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What is "cheating" exactly though? Isn't that also culturally specific? Like why shouldn't the collective benefit from the work of a few, if the few are willing

What is "cheating" exactly though? Isn't that also culturally specific? Like why shouldn't the collective benefit from the work of a few, if the few are willing? That was certainly the attitude of students of many different cultures when I was in college. Many called sharing work "cheating" I'm certain they saw it as "stupid not too" and "helping their countrymen".

leetcrew 6y ago
I can pretty much guarantee you that any CS department will have a clearly worded policy on what they consider "cheating", usually any sharing of code whatsoever on a take-home assignment. of course, you will likely see that policy blatantly violated every day in the computer lab.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  s/CS// In my university experience, the first day of every class starts with administrivia, which includes the grading policy, homework policy, and what degree of cooperation actually constitutes cheating. In CS, the usual threshold for cheating is whether or not you actually wrote the code yourself--you can (and are encouraged to!) work with other people to discuss how to solve the problem, but you have to sit down and actually write the code up yourself. That said, as a TA, I found that I really didn't want to put any effort to identify if students were cheating. I did catch a few cheaters, but largely because they inadvertently broke my grading setup in ways that made me suspicious that they were getting their code from something other than the homework assignment.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    I also found a few likely cheaters in my stint as a TA. they sat together in labs and turned in nearly identical code for every assignment (down to some truly bizarre formatting choices). I didn't have the heart to turn them in since they were failing most of the assignments anyway.
    - cgriswald 6y ago
      Some cheaters make it impossible not to catch them. We had a guy using his phone during a math class. The professor came by and the kid had covered up his phone with a piece of paper. The phone is obviously not flat and the screen was up and still active, shining right through.
  - chongli 6y ago
    In our course (first year intro CS), we run a tool called moss against thousands of submissions (it's a big class). Inevitably, we catch a few dozen cheaters on every assignment. Some of them are so brazen as to submit their friend's assignment as though it were their own, without even changing the name at the top of the file!
kaitai 6y ago
As other commenters have pointed out, it's generally defined in the first days of the course. Speaking from my former job as "professor", the problem with cheating is that students are not benefitting from the work of others. They think they are, because they think the product of the class is a grade. But I taught math. This point of view is only successful if one can maintain the cheating throughout all classes and then one's job, which is an awful lot of work and in fact even harder than just learning the d(*& math. From my point of view, I tried to use psychology to "trick" students into learning when they were inclined to cheat -- making the process of iteration into something worth points (you don't show me an imperfect MVP and then improve it? you don't get points), making acknowledgement of collaboration and outside sources into something worth points, etc. I also provided old copies of all my exams going back several years, some with answers, because I wanted all students to have an equal playing field. Last, I always included a question or two very similar to/identical to a question on a previous exam or homework. You might think this is just bad teaching, but it was actually a quite useful tool: since I telegraphed it beforehand, students actually studied the old tests/homework, thereby accidentally learning something, and then when a surprising number of students did terribly on something word-by-word from a previous test, we got to talk about effective learning techniques. Cheating is relatively predictable in character. Use the impulses and mechanisms gently against reluctant students to trick them into learning despite themselves. It's way more fun than the alternative.

leetcrew 6y ago

I can pretty much guarantee you that any CS department will have a clearly worded policy on what they consider "cheating", usually any sharing of code whatsoever on a take-home assignment. of course, you will likely see that policy blatantly violated every day in the computer lab.

jcranmer 6y ago
s/CS// In my university experience, the first day of every class starts with administrivia, which includes the grading policy, homework policy, and what degree of cooperation actually constitutes cheating. In CS, the usual threshold for cheating is whether or not you actually wrote the code yourself--you can (and are encouraged to!) work with other people to discuss how to solve the problem, but you have to sit down and actually write the code up yourself. That said, as a TA, I found that I really didn't want to put any effort to identify if students were cheating. I did catch a few cheaters, but largely because they inadvertently broke my grading setup in ways that made me suspicious that they were getting their code from something other than the homework assignment.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  I also found a few likely cheaters in my stint as a TA. they sat together in labs and turned in nearly identical code for every assignment (down to some truly bizarre formatting choices). I didn't have the heart to turn them in since they were failing most of the assignments anyway.
  - cgriswald 6y ago
    Some cheaters make it impossible not to catch them. We had a guy using his phone during a math class. The professor came by and the kid had covered up his phone with a piece of paper. The phone is obviously not flat and the screen was up and still active, shining right through.
- chongli 6y ago
  In our course (first year intro CS), we run a tool called moss against thousands of submissions (it's a big class). Inevitably, we catch a few dozen cheaters on every assignment. Some of them are so brazen as to submit their friend's assignment as though it were their own, without even changing the name at the top of the file!

kaitai 6y ago

As other commenters have pointed out, it's generally defined in the first days of the course. Speaking from my former job as "professor", the problem with cheating is that students are not benefitting from the work of others. They think they are, because they think the product of the class is a grade. But I taught math. This point of view is only successful if one can maintain the cheating throughout all classes and then one's job, which is an awful lot of work and in fact even harder than just learning the d(*& math. From my point of view, I tried to use psychology to "trick" students into learning when they were inclined to cheat -- making the process of iteration into something worth points (you don't show me an imperfect MVP and then improve it? you don't get points), making acknowledgement of collaboration and outside sources into something worth points, etc. I also provided old copies of all my exams going back several years, some with answers, because I wanted all students to have an equal playing field. Last, I always included a question or two very similar to/identical to a question on a previous exam or homework. You might think this is just bad teaching, but it was actually a quite useful tool: since I telegraphed it beforehand, students actually studied the old tests/homework, thereby accidentally learning something, and then when a surprising number of students did terribly on something word-by-word from a previous test, we got to talk about effective learning techniques. Cheating is relatively predictable in character. Use the impulses and mechanisms gently against reluctant students to trick them into learning despite themselves. It's way more fun than the alternative.