Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I had students that copied one-another's work; in fact I had few students that didn't copy. It made it impossible to mark their projects correctly, so I asked my more-experienced colleagues.

The best advice I got was to explain the difference between collaboration (strongly encouraged) and plagiarism (re-take the course if you're lucky). Forbidding collaboration is a disastrous policy, so an instructor shouldn't have a problem with giving the same mark to each member of a group of collaborators. You just have to test that each individual can explain what they've submitted.




My school auto-graded everything (file drop your code to a server by midnight & get a score back). I don't recall a single instance of TA/professor written or verbal feedback on code.


Yuh. I guess that's "modern times". I taught in the late eighties, and auto-grading wasn't a thing.

FWIW, I was a "temporary visiting lecturer", i.e. contract fill-in help. I had to write the syllabus (literally), the course plan, and the hand-outs. I also had to write all the tests and the exams; and I had to mark the exams, and then sit on the exam board through the summer holidays. The pretty girls would flutter their eyelashes at me, and ask for leniency. I suspect they took their cue from my louche colleague, who was evidently happy to take sexual advantage of his students in exchange for better marks.

[Edit] I liked this colleague; but I would not have introduced him to my wife or my daughter.


Yikes.

Actually not so modern, my college was auto-grading 20 years ago.


This was in the 1980's. We're talking 5 1/4" floppies, no internet, 64MB RAM. I had to review my students' work as dead-tree submissions or completed circuits or whatever.

(I certainly wasn't going to take digital submissions from them; that would mean floppy disks, and I regarded any disk that had been touched by any student as if it were infected with plague, because it almost certainly was. All the school systems were always infected).


I think you intended to write 64KB?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: