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What they call "cheating" is how I do my job as a developer of a 3-person (dev) software company. We make software. People like it and use it. We make money. W
by keerthiko 9y ago
What they call "cheating" is how I do my job as a developer of a 3-person (dev) software company. We make software. People like it and use it. We make money.
Who cares whether the code came from our head or from something publicly available on the internet, or from someone willing to help us? As long as it wasn't an actual violation of the law. There's no good reason to create a separate set of laws for the classroom than the real world.
Can we just accept that this is how software is meant to be developed? Beyond the very intro level, the real assignments and challenges given to students should be about how to utilize, extend, integrate and optimize easily available existing code, not how to reinvent (regurgitate, rather) the wheel. This tests and improves understanding just as well as, if not better than making them implement from scratch. Evaluate the student's understanding and the quality of his output, not how independently they wrote the code.
- wyager 9y agoIf the structure of the class incorporates using real-world code, then fine. Most upper-division classes allow you to use any libraries you want anyway. But some classes, especially lower-division, are explicitly built around learning a concept from scratch. If you copy the code, you can't learn the concepts. I agree that teachers should strive to allow "open internet" assignments and tests as much as possible, but it's not always viable. All the best classes I've had were this way, but it's usually quite labor-intensive for the instructors.
- chrisper 9y ago>As long as it wasn't an actual violation of the law But it is a violation of Academic Integrity, which is sort of a law you agreed to when signing up for a class. At least at my school it was like that.
- stale2002 9y agoHe is saying that we should get rid of the law of Academic Integrity, and make classes more like the real world. It is an interesting idea, the problem being that in the real world, while you can kinda look up the answer, it is rare to find someone who is doing the exact same thing as what you need to do, for thousands of lines of code. Maybe college would better simulate the real world if you gave students personalized, large problems, that nobody has ever done before(instead of small, toy problems)?
- kurtisc 9y agoI would have liked a coursework where we had to work on a module, document it, then swap it with another student to do the second half.
- lostboys67 9y agowith my IR hat on In the real world "bringing the company into disrepute" is gross misconduct and normally an immediate firing offence.
- yrio 9y ago> Who cares whether the code came from our head or from something publicly available on the internet, or from someone willing to help us? I hope you are not implying it's OK for students to blindly copy / use code they don't understand. Otherwise you will end up with "professional" software developers who can't even solve FizzBuzz :p
- humanrebar 9y agoIt can also be a copyright violation, depending on where the code is copied from.
- lacampbell 9y agoBlindly copying code doesn't really scale though. It might solve one specific problem, but you still have to organise the code and make it reliable - which you probably won't.
- 0xfeba 9y agoBut the examples they give from intro courses are not where you want this type of behaviour. A student handing in dead code either doesn't understand it or didn't care to go over it after copying. Either way, that's not someone you want "looking up answers" on Google as a professional.