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posted by mrpg on Monday March 26 2018, @09:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-tiresome dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Monday March 26 2018, @12:54PM (1 child)

    by looorg (578) on Monday March 26 2018, @12:54PM (#658400)

    Couldn't part of the issue here be the subject. Doing some basic programming class isn't exactly a class for free thinking and problem solving, a lot of students might never have programmed before. They are learning to do basic things, mostly from books, lectures and/or examples. They are learning to apply previous knowledge to solve trivial problems, that have already been solved for ages. There really is a limited amount of possibilities as to how to solve them, if you are not using one of the standard solutions you are probably doing it badly or wrong.

    If their code is obvious cheating, down to the last white space, identical names and errors then yes there is a problem with that and they should be reported. Certainly so if they can't explain what their program is doing or where they found their example code. At the same time if they are copying the standard solution, or best practice or example solution, to a problem then is that really cheating? It's the standard solution.

    Perhaps the teachers should stop reusing the same problems over and over again that there are easy, clear and complete solutions to on some wiki-page or in the books then if they want to get rid of that. That would be a lot of work required on their part tho. His solutions are all about increasing cost to the university, they won't like that -- hire more TA:s, does he think the university is made of money!!?

    Though coding is a foreign language to most people, the principles of plagiarism are the same as with papers written in English. Sometimes it is acceptable for lines of code to be identical, if the code is performing a routine task or one that cannot be done a different way. But other times it is a red flag. (from NY Times article he links to)

    It's more like solving a math problem really. Identify problem, apply known solution method. Either way almost everything in code is in some way shape or form routine tasks and standards at this level. If it was like writing a paper in English then if I borrowed half my code from some website I would just make a little note about that as a citation and everything would be fine. Also you don't have to cite trivial things that one can safely assume the reader should just know. That could possibly work for CS to then. Somehow it doesn't appear to be a thing.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Monday March 26 2018, @02:02PM

    by BsAtHome (889) on Monday March 26 2018, @02:02PM (#658423)

    This is exactly why we shouldn't focus on the solution of the problem, but the process of getting to that solution.

    Many, if not most, problems in programming have known solutions and a very big part of programming is pattern recognition of the problem and map it onto a known solution. But, the process of getting there is what makes programming interesting and is the great learning experience; not the actual solution itself.