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, @09:46AM (6 children)
Just expel them if it was that obvious. Not everyone has the fortitude to make it through tertiary education.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Alphatool on Monday March 26 2018, @10:30AM (4 children)
It's not always that easy though, especially in computer science and other subjects where there is a correct answer. It's very possible for multiple students to produce almost identical solutions to a problem even without any actual plagiarism. As an example, in first year computer science I had an assignment automatically flagged as plagiarized from another student, with only the formatting and variable names changed. There is no doubt that we had submitted very similar code - but we'd never even met each other until we were dragged into the plagiarism investigation. Turns out we'd both found the same solution to a fairly trivial assignment. It took a few unpleasant months to get everything cleared up.
The point to the story is that plagiarism isn't always clear cut so things like an automatic expulsion policy can leave honest students in real trouble.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Monday March 26 2018, @01:23PM (3 children)
Not to mention that when one student covertly copies from another there is the problem of deciding which of the two was the plagiarist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @02:43PM (2 children)
This is usually not difficult, because in this case only one of those students will properly understand their solution.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 26 2018, @05:05PM (1 child)
Not necessarily so. Think back over all your years in school. Yes, you saw other student's work before it was collected, whether multiple choice, essays, math, whatever. It happens. Sometimes, you're stuck on something, and you see the other student's paper. For my purposes here, it doesn't even matter whether you looked at that paper intentionally - you saw it. And, his answer nudged your frozen brain fart enough that you remembered what you studied last night, or two, or six days ago.
Not that I'm strongly in disagreement with you. Most likely, the person doing the copying really doesn't understand the subject matter. More, I'll admit that plagiarism is going to be far less obvious in a simple multiple choice, and/or write down some simple responses - that's really going to stick out on an essay type exam. I'm just saying that sometimes, those brain farts can get locked into place, and a little nudge is needed to get them moving.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @10:00PM
Plagiarism means passing off somebody else's work as your own. That is, you are attempting to take credit for something you did not create. This is a Big Deal™ in academia because proper credit is extremely important to academics.
Reading somebody else's solution, even intentionally, is not plagiarism. If this inspires your own work, this is a good thing. Depending on circumstances, it may be appropriate to credit the other person for inspiration.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @10:36AM
the students pay tuition. I'd say the university administrators frown on teaching staff expelling people for silly reasons like not learning.
(Score: 4, Funny) by KritonK on Monday March 26 2018, @10:14AM
When I was a TA in the Computer Science Department of a prestigious US university a long time ago, I didn't notice any plagiarism in assignments.
On the other hand, when visiting one of my old professors in Greece, along with another of his former students, we noticed a pile of submitted assignments, left on his desk. We skimmed through it, and had no difficulty separating the assignments into three or four smaller piles, according to which code they'd copied. Apparently, only three or four people had done the assignment. Everybody else had copied from them!
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday March 26 2018, @10:27AM (1 child)
The teacher caught every last student in our class cheating on an exam
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Funny) by Thexalon on Monday March 26 2018, @02:30PM
True story: My dad, a high school math teacher, suspected some kids in his class of copying. So he wrote about 4 different versions of the test that he handed out scattered around the class so that nobody was adjacent to the same test. Within about 1 minute, a student raised his hand: "Mr ____, Mike's test is different than mine!"
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday March 26 2018, @10:31AM (7 children)
I like the way my school does it. If I think a student cheated, I fail them. It's then up to the student to file an appeal and prove that they didn't cheat.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(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.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday March 26 2018, @04:36PM
Guilty until proven innocent. Brilliant.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snospar on Monday March 26 2018, @10:37AM (7 children)
If I remember correctly from some of my early CS assignments they were fairly dull and had very limited scope for truly original thought. It would be more than possible to create almost identical code to another student simply because there was only one obvious way of completing the assignment. And that was in the days before the Internet, now a fairly innocent search for some help with a problem is likely to present the whole class with the same code snippet. Even if they don't copy-and-paste their solutions will all seem "suspiciously" similar. But is that really plagiarism? Who among us has not done a quick search and ended up on Stack Overflow with a nifty one liner that works perfectly?
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @03:00PM
No stack overflow in my day, but we did have unprotected directories.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 26 2018, @10:52AM (7 children)
For spring break, put them in a situation where they are likely to die. The only way they can save themselves, is to apply the lessons taught in class. A pack of mad dogs is coming down the hall, to the room where the student is confined. Either he applies the lessons learned to destroy or deter the dog pack, or they devour him. This way, you don't go to court, trying to justify the low grades you gave the student.
What's not to love about a solution like this? Shkirelli would have been eaten alive if he had ever taken an ethics test.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday March 26 2018, @02:03PM (3 children)
That might have been a good way to train elite fighting regiments back when no-one valued human life. Not sure it's a good fit for undergrad CS, but I'm open minded.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 26 2018, @02:13PM (1 child)
Now, now, people have always valued their own lives. In fact, they tend to overvalue their own lives. The typical brain dead high school grad, embarking on a career in college, really has little value to society. We could afford to lose a few hundreds each year, to serve as an example to their peers. It would be a great way to reverse the infamous "dumbing down of America".
Graduates and post-grads have greater value, so maybe we don't want to waste as many of them. But, the opportunity for them to waste themselves should always be available.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @03:39PM
Do you have a lawn I can piss on?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @01:47AM
Within 10 years these kids are going to be shivering in collapsed buildings while the robotic AI dogs are tracking them down to rip their guts out. You should be preparing them now to hack into complex systems on the fly under intense pressure if you want humanity to survive. If you don't pass on these skills now, there won't be anyone left to do so when they're truly needed.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday March 26 2018, @04:40PM (2 children)
But where do you get a pack of dogs that only responds to ethics?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 4, Funny) by nitehawk214 on Monday March 26 2018, @04:43PM (1 child)
And, just to be clear, I am just curious. I do not in any way intend to release this pack of dogs on the floor of congress.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 26 2018, @04:51PM
Hilarious!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Virindi on Monday March 26 2018, @11:13AM (15 children)
I did a CS undergrad program in a mid-tier university in the US. In one senior level class, there was a large final project which was worked on during the whole semester by groups of students, who were able to somewhat choose their approach by themselves within the confines of a general type of problem. At the end of the class everyone presented their project.
The vast majority of solutions were a minimal response to the presented problem, and barely successful at that. Two or three groups obviously had a good grasp on the problem (based on their explanation) and went out of their way to solve something more difficult than the minimum task.
One group presented a piece of software that solved the problem as well as you could imagine, with flashy 3d graphics during the process. They described absolutely no detail and essentially just said, "uh yeah, here is our program". During the question and answer part of the presentation, they gave extremely vague non-answers to every question. They could not even describe the basic approach they had taken to arrive at the solution beyond repeating a few keywords that had been discussed in class.
Afterwards I discussed this with the professor. I said something like, "Those guys were pretty obviously cheating right? I mean there is no way they came up with that themselves? What is the deal with that?"
His response was, "Yes, I am pretty sure they didn't write that, but it is too much difficulty to accuse them of plagiarism. So I am just going to let it slide and give them a B."
Maybe it would have been better if the presentations were recorded, so the inability to answer even basic questions about one's "work" was available as evidence.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Monday March 26 2018, @12:23PM
As a teacher, I use to say to my students "It works but I don't know why" is failure. If it doesn't work, but you can explain what and why things went the way they did, you still get a good grade. Neither is an encouragement to do half work.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @12:36PM (3 children)
Problem with penalizing those guys is that they would be insanely effective in the real world, especially when they have a flashy demo, as long as the product does what it is supposed to that's all the business cares about.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Virindi on Monday March 26 2018, @12:48PM (1 child)
If cheating is the way to success in business, then we need to do what we can to change that culture. Such a situation is not good in the long run for the advancement of society, technology, or the economies of places that share this culture.
Rewarding it in school packs the workforce with incompetent cheaters (hey, their on-paper qualifications are good, and that's what HR cares about). These are the people who spend all their time trying to game the system and further take advantage of those who are actually good at their job. This disincentivizes quality work and incentivizes office politics. This reduces the competitiveness and productivity of the economy as a whole, and makes everyone poorer.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 26 2018, @05:23PM
Yes. Correct. Perfect answer. I agree about 10,000%. Now, how do we convince managers to understand and adopt the attitude?
A couple places, I've wanted to insert something similar into the previous conversations. Something like, "If you think he cheated, but aren't certain, and/or can't prove it, give him a low passing grade, and let him sink or swim later in life." But, that "sink or swim" stuff really doesn't work. It's the networking that works, for so many. No need to really understand what you're doing in your shop/lab/factory if you have a buddy that you went to school with. Or the boss is an alumni of the same college. Or, you go to the same church as the HR. Or, you drink with the right people. Nepotism has no boundaries. If you have friends in the right places, they won't let you sink.
Those of us who grew up believing in a meritocracy have experiences some pretty sad disillusionments.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Monday March 26 2018, @11:11PM
What jobs are available in the real world with a decent salary where everything you are asked to do can just be copy pasted off of Google?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by theluggage on Monday March 26 2018, @12:46PM (6 children)
Why do you need to prove plagiarism? They should have failed because they gave a poor presentation and didn't demonstrate understanding of the topic. Conversely, even if the code was pure copypasta but they clearly understood it (e.g. how would you modify it to X? why didn't you use method Y?) , who cares? The correct answer to virtually any problem in programming is "someone out there has probably spent several years researching this specific topic - I'm not going to come up with a better algorithm in an hour".
Oh, right, the presentation is a token-bolt on which you can't actually fail, because that would require a qualified person to exhibit human judgement and a management team with the balls to support their unpopular decisions, whereas our entire education system is predicated on memorising shit for unrealistic, but easy and cheap to assess assignments - preferably picked from the same handful that get re-used year after year.
But yes, we should definitely go after lazy plagiarists who just copy and paste - they are an insult to all the other hard-working plagiarists who have the nouse to change the variable names and re-word the comments.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Virindi on Monday March 26 2018, @12:52PM
It was not prohibited to look up how someone else solved the problem. In fact, my solution personally was based on a paper I found. I mentioned that fact, explained what I had to come up with on my own, and of course I wrote the code myself since the paper only described a general approach and not every detail. I got an A.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday March 26 2018, @01:44PM (4 children)
And what do you then do when the problem you have is genuinely unique and Google fails you?
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Monday March 26 2018, @04:08PM (3 children)
The same thing as you do when the problem wasn't on the course: hope that you've actually gained some understanding of the subject. If you've bluffed your way through by just blindly copying stuff from Stack Overflow without making an effort to understand it then yeah, you're stuffed - but if you've just bluffed your way through on good exam technique you'll be equally stuffed. Courses which require students to show that they understand their answers, and that include problems you won't find on Google, won't have either problem.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday March 26 2018, @04:46PM (2 children)
So, learn the material and come up with a unique solution to the problem?
That is the most diabolical form of cheating I have heard of!
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 26 2018, @05:29PM (1 child)
Don't forget the icing on this diabolical cake. Make sure it's over the teacher's head, so that he/she is simply awestruck, and begs to be permitted to prostrate him/herself before your superior intellect.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday March 26 2018, @08:36PM
Oh I thought the top form of cheating would be to use these skills to get a job. Then they give you the money. Then, 20 to 30 years later you just walk out the front door like nothing happened.
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/acaxis/key-and-peele-the-heist [cc.com]
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday March 26 2018, @02:41PM (2 children)
We also have a big, semester-long project. As part of the grading, we invite each, individual student to an oral exam. We pick some random piece of code that they claim to have written, and ask them to explain it.
If they truly wrote the code themselves, they are usually out in 1-2 minutes. If they can't explain the code, we pick another piece, and another, and another. Eventually, after 15 or 20 minutes, they run out of chances. We fail them as an individual;'the group as a whole may still pass. Since we put this process in place, the number of students trying to ride along on the coattails of their friends has dropped dramatically.
Critical to any sort of procedure like this: the support of the school administration.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @03:16PM
The best prof I ever had ran his computer classes thusly: people could do the assignments on their own, or as a group. The main thread through the course was taking the same program and modifying/adding features as the class progressed.
Then came the final -- we were each given a new modification to make to the program we'd spent all quarter building, there were multiple modifications assigned, and everyone had 15 minutes to think about the problem and then we were marched to the computer room and we had to sit down and actually modify the problem, within four hours. Those who'd done everything themselves had no problem with the changes. Those who'd worked in groups but had actually done the work, also did well. Those who'd done nothing while relying on the group to do it all, failed utterly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @10:27AM
My first CS class (on the C language) had a two-part exam.
One was "theoretical", where, among other things, we had to write, on paper, a working C code that produced a desired output (just printf, nothing fancy).
For the second part we got random problems (literally picked out of a hat) to solve by writing the code within 30 mins at the lab computers (BorlandC, no internet access).
I loved that exam.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 26 2018, @11:47AM
Open books/internet exam - sure, more costly to grade, but the closest to the true value of the student.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday March 26 2018, @12:10PM
Its a cultural problem where a vocational skill like programming doesn't match the rest of the college experience WRT weed out classes and plagiarism.
So CS weeds them out in compiler theory class or automata theory class or data structures class or whatever instead of weeding them out in the entry level class. Eh, so what?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Monday March 26 2018, @12:14PM (7 children)
The plagiarism debate is amplified when you only look at the result of an assignment. If someone wants to copy, then there is no (foolproof) way of stopping him or her. The premise employed is that you can assess a person's abilities by analyzing the result. However, the result is just the final stage of a learning process. Therefore, only looking at the result of an assignment will always be problematic if you want to assess the learning of a student.
Assignments that require the documentation of the development process are much harder to plagiarize. One of the reasons is in the personal strategies employed by each student to go through the learning process. The process of learning can surely be plagiarized, but when the student, as a result, actually has gained insight into the subject matter, who are we to judge the way you became smarter? The point being, we all base knowledge in one or another way on replicating other's work (we are big apes). Therefore, plagiarism is an integral part of learning. The key insight here is that the measure of knowledge gained is not solely a measure of result. It is a measure how much a student adapts his though-process to get to the result. As such, an assignment that includes documentation of process can help both teacher and student.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday March 26 2018, @03:16PM (6 children)
As mentioned in some threads above, there is in fact a foolproof way of stopping a cheater: Oral exam. Ask a student who did the work about their work, and they can tell you. Ask a cheater, and they can't. It's that simple, and it's one reason that doctoral candidates and many master's candidates have to defend their theses before a panel.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Monday March 26 2018, @03:36PM (5 children)
Actually, oral exam is not foolproof at all.
How would you react to the situation where the student copied all of his work and is able to defend everything that is in it(*)? Do you fail the student for copying, or does he pass because he knows the subject matter?
There is a subtle and fine line to walk here. No single way will be able to "solve" the problem. It always depends on the details.
(*) been there, seen that
(Score: 2) by tekk on Monday March 26 2018, @05:40PM (2 children)
Pass because he knows the subject matter. The problem with cheating is that you go forward without understanding what's going on.
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Monday March 26 2018, @05:59PM (1 child)
No, during oral exam, if you understand the subject matter then you know what is going on. It is actually quite easy to weed out those who do not understand. Those who reiterate the content instead of explaining its meaning do not understand the subject matter at all.
It is the task of the examiner to determine to which degree a student understands the (deeper) meaning and the consequences of the subject matter. That is what the grades are supposed to reflect.
(Score: 2) by tekk on Tuesday March 27 2018, @11:16AM
I think we're in agreement?
The hypothetical given was "what if a student plagiarized their assignment yet they successfully demonstrate understanding of the subject matter in their oral exam."
The answer to this, in my opinion, is that if they fully understand what they submitted and the subject matter of the project, then I would pass them.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Monday March 26 2018, @06:21PM (1 child)
So the downside of being able to defend plagiarized work would be that the required knowledge doesn't extend past the contours of the problem at hand? I could see where someone could study someone else's work sufficiently to explain it, but then couldn't synthesize anything similar. That doesn't sound much different than being a literary critic.
The curriculum would have to change to ensure that the gaps were filled in, perhaps with extraordinary volumes of additional work. But that would encourage even more plagiarism. Damn you and your details!
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Informative) by BsAtHome on Monday March 26 2018, @06:53PM
The whole point is that much of education exactly starts with reproducing the knowledge of others! We give the students books and assume they know the content. Reproducing someone else's work is what every student starts with.
The part of synthesis is the taxonomic leap we want to see in students. It is assumed that a student attaining sufficient subject-literacy in different fields will result in a student to be able to use and combine that knowledge and get to a higher level than the sum of subjects. And this is exactly what the grades are supposed to be based on; to which level has the student assimilated knowledge _and_ to which degree he can use and combine this knowledge to see and create a bigger picture than its constituent parts.
Therefore, the process of learning is an important part. Simply asking factual knowledge is like asking the library for a book containing words. If the student actually understands the subject matter, he will be able to explain the relational contexts of that subject matter, regardless where he started.
It actually does not matter at all where the student started, or we would need to throw every single student out of school for plagiarizing the books they learn from!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @12:35PM (2 children)
In 2 semesters as a grader plus one where I often saw work being submitted but didn't grade it myself, there were always a couple of students (I mean actually a pair out of 30 or so) who would occasionally submit mysteriously similar assignments, but not consistently so. I was suspicious of some cheating, but it wasn't consistent or blatant enough that I felt that I had to address it and put it upwards. Even if it were blatant I'm not sure that I'd feel the need to push it up anyway, it's going to come back to bite them next class if it doesn't bite them this class.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Virindi on Monday March 26 2018, @01:12PM (1 child)
Everyone on up keeps saying that, the cheaters get a degree with high honors which gets them a job where the noncheater (with higher actual skill is rejected), then once installed in the workforce the cheater turns to office politics and backstabbing to succeed. It is likely they continue to to this in perpetuity, and in the process the people who do actual good work (but don't play politics) are penalized, making doing real work a sucker's choice.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Monday March 26 2018, @01:15PM
Move that ) left a bit. Damnit. Funny article on which to make such errors.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Monday March 26 2018, @12:54PM (1 child)
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!!?
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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Monday March 26 2018, @02:02PM
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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by lemonlime on Monday March 26 2018, @05:50PM
It's hard to prove plagiarism for problems that have objectively correct solutions. The right answer is the right answer, if everyone gets the same/similar answer that just means everyone did the project right. ESPECIALLY for undergrad courses, if you have simple problems like "build a dice-roller using Python" there are a very limited number of solutions that are both correct and efficient/best practice.
Also imo it's hard to draw a line between plagiarism and research. Student A gets a bug, googles it, and blindly copy/pastes the first solution they find. Student B gets a bug, googles it, takes time to digest and fully understand the bug/solution, and then implements a solution based on this new knowledge (which may be almost identical to the code snippet on Stack Overflow, depending on the complexity of the problem). What Student A did wasn't great, but Student B basically did what I do every day as a professional programmer.
I had a instructor in college who marked all major projects face-to-face, he'd pull up your project on his machine and go through it with you sitting next to him. If something looked off he'd ask you questions about it. Why did you decide to code it that way, can you explain what this function is doing, etc. If you just gave him a blank look he'd dock points, if you could explain it and talk about it that proved you actually understood it and didn't just copy/paste blindly.
Probably not feasible for most groups. Obviously it's a lot more time consuming than traditional marking, I went to a tiny community college with very tiny class sizes so it wasn't too bad. But I'm sure something similar could be done with larger groups, maybe require students to include comments explaining their code in their own words?
It's hard to prove plagiarism for problems that have objectively correct solutions, but you can try to prove legitimate understanding vs blind copying.