Avoiding homework with code and getting caught • Hacker News Board

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#61

Post by kaitai » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 3:35 AM UTC

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.

I think this was an "educational experience" in the truest sense. Hegarty showed the spirit of a true educator. This is a situation that can end up with legal action -- but there is a much better path for both sides! Young people may not know the ramifications of their actions, and it is much better to show the range of outcomes and work together for a mutually beneficial solution.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#62

Post by bgro » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 3:38 AM UTC

Maybe I had a different takeaway from everybody else here about this story. It's hard to focus on anything other than the ending interaction.

To me it sounds like the CEO just started panicking and sent you an email so he wouldn't have to do anything relating to fixing or explaining the problem in sales for all his customers or paying you for your work / to fix it. He probably didn't even want to pay for a lawyer, rather than how he played off being nice.

It sounds like he just got away without having to do anything because he threatened you and sold you a cop-out story "But what about the kids?"

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#63

Post by chriscappuccio » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 3:47 AM UTC

bgro wrote: post #62

Maybe I had a different takeaway from everybody else here about this story. It's hard to focus on anything other than the ending interaction. To me it sounds like the CEO just started panicking and sent you an email so he wouldn't have to do anything relating to fixing or explaining the problem in sales for all his customers or paying you for your work / to fix it. He probably didn't even want to pay for a lawyer, ra…

That's a very cynical take.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#64

Post by edgyquant » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 3:48 AM UTC

rcfox wrote: post #55

When I was in university, I scraped an internal job postings site for students to find internships. The site was terrible- each job description would load in a pop-up window controlled by Javascript, and loading a second description would override the first. It was also really slow and had limited filtering. My version could load job descriptions in new tabs, presented the table on a single page, and you could mark j…

I did “information security” at a community college and learned I could find sites just by googling answers. These sites were behind a paywall after the first few answers but if you viewed the source you see them.

So I wrote a python/selenium script to search google and dump all of these answers for my weekly homework. Then I’d bang out all of my classes in a few minutes.

I knew just enough about networks, security and building computers from my childhood I never got worse than a C on a test.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#65

Post by pc86 » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 3:59 AM UTC

bgro wrote: post #62

Maybe I had a different takeaway from everybody else here about this story. It's hard to focus on anything other than the ending interaction. To me it sounds like the CEO just started panicking and sent you an email so he wouldn't have to do anything relating to fixing or explaining the problem in sales for all his customers or paying you for your work / to fix it. He probably didn't even want to pay for a lawyer, ra…

I can absolutely see how you think that, but I didn't get that impression. There was certainly the thinly-veiled legal threat -- or at least, the implication that it could go that direction if they completely ignored him -- but it sounds like they did take these kids' suggestions on how to harden their system a bit to heart and implement at least some of them. That time isn't free.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#66

Post by pfoof » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:10 AM UTC

Reminds me of the times when at my school (2010) there was WLAN but only the teachers had the password. I was nagged by my schoolmates as the most proficient computer nerd and my IT teacher said that if I cracked the wifi password, I would get an A+ from IT classes for all three years.

Backtrack 4, Atom N270, some deauthenticated Windows XP and 13 hour long dictionary attack did NOT do the trick. But what I learned is mine.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#67

Post by abigail95 » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:15 AM UTC

phibz wrote: post #30

Interesting response from Mr Hegarty. I wonder if they would have gotten the same treatment by a US company?

I did a similar thing as a universtiy student and received a similar very nice response from a (huge) US company.

I got good advice and a cool story out of it.

There are nice people everywhere.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#68

Post by tomrod » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:27 AM UTC

Daub wrote: post #39

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 t…

And professors complain about not being able to get data to check on enrollment trends for their departments!

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#69

Post by mod » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:37 AM UTC

collegeburner wrote: post #52

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #10

I hope they did their homework even after breaking the platform.

tbh i had online math homework years ago now like back in 5th grade. my solution was a whole lot jankier but i spent more time writing a script to store and use answers (unlimited quiz retakes go brrrr) than it would have taken me to just do the quizzes and was still happy. i ended up with this unholy thing that used a flat text file like a very ghetto database bc i didn't know shit about coding... eventually got to…

> flat text file like a very ghetto database

My second site was a blog in about 1998. I had never heard of a blog, but whatever. I built a user system, "karma" system, ability to spend karma (anyone with enough karma could post on my front page), an interactive choose-your-own-adventure story where you got to help write it, and some other features I'm forgetting.

Anyway, I built all that with flat files at first, because I hadn't heard the word "database" yet--even though I wrote this in PHP. As soon as I heard about databases, I converted it in a couple days.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#70

Post by expensive_news » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:43 AM UTC

tomxor wrote: post #48

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

That's a total no-go unfortunately since WCAG-AA accessibility is a non-optional requirement in edtech. The solution in general is in improving the quality of the content, using a more sophisticated format of questions that requires work rather than mere knowledge (which is also far better for formative assessment, but most platforms are focused on summative, particularly in the US)... independent multi-choice is alw…

Bad multiple choice sets reminded me of a history class my friend took in summer school. All the questions were multiple choice, and the teacher was extremely lazy and decided that the answer bank for every question would just be randomly drawn from the population of all answers. The end result is that most the questions end up like :

What year was the Declaration of Independence signed?

a) Martian Luther King Jr. b) The Spanish-American War c) 1776 d) The New Deal

Needless to say everyone aced the test.