161–170 of 303 posts
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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.
What language were they asking Australians to take their exams in before?
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> Also, I don't know what these people expect when they have to do a technical interview? They probably don't know they exist, they're fairly unique to our industry. They probably expect interviews to be just like everywhere else, all smiles and dressing well, with generic "when have you been challenged in life" questions. A lot of them will get hired by big corporates that don't do code tests too, that's why even pe…
Every form of engineering will have technical interviews. I imagine a lot of them use their degree as a ticket to a non-technical job.
As for those in college, it's entirely possible they don't realise the testing requirements either.
The bottom line: software should take into account not just how similar two solutions are, but how far from each other both students were.
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>As long as it wasn't an actual violation of the law But it is a violation of Academic Integrity, which is sort of a law you agreed to when signing up for a class. At least at my school it was like that.
He is saying that we should get rid of the law of Academic Integrity, and make classes more like the real world. It is an interesting idea, the problem being that in the real world, while you can kinda look up the answer, it is rare to find someone who is doing the exact same thing as what you need to do, for thousands of lines of code. Maybe college would better simulate the real world if you gave students personali…
Anecdote time: My friend is currently doing a Computer Science MS at a university that I'm sure most people on HN have heard of. She got accepted with an unrelated undergrad degree (though still STEM) and two Intro to Programming community college courses she took after graduating (which she cheated her way through by paying her roommate at the time to do all of her homework). She hits me up for help with her homewor…
I've had jobs where I had to sit around and pretend to be busy. They're awful. I much, much prefer to have challenging work to do.
> My friend
I don't care to have friends like that. Cheaters will eventually try to scam their friends, too. Besides, cheaters are boring losers.
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…
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 to take advantage of it. I wouldn't be surprised if they had guys helping them cheat on exams.
Supply and demand, plus sexual attraction are a part of the problem.
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The whole "effective hiring" answer doesn't scale. I am absolutely appalled at the idea that I would have to do a 'fizzbuzz' test for a purportedly senior developer listing 'strong C/C++ skills', for example. However, that's the reality we face, and part of that reality comes from having people be comfortable with lying their way into our "profession" and us not be completely aghast when it happens. A fake doctor or…
> A fake doctor or accountant is a scandal. A fake programmer is business as usual. I generally agree with your points, but people don't die or go to jail because of bad code. With a few exceptions. And in those exceptions there are additional checks (checklists upon checklists, rigorous testing gauntlets) to prevent buggy code from causing safety issues. Technically underqualified people typically result in missed d…
> Bookout and Schwarz v. Toyota emanated from a September 2007 UA event that caused a fatal crash. Jean Bookout and her friend and passenger Barbara Schwarz were exiting Interstate Highway 69 in Oklahoma, when she lost throttle control of her 2005 Camry. When the service brakes would not stop her speeding sedan, she threw the parking brake, leaving a 150-foot skid mark from right rear tire, and a 25-foot skid mark from the left. The Camry, however, continued speeding down the ramp and across the road at the bottom, crashing into an embankment. Schwarz died of her injuries; Bookout spent five months recovering from head and back injuries.
It's not just spacecraft that kill people due to crappy code. Even something as mundane as a _Camry_ can be fatal if the software team isn't diligent about their work.
http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende...
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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…
Is the work sample done in person or take home? If it's take home, then they can just cheat on that by hiring someone else to do it.
"Why did you do this part this way? Would you do it differently if requirement X were different?"
It's immediately obvious if they cheated. Better yet, that's a much better, more relevant discussion than most whiteboard problems.
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The real problem is, the idealised goal of a university should be "learn something", but it's actually "get a degree".
Another case of "Once you turn a metric into a goal, it ceases being a good metric".
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What language were they asking Australians to take their exams in before?
Not sure I get your point. I don't know Australian culture, but wouldn't English be appropriate?
Our universities also have a high proportion of international students. Predominantly from China, Korea and elsewhere in SE Asia. These students pay much higher fees than Australian citizens. They're used to subsidise the local education market. Classes are conducted in English, but allowances are often made for assessments.