

How I Dealt with Student Plagiarism - reinhardt
http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20110723/

======
joshfraser
In the real world you don't get punished for using Google or surrounding
yourself with people who are smarter than you.

Maybe classroom programming shouldn't punish you either. What if you could
turn in any code you wanted as long as you cited where you got it from and
which license it was released under?

// got this from John. he explained this to me & now I finally understand how
it works!

or

// thanks Google! found this great code on Github (Apache 2.0 license)

Of course, this approach would require assigning different types of projects
than we're currently used to, but I imagine students would graduate a lot more
prepared for real jobs.

~~~
shou4577
I think that you are right, in that this would probably prepare students for
jobs very well.

However, I think that a Bachelor's degree is supposed to be about something
other than job training. Sure, there is some overlapping material between
"prepare for a job" and "get a Bachelor's degree," but not very much. People
who have a Bachelor's are expected to have knowledge that is both broad and
deep. That is, they are expected to know far more than they need to know, and
have skills outside of their area of expertise.

Not that there is anything wrong with your approach, I just think that it
disagrees with the overall goals of a standard university degree program,
which is not terribly concerned about job preparation.

If you can just copy and paste answers, with source, then you haven't actually
learned anything (technically, you might have, but there is nothing in your
work to support this conclusion - unknowledgeable until proven knowledgeable).
The grade you receive should be a measure of the skills you have obtained, and
the things that you have learned, rather than the results you produce. Sure,
you can do this in the real world, but in the real world you are not trying to
show what skills you have obtained, you are only asked to produce results -
this is the major difference between the education environment and the work
environment.

~~~
joshfraser
fine point

------
yummyfajitas
How I dealt with student plagiarism:

    
    
        10% homework
        25% quizzes
        25% midterm
        40% final exam
    

On rare occasions, plagiarism might have helped a borderline student move from
a C+ to a B-. But I suspect it hurt more students than it helps - the
plagiarism bonus on homework is usually offset by the lack of practice penalty
on exams.

~~~
Joakal
I dislike quizs and exams because I view them as memorisation tests. I do
badly while those people who can memorise everything so well, don't understand
what they're doing.

Do you allow books or computers? I'd think the internet would make it too easy
as it'd allow people to communicate.

Some more pet peeves:

* Expected to write perfect code on paper despite students using the IDEs and documentation throughout coursework and tutorials. Professor's response "Practice writing on paper before exam/quiz"

* Timed exam/quizs and it's on paper. I write far more slowly on paper than computers. In fact, I can type for many hours but after one or two hours on paper, I'm exhausted. Professor's response "Too bad / Not enough computers for everyone"

~~~
yummyfajitas
I taught math, not CS, and my exams required very little memorization. An
example:

<http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/spring2009/midterm.pdf>

The majority of the points are obtained via understanding.

As for your experience, one can certainly come up with bad tests. Also, tests
aren't perfectly fair. But overall, I'd rather penalize people for being
unable to work outside their comfort zone than penalize people for not
cheating.

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varunsrin
This brings to mind a professor at my university, who used to handout
textbooks with problemsets which were most of the course's homework. The
problem sets would have answers at the back, but he would misprint some of
them on purpose that he could 'catch' students cheating from the back of the
book.

I always thought that sounded like entrapment - the assignments I tend to
learn the most from are the ones that are inherently structured so that there
is no way to copy / cheat on them.

~~~
Jach
That does sound awful. Especially for the students not confident in their
answer, finding it's different than the back, spending time trying to get that
same answer. I've had times like that where, once I got the right answer, I
had convinced myself of the right way to do things and similar problems aren't
as hard anymore. In the case of wrong answers, I might convince myself of
something that is false.

This is why I think grading on work is more important than the right answer,
though of course the right answer and right work should be taken into account.
If problems are such that little to no work needs to be shown, they aren't
worth assignment as homework.

~~~
william42
I always hated grading on work in my earlier classes because until the work
started to get challenging I could do the entire problem in my head.

------
ajray
As someone who hopes to be a future professor, posts like this are _extremely_
valuable to me.

I hope that some of the good that's come from this media storm is we'll have a
surge of great ideas on how to design courses and assignments to minify
plagiarizing.

~~~
Jach
Is your goal to get students to understand, or get them to do the work-hours
you want them to? If your course is one where a smart student could pass your
exams without doing any of the assignments (or conversely an average student
who might fail your exams but does well on assignments without cheating), why
should you care if anyone does those assignments or even copies them? Just
make assignments optional and the tests account for >90% of the grade, and use
your cheating-detection skills at test-time where you can actually test
understanding.

~~~
alf
The problem is that test taking is only minimally useful outside of school,
and by choosing tests as the only measurement, you end up optimizing for the
wrong skill. (I know because I was a pretty good test taker as a student, but
the laziness and procrastination that it fosters is really starting to bite me
in the ass right now) I think tests are useful because they're an easy metric,
but if you're goal is to teach or learn a skill, tests are a really poor tool.
As a thought experiment, if you wanted to teach yourself something what would
you do? You probably wouldn't do it by giving yourself written tests.

~~~
equark
Testing can actually have a direct effect on learning:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/science/21memory.html?_r=2...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/science/21memory.html?_r=2&ref=science)

~~~
alf
>A week later all four groups were given a short-answer test that assessed
their ability to recall facts and draw logical conclusions based on the facts.

The problem with this study is they measure learning using test. Of course the
groups that had taken tests while memorizing scored better, they got practice.

~~~
Jach
HN discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2125742>

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viraptor
(more related to the previous post rather than this one, but still on-topic) I
wonder how well would automating the process work. Right after the student
clicks "submit", show the plagiarism analysis / score (previous article has a
pretty interesting screenshot with all the sources annotated / issues
highlighted).

Would that be a sufficient deterrent? Would the guys copy/pasting the work
cancel the submission if they saw that everyone will know they directly copied
60%+ of the content?

~~~
hardy263
In my university programming class, we submitted assignments using turnitin,
the same software you saw in the screenshot. We were allowed to see how much
of our programs matched other people's programs, and where it was copied from.
Scores of up to 70% were not uncommon because the whole class had the same
assignment and example code to work from. The only problem is if your score
was near 99%, which would probably raise some eyebrows.

But since we could see what parts were considered to be plagiarized, we could
easily change our program and resubmit to avoid the filter. It would only
deter the students who were too lazy to change their variable names to
something else.

~~~
Jach
Did anyone submit a pre-processed version of the code? (Assuming your
assignments were in C.) If only one person did it they'd probably have high-
uniqueness, but if >1 did it they'd all have high-sameness.

~~~
hardy263
No, it was done in C#, and even if it was in C, it's not worth the trouble to
preprocess the code anyway. The assignment answers were usually simple but
short. Something like sorting a linked list using insertion sort. If you have
no idea how linked lists work, it's likely you would copy it. But if you
understood linked lists, and already knew insertion sort, you could probably
write it on the spot within 20 minutes.

~~~
Jach
Wow, so you never had to write complete programs for assignments? That "write
a sort function" question seems more suitable to what I'd expect on an exam.
You find out who knows/doesn't know a lot faster than a homework problem where
you may be able to program it at the time but don't understand in general only
to fail on the next exam, or maybe you think you know it already so you just
copy from somewhere and change variables, but don't really know it, and so you
also fail at test time.

Bleh. The whole point of catching plagiarizers has been to determine whether
work was done in some expected way, not to make sure learning happened or
anything useful came from the work.

------
erikb
The idea is really nice. If I understand correctly he let's the students
computer do the grading (and not the server, who he can trust a lot more), but
that is just a small security design problem. Allover using a program to solve
the problems of a CS class is quite smart and I wonder (since I started to
study CS) why not more people do that.

