5 ms·

I think a lot of it has to do with a disagreement between what academia thinks is acceptable and what students think is acceptable. I realize this isn't a very

I think a lot of it has to do with a disagreement between what academia thinks is acceptable and what students think is acceptable. I realize this isn't a very popular viewpoint. It's much more socially acceptable to say "kids today are under all this pressure" or "kids today are lazy," depending on how much you want to blame them. The question is framed in terms of how much the students are wrong, not whether they are wrong. Academia has developed rules / guidelines for what is acceptable in their circles. Who is to say this arrangement is fair / equitable / maximally conducive to development of new ideas? Throughout 90% of civilized history, we've operated under a much more culturally lax attribution system than the one practiced by today's professors. Why is the new system good and the old system bad? And the workforce operates under a more lax set of attribution rules as well. You can ask for help on a mailing list or grab some BSD source code at your day job, but God help you if you do that in CS1 class. To be clear, I think there are a lot of other causes to "cheating", which is really an umbrella term. There are individuals who steal others work to the point of actually not knowing how to do it. That does happen, but I'm not convinced that kind of cheating happens any more than it ever has.

Lewisham 16y ago
"And the workforce operates under a more lax set of attribution rules as well. You can ask for help on a mailing list or grab some BSD source code at your day job, but God help you if you do that in CS1 class." But if you need grab that BSD code in CS1, you sure as hell won't understand it. The other thing is that we can roughly equate "being caught for cheating" as "being fired for incompetency" in the workplace, so while the workforce has more lax attribution rules, the reason those attribution rules are there at university is intended to prevent the firing later on. Having TA'd undergrads in a first year programming course (with GameMaker for a CS Game Design degree), the ones that hit trouble are the first ones that run to the Internet for help. They then cut and paste the code, don't understand it (they don't even realize that variables will need changing), and their coursework grades will suffer considerably. Sadly, it's only then that they come to the TA. FWIW, my 2¢ says that the reason cheating is more rampant is because there are a lot more students who just don't want to be there; they've arrived at university because "that's what you do." They don't put effort into learning, because they're not learning for any life value, as soon as they have the degree certificate the major could have been anything. That said, it could be worse in the US than it is now. When I lived in New Zealand, the incidence of cheating amongst foreign (read: Asian) students was a source of great alarm, the figures were pretty stratospheric. It was partly cultural, as they were never taught that it was a big deal to not copy verbatim someone else's work, and it was partly because they didn't care at all, they'd been sent there to learn English and get a degree from an English speaking school. How they reached that point was academic (pun unintended).
- drewcrawford 16y ago
  > But if you need grab that BSD code in CS1, you sure as hell won't understand it. That's my point; it's impossible to really "cheat". You can copy and paste things off the internet, which violates the artificial rules of academia, and everybody gets all uptight about it, but you still have to know enough to google "declare array", which means you've mastered effectively all the actual concepts of the course. What's left is merely syntax. Which is rote memory. I know how to declare an array in a dozen languages only because I do so hourly. Testing this is trivia. Yet everybody does.

Lewisham 16y ago

"And the workforce operates under a more lax set of attribution rules as well. You can ask for help on a mailing list or grab some BSD source code at your day job, but God help you if you do that in CS1 class." But if you need grab that BSD code in CS1, you sure as hell won't understand it. The other thing is that we can roughly equate "being caught for cheating" as "being fired for incompetency" in the workplace, so while the workforce has more lax attribution rules, the reason those attribution rules are there at university is intended to prevent the firing later on. Having TA'd undergrads in a first year programming course (with GameMaker for a CS Game Design degree), the ones that hit trouble are the first ones that run to the Internet for help. They then cut and paste the code, don't understand it (they don't even realize that variables will need changing), and their coursework grades will suffer considerably. Sadly, it's only then that they come to the TA. FWIW, my 2¢ says that the reason cheating is more rampant is because there are a lot more students who just don't want to be there; they've arrived at university because "that's what you do." They don't put effort into learning, because they're not learning for any life value, as soon as they have the degree certificate the major could have been anything. That said, it could be worse in the US than it is now. When I lived in New Zealand, the incidence of cheating amongst foreign (read: Asian) students was a source of great alarm, the figures were pretty stratospheric. It was partly cultural, as they were never taught that it was a big deal to not copy verbatim someone else's work, and it was partly because they didn't care at all, they'd been sent there to learn English and get a degree from an English speaking school. How they reached that point was academic (pun unintended).

drewcrawford 16y ago
> But if you need grab that BSD code in CS1, you sure as hell won't understand it. That's my point; it's impossible to really "cheat". You can copy and paste things off the internet, which violates the artificial rules of academia, and everybody gets all uptight about it, but you still have to know enough to google "declare array", which means you've mastered effectively all the actual concepts of the course. What's left is merely syntax. Which is rote memory. I know how to declare an array in a dozen languages only because I do so hourly. Testing this is trivia. Yet everybody does.