in you have time to just learn on your own, without lectures or structured study? I never had trouble finding time to do that at university. How much is enough in your book? And you could always just take fewer credit hours per semester or something.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#63

Post by eric_b »

NickGerleman wrote: post #26

I'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…

Somewhat off topic, but I doubt very much there are any professors at state schools specializing in research that spend anywhere near 55 hours a week on their classes. Maybe he meant per month.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#64

Post by Buge »

I was an IA for a computer security class. We discovered a number of students cheating by copying answers from a public github repo from the previous semester. We noticed because many students were submitting the same bizarrely wrong answer. Some students had even copied all the typos.

Even crazier, a number of the students had even forked the github repo with their github accounts. That is some terrible opsec. Definitely losing points for that.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#65

Post by goodroot »

Buge wrote: post #61
goodroot wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 attracti…

Is the work sample done in person or take home? If it's take home, then they can just cheat on that by hiring someone else to do it.

At Compose (YC, S11) we had a two part hiring method. The first was a blind work-sample. You had unlimited time to complete it. Identifying information was obfuscated and graders would yes/no objective criteria. The best samples proceeded to the "work day".

During the work day, you'd join is in Slack for 8 hours. You'd need to ask probing questions to mock-up our infrastructure and pitch a feature based on "how we work".

One could try to cheat on the first part, but there is no chance one could have bamboozled us during the work day.

For our technical writing positions we had some instances of outright plagiarism, but no instances of anyone trying to cheat the coding sample.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#66

Post by nyc640 »

eric_b wrote: post #63
NickGerleman wrote: post #26

I'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…

Somewhat off topic, but I doubt very much there are any professors at state schools specializing in research that spend anywhere near 55 hours a week on their classes. Maybe he meant per month.

Because introductory CS enrollment has ballooned so much recently, many professors for large introductory CS classes nowadays are full-time lecturers that do not conduct any research. Many full-time research faculty only teach smaller, upper-level classes.

In my experience, this works out pretty well since many of the full-time lecturers do dedicate a lot of their time to teaching (55 hours is totally believable depending on teaching load) and do a really good job of it.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#68

Post by yrio »

keerthiko wrote: post #20

What they call "cheating" is how I do my job as a developer of a 3-person (dev) software company. We make software. People like it and use it. We make money. Who cares whether the code came from our head or from something publicly available on the internet, or from someone willing to help us? As long as it wasn't an actual violation of the law. There's no good reason to create a separate set of laws for the classroom…

> Who cares whether the code came from our head or from something publicly available on the internet, or from someone willing to help us?

I hope you are not implying it's OK for students to blindly copy / use code they don't understand.

Otherwise you will end up with "professional" software developers who can't even solve FizzBuzz :p

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#69

Post by coralreef »

Buge wrote: post #56
coralreef wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's obvious enough. Any recruiting funnel will have a criteria of requirements that the prospect needs to fulfill. Then they're brought in for a technical interview. There's no escaping that. You don't give automatically give them a job because they listed a 4.0 GPA on their CV and were nice on the phone.

If you weed out a large percent due to low GPA, then you've saved time interviewing those people.

You would also weed out a lot of fantastic talent, who aren't motivated by school or didn't go to school.

In programming, this is a significant amount of people.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#70

Post by sdiq »

In this case, I believe, the prevalence of cheating among CS students isn't higher than cheating among students of other courses in the same universities, or elsewhere. Even in public health, occasionally, the prevalence of a certain disease goes up courtesy of technological advancement. The prevalence of that disease in a population that was initially low or unknown suddenly shoots up because the means with which to detect the disease has now become widely available, and not always because the incidence of that disease in that population has only started going up. Now, if other courses offered at these named universities had means of detecting students cheating in such courses, the prevalence of cheating in these other courses would probably be as high as in CS. Universities would thus need to either come up with systems that detect cheaters that has both a high true positives rate and a low false negatives rate, or, come up with a better way of assessing students that does not involve exercises that can easily be "borrowed" from the Internet.
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