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As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
21–30 of 303 posts
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#22anyone who relies on cheating never seems to do well during the harder major courses at my school (Texas). A lot of the professors have really rigorous cheating detections, and will make you explain every line of code in person if they suspect something. (At least in honor classes) Also, I don't know what these people expect when they have to do a technical interview?
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#23This 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 lack of these specific skills exposed again.
In my experience these people are very dangerous, as their motivation to avoid being forced to try to do the thing they were actually hired to do is very strong. So they will have a mindbogglingly strong motivation towards office politics, manipulation of grievance mechanisms, etc. relative to someone who is 'distracted' by the prospect of, I dunno, doing the work that they are meant to do.
I worked at a tutor at the University of Sydney in 1993, where a group of 7 students hired a professional programmer to sit the 'gatekeeper' practical exam. These exams could be retaken but you could not enter 2nd year CS without passing them regardless of your marks. They were caught (via handwriting analysis on the worksheets where you were required to show your notes, among other things!) and in some cases fought the university in court for years over this.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#24EDIT: My comment completely missed that there were 100 lines of identical code noticed as well. Leaving below for context. ------- Does anyone else find the example cited in the article rather flimsy? Out of 450, two students incorrectly used the inverse of a Boolean for a conditional – an error I have seen tens, if not hundreds of times. Perhaps they used better ways of detecting cheating (some are covered later in…
The article implies that the cited instance of text is verbatim identical, which is unusual.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Saves time. It's a lot easier to determine if you are capable from "my GPA is x" rather than having someone sit down and write code for a few hours and doing a code review.
Everyone does code review or whiteboards now in industry at least - it's not as if you're offered a residency or job after you get a degree unless it's a pretty good degree with some actual interviewing.
What percentage of applicants do they offer interviews to? How do you think they whittle that number down?
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#26I'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 (Measure of Software Similarity) find much more.
It's hard for professors to take time to deal with it. A professor more or less told me that the process to report it to the dean of students would take months of his time, and that he already spent 55 hours a week for his classes. He explained that the time it would take to go after the cheaters would detract from time to make good assignments, labs, and lectures for the students.
It's hard to see a professor for a large class (500 people) having the time to deal with handling cheaters so the problem continues. I'm curious how common this is as a problem at other schools.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#27Why do those students even need to cheat? Harvard has a 97% graduation rate and Stanford 93%.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#28No one talks about the fact that current CS curricula are fundamentally flawed. Too much time is spent in class, and on homework and one is left with little time to do "real" work.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#29What 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…
If the structure of the class incorporates using real-world code, then fine. Most upper-division classes allow you to use any libraries you want anyway. But some classes, especially lower-division, are explicitly built around learning a concept from scratch. If you copy the code, you can't learn the concepts.
I agree that teachers should strive to allow "open internet" assignments and tests as much as possible, but it's not always viable. All the best classes I've had were this way, but it's usually quite labor-intensive for the instructors.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#30Why do those students even need to cheat? Harvard has a 97% graduation rate and Stanford 93%.
How do you think they got that?