Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science

kevinchen.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 124 posts

Re: Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science

#41

Post by protonimitate »

thatswrong0 wrote: post #11

Here's the easiest solution: stop grading homework Why judge student performance on something that they are using _to learn_? It doesn't make any sense. Every student is basically competing with one another to get the highest GPA possible - if you're going to give them cookie cutter homework with solutions can be easily searched for on the internet _and_ can only bring their GPA down, then they're going to cheat. Pla…

The goal isn't to have students to learn.

It's to get students to retain just enough information to get placed in a job after graduation to boost placement rates, earn good salaries, and donate back to their alma mater for the "opportunity it provided".

Students aren't the customers, they're the products.

Unfortunately, companies that propagate hiring based on GPAs, # of internships, and whiteboarding skills are only hurting themselves in the long run. When you need a 3.9 GPA and be able to recite all of LC and CTCI from memory just to get an entry level position, you aren't being encouraged to learn, only to graduate with the best possible resume you can get. That means doing whatever it takes to boost metrics that are completely meaningless for creating value for a business.

Ya'll mad that you can't find 'good' engineers, but put all the focus on cheap memorization and circle-jerking Big N style interviews. Want better workers? Put more focus on workforce training and hold colleges responsible for providing it.

Re: Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science

#42

Post by compsciphd »

thatswrong0 wrote: post #36
diabeetusman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optional homework almost definitely won't get done. Making it count ensures that students would actually do it, which is useful to instructors (what do they need to focus on in class? Is the class understanding the lectures?).

You can still grade the homework (to give both lecturers and students feedback), but just have it not count towards the kids letter grade in the course. If no one is doing it, then you could make the grade for homework pass / fail: did you hand something gradeable in or not?

or have it count to a small part of the grade.

Basically, perhaps construct a class like this

1) HW 20% of the grade

2) Quiz (say 1 Q a week related to homework that was returned a week ago, give students a chance to figure out what they did wrong) - say 20% of grade

3) midterm and final, a 30/30 or 20/40 split.

one can adjust the percentages to achieve one's desired pedagogical goals.

personally, I don't find copying homework to be a problem if the student figures out what they copied. It's no worse than students frantically copying down everything the teacher puts on the board or slides which seems to be a common way students study.

Re: Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science

#44

Post by kangnkodos »

After implementing plagiarism detection campus-wide, design a process which is very time consuming on the students part, and not as time consuming on staff.

Maybe something like: "Your homework was flagged as possible plagarism. Report to this lab at this time, and code one additional problem which should be easy to anyone who understood the original homework."

Anyone who really did the homework will be in and out within five minutes. If you can't finish in an hour, you get a zero on that one homework assignment, not expelled.

That flips the incentives. Also, reducing the punishment cuts the drama of people arguing that the software is not 100% accurate.

Re: Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science

#45

Post by mjw1007 »

ambulancechaser wrote: post #33
mjw1007 wrote: post #6

Maybe I'm being small-minded, but I strongly dislike using the word 'plagiarism' to refer to cheating on your homework by copying someone else. To me, plagiarism is taking credit for someone else's ideas at their expense; it's a "sin" against the person being copied. Copying someone else with their connivance, or paying some essay-mill writer to do your work for you, should be in the same category as taking a calcula…

> plagiarism is taking credit for someone else's ideas at their expense; that seems like an unworkable definition. If I submit John Milton's Paradise Lost as my own work on an application to grad school, it certainly wouldn't be an "expense" to the long dead author. Plagiarism is a fraud where you misrepresent the work of others as your own. In the academic world, what else is there but your own work?

If I discovered a lost work of Milton and pretended it was my own, then that would be acting at the expense of Milton's reputation, in the sense I mean. So I don't think it matters if the "someone else" happens to be dead.

(If I tried it with Paradise Lost there'd be no expense to their reputation, but that just means it's not a realistic example of someone attempting plagiarism.)

Re: Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science

#46

Post by emidln »

leetcrew wrote: post #27
waqf wrote: post #5

The article doesn't seem to even consider the possibility of assessing students in some other way than through standardized homeworks which are easily copied. For example, individual projects where everyone in the class is working on something different; or at the other extreme, proctored exams. (Of course, neither of these systems is entirely free from cheating, but the barrier is higher.)

as a grader, it is already hard enough to keep up with the work that gets generated by thirty students attempting the same weekly homework assignment. i don't know how i could possibly grade thirty different projects in a week, let alone in any fair or reasonable way. i've always wondered why they don't do something like select a random number of students and ask them to explain their work in an interview with the pr…

Add a grading section to each assignment with something like this: --------- Program is expected to maintain this interface over stdin/stdout (or sockets, etc).

Students will pass when their program passes the grading/test suite. Test suite can be check ahead of time by uploading binary/zip/tarball to this location using their student id: . Detailed instructions .

IIRC, this is what my university did 15 years ago. Not everyone had unique homework, but often the homework assignments were not all the same. I guess how unique they are depends on if you have some parameters in your homework generation or if you have a bunch of misc grad students to generate a few sets of homework that you can build up over time.

How might you grade style? IMO Don't. If you must, then save it for interactive review/lab sessions/office hours or style-specific spot checks (e.g. "At least once per semester your assignment will be additionally graded on program style according . This will be added as additional points to your semester total.")

Re: Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science

#47

Post by thaumasiotes »

ambulancechaser wrote: post #33
mjw1007 wrote: post #6

Maybe I'm being small-minded, but I strongly dislike using the word 'plagiarism' to refer to cheating on your homework by copying someone else. To me, plagiarism is taking credit for someone else's ideas at their expense; it's a "sin" against the person being copied. Copying someone else with their connivance, or paying some essay-mill writer to do your work for you, should be in the same category as taking a calcula…

> plagiarism is taking credit for someone else's ideas at their expense; that seems like an unworkable definition. If I submit John Milton's Paradise Lost as my own work on an application to grad school, it certainly wouldn't be an "expense" to the long dead author. Plagiarism is a fraud where you misrepresent the work of others as your own. In the academic world, what else is there but your own work?

> In the academic world, what else is there but your own work?

Work published under your name but performed by anonymous flunkies. It's... the norm in the academic world, actually.

Re: Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science

#48

Post by jessaustin »

TFA seems a bit at odds with itself. One reason academic boards don't care too much about CS plagiarism complaints is that CS generates so very many of them, compared to other fields. The reason isn't that CS students are degenerates (although they may be anyway), instead it's because it is so much easier to check for plagiarism in CS. So, sure closed-source is bad and definitely we can always use more TAs, but the problem is clearly not "we're only punishing 10% of our students while we should be punishing 40%!"

The problem isn't with CS at all, but rather with USA colleges in general. Indeed the only professor I've read who seems to even notice the problem is Harry Lewis. Most subjects should be taught very differently than they are taught. USA university education makes a great deal of unnecessary and counterproductive work for students and professors. The busywork threatens to drive out real academic work.

The reason for this is so that more such work might be created for administrators, who must multiply inexorably to absorb the ridiculous amounts of money that our ridiculous system of student debt generates. In fact it will be no surprise if some schools eventually do hire enough administrators to suspend 40% of every CS course every semester. One hopes that the professors who could restore some of the quality that universities used to possess, will realize by then that they can restore that and should restore that.

Re: Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science

#49

Post by eecsninja »

Engineering classes should really switch from being homework-based to being project-based. Even something as simple as small coding projects that can be done in a week.

Then, the final project would be such that you'd have to explain your code, either in person with a TA, or by writing documentation for it.

We really need to move on from this academic mindset of homework, grades, and plagiarism toward something that is actually reflective of the world outside of academia. The concept of plagiarism doesn't really exist in the software industry -- it's a matter of what you can get done.

Re: Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science

#50

Post by emidln »

fr0sty wrote: post #9

Requiring students to submit their VCS history along with the finished project would at least up the cost to the students for copy and pasting. They even hint at that sort of solution in the piece by mentioning cosmetic changes to the files at the last minute.

I wrote assignments for cash in college. When it came time for me to take a class, it was noticed that my work was very similar to past students. I tried using my VCS history as a defense when my prof noticed that my homework was similar to that of past students. After questioning some former students, it became obvious that the reason my VCS history was reasonable and style still so similar was that I was the person who had written other student's assignments in the past.
Post reply on HN