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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

#31

Post by jviotti »

Congrats Alistair and Scott! This is an amazing story that made me remember my high-school days. As the authors, I was into programming from an early age, and high school definitely took the second place :) My grades ended up REALLY suffering when I got my first full-time role at a startup while I was 17 years old (parents approved) and on my last school year. Fast-forward many years and I don't regret a thing. I attended University of Oxford (despite my bad grades!) and I'm doing very well doing what I love.

Wish you both a very, very bright future!

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#33

Post by throwaway892238 »

jrockway wrote: post #3

I love the veiled threat to "take a legal approach" in the last email. If I ever take over the world, there will be a law where if you imply that you're investigating litigation, you have to file your case within 24 hours or the ability expires.

That would be a really, really annoying world, because people wouldn't threaten litigation, they would actually just start suing immediately. If you have only two choices: to not do anything and put yourself at risk, or start the expensive and time-consuming litigation process, the latter will be the "smart" move more often than not. Products and services would become more expensive, there would be fewer free things, there would be more weasel words and fucked up clauses in ToS, etc. Let's not go down that path.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#34

Post by aabbccsmith »

kazinator wrote: post #27

Why would you need to fake whether you watched a video? Just let it play while you do something else. If it still bothers you how long it takes, put it on 2x speed.

It was part of the homework, we had to watch a video and write down notes in a physical notebook. The notebook was never checked because they assumed that a video watched >=1x meant that we understood the task. The videos took a while to watch so we'd rather skip.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#35

Post by spullara »

mynegation wrote: post #6

Everyone has to start somewhere. These young lads “worked around” couple of educational platforms. 35 years ago I was hex dumping ZX Spectrum game saves and disassembling the program files to get more lives, infinite lives or just more ammo or whatever. That seemed easier and more interesting than getting good at games themselves. I sometimes wonder if that kind of “not approved” intellectual curiosity can be used to…

I fondly remember playing Bard's Tale on one computer while using the other one to edit the character files and reverse engineering all the item codes and other statistics. Good times.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#36

Post by hiett »

jviotti wrote: post #31

Congrats Alistair and Scott! This is an amazing story that made me remember my high-school days. As the authors, I was into programming from an early age, and high school definitely took the second place :) My grades ended up REALLY suffering when I got my first full-time role at a startup while I was 17 years old (parents approved) and on my last school year. Fast-forward many years and I don't regret a thing. I att…

Thank you! Alistair and I have been in startups since we were 15/16, and we've both now finished school and work full time in the startup space. My grades definitely took a down turn the last two years, but I'm happy with my decisions and am loving working in tech!

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#37

Post by hnjst »

trinovantes wrote: post #20

These online learning platforms should also consider drawing on canvas e.g. flutter to make it harder to scrape screen contents I think they could also just check the isTrusted field in the Event since that can't be overwritten without a custom compiled browser

Don't forget checking for the evil bit too! https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#38

Post by arjvik »

jbman223 wrote: post #29

Reminds me of a passion project I started in high school that went completely viral and took on a life of its own. Wrote a small script for my friends to check their AP scores a few days early. Required high schoolers giving clear text access to their entire CollegeBoard account so I could log on and scrape their scores. Somehow it got posted to Reddit and from that year on, grew wildly. Got to almost 2 million stude…

You ran EarlyScores? Thanks for a tool that really helped my friends and I!

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#39

Post by Daub »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #32

I was a supply teacher. A kid did something similar in early 2010s and he was doing online homeworks for his classmates for about $1 per month. He had about a hundred clients at the peak and he was never caught.

Overall, those who cheat are lazy by nature, and therefore easy to catch.

I teach art and design. Now is grading season and it is maddeningly easy to catch students who plagiarize. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

The contract cheating is another thing. At one of my previous places of employment, companies contacted students directly on their university mail and approach them offering 'educational services'. Some of them even knew what courses the students were taking.

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