Definitely my experience! And one of the most important comments I've seen on hn in ages. Cut it out and put it on your bulletin board.

As smart people who deal a lot with binaryness (there is a right answer), we place high regard for education, as we should. But please understand that business and academia are 2 different animals with only a little overlap. I have lots of education and lots of practical work experience, and I have to be careful when to apply my formal education, which isn't often.

Classic example (I'm sure many of you have many more):

I graduated Allegheny College with the founders of ijet.com. At an alumni event, they presented their business case and web site. It was very interesting, like many discussions here. At the end, a business professor summed things up. Not a single thing he said made any sense or had anything to do with the presentation. I wondered if he had even watched it. That's when I decided to stop feeling bad about sleeping through all that Cost/Value Curve bullshit so many years ago.

Get your degree. Get your education. But please understand they aren't necessarily the same thing.

Don't troll.

  The pitcher cries for water to carry
  and a person for work that is real.

  -- Marge Piercy, "To be of use"

What I do find though is experience at university does vary greatly. I had a fantastic module on Software Quality. The lecturer in question has been working in the real world before he became a lecturer so had many practical examples of software quality, but he was also able to quickly gloss over the irreverent stuff.

I really did enjoy that module, and recommended it to a friend who was a year below me academically at the same university. Unfortunately the lecturer in question left the university before my friend started the module. As a result his experience with the same module was vastly different than mine. The replacement lecturer was very much into mathematics and didn't have the real world experience his predecessor had. As a result a lot of time was wasted on the maths of how to calculate cyclomatic complexity. When I did the course about half an hour to an hour was covered on how to calculate it, when to use, why you'll need it and so on. Plus there was further reading in the lecture handouts. When my friend did it he had to spend about 9 hours running through just the maths. He told me it was very detached from the real world, there wasn't much connection to when you'll use it.

Some people are currently exploiting the "efficiency" you mention, which is in my opinion a bigger problem than the extra time needed to create fresh materials.

What course could you imagine where it would take more than a few hours to create a fresh exam or batch of quizes? We're talking about undergraduate classes and any prof qualified to teach them could easily rattle off dozens of great (and unique) questions on a moment's notice.

Why do students use archived answers in the first place? Apparently, to get credits for (and ultimately pass) a course whose course points they need for something but whose contents they don't want to learn that badly that investing their own time would seem worthwhile.

I see two ways in which to attack this situation:

1. Remove the possibility of passing a course without having understood its contents: e.g. oral exams with "why" questions.

If the professor has to constantly come up with brand new problems, the students are forever seeing rough drafts of unvetted exams.

Here's a very simple example of a failure I had that illustrates the kinds of things that can unexpectedly go wrong: "what is the angular speed of the second hand of a clock?"

After struggling for a long while with this question, a very bright Asian student finally asked, me: "I see three hands on the clock: obviously they are the first hand, the second hand, and the third hand. Can you please tell me which one you are calling the second hand?"

In my experience most such questions are simply intended to verify a cursory familiarity with the subject -- or to be easily graded. Easy grading is another aspect of laziness that ought to be done away with.

Also, after "Intro to X Programming Language", there aren't going to be any trivial assignments and every (or nearly every) solution should be different. At NCSU they had software that would examine all code for assignments to detect people sharing code and trying to make trivial modifications such as changing variable and function names, and changing the order of code. I had quite a few friends get caught by it.

1. write a sed script that strips out html-tags from arbitrary, well-formed HTML.

I have a friend who was an art student. Every major assignment was put into a public portfolio for future employers (etc.) to look at. This is considered standard for the field. It's also possible that someone else could look at her portfolio, copy her assignment, and turn it in as their own. Despite that, it's still her right to share her creative work with the world.

As programming is just as creative as design, I don't see why programmers should be held to some other standard. We need jobs out of college too, and we are also proud of our work and want to show the world.

You shouldn't. Because you haven't. You are greater that then sum of what you have done. You wrote it once, you can write it again (not exactly the same, of course, but you get the idea).

No one's impressed by his sophomore-level introductory data structures and algo classes.

So? As someone who is not a student there, I could also read the labs and post my take on the code. Information wants to be free.

Anyway, my advice would have been to take down the code when asked. Wait a week (until grades are published), then put the code back up. By that time, everyone will have forgotten. (People are very, very lazy.)

I'm further bothered by the fact that he's a senior-to-be and hasn't done anything substantial yet. Where's the kernel, 1337 freedom of information defender?

True on the lazy part though.

Really? I've heard of:

-Systems programming: Implement ext2.

-Operating systems: Write a kernel.

-Compilers: Write a compiler for a C-like language.

and that's at my school alone. Though 2 of those are senior level classes, systems is a junior level class.

There are basically three kinds of CS assignments. The first is the moral equivalent of algebra problems, where you change the parameters every year if you care. These were boring to give, boring to solve, but very easy to grade.

The second is "write an implementation of X" for X ranging over things like binary trees, etc. In these cases there is one correct answer that the TA is looking for and it is already in the book. No creativity is necessary. Simple copy/paste detection will catch obvious cheaters, and anybody who modifies this guy's code enough to be non-obvious has just performed as much work, if not more, than was needed to do the assignment in the first place.

Not only was the matter resolved properly, the Chair also managed to stop it from "escalating" until lawyers had to get involved.

Instead, the Chair successfully "hit the pause button", reflected on the issues, got some expert advice, and then communicate the result clearly and definitively, so everyone could close this chapter and move on.