SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Interesting) by Oakenshield on Monday March 26 2018, @12:24PM (5 children)
In my second intro programming class, I had a friend who was struggling on an assignment. I let him have a printout to help him understand the assignment. The TA busted us because he had copied my code verbatim changing only the variable names. Since I had a novel way of solving the problem, it was obvious. Luckily, he admitted to copying the code and took a zero on the assignment. I got a warning about sharing code. That was back in the days before threats of expulsion for the crime of leaving a printout where someone might pick it up.
My senior year, we were given a complicated final assignment for one class and a classmate asked me how I intended to solve the problem. I gave him a rough description of my plan and he proceeded to argue with me that I couldn't do it my way. I pulled out the assignment sheet and asked him to show me where it required me to do it using his method, or forbade me from doing it my way. Of course he couldn't. He only claimed I made the assignment too "easy." I turned in my final project two weeks before the end of class and he couldn't even get his mess to compile. Two days before the drop dead date for the final project, he begged me to show him my code. I of course, remembering my freshman incident, declined. There was no way he could have started fresh using my method and completed his project on time without copying mine verbatim. Mr. Hot Shot know-it-all turned in a project that wouldn't run for partial credit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @03:03PM (2 children)
In my freshman computing class, the same thing happened to me: letting a friend have a printout to help him, and he copied the whole thing verbatim. The TA reported it to the professor, who hauled us both in to find out who copied who. My friend fortunately also owned up to copying, and the prof verified it by a few simple questions which I could answer and my friend couldn't. The prof zeroed my friend's score, and dropped my assignment's grade a letter for being a dumbass.
My now former friend dropped out the next quarter. Last I heard he was a hairdresser out on the coast.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @05:12PM
Aren't there times when you wish you had a nice easy hair dresser's job?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @03:53AM
The one I planned to turn in, and a buggy version for anyone who was having trouble.
They either failed with plagiarized code that couldn't be traced back to me, or succeeded by at the very least debugging the issues I had left in my version of the code.
Sadly I lost interest in programming and my grades slipped over the next 2 semesters. While I ended up getting a degree I had no desire to do it in the real world.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Monday March 26 2018, @03:10PM
Grading like this always bothered me.
If you are unable to complete the task, why are you allowed to continue on to the next class? Instead, the person should be given as much time as needed to complete it but cannot advance until they do.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @05:45PM
Don't worry. You'll meet him again as your team lead or architect on a project in the real world. Because the most pushy and smart aleky are promoted because that shows leadership.