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Yeah I think this is a huge issue. It might be good for the students to get this experience, but it would be horrible for the projects. People working on a pro
by skohan 5y ago
Yeah I think this is a huge issue. It might be good for the students to get this experience, but it would be horrible for the projects. People working on a project to check a box is not going to lead to good outcomes.
A better option would be to require students to work on projects which depend on eachother, and practice pull-requests on eachother's student projects.
- nerdponx 5y agoHow about this? The instructor forks a real open source project, with an existing license, contributor guide, etc. The instructor then picks an issue from the issue tracker with a known solution, but no PR yet. The assignment is to submit a PR to the instructor's fork of the project that fixes the issue, and the PR itself is the final project submission. Points can be deducted, according to a rubric, for failing to pass the test suite, failing to follow contribution guidelines, etc. Choosing an issue that has not been publicly resolved in code should prevent obvious cases of plagiarism. I'm not sure if this could scale up to a big lecture-type course with TA is doing the grading, but I think it could be a fun assignment. The risk of course is that there is some unforeseen problem preventing the "known" solution from being valid. But maybe that in and of itself is part of learning exercise...
- Ensorceled 5y agoI think that would work. Then the instructor (or a enterprising student) could push the PR back to the real project if it turns out to be worthy of a real merge.
- skohan 5y agoIt might work, but there's always the risk that someone submits a PR to the repo between the time the assignment is given and when it is due.