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At my university, the CS department requires students to pass both the homework/project portions of the class and the exam portion. If you get a 95 on the final

At my university, the CS department requires students to pass both the homework/project portions of the class and the exam portion. If you get a 95 on the final and don't do any of the projects, you fail. It's not exactly a 50/50 grading scale, but the idea is similar. It's worth noting that the CS department is the only department at this university that applies this grading requirement- I'm a little surprised the other engineering programs haven't picked it up.

gamble 16y ago
They haven't, because putting a large amount of weight on assignments leads to endemic cheating. Exams are highly weighted because they take place in a controlled environment where students can't easily copy answers or crib off the Internet. I suspect if they ran source-level comparisons on the programming projects at your university, they would find a huge amount of copying between students.
- meric 16y ago
  Not huge... I was with a friend who was a marker of assignments in my university... He says that there are always cheaters when he marks the assignments, but its only 1 or two out of a hundred. He marks only one part of the assignment... so if we suppose there are 5 parts to each assignment and each assignment is copied similarly... the rate of copying is only ~5%, which isn't a "huge amount" IMO. The most worrying is not copying but students outsourcing their assignments. I've googled coding questions before just to find them on rentacoder.com. Just last week a student offered me money to do their assignment for them. (but of course I flatly declined.) I've heard from some first years the market price for completing that assignment was $75.
- RodgerTheGreat 16y ago
  I can certainly see that concern, but actually we do source-level comparisons, and we make it very clear up front that this takes place. It happens, but not at the rate you're suggesting.

gamble 16y ago

They haven't, because putting a large amount of weight on assignments leads to endemic cheating. Exams are highly weighted because they take place in a controlled environment where students can't easily copy answers or crib off the Internet. I suspect if they ran source-level comparisons on the programming projects at your university, they would find a huge amount of copying between students.

meric 16y ago
Not huge... I was with a friend who was a marker of assignments in my university... He says that there are always cheaters when he marks the assignments, but its only 1 or two out of a hundred. He marks only one part of the assignment... so if we suppose there are 5 parts to each assignment and each assignment is copied similarly... the rate of copying is only ~5%, which isn't a "huge amount" IMO. The most worrying is not copying but students outsourcing their assignments. I've googled coding questions before just to find them on rentacoder.com. Just last week a student offered me money to do their assignment for them. (but of course I flatly declined.) I've heard from some first years the market price for completing that assignment was $75.
RodgerTheGreat 16y ago
I can certainly see that concern, but actually we do source-level comparisons, and we make it very clear up front that this takes place. It happens, but not at the rate you're suggesting.