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Anon is a T.A.
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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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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.
Let's 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 there's 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.
To clarify, I wasn't trying to argue there shouldn't be consequences, just that depending on severity it must be proportional.
I want to compare it to the US justice system where, from an outsiders perspective, many are judged unnecessarily harsh. This makes it harder for people to "come back" after release and creates a societal loss.
I'll end it there because I cba to write more but, eh, just my thoughts. Some nuance is lost in translation too.
Your thoughts are valid and I agree – in principle.
The proportionate punishment does, however, depend on the severity of the violation. In an academic context, there are few things as severe as blatant plagiarism. Being caught in not just cheating but brazenly copy-pasting other people's work can imho be appropriately punished with expulsion, be it in the US or elsewhere.
Expulsion is honestly not a harsh punishment in that case
As a general rule, the stick is better than the carrot when teaching someone what not to do. But this guy's goal isn't to teach them "cheating is bad" but to weed out dishonest people too stupid to program.
What's the carrot for being honest then?
A CS degree
?? When the cheaters are simply waved through the courses as well, some of them will definitely achieve a CS degree as well. They will simply have put in less work and be less well educated.
But in my experience people who cheat do so repeatedly, in multiple courses, their bachelor thesis, in exams when there is a way, ...
Never said they didn't know it wasn't allowed. I said that the teachers view of cheating is flawed. I'm also not saying the students aren't*** (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.
You’re 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 uni’s name and their connections.
Lol 20% is absolutely not a high fail rate
This is not a 20% fail rate, but a 20% expulsion rate. A bit different.
... And a 20% reduction in kids cheating in that class.
That's a win.
If you give cheaters too many chances, the other students will feel betrayed. And I guess rightly so.
It's not uncommon to get mails directly, or later in course evaluation, from students who complain about other students that didn't put in the work. I can only remember few cases where there were names involved. Typically it's 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 doesn't 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.
The result of any degree is someone who can get a degree. Everything else is a potential bonus, not a guarantee at all.
In the real world the faculty would step in to prevent losing so many students at once (tuition is lucrative), and the students would learn a couple life lessons: cheat but don't get caught, and if you do then might makes right.
Getting a degree without cheating is an impressive feat and teaches valuable skills. Unfortunately the underperforming cheating frat bro at the back of the auditorium will use his connections to land a C-level job making about 10x as much as his former classmates.
Surely these kids knew that cheating is bad before they enrolled in college.
"Teachable moments" 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.
He's dead now, the lazy fuck. Fuck you Dr. Aung.
Believe it or not, one of the goals of a good university is to not graduate stupid people who don't know anything.
Keep in mind, it's likely that more people cheated, but the smarter ones changed just enough code to make it look "their own", or actually tested to ensure it'd work, and thus weren't 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.
Junior/senior level students know the consequences of cheating. Professor catches students cheating. Students face consequences of cheating.
"BuT tEaChAbLe MomEnT!"
Especially, if they are to lazy to change the tasks. Sure, cheating is bad but it's also bad teaching.
There is no but. Cheating is bad. Period. If you don't like school/uni go work at a Wendy's. In the restaurant or behind the dumpster. I don't care.
They're all fucking wankers and got what they aimed for. Nothing. Turning this around on the prof is the entire fucking problem here. (it's not my fault, you made it possible so I had no other choice but to cheat. It's a bullshit argument. Take some responsibility for your own choices.)
Sounds like they didn't learn the material though. If they had learned it they would have noticed it would fail when graded by a human.
The point of a degree is that the individual is certified at having a certain level of ability in a specific field. How is a student supposed to regularly demonstrate they understand the material in a format that is workable with one teacher, a few TAs, and a hundred students? Would the degree be an accurate endorsement if they passed all their classes by cheating?
Anecdotal but I have a team of devs under me, cheating is definitely still a thing in industry. Some people copy other people's work and claim it as their own and they are weak devs. I could teach them, but when it gets close to micromanaging I have to let them go due to poor performance.
Many of them don't grow up. Be an adult. I hire people based on how teachable they are. Cheating cheapens that.
"If I were a teacher I could give to shit's if students cheated if they learned the material."
Oh, the irony😂, do we tell him?
There's often modules to work collaboratively for this very reason.
The point of this module will have been to learn and understand the material, which will also have been the point of the assignment.
Also, on the cheating not being a thing outside of real life point. a) it is - there are lots of things you can cheat at which is against the rules. Stealing for example could be considered cheating as you haven't earnt the item you're stealing. b) uni/college is not there to teach you real life. It's there to provide you the materials to learn a subject. Don't want to use those materials and learn? Well then you probably just shouldn't be there.
They are supposed to know how to program. All these students had to do was to fix the code they copied. In the outside world that's the difference between having a job and getting fired for being an incompetent ass.
If the code they copied from github worked with the sample data provided but failed in most other cases it's safe to say they didn't learn the material, or didn't care enough to actually read the code they were submitting.
Just to clarify, you don't need schooling and a degree to get a job as a dev, I've hired several that are particularly strong. Strong junior devs love learning. Cheaters...well they don't care about learning. They just want to look good.
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. I'm not paid to code. I'm paid to fix problems. So I research and focus on remediation. If there's a script for a fix I'm using it.
I'm 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 it's doing.
Often I'll just take the logic or parts I need and write my own.
A person's character is built at home. If you're an adult in secondary school and can't figure out not to cheat, better hope you get a warning and understand THAT's the only teachable moment you're 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 doesn't have a lot of patience for the laggards.
That's something you do in the freshmen year. This is a master's program. They should be able to write the tests that catch a cheater themselves and they know better.
The difference between a quality college/University education and a shit one of that the students who should fail get failed.
My uncle's a uni professor. First assignment last semester was writing a paper specifically using ChatGPT, and seeing how much work you had to do to fact-check it and make an actual paper.
Reminds about recent Linus' rant on LKML.
I work in IT, and it's a similar situation. Bluntly, I Google half of the tickets I touch. I don't 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 don't remember crap about how to do just about everything.
There's 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 you're 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.