You study to learn. Assignments are to help you learn and evaluate yourself. If you skip them in whatever manner only you suffer. Noone else. When you finish your studies and go to work noone will care about the grade you got, especially if you can't code your way out of a wet paper bag.
EDIT: sorry, I misread your question....
I think it's a problem for the university because it might mislead universities into keeping terrible teachers on the payroll because too many of their students are getting too high grades because they copy because teacher was unable to teach them or motivate them.
This problem is solved cheaper and easier just by monitoring teachers directly.
Another problem I can see is that if a lot of particularly terrible students graduate suddenly it might spoil the reputation of the university, but it's a problem with increase of the cheating level, not with the cheating level itself, it's already calculated into university's reputation.
It really doesn't matter all that much because the main source of university graduates success and as a result university's reputation comes from how picky they are when admitting students. Good freshmen usually make good graduates.
When students are taught nearly every university does similarly good as long as they try to do a decent job and not just scam people.
I don't see any other problems. And I see zero incentive for the university to reduce cheating. This would just reduce the number of graduates and they can already do that on admission if they want that. Unless they can somehow earn money from catching cheating students.
Heck, top universities even admit more on the affluence of the student's family not on how smart they are. And that's because affluent graduates are also sought after by the business so this works for everybody.
I think the person who wrote that article is cynical enough to understand the incentives to not care about cheating too much at the level of individual teacher but they are not cynical enough to understand that at institutional level there's also lack of incentive to care about that because university is not really about teaching and grading. It's for selecting and it doesn't need to be 100% accurate to be useful and valuable.
There exist quite a lot of countries in which it is very common that the respective company will look a lot at your marks.
Different Universities have different standards and everyone knows this. It’s why a degree from Stanford is a stronger signal than a degree from an average institution. It doesn’t guarantee the Stanford grad is better, but it’s a strong signal that people know they can trust.
If a University starts allowing cheating (by ignoring it) the value of their degree will fall over time. Not at all once, but these things get noticed.
> If a University starts allowing cheating (by ignoring it) the value of their degree will fall over time. Not at all once, but these things get noticed
This also means that any effort put into reducing cheating would lead to benefits (if any) far removed from the actions undertaken.
Wait, why don’t I just ask the LLM from the get go?
The ships are all gone from the harbor. Luckily for justice, there won’t be any jobs anyway for those degrees. Something about the universe is just doing quite a rug pull on so many things, fascinating times.
As long as it's clearly communicated in the syllabus, should be fine. If identical code submissions are so common then everyone should be doing the same quantity of work on average and it shouldn't be an issue if you automatically get assigned bonus problems.
#include <stdio.h>
During the exam professor asked me why I called arguments of main argv and argc and if they can be called something else, I did know the answer, but I didn't know exactly what continue does because I wasn't using it in my code.
This is why homework are NOW being done in-class: no takehomes.
In short, weekly exams, on-paper, in-person, in-class, on teacher's test form paper.
No phone. Calculator permitted. Some allow open-book.
I too welcome back the 1980s.
Mimograph, anyone? * sniff * sniff *
For those who went to schools with strong honor codes, would you advocate that to others?
For example, did you find an environment of trust and respect, like you've not seen elsewhere?
For another example, do you have strong post-graduation alumni network, where someone in the alumni directory isn't just a possible foot in the door for sales ("hey, we went to the same school, can you grant me the courtesy of a call"), but that you can assume they are likely honest and have integrity?
Did it improve the quality of your education?
Were there downsides?
Some people will cheat. Honor code or not. But, especially if you go to a very good school, the people who don't need to cheat or don't want to, will always be worth knowing.
I think what's happening is kind of dark. Universities might be slowly returning to what they were a long time ago which is a place of learning. In recent times they have been selling prestige to credentialists. It turns out that those people don't really need to take the classes especially with the internet and AI now being resources. So the universities are stuck between earning more revenue yet having decreasing academic integrity versus having lower revenue and catering to a smaller group of people.
The honor code itself doesn't really seem to change how people behave. Anecdotally, I hear that cheating increases every year from whispers of CS profs and TAs. I feel like if you are going to use AI to cheat, as one example, why not skip the university altogether? I think the lack of academic integrity will lead to that in some form or another.
Do you know, as cheating increased, was there peer pushback against the cheaters, such as overt disapproval that lowers the cheater's social status?
Or, were cheaters secretive from fellow students, so mostly only profs and TAs could tell?
If cheaters were secretive from fellow students, was it out of fear of hurting their peer social status, or fear of being ratted out and facing school disciplinary action?
The school seems to keep it private who is caught but I also don't think anyone is punished harshly. Despite all of this I am not aware of anyone being suspended or expelled. I assume there were people who would cheat on actual exams so exams now have proctors and there are assigned seats. The school wouldn't have insisted on proctors being in the honor code without a reason.
I think the fear of getting caught/ratted out is more salient. Use of GPT is so pervasive, just in general, that there's probably more cheating than there is not. Imagine people who rely on GPT for tasks like what they should eat suddenly not using it for hw. I think most just want their A- and their degree and to move on.
That same reason people used other methods to cheat in the past, a degree is valuable to have in the job market. I honestly doubt cheating is even increasing, they are just lazier about it now.
Strong honor codes aren't the norm, so I don't think you could say we wouldn't be having this conversation if they had any significant effect on plagiarism.
When I studied applied physics eons ago we had tutorials in term time and a substantial essay to complete in the long vacation but these were between the student and the tutor and had no effect on the final class of degree; that was determined by a series of final exams (open note), the report of the final year laboratory project and its oral defence. My project report was more than a hundred typewritten pages with numerous diagrams and I had to defend it to my project supervisor and the head of department. I don't think a plagiarist could have done it.
Of course this is expensive, all the academics involved were permanent employees of the university, there were no graduate students doing slave labour tutoring.
In my opinion the plague of plagiarism is a direct consequence of attempts to get education on the cheap and of valuing the diploma more than the education itself.
My friends who teach used the same level of filtering in the past: They suspected a lot of students from copying from each other, but they only took action on the cases where it was so undeniably obvious that it would be an open and shut case.
In the era of LLMs, that degree of precision is completely gone. However, the other signal is amplified: They have more students than ever getting 100s on homework and completely failing any exams. In the past it seems that many of the plagiarizers at least learned something, however minimal, in the process of copying homework and then trying to turn it into something that looked less suspicious. The LLM users are so brazen that they just submit the prompt, copy the output, and call it a day.
No one is going to stop the student and ask them why they cheated even if they were practically being asked to eat a tomato soup with a fork. It's easier to hide the problem under the rug and scapegoat.
Yes, it took a long time and some sleepless nights (unless the student has perfect time management). This is all by design, you can't learn without it.
Yes, some people got bad grades. This happens, after all what even is the point of grading if everyone gets good grades.
What is the problem that you think is "being hidden under the rug"?
I plagiarized quite a bit in school. I'm not proud of it. Desperation and poor role models can create all sorts of negative outcomes, though. I was taught how to survive, not how to live ethically.
You can try to filter the plagiarists, sure. But uh, I'm not sure if it will work. The plagiarists are in league with each other.
The reality, to me, seems to be that universities sell credentials with learning as a sort of sideshow or window dressing.
I've met a lot of excellent engineers who didn't have degrees. I have met a lot of terrible ones who did. I can tell you which group has an easier time getting hired... and I don't think I am focusing on edge cases. The system is broken.
So do whatever you have to to get that permission slip to work from the education-industrial complex. By all means, please learn your trade as well, but let's not pretend like "knowledge" is what you are paying six figures for at a university. Knowledge is available for free. It's certification that costs as much as a house.
The commons is the value of a university degree. No, not the education! The diploma.
There will always be some fraction of students that genuinely learn and earn their diplomas. Industry rewards them with higher salaries because the diploma demonstrates that they’re educated and self-motived intelligent people — grade A employees in other words.
So of course, some students will cheat and gain a diploma through copying others. This is inevitable, like the drug trade or prostitution.
If the percentage is low enough, nobody cares.
Okay, but… what if it’s a little higher? Those students might be highly profitable foreign students just looking to get a piece of paper so that they can get a better life back home.
What about a bit higher? Now the university is making bank, the foreign students are funding a new physics lab and a new pool! Awesome.
What if it’s 90%?
Now… it’s too late to rock the boat. The emperors nakedness must not be revealed! If industry catches on that almost all of the diploma-wielding graduates are actually C- instead of A+ the whole thing will implode.
That’s why universities are “helpless” against cheating! They won’t fix it, because if they do, the music stops.
We’re nearly there now. I walked through my old university and saw maybe 5% locals. I hardly heard a single conversation in English. This place is now graduating students in bulk that are functionally illiterate (in English), let alone the subject matter.
The song hasn’t stopped yet, but AI is fiddling with the buttons on the stereo.
There are no chairs.
Stanford has a problem but I was never going to get into a school that the prestige matters. This just doesn't matter for the vast majority of students.
In the long run, the state school problem is easily fixed by an AI first, ultra low tuition, accredited option.
I actually just looked at my state school thinking of going back in my 50s but the tuition makes it a complete non-starter.
I just think of how cheap we could do an AI first class with 1 or 2 in person, controlled exams like any license exam that cheating is just not going to be an issue.
The prestigious schools have a much more difficult problem but there are pretty simple ways to have in person exams that most people are not going to cheat on.
Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16651099 - March 2018 (118 comments)
Some of them simply don’t generalize, like creating new homework assignments from scratch each semester.
As much as I'm loathe to suggest using AI in CS, that's actually something an LLM might be able to help with --- generating tons of pseudorandom variations on a theme.
I think making assignments completely for practice, and having 100% of the grade be the final exam, where there is zero computer use and pure brain use, outputting on pen-and-paper, will work. Anyone who tries to cheat will only cheat themselves and have the results of that exam reflect their actual understanding.
But universities are businesses now. They produce diplomas in exchange for money, and interrupting that with details like "this student shouldn't be here" costs them money they can't afford to lose.
The homework is supposed to be for practice.
I’ve heard multiple stories of professors for undergrads who tried making homework optional, but the number of students failing exams increased dramatically because fewer people did the homework.
LLMs have short circuited a lot of student’s thought process and even sense of morals. A lot of students who wouldn’t copy a friend’s homework or even copy and paste from GitHub have started using LLMs to do their homework. I don’t really know what it is. Maybe a sense that because they’re using a tool that it’s not cheating? Thinking they’re less likely to get caught because it’s not identical to existing work?
I agree that weighting the exams most heavily is the only way out, but I’m sure we’re in for a struggle as universities see the shocking grade drops that come with that practice.
In a sane world that would be a "not our problem", as the horses have been brought to water and they just won't drink, but unfortunately institutions chasing pass rates metrics as a pure indicator of instructor skills pushes towards increased leniency in grading and that's another can of worms which I won't open here.
It's their problem.
That would make sense. The logic that they are not copying work from another student or copying someone else’s “efforts” so to speak.
Another aspect is how easy it is. It’s not having to find someone to copy it from, or search online and so on. It’s “just open an llm chat window and ask”.
The worst part is those that don’t cheat will hear how so and so uses llms to do homework and nails all the answers unpunished while they are barely managing, trying to do honest work. That stuff is soul killing.
I'm seeing in work that developers are producing code they don't understand. I think overall AI is making it harder for them to learn because the temptation is to just use what ever it produces. Especially when this is combined with measuring productivity on tickets closed.
Just let them fail.
This is very common in British universities
And an university is not a school. Nobody should be forced to take it, if you are not interested in learning just go home. But at the same time, a quality university should have a high barrier so that only people that actually learned and have demonstrated to have learned the required subjects, in a setting where cheating is almost impossible, should be able to get a diploma.
Those who didn't took it serious, learned early that they won't get far.
Asking people to write Java (or whatever) on paper is crazy, it doesn't really line up with anything you would ever do in the real world, and expecting people to memorize the signatures of functions feels like a total waste of time.
On the other hand, we have to accept that LLMs are I think, at this point, better than over half of all 1st year University students, so we can't let students use LLMs, without either letting half of students pass with no effort, or making tests harder and failing half of students -- and that isn't a long term solution, as I imagine LLMs are just going to keep getting better.
I tried that, but some students who had cheated became really aggressive when it turned out they did not have a single clue how their AI-generated solutions worked and still demanded a pass. We now do more written exams where we have some distance.
But to be fair, there is no ambiguity in this extreme example but ambiguity can be misused by either party in other cases where it is not so cut and clear.
That is what we do now. Some reasons why we preferred oral exams before:
1. In order to write a written exam, you have to create a written exam.
2. Scheduling is more difficult. You have to reserve a room for the exam, ensure that the date does not collide with other exams, and students have to plan their vacations around it. For oral exams, you only have to schedule two people, which allows for much greater flexibility.
3. During oral exams, you can probe a bit deeper if you notice that a student did not understand the question correctly, but still knows the solution. In contrast, in a written exam, there is no way for the student to recover from an initially incorrect understanding.
4. It is much easier to cheat on a written exam, especially since there have been all kinds of technological improvements, like ear canal earphones, tiny cameras, glasses with integrated AI assistants, polarized smart watches and who knows what else.
Maybe language translation is a case where an AI should be allowed during exams.
Also, oral examinations are costly to administer. This work needs to be done with a panel, to avoid complaints. And the panel members cannot include TAs, who are after all just students themselves. A 10-minute examination can have start-up problems, and doesn't allow for in-depth followup questions.
With a panel of say 3 professors replacing 1 professor, and interviews of say 1 hour replacing what might be 20 minutes of grading, we are talking about quite a lot of increased workload.
"Umm... this is how I've always done it" / "I copied it from my solution for assignment 1 and I no longer remember why I did it that way" / "there was an error and somebody suggested this as a workaround in the Github issue" are all perfectly valid answers in my opinion.
Remove the incentive to cheat, and save yourself the time trying to catch it (and punish it, despite an uncooperative administration).
But I have zero qualifications for any of these opinions other than having been forced to attend a number of nearly worthless university classes that were pointless in the face of just reading the course book. Of course I also had some classes that were worth way more than just the book material, but probably half the classes I had to take I felt were dubiously useful to start with, not to mention the absolutely terrible actual class, and forcing people to attend to get a passing grade was just there to prevent 95% of the class being empty every week.
Similarly, exam-only courses are an excellent way to teach huge numbers of students without the costly hassle of grading homework assignments. But that doesn't mean they're an optimal solution.
From my experience as a student and now a professor, nothing can possibly compare to the benefit you get from hands-on learning. You get so much more understanding from the 20 hours you spent making a complex system work, than you will ever get in three 3-6 hours of in-class instruction you'd get during the same timeframe. And I have no good idea how to test for all the skills you learn from "writing a tiny OS kernel from scratch in C" or "building a compiler" or "implementing a complicated cryptographic protocol and then realizing an attack on it." I do observe that my students who do the homework tend to do much better on the exams, but I'm concerned that the incentive to take shortcuts will be much too high if homework isn't required.
The other dichotomy is also strange, especially since the only person with an actual job is the professor - it is in fact his direct responsibility to structure the course, including incentives, to achieve the best learning.
How? I can vaguely see it if the assignments were truly out of step with the material, but I cannot understand how relevant assignments are a distraction. In mathematics, and in all CS courses I have taught, assignments are at the core of what you are learning, and the best feedback (to yourself and your teacher) that you have a working knowledge of the material.
I don't understand your second question. Currently, university assignments are graded to hold students by the hand. I'm saying they shouldn't do that.
The thread was abou that, but your argument wasn't, it suggested an alternative reason for rejecting assignments, so would be true regardless of cheating, thus not related to this thread
But I guess I let through that yes, I don't think we should take students by the hand at all and you're right that's a whole different debate.
Personally, the best classes I had all had rigorous homework assignments. I would learn much more from them than studying for the tests. In fact, doing the homeworks would generally cover more than would be possible to test.
Plus I'm just glad to have built things like a DNS server, and inode filesysyem. Many small games and web servers. Database applications, shells, and compilers just to name a few. These are all things that give me confidence as a programmer.
...I wonder if this is true. "Real work" sometimes requires you to perform in the moment. You can't always just pull an all-nighter to get it done if you're slow.
Also, the best way to do better on a test is to do homework to prepare for the test. And teachers can still assign homework to help students learn, they just can't necessarily use the results for assessment.
My main point is that while testing knowledge in small bits is useful for grading, it's less where I got value as a learner.
An intro to CS class where every answer is a few lines of pseudocode might be able to effectively teach the material by forcing everything on to the test.
A software engineering class that just test your knowledge of memorizing patterns and makes the project where you actually implement real software incorporating the patterns worth nothing would be useless to actually teaching students anything they can use after graduation.
As a teacher I just don't know how to replicate that experience in a world where half will skip the work, and all I'm able to do is a two-hour sanity check that they learned some concepts. How do I test for "the experience you developed spending four hours making that register allocator behave properly, to the point where you're intimately familiar with every failure mode"?
ask them to list and describe failure modes on your exam.
We regularly catch cheaters in our classes; I do so every term and report all the cases I see up to the dean. In my experience these have not resulted in catastrophic declines in teaching evaluations; the few unhappy with getting caught cheating are drowned out by the 80-90% who don’t cheat.
It is actually critically important that institutions take cheating seriously. Rampant, well-known cheating can tank the reputation of a program or institution, or at the very least serve to cheapen the value of the degree.
Obviously cheating is unacceptable, but empathy can really help the student in this situation.
A disciplined character will handle hard times well. An undisciplined character will not.
Compassion exists, sure. But morality doesn't disappear just because something bad happens. Compassion should be sought after before resorting to cheating, not after.
If you are disciplined in morality and have a well-trained conscience, that will tend to follow you as long as you keep up the discpline.
Everyone is capable of murder in the right circumstances.
That doesn’t make everyone a murderer.
Citation needed. I don't think this is true, and if it was it wouldn't change anything. Notably, the individual level of circumstances required matters a lot, pragmatically even if you don't care in principle.
Think about training soldiers and the concept of “non-firers”. I’m not an expert on those things but the fact that training soldiers to kill is hard, and no one has a great solution even after a lot of effort, and passive combat personnel concepts even exist at all, I think gives evidence to the idea that not everyone can be a murderer, even under extreme circumstances.
“ Gen. S.L.A. Marshall once described war as “the business of killing”. And yet many war-fighters throughout history have gone out of their way to avoid it. Marshall himself estimated (though some say he exaggerated, or even fabricated) that only 15-25 per cent of infantry soldiers in the Second World War fired their weapons in any given battle. The rest were so-called “non-firers”; they had the opportunity to shoot at enemy soldiers but failed to do so. Marshall added that even those who did shoot often deliberately missed their target — they were so-called “mis-firers”. These “passive combat personnel”, as they are sometimes called, have long been a thorn in the side of military institutions. War is a “competition in death and destruction”, in the words of Henry Shue, and these individuals deliberately forego opportunities to score points for their own team.”
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/ned-dobos-military-training-...
However, the part you miss is the keyword discipline. To be discipline in morality means that you are aware you can be a monster and you actively choose not to be, even if it means what appears to be a negative outcome for you, relatively speaking.
Morality isn't free. It's not easy, and it requires diligent practice, aka it's a discipline.
By the time your in college, you should have enough discipline to not cheat. If you don't, you have a very untrained conscience.
Sorry it wasn't harder to counter your response. I would really implore you to change your perspective and attitude. Other people generally aren't psychopaths trying to take shortcuts. they are as i said, often just very desperate.
Like i said, others have similar criticism to yours but don't include this dismissive bit.
Properly aligned incentives need to be enforced from day 0.
This is easy to argue, people do it all the time (hello, TOS). So there is nothing incontrovertible about it.
It also contradicts the goal for pledges expressed by those setting this policy, they want to "strengthen the dedication to academic integrity" etc
Focus. The only goal here is creating a paper trail, and signing the honor code once does that and exactly that.
To me it seems completely congruent with your quotation.
And then there is face-culture, which assumes that everyone puts up a show anyway and the grades are created by a bribe competition of the families heads in some backroom.
There is a reason, why academia refuses to read a ton of papers from certain countries unless they get propelled by other trusted sources to the top of the heap. A mediocre, honest student is worth 20 fake doctors with accolades.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1296860.pdf
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10805-021-09391-8
It’s not just about the reputation of the schools, it’s about society as a whole. A chronic problem in the third world is widespread cheating and low level corruption. The last straw that convinced my dad to leave our home country was a phone line installer asking for a bribe when he came to install a second line. If we don’t police our culture we will degenerate into that sort of behavior over time.
I am confused as to why anyone would need to sign a pledge to provide proof that they are aware cheating is bad. If you don’t know that by the time you are in university, then tough luck. One would hope a defense of “I didn’t know cheating was frowned upon” would get you laughed out.
What I think teachers could do is to come up with truly novel and strange assignments that require real curiosity and creativity (and some do, which is great). I can only assume this to get harder and harder with modern AI readily available to everyone but perhaps the key is to assign something that would take a long time even with these tools. It should be as hard as necessary which is only all the more fulfilling to a curious student.
I've heard many a story about professors treating it like a trap door, paying no attention to prevention and much more to detection/punishment to the point you'd think they're sadistic pleasure out of it. (I doubt they are, but you'd have to numb yourself to it in that position.) In certain ways, I guess this is better than pushing people through to the next class—giving them no option but to catch up quickly or cheat more—but it isn't great...
OP mostly talks about detection/punishment, but I think it's also the job of course staff to make cheating as impossible as possible before it happens. Engaging and novel assignments are great; putting more weight on exams is low-cost and acceptable.
There are flaws in every method of measuring competency but I thought this was one of the better ones, and it is very difficult to cheat on. His exams were by far the least grumbled about and I don’t recall a single student that thought the method was unfair. And even though this required more upfront work from the professor he said it was ultimately less time consuming than grading written exams, and far more enjoyable.
Early on I've made the mistake of sharing my solutions with people I knew. Unfortunately they kept sharing the solution too, and so on.
Two times I was pulled into a profs office after the relevant lecture, to be questioned about it.
After it became clear that I was the author, and what happened, nothing ever came of it (for me).
Ironically both times the copiers supposedly failed to remove the git repo that was part of the handoff, so it was primarily about verifying I was the original author.
Lesson learned: "invisible" watermarks work, because people are generally lazy (also don't share graded work, just offer to help)
Why are adults at a university doing graded homework? They're responsible for their own learning, and if they want to cheat, well good luck on your exam. Our exercises in math and CS always were a few years old and kind of cycled through, so just copying old solutions was trivial, but what for, you're only hurting yourself. People who didn't learn just bombed out at the end. A university education is voluntary, people are there by their own choice.
Honestly this seems almost entirely like a byproduct of the privatized education system. University as children's daycare where everyone needs to pass and be tutored because there isn't an incentive to just filter people out.
The answer here is surely a monitored environment. An online editor/tester/compiler that logs not only the resulting code, but the way they got there. Anyone who pastes in 99% and just renamed the variables is trivially discovered. This probably works for far more than computer science.
It's not just a stick to beat kids with. You can work back to actually see where they're falling down, do seminars where you can open your environment to allow TAs and others to work on a single codebase collaboratively. This must exist already, no?
Why hasn’t anyone used them for a CS class? No idea, maybe cost?
And I can’t help but think if they did people would find a way to make the cut and paste look like organic typing…
These are obviously extreme measures, but it is possible to try and enforce enhanced levels of proctoring. And I’m not saying I like the idea of doing this for all coding interviews, just that I guarantee people would go through with this if it meant a chance to get into big tech.
I guess if I wanted the job badly enough I’d spin up a vm for it.
Is the point of the homework to have students just do some work or is it a tool to encourage them to more deeply engage with the material? If it is the former, then what is wrong with using LLMs? If it is the latter, then students should be judged based on their understanding, which they have to demonstrate in a scenario where deception is very hard or near impossible.
The real problem is students not wanting to learn. And what is the point of educating people who do not want to learn?
Plagiarism is now rampant - but for structural reasons. The university seemingly decided they want the money of foreign students, and started deciding that degrees from certain foreign universities counted as prerequisites for CS Masters programs.
A lot of these foreign students somehow have little programming skill despite undergraduate degrees in CS.
The cheating is obvious. She gives students 0's with no push back from administration if she thinks they are cheating. Some amazing stories:
- Students who turn in assignments with someone else's name of them
- Students who admit to cheating and do it again and again, never becoming more sophisticated at it.
- Students who get caught cheating 5 times and ask if there is any way they can pass the course.
- Students who despite being told there is no way to pass the course, request a call or in person meeting to discuss how they might be able to pass the course (she has never taken them up on this - one wonders what their pitch would be)
Cheaters who put a little effort in are undetectable. Or at least she suspects, but can prove nothing and grades the (not obviously plagiarized) code on its own merits. The general feeling is that barring these foreign students, cheating is there but not too widespread.
She does, indeed, have a bad rating on RateMyProfessor and does not care. Her administration still thinks highly of her because of her other work (such as running accreditation programs).
If you are a professor YMMV. This is how it is for my wife.
Obviously we all forget things over time, but if the homework was suspect from the beginning, and when the student is tested he has just no idea whatsoever, that could be grounds for taking back some of the homework credit.
I'm pretty sure that student incentives come from having a degree that will instantly put you above 90% of non-degree-holder applicants after graduation, especially in this market.
Faculty can't compete with this, no matter how much they want education to be the goal; it's not, for most grads, and teachers should blame companies for that rather than students.
Plagiarism can be countered in comp sci settings by having in-person coding and bugfixing exams, which would also prepare students for real-world work much better than the 'turn in a big (music player app written in java) project at the end of the semester' model that programming classes in my comp sci program used.
nextos•1d ago
sebmellen•1d ago
nextos•1d ago
ghaff•1d ago
kaonwarb•1d ago
I don't believe that investment made in time or money should factor in to assessing a student's mastery.
Henchman21•1d ago
Money in education perverts everything. More generally money is the root of all evil, eh? But if you took my cash and I get nothing? Thats a very loud complaint and/or lawsuit.
afavour•1d ago
> you took my cash and I get nothing?
If I book a hotel room then turn up a week later than my booking date trying to get a room I can expect to receive nothing.
Henchman21•1d ago
afavour•1d ago
Henchman21•1d ago
krisoft•23h ago
Noumenon72•1d ago
Somehow, I missed this theory and also just wanted to skip all my classes with no repercussions, but I wish it had been explained to me better.
throwaway314155•1d ago
Guess I'm a terrible person/s
bawolff•1d ago
Maybe in america... but at the end of the day its not that hard to tell the customer to fuck off. The value proposition of a university is either the credential or self-improvement. Its not their customer service.
ghaff•1d ago
ashdksnndck•1d ago
raydev•1d ago
HenryBemis•1d ago
I get it that shit happens in life (imagine someone having exams two days after they buried a father/mother/brother/sister), now THAT person, yeah, boost their results by 'one step' because if they got a 40% going through THAT, then they would have gotten 60% in a normal/BAU situation.
But don't hand out degrees to people who don't deserve them. It dilutes the degrees of those who do.
dgacmu•1d ago
(This is, at least, my policy. A grade reflects mastery and only mastery, but it's my job to help students get there and sometimes that means finding creative solutions.)
ghaff•1d ago
andrewflnr•1d ago
apparent•12h ago
WrongAssumption•1d ago
nextos•1d ago
riffraff•1d ago
E.g. implement a simple compiler for a C-ish language with only functions, if and while loops; as the big change, ask to add for loops.
jwilber•1d ago
Another great solution is to give an interview-like oral whiteboard interview for midterms/final. Quite time consuming (you can’t just assign the TA’s a grading prompt) but quite effective.
mschuster91•1d ago
... and required an awful lot of resources to grade, unsustainable for modern academia that has been perverted to be mostly a diploma mill.
No front but a "CS degree" is, for 99% of the people that have one, factually useless - people only do it because employers use it as a very efficient filter to weed out everyone who might have an issue with what big corporate demands - cogs in a wheel, not artisans with own opinions. The purpose of academia isn't science and advancing it anymore, it is raking in tuition money on one side and molding people to corporate drone conformity.
busyant•1d ago
I think the simpler explanation is that the CS degree is supposed to be an independent verification that the student has learned and can employ fundamental aspects of CS.
I realize that verification can often be wrong (especially now with the ubiquity of LLMs), but I think the view that employers are simply looking for "cogs" and avoiding "artisans" is an arrogant and cynical take on what a degree is supposed to indicate.
add-sub-mul-div•1d ago
ode•23h ago
add-sub-mul-div•18h ago
- Mild autism, mild ADHD, undiagnosed until recently. Intersectionality leads to highly bespoke set of strengths, weaknesses, behaviors.
- Mensa-level IQ, smart enough and high enough performing to have done well despite friction (and no degree.)
- High need for autonomy in learning and work practices. Never consciously understood it until recently, but instinctively and awkwardly fought for it.
- Clash highly with scrum, agile, any high-process environment. Don't fit well in larger or more formal companies.
- High achieving, high output, quality output in good conditions, but low ambition for entrepreneurship, management, or advancing in an org's hierarchy.
- Earn trust early on at each company through high achievement but inevitable friction with management grows over time as I use the capital to secure high freedom, independence, optimal conditions for my own productivity and comfort.
- End up quitting jobs at the two year mark due to friction except for one where my accomplishments kept me around much longer.
- I interview well with people who just want to know someone is smart and gets it and is easy to get along with, interview poorly with people looking for a more specific and narrow profile.
- Good natured and likable, but don't form networking relationships. I like interacting with people and working alongside people, but need to be independent and do my work on my own. I'm not antisocial, but a lot of what teamwork and leadership and collaboration mean in engineering today are alien to me.
- Kind of selfish from a team point of view because I'm so individualistic and focused on my own work practice needs, but when I work with business or other end users I'm highly compassionate and driven to understand and solve their needs.
- It feels like I speak a different language as other smart people, other high performing engineers. I find things easy that others find hard, and vice versa. I feel pain points others don't, and vice versa. Ambitious and curious but not in a way that matches other high achievers. I solve problems others have struggled with, especially if they benefit from creative problem solving or a nonstandard solution. It's seen either a strength or a weakness depending on the situation and the people around me.
- My last job was the first one I've had that was defined more by the friction than the success but I still did good work and left on my own terms. It sucked, I haven't bothered with a job search since.
I don't think I want to work in engineering again. What it means to be a successful part of an engineering team has evolved too far away from my preferences and strengths and needs. I'm no longer interested in fighting it or faking it. I'd be happiest in whatever low profile job let me do my own thing. I don't mind dull business work or even rote work if I can do it or automate it my own way. Job descriptions are pretty homogenous and aren't written to expose what I'd really want or need in a job. I'm probably overqualified for the job that would fit me best for the rest of my career. But I have a lot of money saved and low living expenses and don't mind lower comp if it means having a job I'd like.
nradov•12h ago
bluefirebrand•3h ago
This resonates strongly with me.
I find past the two year mark at a company I wind up starting to burn out and causing friction with my management and teammates
Unfortunately I don't have the savings to retire or anything, and job hopping so frequently is a big challenge for me. I'd really like to find a way off of the treadmill and into less stressful day to day operating
mschuster91•1d ago
Look at how many basic paper pusher bullshit jobs these days require some sort of academic degree (often enough, it's literally any academic degree). It's obvious that the true intention is to violate the ADA and other anti discrimination laws in spirit without violating it in a legal sense, because it's pretty obvious that minorities and those with any kind of disadvantages have markedly lower chances of acquiring an academic degree.
And even leaving that aside, "academic degree" is a good proxy for "doesn't use drugs to a degree he can't function, doesn't have too bad ADHD or other issues, is likely able to fulfill duties somewhat on time and has an attention span of larger than 30 seconds". This is stuff that companies had to risk hiring (and firing) on their own dime, so by requiring an academic degree they offload that cost onto the prospective employees.
nradov•12h ago
RHSeeger•18h ago
When you have 5 positions open, and 100, 500, or even more people applying for that position, having a broad filter to help reduce the numbers it very useful. While that filter can be wrong, using it is likely to raise the average qualifications of the people in the pool, even if it does cut out some of the well qualified people.
const_cast•1d ago
I just don't understand how people can believe this. I learned most of my programming skills in college, and everyone I know did too. I could program before, but really poorly, because I didn't have fundamental computer science knowledge. Taking algorithms, theoretical comp sci, discrete structures - these transformed me from a code monkey to a real programmer.
mschuster91•1d ago
That's what I meant! Companies don't want "real programmers". They want cogs who mindlessly implement what some "architect" dreams up, no questions asked.
Land the architect role and you're set for life (or at least until AGI appears), but everything else is just destined to be either moved off to AI or be replaced by some sort of offshoring venture.
saagarjha•23h ago
bshacklett•8h ago
Suppafly•1d ago
This, a lot of the self taught folks that sneer at degrees often struggle with things that were essentially solved by algorithms that are very familiar to people with an education.
yorwba•1d ago
LtWorf•12h ago
ttoinou•1d ago