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: 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.