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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

#221

Post by Clubber »

glangdale wrote: post #47
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…

Here's the trajectory: Fake your way through basic CS courses. Find your way into group-work heavy projects in later years, possibly doing enough ancillary aspects of the work to be semi-useful. It will be likely that your other group members will find it easier to grin and bear it. Optionally: do a Masters or PhD. Plagiarize your work, or potentially hire someone to do it for you. Continue into the work force, focus…

>Every time you get dragged through some pointless, patronizing and degrading interview process that assumes that you don't know your stuff - you can thank the cheaters and fakers, and the fact that our industry doesn't have the will to root them out.

Not only that, but it devalues and dilutes your own degree, which is significantly more damaging monetarily.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#222

Post by abronan »

In my French University, group or individual assignments had a very low coefficient compared to written exams (where it was almost impossible to cheat as this was basically like white board coding and students would be spaced by 2/3 seats between them).

It was in the order of 20%(group/coding)/80%(written exam). This had the effect of eliminating 50% of all students on the first semester for the first year of CompSci (DistSys) Master's Degree. So even if a group cheated on group/coding assignments, they most likely wouldn't go through the written exam. We called it: "The Purge".

From then, very few instances of cheating (topics were changed every year). One group got caught cheating on another one during the second year (iOS objectiveC class) and they got a failing grade.

Almost every professor would use automated code checkers on group and individual assignments. And if you get caught, you have to go through thorough questioning by the professor, eventually getting a failing grade and having to go through the second session of written exams (which was most of the time harder than the first session).

What was unavoidable though were group projects with only one person working on the project and the others doing nothing or just spending time preparing for written exams. This happened to me quite a few times. I didn't mind as I was learning a lot, but it got me exhausted for written exams where I was getting good but not outstanding grades.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#223

Post by FLUX-YOU »

lacampbell wrote: post #83
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…

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 Wait a minute, are you saying all I have to do to be promoted to Project Management is to code really badly? Hmm. I wonder if C# has GOTOs...

>Hmm. I wonder if C# has GOTOs...

Why yes, yes it does.

You can also alphabetically sort a list of 30 things by adding those things to a list line-by-line, sorting them in alphabetical order yourself.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#224

Post by dgacmu »

b0rsuk wrote: post #166
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…

Misogynist post ahead. You can make yourself feel good by downvoting this. 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 t…

As others have noted, this is unlikely to explain it.

I'm a professor at Carnegie Mellon. In the most recent semester, I taught a large undergraduate intro to programming course (CMU 15-112 is similar in audience to CS50 at Harvard. Our cheating ratio - about 10% - was similar this year, and was also higher than normal). The course is taken by almost all first-year students at Carnegie Mellon - it has about a 50/50 gender ratio. Out of curiosity, I examined the stats for our cheating cases - briefly, so I may have made some errors. But males accounted for about 2/3rds of the cheating cases. It's not clear that that is statistically significant, or if it boils down to "about the same."

Unlike your hypothesis, this is based upon the actual cheating statistics from a class of about 450 people. :-)

Some time over drinks, remind me to tell you the story of the guy who asked his g/f to go get him a snack from the vending machine, stuck a USB drive in her computer, and stole her homework to hand in as his own.

Cheating happens across genders and nationalities. We look hard to identify trends, because we try hard to find ways to intervene before the cheating happens. Most cheating comes from poorly-managed stress. A smaller, regrettable subset comes from people who actively seek to cheat their way through something -- but most of it is simply a bad decision under time pressure.

The NYT article's hypothesis that people are putting more hopes on CS classes for their future careers rings true to me. We see a lot of people who are (a) not doing very well in the class; and (b) (probably mistakenly) believe they need an A or a B in the class in order to succeed in . This creates a stressful situation for them, and some respond in a way that bites them in the long run: they cheat. And, because this is CS and we have MOSS and other tools, they get caught.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#225

Post by pavel_lishin »

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 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.

Even if they don't follow the Dilbert Principle path, it's not like there's a universal catalog of how skilled any given employee is; someone who can bullshit their way into a job and can last there for six months is still employable after they're let go when it's discovered that they don't know what a for loop is. Not everyone checks references.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#226

Post by ThomaszKrueger »

wayn3 wrote: post #120
Houshalter wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Parent of a surgeon here. My son's medical school did away with grades altogether - it's pass / fail. They still have to pass the board exams every year.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#227

Post by Blackthorn »

raverbashing wrote: post #177
chrismcb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't the University's job to teach people how to code. University isn't a vocational school. Yes, one should know how to code when they graduate. But the school is usually trying to teach the theory not the coding

"It is not the medical university's job to teach people to practice medicine. It's not a vocational school. The school is usually trying to teach the theory, not the practice" See how it doesn't make sense?

No, because a medical school is literally called a professional school.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#228

Post by dccoolgai »

sitepodmatt wrote: post #220
glangdale wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the trajectory: Fake your way through basic CS courses. Find your way into group-work heavy projects in later years, possibly doing enough ancillary aspects of the work to be semi-useful. It will be likely that your other group members will find it easier to grin and bear it. Optionally: do a Masters or PhD. Plagiarize your work, or potentially hire someone to do it for you. Continue into the work force, focus…

A big tactic the fakers use is to paraphrase everything everyone else says. We had a guy in our team that literally paraphased everything said by anyone else in the stand up. E.g. you could say we're waiting on the dba team for a qa db (grr large multinationals and their asshat dbas), he would seconds later say something like 'i think whats currently delaying our progress is waiting on the dba team'. Last I heard he…

"Fakers, cheaters, bullshiters are everywhere unfortunately"

We are. Source: I am a master-level bullshitter. Professional lobbyists and politicians ask me to make introductions, use my network, etc. Here's the weird thing, though: I'm a software developer. A pretty good one. Not the best, but top 20%.

I know tons of Natural Bullshitters like myself, but I've never met another one that was a software engineer. Dabblers, occasionally, but no Naturals.

The thing is, it takes a bullshitter to spot a bullshitter. So being a good bullshitter is the skill that has offered the most utility to the various jobs I've had in tech: calling out frauds, inflating the profiles of the people on my teams doing actual work, undermining lesser bullshitters that try to take credit from them... come to think of it, there's never been a technical team I was on where I was not the most popular member of the team (among my peers, at least).

So if you can find a Daywalker, try adding them to your team...

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#229

Post by b0rsuk »

dgacmu wrote: post #224
b0rsuk wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misogynist post ahead. You can make yourself feel good by downvoting this. 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 t…

As others have noted, this is unlikely to explain it. I'm a professor at Carnegie Mellon. In the most recent semester, I taught a large undergraduate intro to programming course (CMU 15-112 is similar in audience to CS50 at Harvard. Our cheating ratio - about 10% - was similar this year, and was also higher than normal). The course is taken by almost all first-year students at Carnegie Mellon - it has about a 50/50 g…

I'm not pretending to explain why all cheating occurs, or who cheats more. Only what makes the problem worse. In any case I don't know enough woman programmers to make a statistically significant argument. I just described what I encountered while earning my own degree.

It could be that those girls just had a cheaty nature and would cheat one way or another. On the other hand, there's a saying "Opportunity makes a thief". It's why during a war looters and marauders become a problem. In other words, some people cheat because an opportunity presents itself. Some horny guys essentially offer to cheat for you, and you have to actively resist.

Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

#230

Post by komerdoor »

consp wrote: post #205
komerdoor wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company in the Netherlands sometimes hires me to help them guide the interns. They are what is called a learning-company over here. Out of the 100 IT interns every year there are usually about 5 that know more than only the basics. This has been a consistent pattern I've seen over the last 4 years. It does not matter what level education they are having. Many times I even had to explain what functions, conditions e…

I've been an assistant on 1st to 3rd year bachelors courses in CS in the Netherlands (basic OOP, Software Architecture and Algorithmics like courses) and probably seen many of the types of copying and forgery. I can concur that most students don't really understand but just regurgitate what has been said even at Academic levels. On some Examples of what i've seen which sometimes leads to the types of interns you give…

Yes. I can imagine this to be common among all levels, but the interns I am guiding are mostly from HBO (between college and university level) and some MBO (college level). Did not expect it to be the case at university level as well.

I really do not understand why so many people want to get into IT if they are not really interested in it. Job security probably? Not for the money I assume as in the Netherlands the average salaries for even a senior programmer are pretty low. +/- EUR 20,81 an hour before taxes (+/- EUR 12 after taxes).

Sources:

https://www.loonwijzer.nl/home/salaris/salarischeck#/ (search for Application Programmer)

Anecdotal evidence of many programmers around me that I've met in the Netherlands.

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