Coursera's Functional Programming - Cheating Discovered • Hacker News Board

Re: Coursera's Functional Programming - Cheating Discovered

#61

Post by think-large » Tue, Oct 09, 2012, 3:25 PM UTC

jmduke wrote: post #38

Permit wrote: post #31

I'm of the opinion that the value of Coursera's courses comes from the learning opportunity, not the certification. I think they should simply allow cheating and not issue certificates. Alternatively, allow cheating and continue to issue certificates while letting employers decide the true value of the certificates. The point of Coursera (to me) isn't to pad my resume, it's to learn from courses not always offered at…

I completely agree, which is why I find the cheating so interesting. I strongly doubt that any employers are going to lend much value to the certification so early in Coursera's lifespan, but I don't doubt that cheating is going to continue even though the only thing you 'truly' gain from a Coursera course is knowledge.

I agree with you, but that is mostly because I already have a 4 year degree in Engineering and I'm assuming you do too. There is a problem in the fact that many people cannot afford that degree because their parents can't afford it (or the loans that they'd need).

Cheating degrades the quality of education at any level. Cheaters are trying to get accreditation when they shouldn't. While Cheating is all over in education (we had a couple of cases at my school), it is obviously going to be more prominent in a place like Coursera, where cheating is easier and looking for cheaters is harder.

One thing they could do is create an algorithm that checks answers much like what they do for journals, but again that's an extra load they "shouldn't" have on their employees.

Re: Coursera's Functional Programming - Cheating Discovered

#62

Post by elliott99 » Tue, Oct 09, 2012, 3:25 PM UTC

nicksergeant wrote: post #55

namank wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, thats harsh. Everyone makes mistakes, everyone slips. Making mistakes is an integral part of iterating towards the better.

"Cheating" is not "making a mistake".

Forget the certificate. If you enroll in a coursera course to learn, and you need some help getting started on the code or checking your work, why not take a look at the code? Not submitting it as your own, of course, but taking ownership of your education, which is all that matters.

Re: Coursera's Functional Programming - Cheating Discovered

#63

Post by think-large » Tue, Oct 09, 2012, 3:26 PM UTC

nanijoe wrote: post #52

edw519 wrote: post #42

Actually, this is valuable data. As a potential employer, I care more about the candidate's ethics (or lack thereof) than their ability. I could always teach them, but I could never trust them. Coursera should just publicly identify cheaters so I can cross check against resumes or certifications. Problem solved.

Problem solved only if ALL of cousera's students need to be employed by you.

Or by any employer who checks this "black list"

Re: Coursera's Functional Programming - Cheating Discovered

#64

Post by slashedzero » Tue, Oct 09, 2012, 3:27 PM UTC

Permit wrote: post #31

I'm of the opinion that the value of Coursera's courses comes from the learning opportunity, not the certification. I think they should simply allow cheating and not issue certificates. Alternatively, allow cheating and continue to issue certificates while letting employers decide the true value of the certificates. The point of Coursera (to me) isn't to pad my resume, it's to learn from courses not always offered at…

I think that's how I instantly analyzed the title: "how can someone cheat at coursera??". I get it that some people put the certifications on their resumes, but there are also a subset of people who take the courses just to learn, and therefore may not be able to spend the time doing the work.

Re: Coursera's Functional Programming - Cheating Discovered

#65

Post by benmanns » Tue, Oct 09, 2012, 3:27 PM UTC

The fact that people publicly posting their work would get expelled disappoints me. During the Machine Learning class on Coursera, I did all of the programming exercises myself. After submitting the assignments and getting 100% scores, I would browse other people's GitHub repositories to see how they completed the assignment, which taught me more about both Octave syntax and machine learning and helped me to vectorize some of the more tricky algorithms (use Octave's native matrix operations rather than slower for loops).

The people who submit exact copies of assignments they find online should absolutely be penalized. To expel those who publish their work seems overly harsh.

Re: Coursera's Functional Programming - Cheating Discovered

#66

Post by michael_miller » Tue, Oct 09, 2012, 3:27 PM UTC

nicksergeant wrote: post #55

namank wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, thats harsh. Everyone makes mistakes, everyone slips. Making mistakes is an integral part of iterating towards the better.

"Cheating" is not "making a mistake".

I disagree with your assertion. Cheating is not necessarily an act of malice. As an example, a friend of mine (who is from India) helped another student (also Indian) with a programming project in an intro to CS class at my alma mater. My friend was trying to help a friend out, not intentionally trying to break the rules. This took place during the first few weeks of school, mind you, and neither student had any significant experience with the ethical standards of American institutions. Both students readily admitted to what had happened- neither was trying to hide anything. Nonetheless, the professor gave my friend a two letter grade demotion and the person whom he helped an F. Arguments about the fairness of their punishments aside, I don't think it's fair to assert that either had a lapse in ethical judgement more than a cultural misunderstanding, but nonetheless both students did cheat.

Re: Coursera's Functional Programming - Cheating Discovered

#67

Post by mindslight » Tue, Oct 09, 2012, 3:29 PM UTC

Permit wrote: post #31

I'm of the opinion that the value of Coursera's courses comes from the learning opportunity, not the certification. I think they should simply allow cheating and not issue certificates. Alternatively, allow cheating and continue to issue certificates while letting employers decide the true value of the certificates. The point of Coursera (to me) isn't to pad my resume, it's to learn from courses not always offered at…

Present market value of learning materials - ~$0. (Wikipedia/library/sneak into university/independently tinker/etc)

Present market value of a common certification - ~$100k.

Which aspect would you attempt to build a business around?

Re: Coursera's Functional Programming - Cheating Discovered

#68

Post by dkhenry » Tue, Oct 09, 2012, 3:29 PM UTC

I would think it would be better to let the course go on, and mail the certificates and give each one a unique identifier. Then make an annotation at cousera of which students were caught cheating. Then give employers the ability to check if a certificate is from an honest student or one who was caught cheating. Everyone wins.

Re: Coursera's Functional Programming - Cheating Discovered

#69

Post by dodo53 » Tue, Oct 09, 2012, 3:30 PM UTC

llimllib wrote: post #45

readme wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The certificates will have value as long as they remain evidence of honest completion of the course. To say they are worthless is kind of short-sighted. Considering the number of tech resumes in the typical hiring manager's inbox that contain a laundry-list of programming languages in the skills section and not even a single project or course to prove the knowledge of the candidate, I'd say there is a fairly large do…

> Given two resumes, one with a big bullet list of unverified skills, and one with a bullet list of some completed coursera courses, which would you choose? I would accept neither as evidence of anything other than the skills a candidate advertises. IOW, I trust "I know Scala" on a resume exactly as much as "I know Scala and completed a Coursera course on it".

Well if nothing else it gives a portable measure of ability. Like instead of having to saying I'm an expert in Scala and the meaning of that being largely arbitrary; you've got a syllabus of stuff they claim to know (which you still need to verify it it matters).

Re: Coursera's Functional Programming - Cheating Discovered

#70

Post by think-large » Tue, Oct 09, 2012, 3:31 PM UTC

riffraff wrote: post #37

blindhippo wrote: post #28

If it's this easy to "cheat" on these assignments, then maybe the professors should sit down and think about how to properly craft assignments. It's clear to me that traditional assignment grading will not work in an online/anonymous environment - appealing to a code of honor will not help if they want the certificate of completion to actually hold meaning. I don't have any actual suggestions other then when I was in…

actually, when I took the first "not-quite-coursera" classes (ML and DB) they did quizzes in a smarter way[0], using a larger set of questions per quiz than the stuff you'd get in a single attempt. So each attempt, even from the same student, would get a slightly different set of questions, and the dumbest attempts at cheating were discouraged[1]. I don't see why this couldn't be done for the programming assingments.…

Another solution would be to employ an alogrithm that checks your solution against past solutions. It would work much like what professors employ when they submit Reports to an online repository.

If someone it stupid enough not to even change variable names then they'd be caught easily. While with Millions of solutions it would be easy to get some replication, most of the time there wouldn't be any and this is when manual intervention by a person could be triggered.

This in conjuntion with your solution would work pretty well especially if someone submitted a wrong answer for another question that they haven't seen.