I understand cheating is shitty but it would make a lot more sense for the teacher to make this a teachable moment about cheating, and to promote collaborative solutions, but also checking work you get from others.
A huge part of development is copying code and reusing code from libraries. The important part is that you know how the code you copy works.
Their teachable moment is that plagiarism has consequences, and they earned that lesson entirely by themselves.
Sure, but as a general rule the carrot is a better incentive than the stick.
Letโs not pretend these are kids who have a test for their first time. They all were told to not cheat and that cheating would lead to expulsion.
On the flip side, all threat of consequences works as a deterrent only when thereโs the expectation to be caught and punished.
By always catching but never handing out punishment to kids violating rules, you only teach them that consequences are inconsequential.
As a software developer Iโm expected to, at the very least, to do two things when โplagiarizingโ:
- Find the source to copy from.
- Perform the necessary adjustments to apply that copied solution to my own problem.
When students plagiarize, they donโt even need to do that. The solution they are copying from was written for the exact same assignment, so they donโt need the adjust anything (at most, they change some identifiers to throw off plagiarism detectors). And they copy from each other, so they donโt need to search for a solution. They may need to apply some social skills to find out who to copy from - but these are vastly different from the technical skills required to find relevant code to โplagiarizeโ in real world programming.
i wish my deadlines are not hard enough so that i could actually take time to learn everything from the code i copy.
College students know that cheating is not allowed. You learn this in first grade. I donโt know why you would need to keep โteachingโ that to students.
Never said they didnโt know it wasnโt allowed. I said that the teachers view of cheating is flawed. Iโm also not saying the students arenโt*** (autocorrect likes to change my contractions to the exact opposite) guiltless. My point was that young people make mistakes, and teacher should use this as a teachable moment about the difference between cheating and collaborating. Between just copying code, and knowing how what you copied works. These are students they are still learning. Also, an over 20% fail rate is abysmal and speaks to how poor of a teacher this professor is.
Youโre assuming good faith and willingness to learn/change in the part of the students. I was a TA at a private US uni for the not so smart kids of rich parents. Our approach (imposed by admin) was all carrots all the time. 20% seems fair, even low, for the share of students who were there to get a degree with the least amount of effort necessary and then get a job thanks to the uniโs name and their connections.
The point of the (probably fake) story is that there was a massive issue with cheating.
When we run through the cheating software at my uni it give you a percentage of how much of this paper is copied (quotes.etc) from previous work. In some first year this gets as high as 30% - not because of cheating, but because everyone us running from the same text book, same readings and same templateโฆ and when you are discussing historic theories not much has really changed in the last 50 years for first years. But there is a massive difference between writing something similar to the other 300 students and copying a block of work - was it understood, did it flow correctlyโฆ or did they copy the Wikipedia article?
You are correct, young people make mistakes. But if this is a capstone course its likely third year - the time for a teachable moment was 20 papers ago.
If you give cheaters too many chances, the other students will feel betrayed. And I guess rightly so.
Itโs not uncommon to get mails directly, or later in course evaluation, from students who complain about other students that didnโt put in the work. I can only remember few cases where there were names involved. Typically itโs some general complaint, but the frustration is obvious.
It sucks when you make an effort but witness other students cheating their way through the class. What are we supposed to tell them when the dishonest behaviour of other students doesnโt cause any consequences?
You tell them that they have learned the important life lesson:
In most situations, results matter more than the means by which you got them.
The result of a CS degree is supposed to be someone who knows how to program. This prof got what he wanted.
โTeachable momentsโ are for freshmen. Cheating seniors can get fucked.
On a very related note, I actually earned my CS degree.
As someone who only cheated in one class because the professor was a lazy fuck and assigned 5 hours worth of problems for a 1 hour exam with no regard to whether it was completable, I agree. The whole class cheated, because they had to. We actually all knew the material really well because distributing that material across 20 students was still iffy on time.
Heโs dead now, the lazy fuck. Fuck you Dr. Aung.
Keep in mind, itโs likely that more people cheated, but the smarter ones changed just enough code to make it look โtheir ownโ, or actually tested to ensure itโd work, and thus werenโt caught. Those 22 caught are very likely the ones that copy-pasted verbatim.
Then the smarter ones fulfilled the task, knowing and understanding the material enough to provide a working solution, rather than paste a non-working one. They may have done less than someone working from scratch but they showed themselves no less competent in the material.
make this a teachable moment
A personโs character is built at home. If youโre an adult in secondary school and canโt figure out not to cheat, better hope you get a warning and understand THATโs the only teachable moment youโre going to get.
The prof has neither the time or opportunity to fill in where your up-bringing was incomplete . Uni is the first place we learn that the universe doesnโt have a lot of patience for the laggards.
Strongly agree.
I was lucky enough to take a computer science course at my high school almost 20 years ago. The teach straight up we web design was 90% copying and 10% modification. He was a early retiree webmaster switched teacher.
Fast forward to today. System administration. Iโm not paid to code. Iโm paid to fix problems. So I research and focus on remediation. If thereโs a script for a fix Iโm using it.
Iโm super paranoid about copying code to use on a production system though. Whenever I come across a script or code to fix an issue i go through it line by line to ensure I know what itโs doing.
Often Iโll just take the logic or parts I need and write my own.
Reminds about recent Linusโ rant on LKML.
You copied that function without understanding why it does what it does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE.
AGAIN.
I work in IT, and itโs a similar situation. Bluntly, I Google half of the tickets I touch. I donโt really know shit about how things work specifically. I know the generalities, and the structure in which they function. I have the foundation of knowledge to know what to Google, but the fact is, I donโt remember crap about how to do just about everything.
Thereโs simply too much to know.
In college, using Google was a sin. IMO, they should teach a class on how to get the results you need from Google because youโre not going to remember whatever the subject is when you need to in six years and you come across an issue which requires that knowledge.
itโs the fucking capstone for a masterโs in CS. If theyโre not able to write their own code, then thatโs on them.
If itโs a capstone class and Iโm still having to do stupid mini weekly assignments instead of focusing on my semester log project then I would also be phoning in those assignments. If itโs a capstone then why is the teacher not just letting them focus on their big coding project. Bad teacher.
Especially, if they are to lazy to change the tasks. Sure, cheating is bad but itโs also bad teaching.
There is no but. Cheating is bad. Period. If you donโt like school/uni go work at a Wendyโs. In the restaurant or behind the dumpster. I donโt care.
Theyโre all fucking wankers and got what they aimed for. Nothing. Turning this around on the prof is the entire fucking problem here. (itโs not my fault, you made it possible so I had no other choice but to cheat. Itโs a bullshit argument. Take some responsibility for your own choices.)
Just to clarify, you donโt need schooling and a degree to get a job as a dev, Iโve hired several that are particularly strong. Strong junior devs love learning. Cheatersโฆwell they donโt care about learning. They just want to look good.
Nah, cheating is fine, if used sparingly and under specific, niche circumstances, and in ways that donโt harm others. As an example: I was struggling with Calculus. Like basically getting my ass handed to me. I went to all the study sessions, saw the Professor in their office several times, found a math tutor, and fuck me the info just wasnโt sticking. I put in legitimate effort and it wasnโt working and I wasnโt about to let one class shit on years of hard work towards a degree. So: I cheated.
We were allowed your typical little notecard. For the record, this is math. Make that shit open book, dear instructors. I know you all looking up near every formula yourself anyway. I digress. I slapped two notecards together and slapped a third into the fold. I had a very non-traditional schooling as a child so the rules as formulas changed were really getting me and I needed those and other reminders. Long as I had those I was fine. Still only squeaked by with a C.
Cheating in many situations is a very reasonable morally unjustifiable thing to do. If youโre not actively fucking over someone that doesnโt deserve it, or causing no harm, I honestly see no problem.
Thaaat saaaid, cough Thomas Edison cough, some cheating should be punished.
Even though the school might call that cheating, I donโt really think it is.
All of my engineering and math classes were open book, open notes. I got lucky in that all of my professors (except one (fuck you Dr. Aung)) designed exams such that they tested understanding, not memorization.
And here I am, 10 years later, still able to solve most of these problems without looking at a textbook for reference other than tables and formulas, despite not having worked in the field for half that time.
I got a mechanical engineering degree. Two the most useful classes I took were microeconomics and circuits 1.
This is a part of what I was trying to say. What I did is considered cheating. Yet it is defined as such largely by those who place artificial, and sometimes extremely unfair, limitations in place. Many of which serve no real purpose. Yet often if it works in their favor such โcheatingโ becomes a convenience.
In academia cheating is rightly frowned upon and often definable by the cheaters removal much of the time. Yet as a general rule I feel it has its place, and plenty of us use some form of it in our daily lives. Many of us are not particularly dishonest or openly practice deception with others, though we withhold truths amongst other mostly acceptable social whims. Iโd bet though most of us have gone to the bathroom for too long at work. Chatted with a colleague. โForgotโ to reply to that email. Faked being sick. All defined in some way under the larger moniker of โcheatingโ.
Not saying any of it is right or wrong specifically. Just laying justification for why I believe this.
On the one hand: awww, poor cheater worldโs smallest violin meme
On the other hand: expulsion from the university for a first offense seemsโฆ harsh.
universities take plagiarism very seriously. Friend of mine teaches stage craft (how to make sets, props, costumes, lighting and sound design/planning/execution/engineering)
First semester, first test, easy pass: Someone pokes their head into the class and my friend goes to the door to answer them, stepping outside for like ~30 seconds
comes to mark the papers:
โIn a proscenium theater, what is the very front of the stage called?โ
Real answer: apron
55% of the student answers: the same made up word that sounded vaguely Portuguese with no hits on Google.
even though itโs super dumb and super easy and barely matters at all and is a one word answer to a basic question - the students ended up being investigated by the university and my friend had all his classes audited.
Just wanna say I took a stage craft class as an elective many, many years ago when college was affordable enough to do such things.
We didnโt do anything hands on, just learned how stuff works.
It was one of my most favorite classes. I was a beer chugging, skirt chasing, never went to class burnout back then, but I enthusiastically went to that class every time.
I may be dumb, but to clarify: they were assumed cheating because the word was fake, and the only reason for so many duplicated fake answers would be if they shared a faulty answer sheet. Right?
yeah, I mean a forgivable wrong answer would be โdownstage centerโ โthe frontโ โthe lipโ โlimelightsโ โfootlightsโ โwingโ โlegโ โcurtainโ โpitโ - like close but wrong terminology or similar guesses.
The fact that loads of them said the same weird wrong answer was very sus.
Cheating is taken VERY seriously at every decent University. As it should.
Still, cheating to some extent exists everywhere. This just weeds out the real lazy or stupid cheaters. Which is also some kind of quality check, I guess.
To cheat properly, Iโve has to be a bit clever and shrewd, which is a valuable character trait. Maybe not the most moral one, but real life isnโt all moral either. ๐คทโโ๏ธ
Sometimes the best and most efficient solutions are created by just cleverly combining the work of others.
I will say up front that I am not a cheater - not because of good moral character, but because I am a terrible liar. Itโs less stressful to me to risk failure, than to risk being caught.
That said, a lot of cheating is excellent preparation for work in corporate America. I donโt like that it is, but it is. My main beef with capitalism is that it encourages, breeds, and rewards the absolute worst attributes of human nature. Thereโs literally nothing in capitalism that speaks to anything good in people. Knowing how to cheat, cheat profitably, and (most importantly) avoid being caught is perhaps one of the most useful skills in the American capitalist corporate space.
Doesnโt mean it has to be tolerated.
If a school is known to go easy on cheaters. Why would anyone actually trust a degree from that school?
You donโt learn by just copying someoneโs github repository and presenting it as your solution.
As someone said. โYou copied that function without understanding why it does what it does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE. AGAIN.โ
On the other hand: expulsion from the university for a first offense seemsโฆ harsh.
Itโs a masters program, I have no issue with high level cheaters getting slapped with consequences. When I was in undergrad, first offence was an immediate F in the class, with a second being expulsion. Given the requirements for masters/doctorate (my MIL got both while I was dating my wife), getting an F is probably going to bounce you from the program anyway, so itโs not that much difference IMO.
Iโm going to allege that such โeducationalโ institutionsโ focus on โcheatingโ is harmful and dangerous for their students.
Iโm a flight instructor. Students would show up to my class actually afraid to be caught writing things down to refer to them later. They were afraid to be caught using checklists. They would overwhelm themselves trying to commit entire technical manuals to memory. Thatโs not how anything actually works. The FAA prints all these references so pilots can read them. We donโt take them away from you when you pass your practical.
Checklist usage in the cockpit is a required skill to pass a practical test. The examiner has to see you using a checklist during the test in order to pass you. Writing things down so you can refer to them later, like flight planning and ATC clearances, also a required skill. Schools make people afraid to do these things.
If youโve got a kneeboard that has the tower light gun signal chart printed on it, and you lose the radio and need light gun signals, youโre not going to have your license taken away from you if you use that quick reference. Too many students bring that pressure into flight training with them. Itโs a fun bit of deprogramming to do.
Iโm going to allege that such โeducationalโ institutionsโ focus on โcheatingโ is harmful and dangerous for their students.
I wonโt disagree that the overall anti-cheating mentality goes too far, but this example was students literally plagiarizing their first project.
That mentality sounds like instructors arenโt properly setting expectations for students. If going over checklists is a required skill, students should be informed regularly that they need to be doing XYZ and should be writing that down. When I was still trying for my CS BS, that was something my profs did regularly. We could bring notes to the final, but you were still expected to write your own code (by hand) on the final.
That mentality sounds like instructors arenโt properly setting expectations for students. If going over checklists is a required skill, students should be informed regularly that they need to be doing XYZ and should be writing that down.
Yeah, thatโs what I meant by โitโs a fun bit of deprogramming to do.โ Especially younger students are strongly conditioned to think of tests or performances as โclosed bookโ unless specifically informed otherwise and often demonstrate actual fear of being caught using reference materials or god forbid open a reference manual. Breaking them of that habit often takes more than โsetting expectations.โ It can take some effort to get students to realize the game weโre playing here isnโt โYou have to know everything in all the textbooks,โ itโs โYouโve got to know which book to find which answer in.โ
Having gone back to college after becoming a flight instructor, Iโm strongly under the impression that college just doesnโt matter. There is no certification or accountability requirements for professors; no legal requirement for them to study the fundamentals of instruction, hell Iโm not convinced anyone actually interviewed some of my professors before hiring them.
I had an English professor tell me she โlikes to give students enough rope to hang themselves with.โ I want you to imagine hearing that out of a flight instructor.
College professors seem to see themselves as gatekeepers rather than guides. Their classes have to be hard so that only the worthy graduate. Flying an airplane is already complex enough, my job as a flight instructor is to make the process of learning that complexity as easy and safe for my students as possible. What even is college if not corrupt?
I think itโs more that itโs in their masterโs capstone class. In undergrad, definitely too harsh. But for a masterโs program I get it
Yeah, that makes more sense.
Who TF is copying out of github for their masters, though, honestly?
I hope my Uni had this. I have never cheated, but cheaters sometimes have better grades than me.
I guess that would harm you if the class is graded on a curve. Iโm not saying they shouldnโt be caught and penalized, only that expulsion from the university is a harsh penalty. Automatic failure of the class would hurt plenty, without utterly destroying someoneโs life.
when a professor does this theyโre โbasedโ and โbrainpilledโ but when I pretend to sell crack on the benches outside, all of a sudden the judge claims itโs โentrapmentโ and โillegalโ smhโฆ
At this point Iโm only hoping to emerge from the other side of the โbasedโ fad although Iโve never understood what it meant. WTaF is โbrain pilledโ?
Groovy. Tubular. Fetch.
Hereโs the real answer for based:
โBasedโ (corruption of base head - from someone who smokes base - street name for crack cocaine) was popular as an insult in rap / African American circles in the early 00s
Rapper Lil B got called it and decided on a whim to pretend the meaning was changed to mean something positive, started using it in this way, it caught on - mostly through the new York scene and its attendant twitter following
As all slang does in the last ~100-150 years, passed from black people to everyone.
Brain pilled is a reference to The Matrix f/t Keanu Reeves in which Morpheus - whose namesake is the God of dreams - offers to wake up Neo from his fake reality by taking the red pill - leading to the phrase "red pilled" meaning (a right wing variant of) "woke."
Over time [x]-pilled became slang like how Watergate/ [x]-gate became a suffix to imply an imbrolglio.
I always took based to be a sort of ironic agreement with a slight political connotation, especially if something said seems particularly โbold.โ
Essentially โYou totally understand who youโre talking to (your โbaseโ) and the subject at hand; This guy/gal gets it; This is โbasedโ on hard factsโ (especially when seen as controversial and few will admit it.)
You can understand how this became conservative-shitpost parlance for a while but thankfully (and ironically) has become more depolarized. So now I see it like โYeah this fellow human being understands their fellow human beings!โ
โBrainpilledโ is just a stupid shift from the term โRed pillโ, coined by The Matrix and eventually co-opted by conspiracy theorists and others with intense socializing difficulties (that are everyone elseโs fault, naturally.)
The idea being you made a choice to โsee the truthโ when nobody else wants to.
It eventually spawned โblack pilledโ which is a ridiculously nihilist idea that โI see how everything really works now, and itโs all terrible and thereโs zero hope.โ
And now weโre at โbrainpilledโ, like the movie Limitless maybe? LOL. โThis person sees it from some genius angle us mere mortals can barely comprehend. Theyโre playing 5D chess and weโre still playing Candyland.โ
I dunno, some of it is fun and descriptive. Some is braindead. Language is like any art, itโs like Bruce Lee says: take what works and leave the rest behind. :)
Cheating in academia is the name of the game. There is a survivor bias here assuming the other 78 students didnโt cheat. Theyโre Learning how to not get caught. Building a better trap may simply yield a better better cheater. The proof ends up being in the work.
I still think honeypots are amusing AF.
i didnt have a big problem with cheating, except with the caveat if a test is weighted via averages, then it actively fucks over those who dont cheat, as the curve is set higher than it should.
Average-weighted tests can go die in a ditch
It just discourages cooperation leading up the the exam, because you actively benefit from your peers performing worse
it works when tests are graded where the intended score is not 100%. having a test basically be โnot finishedโ shows which subjects on a test was not properly gone over, thus the curve would apply and remove said question from the exam. if it were to be graded in a 100% scale, the question would exist to not give the class a perfect score regardless.
I have average intelligence and maintained a 3.5 at a top bioengineering school. I barely went to lectures, and just made sure to stay on top of the material through online resources (we have literally everything ever available to us). Id say not being a dumbass is the name of the game.
It always surprises me when I interview new graduates now and they canโt explain any of their projects or pass a basic software proficiency test that most intro classes should cover (I usually ask them to write code to reverse complement a DNA sequenceโฆ just swap out some letters and reverse a string, I do include the rules in the prompt). I think cheating is really rampant in software students.
I graduated from software engineering but still until this point, I loathe using one of the chatbots to make the code I want to make work on my own. Iโve used it twice to ask about how to organize a big software project but that was it. I am just a couple years older than the interns at my office butโฆdamnโฆthey are abusing chatgpt to get stuff done, albeit barely, because intern intelligence never ceases to amaze, and itโs funny to watch.
If they wanna cheat, they should at least learn or practice that which they try to cheat xd
I have no issue using an AI bot to help write code, but from personal experience, you have to at least have a basic understanding of how to do what youโre trying to do, otherwise you wonโt be able to fix the code your AI bot gave you. Iโve tried using a bot to just write entire programs for me, it never works out of me. I always have to go back and update and fix what it gave me so I actually have a working product in the end but Iโm also only doing scripting so that might make it easier to get by with a bot.
Luckily chat bots are hot garbage at logic. They have no clue what theyโre doing at all, most of what they say is just easy/popular sources that donโt work or at worst sorta work but will create huge bugs. Sure ai will get better, but imo chatgpt/llm wonโt replace real eng cause it sources from dumbasses like me
There was an early episode of Naruto that involved a test that was nigh impossible for someone of their grade level. The actual purpose of the test was to see how good they were at cheating without getting caught, which would translate to their ability to gather information in enemy territory. I think about that a lot.
Reminded of Space Cadet:
Cheat (open your eyes) -> score is too high -> fail
Keep eyes closed -> laughably low score -> perfect!
Star Trek version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru
At a certain point though, youโve just plain done the work. If you jump through enough hoops to cheat then you have to know the material well enough. Like doing a bunch of editing passes on downloaded papers.
Itโs so much easier to just go to class and do the assignment work.
The same mentality that tries to cheat also doesnโt understand that actually knowing the material is crucial to actually doing the job.
Sure, theyโll argue that we only use about 2 weeks of accumulated college knowledge in our professional careers, and that claim apparently checks out; but itโs the very last few weeks that weโve built on the years of pre-req that we use later on. I.e itโs just the tip of the iceberg, but itโs the tip of a fucking iceberg.
It also disregards all the secondary and tertiary benefits to โknowing the materialโ and those benefits of doing the work to get there.
Like honing your ability to research, skills in pulling the actual useful info out of diverse sources of vastly differing quality, speed at which you can pick up new ideas and concepts, etc.
Part of what youโre learning is how to do the boring grunt work of learning itself, and honing your skills at that through experience
The most boring days of my job are when I just need to follow well written directions or documentation. The real test is when youโre past that and you need to combine multiple things to meet your specific situation, when no one who has figured it out before ever documented it in one easy place.
This is just what happens when you send a bunch of people to higher education who didnโt really want to go.
Well, if the piece of paper wasnโt necessary to make enough money to split an apartment with 3 other strangers, Iโm sure fewer people would go.
We really need to stop forcefeeding kids this rubbish anyway.
Your life is not over if you donโt go to college. It should be perfectly acceptable to get other jobs, and see what you want to do in life. Thereโs no magic pot of jobs for graduates. Office jobs are easily done from overseas. You know what canโt be done by some poor Indian earning $10 a day? Unblocking my toilet. Plastering my walls. Fitting my bathroom. Making my food. Emptying my bins.
Yeah, theyโre not glamorous. Yeah, youโre not going to be a billionaire doing those things. But you know what? You werenโt anyway.