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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

#111

Post by Apocryphon »

rhodysurf wrote: post #6
jboogie77 wrote: post #3

This should be obvious to any person who tutors people online. If you check out sites like https://schoolsolver.com or https://chegg.com they have become havens for programming questions. One could make the argument that it's partly the teachers fault for reusing old programming assignments. On the other hand, especially on something like school solver, there are plenty of programmers, living in 3rd world countries,…

They were havens for traditional engineering questions when I was in college too (Dynamics, Statics, Fluids, etc). Every homework question we had seemed to be available online somewhere and it let to kids simply copying answers instead of simply learning the same material they were copying. It got so bad the whole MechEng dept at my school got rid of homework in favor of problem sets that were solved in a given class…

> It got so bad the whole MechEng dept at my school got rid of homework in favor of problem sets that were solved in a given classroom, at a given time, with a TA supervising.

Sounds like the Khan Academy format. Which is probably a better way for everyone to learn, to be honest. Why spend hours going down the wrong rabbit hole only to get the wrong answer anyway? Might as well have a TA around to help guide your approach.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#112

Post by danso »

parennoob wrote: post #77
danso wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two students also shared "nearly 100 identical lines of code". The `!done` was the icing on the cake.

Good point! I missed that and focused on the emphasized Boolean test, which is the first time I have seen any code in the NYTimes.

Trivia point: One of the co-authors of the piece, Jeremy Merrill, is a programmer-journalist at the Times (and previously at ProPublica); I imagine he helped with the code:

https://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/upton-a-web-scraping-f...

http://jeremybmerrill.com/blog/2016/01/flyover.html

http://jeremybmerrill.com/clips/2013/05/updating-dollars-for...

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#113

Post by tscherno »

Houshalter wrote: post #93
wayn3 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Would you be alarmed if you found out your doctor had entirely cheated their way through medical school and knew very little medicine? Great, you figured out that grades aren't a perfect metric. But so what? Grades don't prove a student is great, but they can eliminate a lot of students that are bad. If the bad students just cheat their way through, everyone else down the line suffers for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gert_Postel

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#114

Post by jldugger »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #4

What'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?

> What's with the obsession with student assessment over student learning

Surely you don't believe turning in someone else's work for an assignment counts as learning. At some level, we do need to know whether a student has learned the material. We assign homework because a) it's more efficient than lab assignments b) adult students grasp concepts best by doing. We grade them because we believe more students will do the work that leads to learning, because the students themselves want high grades (well, employers and scholarships do).

I'd be happy to see someone try to teach an intro to CS course in a US flagship state school with homework optional, and grades purely based on tests. Would that meet your definition of student learning?

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#115

Post by thegayngler »

humanrebar wrote: post #101
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…

> 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 communica…

TBQH, Management does not care about clean code so much as getting a project out by the deadline however unrealistic it may be. Clean code is very low on their list of priorities. Even among managers who used to be engineers it's very low on the list of priorities. They say they care about it. That's not the reality though.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#116

Post by darioush »

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…

if you know enough coding to break up and merge functions, you can also write fizzbuzz and therefore are not the type of person this article and comments are picking on.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#117

Post by TheSmiddy »

miranda_rights wrote: post #92
sdiq wrote: post #70

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…

This is exactly it, in my opinion. It's much easier to catch cheating by running homework code through something like MOSS than relying on a human TA to catch that 2 handwritten math assignments are exactly alike. I TAed both CS and Math classes at a large state school and once caught ~20% of a 50 person math class on a homework assignment because they had all copied a mis-labeled problem from the solutions manual. I…

At my uni you had to have all electronic devices in your bag under your desk and have all supporting materials displayed on your desk before the exam. There were floor walkers who would go up and down the aisles constantly throughout the exam looking for signs of cheating. If you were caught you were expelled.

A neighbouring uni even gave students lockers and didn't permit bringing anything into their exams.

Exam cheating seems like an incredibly easy problem to solve.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#118

Post by mb_72 »

I didn't cheat once through a CS degree gained in the early 90's (as my sometimes shabby, sometimes ok results would show), but I was made hard to think about whether a certain incident was cheating or not. One of my final year subjects involved a group project; we had to develop a PDA-type collection of applications, so it fitted well with a group project. The 'calculator' guy never turned up to any programming sessions or meetings aside from the initial one - someone else ended up hacking together his app in the last day - and then 60 minutes prior to the submission deadline. Back then we had to put together a paper project outline and notes, and there were strict requirements for it's submission format; laid out like so, printed like so, index like this, bound like that. If this paper submission was a minute late, we'd be docked 50% (!) of our overall marks. Four of us were panicking, with < 1hr left to submit, our project unprinted and unbound, and us with no idea how to operate the required machinery. The fifth member, our 'calculator' guy, actually shows up, and then proceeded to, unassisted, blitz through the printing, collation and binding of the project. We eventually submitted a minute or two prior to cutoff, and got a good mark; without the 'calculator' guy, who did no programming whatsoever, we would have been in big trouble. I've always wondered if he went on to be the 'binder guy' or 'fixer' IRL after graduating.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#119

Post by ender89 »

... The kicker to me is that as a developer if I am having trouble doing something, I ask the internet to see if someone else has already solved it. If I find the solution on stack exchange, I'm not going to rework the solution just so I can claim that I did the work. I'm probably not going to change a thing other than tweaking things to fit whatever the rest of my code looks like. I will re-write anything I find on something like stack exchange because it helps you remember what you did and you think about how what you're typing out works, but its essentially copied and pasted from someone else's work. I don't know if this counts as "cheating" or something in the classroom - though I certainly wouldn't have an entire application with reworked answers from stack exchange - but its a skill worth teaching to cs students. Heck, people sell books with code snippets intended to ease development for pete's sake, I can't see why using a java cookbook should be penalized in the classroom.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#120

Post by wayn3 »

Houshalter wrote: post #93
wayn3 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Would you be alarmed if you found out your doctor had entirely cheated their way through medical school and knew very little medicine? Great, you figured out that grades aren't a perfect metric. But so what? Grades don't prove a student is great, but they can eliminate a lot of students that are bad. If the bad students just cheat their way through, everyone else down the line suffers for it.

- if you actually read what i wrote, youd have figured out, on your own, that i didnt say that you should cheat in order to learn less, but to leave grades behind in favor of actually acquiring knowledge.

- before a doctor is even allowed to practice medicine, he has to go through 5 years of education followed by 3 years of apprenticeship, followed by 5 years of specialization. by that time, hes logged thousands of hours of supervised doctoring and he only "graduates" from that phase if all his superiors write stellar reference letters from him.

i dont really care if hes cheated on his first year anatomy exam. not particularly.

beyond that, doctors are held to a higher standard than other people for a reason. medical mistakes are usually final. but grades are a very shitty way of figuring out whether someone is compassionate, ethical and honest enough to be good doctors.

- modern society is engineered for efficiency. i consider it any persons right to make the best of it, for themselves. whats best for an individual is very often not the best for society as a whole. if you follow the script of modern society, you end up miserable. im not a fan of that. ideally, nobody would cheat those stupid exams, but i wont hold it against anyone. ideally, i dont want 10 million indians immigrating to every first world country, either, but i wont hold it against any one individual who tries.

(i dont have a problem with indians, its just that there are a lot of them, and it feels kind of overwhelming at times)

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