

Georgia Tech adapts to increased cheating among CS students - mbrubeck
http://computinged.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/stanford-finds-cheating-increasing-especially-among-cs-students/

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trickjarrett
I was at GT during the period described (2002-2005) and I was reported for
academic misconduct (cheating.) I didn't do it on purpose but a buddy and I
had discussed a homework assignment over dinner and when we went back to the
dorms and completed it, apparently our code was similar enough to raise flags
so we both had to take the equivalent of a drivers ed course for academic
conduct.

I was really steamed about it for a while. I appealed up to the dean but the
fact we had dared discuss a problem though our actual work was independent
qualified as cheating in the class since we are supposed to act independently.

Clearly the work independently is meant to protect the system from students
skating by, but man was it upsetting and frustrating for someone who genuinely
had found a group of friends where the sum was greater than our individual
parts.

~~~
hga
Hmmm; MIT has very explicit rules, often per course, on how much and what sort
of collaboration is allowed in doing problem sets and projects (see the bottom
of these for some examples which seem to be representative of their various
departments: [http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-
Compute...](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-
Science/6-945Spring-2009/Syllabus/index.htm)
[http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Chemistry/5-112Fall-2005/Syllabus/...](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Chemistry/5-112Fall-2005/Syllabus/index.htm)
[http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-02Spring-2006/Sylla...](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-02Spring-2006/Syllabus/index.htm)
[http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-04Spring-2006/Syllabus/i...](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-04Spring-2006/Syllabus/index.htm)).

I suppose there might be some courses where you just can't discuss a problem
with a fellow classmate or student, but I would _never_ take one of those.

------
johnswamps
This seems to be fairly common for non-cs students taking cs classes. Though
just anecdotal evidence, the student vice president of Stanford was recently
found to have violated the honor code by plagiarizing a CS homework in
Stanford's introductory CS course:
[http://www.stanforddaily.com/2009/11/13/de-la-torre-
violates...](http://www.stanforddaily.com/2009/11/13/de-la-torre-violates-
honor-code/)

------
vibhavs
On a slightly related note: I find the trend of forcing students in non-
technical fields of study to take introductory programming classes to be
troubling.

As an example, CMU requires all undergraduate students to take the
introductory programming class. I saw many students - for example English
majors - develop a terrible aversion to programming, and worse, a very poor
perception of the field itself. Worst of all, forcing some of these students
to take these courses probably leads to increases in cheating.

It may be more beneficial for some of these students to learn more computer
skills (e.g., setting up a WordPress blog) than CS fundamentals. Further, the
field already suffers from a problem of poor public perception. By applying
such blanket policies, are we doing more harm than good?

~~~
jorgeortiz85
I have the opposite complaint. We hold our humanities students to much lower
standards we do our science students.

At least at my university, when science students were required to take a
humanities class, they had to take a regular humanities class that would count
towards a humanities major. They couldn't cop out and take "Bedtime Stories"
instead of an English class or "Should I get out of bed in the morning?"
instead of a Philosophy class. No, they were expected to take regular
humanities courses alongside humanities students and to write humanities
papers comparable in quality to those from humanities students.

However, when humanities students were required to take science classes, there
had the option of taking "Let's play with HTML" instead of Computer Science or
"Let's talk about stars" instead of Physics. These classes would never be
allowed to count towards a science major, but humanities students were allowed
take them to fulfill their "science" requirements.

If we believe that a well-rounded student must have a command of language,
some knowledge of history and literature, and capacity for critical thinking,
then a well-rounded student should also have mathematical proficiency,
scientific fundamentals, and the ability to think computationally. "Dumbing
down" science classes for non-science majors seems to me to be doing them a
major disservice.

~~~
radu_floricica
As Norvig said, it takes 10 years to make a programmer. Why would you want to
teach an introductory course badly, when you can create a course that is
designed from the ground up to be independent and not depend on 9 years of
follow-up?

------
basugasubaku
The funny thing is, at least at Stanford, the students are warned at the
beginning of the course that their assignments are automatically compared
against all other submissions including those of previous years, and that the
the comparison tool is quite smart; simple modifications like changing
variable names will not fool it. It's a bit surprising the number of students
who get caught anyway. Perhaps they think it is a bluff, or perhaps they get
so caught up in meeting the deadline they forget all about it.

~~~
bad_user
It's because they don't know how those tools work, and assume that the
academic staff is incompetent enough to let slip a homework with
variables/methods/classes names changed.

Unfortunately for such students, since we are talking about source-code which
has a parsable grammar, such a tool usually does pattern matching directly on
the syntax-tree, and it's not the names of the nodes that are relevant, but
the tree's structure, and a single routine copied from somewhere can give you
away.

But even if some of them realize it, they still try (since the effort of
changing everything to pass the screening can be greater than the effort of
doing it yourself) with a wishful thinking ... I don't know about Stanford,
but it really depends on the teacher that's reviewing the homework, since many
of them don't use such tools.

I imagine that in the future we'll also have such tools for essays / natural
language, making it easier to detect plagiarism ... I'm suspecting PhD awards
will drop :)

~~~
barrkel
For simple exercises, though, I can easily imagine spurious collisions if the
comparison routine looks too deeply.

------
VBprogrammer
I alway found that the courses that had large restrictions on the amount of
collaboration they allowed (for example, don't discus it with anyone) were the
courses that had very poor quality course work, often featuring a 'trick' or
simply finding the right combination of API functions. The best assignments
allowed a reasonable amount of collaboration and often allowed a large degree
of freedom in what could be turned in, language choice and minimal provided
framework. My favorite assignment was one were the performance of our code was
measured against each other member of the class and the fastest 20% got an A,
the next 20% got a B and anyone who submitted a reasonable attempt got a C. I
think there must be other measures which could be compared in a fun way like
this.

------
gte910h
I've been a TA at Georgia Tech during this period (9 terms).

Cheating in the introductory courses was quite common. They tried approach
after approach after approach to deal with it. Eventually some of the classes
made the homework something you were supposed to work with people on, made it
worth less, and made the grades on in-class things worth more. Around that
time period I moved onto the C programming/good software development practices
class so can't speak anymore.

They had auto-compare tools from 1996 on from what I understand, and
definitely had a few students caught in it.

------
swolchok
Poor headline; the link points to a blog article in reaction to an article
that should carry said headline.

~~~
mbrubeck
Good point. I've now edited the HN headline to be more descriptive.

