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Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

alistair.blog

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Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#141

Post by mensetmanusman »

youssefabdelm wrote: post #135
josefresco wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If anything this should cause some people to question the very educational structure they've set up. I played basketball growing up. Much of our practice was boring things like passing drills, dribbling drills, running, countless free throws. We all grumbled & complained - "Why can't we just scrimmage?" we'd ask. "I already know how to play the game, why do I need to work on these boring skills?" I don't think I nee…

The dependencies still need not be taught in a boring way. For example, if teachers did surveys of students strongest interests and goals, they can think of ways to 'inject' (in a genuine way) dependencies as stepping stones to their goals. "In order to achieve goal X, you need to know how to do Y, and in order to know how to do Y, you need to know how to do Z". Let's assume Z is the boring task. Just by connecting i…

Fundamentals are almost always hard. There will always be struggle, just like working out is painful. It’s part of human nature.

Many people shy away from doing hard things and use words like boring.

There are strategies to make fundamentals more fun, but those strategies only work for a small subset of people. Other people look at those strategies and think they are boring as well.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#142

Post by youssefabdelm »

jonahx wrote: post #139
youssefabdelm wrote: post #118

Rooting for you guys. If anything this should cause some people to question the very educational structure they've set up. If people are attempting to evade homework it's because it isn't interesting to the student, which hints at a deeper problem that the school/teacher/entire school set-up and structure needs to address. They essentially need to throw out everything they've set up because they're operating it more…

> Instead of saying "What are we doing that isn't capturing the students interest in these tasks? How can we connect this subject to the students most meaningful, important, and immediate concerns and goals? What concepts from this subject can we teach the student that'll help them achieve those salient goals?" While this is not a bad question to ask, asking it won't avoid this kind of thing. Because it doesn't matte…

Very fair point. But perhaps if they did focus on those questions in the first place, they'd be viewed less as authority and more as friends.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#143

Post by hedora »

youssefabdelm wrote: post #118

Rooting for you guys. If anything this should cause some people to question the very educational structure they've set up. If people are attempting to evade homework it's because it isn't interesting to the student, which hints at a deeper problem that the school/teacher/entire school set-up and structure needs to address. They essentially need to throw out everything they've set up because they're operating it more…

I think it is telling that the first version simply skipped the mandatory 20 minute YouTube video.

Just provide a transcript! MathML and Latex exist.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#145

Post by jonahx »

youssefabdelm wrote: post #142
jonahx wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of saying "What are we doing that isn't capturing the students interest in these tasks? How can we connect this subject to the students most meaningful, important, and immediate concerns and goals? What concepts from this subject can we teach the student that'll help them achieve those salient goals?" While this is not a bad question to ask, asking it won't avoid this kind of thing. Because it doesn't matte…

Very fair point. But perhaps if they did focus on those questions in the first place, they'd be viewed less as authority and more as friends.

I feel like this can happen with individual teachers that you have a personal relationship with. I don't believe it's possible with a company, no matter how "pure" the company's intentions were, even if they were not for profit, etc. At best, it would a bit less likely.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#146

Post by evandale »

rcfox wrote: post #127
karlding wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, it sounds more like the old system that WaterlooWorks replaced (JobMine). JobMine was just Oracle/PeopleSoft's PeopleTools under the hood. Some of my friends who graduated earlier told stories about how JobMine at one point accepted resumes in HTML. Of course, this also meant that it was vulnerable to XSS attacks. The eventual fix was just to only allow PDF resumes.

Haha, it was JobMine!

Right from your first sentence I was thinking "I bet this is JobMine"

It still blows me away a school filled with CS people had such a god-awful system. Then again we are CS people and not UI/UX designers.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#147

Post by pards »

mcv wrote: post #97

Epic stuff, and I think this experience may well be more valuable than the homework you avoided. Basically you did harder homework in order to avoid easier homework. The problem is letting other people use it; of course it's nice to help people, and it's altruistic to do so for free, but some of those people might actually need this homework to learn, and you may have deprived them of that. (Although I also think wat…

KPMG got fined $US450k for this kind of behaviour [0]. If I recall correctly, employees kept the answers to the mandatory compliance training tests in a document on a shared drive.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/15/us-wa...

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#148

Post by edub »

In the early 80's on a TRS-80 Model III, I was in whatever grade you learn to alphabetize words, and I wrote a Basic program to handle the alphabetization. I input the 20 or so words, it output them in order, and then I transcribed that to my homework assignment. My mom said it was cheating and I couldn't use it, and my dad said that if I could write a program to do it then I illustrated that I could alphabetize word lists and it wasn't cheating.

I have a suspicion that I probably found the code in one of my dads computer magazines, so it probably was cheating since I doubt I actually wrote the program from scratch. Maybe partial credit for being resourceful. :)

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#149

Post by AyyWS »

evandale wrote: post #146
rcfox wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, it was JobMine!

Right from your first sentence I was thinking "I bet this is JobMine" It still blows me away a school filled with CS people had such a god-awful system. Then again we are CS people and not UI/UX designers.

I worked with a guy who was previously a big state university buyer/administrator. He said that Oracle charged around 1% of retail prices to the university.
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