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Kevin Chen writes a post in his blog about incentives and scaling from his two years as a teaching assistant. Specifically in his current post he addresses plagiarism in computer science and why it has still not stopped.
The most important goal is to keep the course fair for students who do honest work. Instructors must assign grades that accurately reflect performance. A student who grapples with a problem — becoming a stronger programmer in the process — should never receive a lower grade than one who copies and pastes.
Finally, as educators, we also hope that the accused student can learn difficult lessons about ethical behavior in the classroom rather than the workplace.
From his experience, every semester somewhere between 10% to 40% of the students carry out blatant, indisputable cases of plagiarism with an unknown amount of less clear cases left unaddressed. How does this match with soylentil's experiences here, either in computer science or other fields? The perspectives are likely quite different from institution to institution as well as whether you are still studying in college or university, recently graduated, or in a teaching role.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Virindi on Monday March 26 2018, @10:59AM (5 children)
Your attitude belies an inherent belief that professors can always spot cheaters. Perhaps in some cases, but that is not always going to be true. "Guilty until proven innocent" is never fair to the accused and when the accusation is based on what is basically a gut feeling it is even worse. 9 times out of 10 sure, but just imagine being that one person who worked extra hard to raise their performance only to be forced to disprove a hunch.
If cheating is commonplace then the assignment itself should include anti-cheating measures. Like, say, on a big project the student should have to give a presentation on how they did it and why.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @02:19PM (1 child)
You must not have gotten the memo. Feminism doesn't support innocent until proven guilty, so I'm not sure why you're defending the idea. The humans seem to be saying across the board that the "innocent until proven guilty" approach isn't working for them.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Monday March 26 2018, @02:55PM
Meh, if I'm a traitor to my gender for wanting "innocent until proven guilty" then so be it. It won't be the first "treason" I'm sure. I'm a rebel.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bradley13 on Monday March 26 2018, @02:23PM (2 children)
"Your attitude belies an inherent belief that professors can always spot cheaters."
Always, as in, catch every cheater? No, of course not. However, only accusing students when I have good, solid evidence? Yes, absolutely, that's part of my job. And, contrary to your implication, it's not based on a "gut feeling". We're talking programming here, and here are three different examples:
- I found the "job for hire" on one of those short-term job forums.
- The student, not known to be a great programmer, turned in a very polished project that used some very unusual classes, like AtomicInteger. When asked, they had no clue what an AtomicInteger is or does.
- Students turn in code where variable names have been refactored, but the code is otherwise identical: spacing, formatting, comments, and bugs.
Funny: once it became known that I'm serious, and that I really will fail cheaters - well, I haven't had a single case in over two years now.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Virindi on Monday March 26 2018, @02:59PM
You should bid on the job and see who turns your own work back to you :D
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday March 26 2018, @03:08PM
As somebody who occasionally looks for potential work on those kinds of things, yes, there's an awful lot of them that amount to, in a fairly obvious way, "Do my homework." I'm too ethical to go anywhere near them, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're finding people somewhere willing to do it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.