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

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#101

Post by humanrebar » Tue, May 30, 2017, 4:24 AM UTC

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…

> The solution is effective hiring.

Meh. Hiring is expecting other people to train your employees for you.

It's important to hire smart, driven, forthright people, but if you really want them to, say, write readable code, assign them to read Clean Code, make code clarity part of the regular performance review, add it to the code review checklist, etc.

In my opinion, bigger than hiring practices is a lack of communication up and down the chain of command about the importance of good code, who is writing it, and what are the carrots and sticks involved in making sure good code happens. Most people able to hand out raises and job titles work off secondhand and hand-wavy information about technical prowess at best:

"Yeah, he's really good. Fixes lots of bugs and get asked for help a lot."

Of course, that could be because the code's a big mess and he wrote himself some excellent job security. A non-technical PM would know little about this very common issue.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#102

Post by humanrebar » Tue, May 30, 2017, 4:30 AM UTC

yrio wrote: post #68

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

It can also be a copyright violation, depending on where the code is copied from.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#103

Post by tsm » Tue, May 30, 2017, 4:31 AM UTC

I TAed every semester of college except my first, and went to a small liberal arts school where cheating was legitimately uncommon. However, I'll never forget the following exchange:

Student: Why did you give me a 9/10 on the sorting lab?

tsm: Your shell sort didn't work for n > 7

S: But Professor Smith looked over my shoulder during the lab and said it looked fine.

tsm: And in fact it breaks for n > 7; I don't care if Alan Turing looked over your shoulder and said it was fine, if it breaks it breaks.

S: proceeds to pout at me for literally the rest of the semester, failing to understand how the professor-anointed code could have problems in it

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#104

Post by humanrebar » Tue, May 30, 2017, 4:33 AM UTC

not_a_cheater wrote: post #90

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 und…

At some point it would incrementally more effort to just write the stuff yourself. Most of the time in undergrad, you're just implementing the (provided in pseudocode) data structures and algorithms from the textbook anyway.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#105

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 30, 2017, 4:43 AM UTC

coralreef wrote: post #69

Buge wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#106

Post by bdcravens » Tue, May 30, 2017, 4:51 AM UTC

These days, at least half of the requests I see come through my CodeMentor profile are blatantly obvious homework assignments.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#107

Post by dba7dba » Tue, May 30, 2017, 4:54 AM UTC

I went to one of the better University of California campuses like 20 years ago. And my friend majoring in CS told me a CS professor caught about a third of his class cheating in their take-home programming assignments. This was in a lower level CS class.

He ran an analysis through turned in assignments and discovered almost a third had patterns that signaled it had been copied from someone else's work. This is before github so the suspicion was that some were copying code from other classmates.

We will always have cheaters.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#108

Post by NickGerleman » Tue, May 30, 2017, 5:18 AM UTC

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.

I can confirm that he does. He is a full time lecturer for 3 or 4 classes a semester and produces a staggering amount of material. He is careful to never repeat assignments and each one requires detailing the project, creating automated tests, creating all sorts of frameworks for them(eg, import this jar and pass the instance of your game logic to this black box and you'll have an interactive Swing application to play the game). He plans out his lectures thoroughly and has 2-4 hours of them a day. This doesn't even cover office hours or meetings.

I never really realized how much work a good lecturer does until I was a TA under them. I have so much more respect for people teaching introductory classes now.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#109

Post by askvictor » Tue, May 30, 2017, 5:21 AM UTC

I teach at a (somewhat academic) high school, and we've noticed a massive shift in how students think about copying in the past few years - about half of our students think it's OK to share answers for an assessment where it will assist another student (i.e. classical notion of cheating). I'm very curious if this is a mind-shift in younger people that are just a lot happier to share things, and this is just a consequence.

The other thing to consider with this is that the assessment system probably needs to be overhauled entirely - which would be a good thing as there are plenty of other reasons why it's broken.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#110

Post by sbov » Tue, May 30, 2017, 5:31 AM UTC

A few anecdotes from college (15 years ago now) regarding cheating/"cheating":

I transferred from community college, where we used C++. The new school used Java, but the C++ classes still counted as credit at the new school, so I was in upper division classes. I asked a teacher about it, they said "theres no way you can survive this class if you don't already know Java." I used one weekend to learn Java, and saw it wasn't much different. However, throughout the semester that teacher would continually say "I know there are cheaters in this class because I know some of you don't even know Java." Uhuh.

My first actual cheating encounter was also that same semester, after I turned in my first project for a class, a classmate asked to see how I did something. Ignorant me sent them my project so they could. However, we had a final project built on the first. After the class ended they admitted they never finished the first, and used my first project as a base for their final project. Lesson learned.

Someone offered me $200 to do a group project with them. Not really cheating, but their intentions were obvious. No thanks.

Of course, plenty of dead weight on other group projects. But nothing as overt as the above two incidents.