As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating • Hacker News Board

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#211

Post by oregondan » Tue, May 30, 2017, 12:48 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #209

As a JavaScript developer none of this matters to me. Here is the reality I see: JavaScript skills are in demand almost everywhere even if it is not the primary language or skill of a given job. Almost nobody receives any kind of formal education or training in how to write in JavaScript. If you work for a web based company you WILL at some point be tasked to write in JavaScript. When developers, who have never touch…

What??

This seems like a road that only leads to technical debt brought on by people who, as you say, know nothing about the code they're working on. Why would you feel that's acceptable to a company?

Fortunately software development (often) has little direct impact on matters of life or death, but can you imagine an architect or construction worker who successfully cheated their way through school being brought on and having zero idea of how to weld, or how to predict the weak points in a structure?

Also, I'd argue that using frameworks is different than 'not writing code,' though I do agree that the JS community has become framework-obsessed...

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#212

Post by beckler » Tue, May 30, 2017, 12:49 PM UTC

I had an incident like this when I was in University.

There was a guy in my class who struggled with a major project, and he asked if I could help him with it. He wanted me to show him how to get started, but he would never meet with me, and wanted to see my code. So I stripped out the most critical part of my implementation, and shared it with him. After weeks of silence he asks for help again, I ask him to send me what he had... And it was the exact same code I had sent him weeks earlier with very little changes. He had been asking everyone for their code and trying to copy and paste it together. I ended up going to our professor about it... And he knew who I was talking about before I finished explaining everything. It was not his first time in the class, and he had done it before. He somehow graduated with a CS degree even though it took him a few more years.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#213

Post by eigengrau » Tue, May 30, 2017, 12:49 PM UTC

wayn3 wrote: post #46

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…

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,…

> In germany, what you call cheating isnt even considered cheating.

I can also attest that this isn’t universally the case. Our faculty’s introductory programming classes explicitly forbade this, and we went so far to even run automated anti-plagiarism heuristics over the solutions handed in.

I’m not sure how strongly I feel about the policy (or whether it’s still current). There definitely were tendencies in such classes that students who already came in with prior programming experience to be eager to »help out« more inexperienced students by sending them their solutions in verbatim, which led to other students copying at least certain program constructs without grokking them and without having exercised more general problem solving skills associated with the task.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#214

Post by marsRoverDev » Tue, May 30, 2017, 12:50 PM UTC

consp wrote: post #205

komerdoor wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company in the Netherlands sometimes hires me to help them guide the interns. They are what is called a learning-company over here. Out of the 100 IT interns every year there are usually about 5 that know more than only the basics. This has been a consistent pattern I've seen over the last 4 years. It does not matter what level education they are having. Many times I even had to explain what functions, conditions e…

I've been an assistant on 1st to 3rd year bachelors courses in CS in the Netherlands (basic OOP, Software Architecture and Algorithmics like courses) and probably seen many of the types of copying and forgery. I can concur that most students don't really understand but just regurgitate what has been said even at Academic levels. On some Examples of what i've seen which sometimes leads to the types of interns you give…

RE the group assignments, my university quite successfully dealt with this by introducing a scaling factor based on peer assessments within the group. This scaling factor was strong enough to allow a group to fail one member if they received poor enough grades. Failing one member tends to boost your own grade as well, as the assumption is that you ended up having to pick up the slack.

I did three group assessments, and out of those three failed two students with the help of my teammates, by co-ordinating our peer assessment. This peer assessment does not become public until grades come out, at which point they can be disputed. But 3 vs 1 usually comes out in favour of the group.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#215

Post by lol768 » Tue, May 30, 2017, 1:00 PM UTC

marsRoverDev wrote: post #214

consp wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been an assistant on 1st to 3rd year bachelors courses in CS in the Netherlands (basic OOP, Software Architecture and Algorithmics like courses) and probably seen many of the types of copying and forgery. I can concur that most students don't really understand but just regurgitate what has been said even at Academic levels. On some Examples of what i've seen which sometimes leads to the types of interns you give…

RE the group assignments, my university quite successfully dealt with this by introducing a scaling factor based on peer assessments within the group. This scaling factor was strong enough to allow a group to fail one member if they received poor enough grades. Failing one member tends to boost your own grade as well, as the assumption is that you ended up having to pick up the slack. I did three group assessments, a…

> RE the group assignments, my university quite successfully dealt with this by introducing a scaling factor based on peer assessments within the group.

This is something my university has done, but didn't implement quite as well. I think the key here is making it completely anonymous (ideally filled out online individually) because otherwise objectively assessing a group member's performance in front of them is difficult.

With that said, I think I'd still find it hard to outright fail a group member via these means unless they literally put zero effort into the group project - it seems a small thing to threaten their entire degree over.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#216

Post by b0rsuk » Tue, May 30, 2017, 1:01 PM UTC

conanbatt wrote: post #210

b0rsuk wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misogynist post ahead. You can make yourself feel good by downvoting this. In Poland where I made my CS degree, girls studying CS are very few. As a result, girl students get a lot more (sexually motivated) attention than on other, less technical subjects. Long story short guys were falling over themselves to help girls pass their programming assignment, do their homeworks for them etc. (Some) girls were very happy t…

Thats fine, they are likely to receive the same benefits on the jobs as well. Who's to say its not a team building skill??

But that way they learn manipulating people instead of programming. The point of a programming assignment or exam is to force people understand programming. If you're hiring programmers you likely want "Masters Degree in IT" to mean "this person can code", not "this person can manipulate people".

Good for them, not necessarily good for other people and the company in general. And in my experience romantic or erotic relationships in a workplace is a very bad idea. It's probably this reason that a woman on a ship used to be associated with bad luck - in an all-male crew people are likely to fight for her favor, instead of cooperating. Note I'm not saying women shouldn't perform traditionally male jobs, I'm point out that an unhealthy proportion of men to women can encourage extra cheating.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#217

Post by aspec » Tue, May 30, 2017, 1:01 PM UTC

b0rsuk wrote: post #166

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…

Misogynist post ahead. You can make yourself feel good by downvoting this. In Poland where I made my CS degree, girls studying CS are very few. As a result, girl students get a lot more (sexually motivated) attention than on other, less technical subjects. Long story short guys were falling over themselves to help girls pass their programming assignment, do their homeworks for them etc. (Some) girls were very happy t…

Good insight, that would explain the mechanism propelling a fractionally small minority of cheaters at best.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#218

Post by lol768 » Tue, May 30, 2017, 1:07 PM UTC

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

I'd disagree on this. Is it important for the university to cover the theory (algorithms, compiler design/automata/languages/parsing, logic, discrete mathematics etc)? Absolutely.

Does that mean there isn't space for a module on software engineering theory (design patterns, development methodologies, OOP principles, testing, version control...)? I really don't see why that has to be the case. Some of the worst code I've seen has been written by academics - undocumented, undescriptive nonstandard single letter variable names everywhere, huge monolithic functions named "compute" that span hundreds of lines and several levels of indentation.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#219

Post by JustFYI » Tue, May 30, 2017, 1:15 PM UTC

skookumchuck wrote: post #155

JustFYI wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employers don't need to take responsibility. All they need to do is to think about income. If they can bill the customer for an employee's "work" it doesn't matter to them whether the employee can actually do anything or not. This is common practice in the IT industry.

I don't know about companies, but I have a tendency to not pay a contractor's bill if he didn't deliver the work as agreed.

Yes, we all get that you don't get that it's easy for larger companies to mix in workforce that either does nothing or does not even exist. This is rampant in the construction and IT businesses.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#220

Post by sitepodmatt » Tue, May 30, 2017, 1:15 PM UTC

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…

A big tactic the fakers use is to paraphrase everything everyone else says. We had a guy in our team that literally paraphased everything said by anyone else in the stand up. E.g. you could say we're waiting on the dba team for a qa db (grr large multinationals and their asshat dbas), he would seconds later say something like 'i think whats currently delaying our progress is waiting on the dba team'. Last I heard he got big pay rises (as a coder at the time with a net negative contribution) and eventually entered management, my friend that was a permie on the team got a insulting 500gbp annual increase and a bad performance review, he wasnt a faker, he quit.

Fakers, cheaters, bullshiters are everywhere unfortunately, spot them early and avoid them where possible, preempt their attempts to land grab credit