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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

#81

Post by flukus »

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…

Wasn't it also the University of Sydney that recently made graduates take their tests in English and checked their ID before taking the test? I think some students sued after a 90% failure rate.

So many degrees are as valuable as toilet paper.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#82

Post by dragonwriter »

glangdale wrote: post #47
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…

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, focus…

> 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.

Mostly the latter, though it's us (practitioners) not the industry (employers). We're a visible, highly paid field of work without professional body either settingnquality standards for schools or certifyiing minimum competency of individual practitioners.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#83

Post by lacampbell »

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…

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

Wait a minute, are you saying all I have to do to be promoted to Project Management is to code really badly?

Hmm. I wonder if C# has GOTOs...

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#84

Post by flukus »

robotic wrote: post #15

This reminds me of My last year at university. At our final senior project we each had to give a group presentation. I remember this one group that showed off this VB6 program (which was considered outdated language even then). They didn't know how to run the program without opening visual studio and clicking run. They didn't even have basic understanding of compilation/run phases. They couldn't answer basic question…

I've worked with a tonne of people in the industry like this, particularly in MS land where something is "impossible" if Visual Studio can't do it. Often you'll end up with a million projects for namespacing because they don't know what a folder is.

It's only going to get worse as we have a generation of kids that have only used tablets and don't know what an "exe" is, or even a file.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#85

Post by lacampbell »

yulaow wrote: post #39
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…

People have no idea how many times in a interview (especially with big corps) I end up talking with a PM and he tells me "Yeah, I started here already as Project Architect after my cs degree. I really don't like coding or anything related so I never do it, I focus on architecture and guide the others". And then I mentally run away.

What companies let fresh CS grads start as Project Architect?!

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#86

Post by benchaney »

chrismcb wrote: post #76
jdmichal wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a lecturer as a close friend in college. He was only a lecturer because he refused to do a dissertation to complete his doctorate. He was the best teacher in the department. So it goes. Anyway, he would get up in front of the staff meetings and say, the school is graduating students who do not know how to code. The school didn't care; they got paid. Every class of any import had team projects because "that's wh…

It isn't the University's job to teach people how to code. University isn't a vocational school. Yes, one should know how to code when they graduate. But the school is usually trying to teach the theory not the coding

It depends on the class, but often times it is the university's job to teach people how to code. For example, if you make it through an algorithms class without knowing how to actually implement the algorithms, that is probably ok, as long as you have a strong enough theoretical understanding of them. If you make it through a systems programming class without learning how to do any systems programming, then that is a problem.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#87

Post by closeparen »

chrismcb wrote: post #76
jdmichal wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a lecturer as a close friend in college. He was only a lecturer because he refused to do a dissertation to complete his doctorate. He was the best teacher in the department. So it goes. Anyway, he would get up in front of the staff meetings and say, the school is graduating students who do not know how to code. The school didn't care; they got paid. Every class of any import had team projects because "that's wh…

It isn't the University's job to teach people how to code. University isn't a vocational school. Yes, one should know how to code when they graduate. But the school is usually trying to teach the theory not the coding

What? Almost the entire meat of my CS program was programming projects in a variety of foundational domains (operating systems, networking, concurrency, databases, graphics, compilers, cryptography, machine learning, visualization, etc).

Theory (discrete math, algorithms, formal languages) was 3 courses out of an 18-course program. HN keeps talking like it's the only thing you do in a CS major, which is bizarre.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#88

Post by orthoganol »

glangdale wrote: post #47
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…

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, focus…

> you can thank the cheaters and fakers, and the fact that our industry doesn't have the will to root them out.

Isn't this in every industry? You don't apply for the job you are most qualified for, you shoot for the next level job, the job that pays better, looks better, but stretches your expertise.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#89

Post by lacampbell »

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…

Blindly copying code doesn't really scale though. It might solve one specific problem, but you still have to organise the code and make it reliable - which you probably won't.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#90

Post by not_a_cheater »

I may or may not have cheated my way through classes.

If I was to cheat, I would use the following methods:

1. Break up (or merge) functions

2. Switch ordering of declaration of variables and the ordering of methods/functions

3. Change names of variables/functions

4. Create useless variables to hold state (or condense/remove useless variables).

5. Switch ordering of math operations

As long as you take the time to understand the code you are copying, you won't make an obvious mistake like that while(!true) fail in the article.

The general guideline is to use cheating as a shortcut to the answer, not as a zero effort copy paste.

If I had hypothetically cheated using the above method on ~ 15 major code projects, I wouldn't have gotten caught.

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