9 ms·

Cheating is getting easier by the day, but the bottom line is that if the student is cheating, they're probably not absorbing the coursework (or if they are che

Cheating is getting easier by the day, but the bottom line is that if the student is cheating, they're probably not absorbing the coursework (or if they are cheating and absorbing the coursework, there might be something wrong with the coursework). The most effective policy might not be to try and mechanically prevent cheating, but to explain that, this is information that you're going to need if you actually want to go into the field and if you're using copilot here you are damaging yourself in the long run. Maybe it's not fair to give as good grades to students who are cheating on assignments as those who are actually doing the assignments, but at the end of the day is the purpose of the course to measure the student or to teach the student?

GrumpyYoungMan 4y ago
> "...this is information that you're going to need if you actually want to go into the field..." That has never, ever stopped anyone motivated to cheat. Even here on highly-educated HN, you get posters with open disdain for what they learned in college. > "... at the end of the day is the purpose of the course to measure the student or to teach the student?" Both. Otherwise, the college diploma really does become the meaningless scrap of sheepskin that its detractors claim it is.
zeta0134 4y ago
There's more to this: it used to be that a college degree carried with it something of a soft guarantee that the student could achieve a baseline level of work on their own. This acted as a useful filter for employers. If cheating runs rampant that filter becomes meaningless, and once the student has successfully cheated their way into the work force, their incompetence can (depending on field) do very real damage to the lives of others. Because of this, there will always be considerable pressure to detect cheating and remove offending parties from the program, be that the students copying answers from the internet, or the institutions failing to detect the problem before handing out a degree.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  A college degree used to signal competence. Now it signals you have the ability to show up and avoid doing something to get kicked out for 4 years. I feel we'd probably get the same value to society if we just made grades 9-12 optional. It would remove the people that don't want to be there, improve the quality of instruction, and college would actually be a meaningful achievement so we no longer have requirements for entry level jobs to require a Master's degree.
  - sarchertech 4y ago
    In many states school is already optional after age 16.
busyant 4y ago
> The most effective policy might not be to try and mechanically prevent cheating, but to explain that, this is information that you're going to need if you actually want to go into the field and if you're using copilot here you are damaging yourself in the long run. I don't teach CS, but I teach an online course in a STEM field. I give out a similar message ("you're only hurting yourself in the long run"). My anecdotal evidence is that my warning does nothing--I have trap questions on various quizzes/exams and the frequency of cheating hasn't changed with or without the warning. My suspicion is that the students who cheat feel this way: "This is just some bullshit hoop that I have to jump through, so it's okay if I cheat. I'll figure out the important stuff when the time comes." I mean, they're delusional, but I understand the mindset for cheating. edit: amusing story. Faculty members in my department are required to take an on-line course on how to handle hazardous waste. There are a few hours worth of videos to watch and a test that you need to pass at the end. Last year, one of the faculty members took the test, compiled the answers and emailed them around to everyone else (to save them the time for this "bullshit task."). I said to him, "Isn't this precisely the kind of shit that makes every faculty member angry when the students do it?" That being said, it was a bullshit test.
- randomdata 4y ago
  > I mean, they're delusional, but I understand the mindset for cheating. Parental (other similar) pressure can indeed be quite strong. Absent of that pressure they wouldn't be there in the first place, so perhaps it is not so much being delusional as a rational response to their environment? If they cheat their way through the parents are happy and then they can return to the life they otherwise would have lived. The time lost is unfortunate in some respects, but at the same time if you're cheating, the time investment likely isn't that great and an acceptable cost given the circumstances. > the kind of shit that makes every faculty member angry I find it curious that the customer using the product in an unintended way would be upsetting to the vendor. What drives such emotions? In my businesses, I couldn't care less how the customer uses my product. If they're happy, I'm happy.
  - busyant 4y ago
    > I find it curious that the customer using the product in an unintended way would be upsetting to the vendor. What drives such emotions? In my businesses, I couldn't care less how the customer uses my product. If they're happy, I'm happy. There's a lot more going on here than maybe you realize. First, the students are not your only customers. The administration is also one of your customers. If you make the course TOO difficult and fail everyone, your "administration customer" will find a way to get rid of you. Conversely, if you make the course too easy and everyone gets to cheat and everyone gets an "A", then many students who pass your class may not pass various professional certification exams that are more rigorously controlled (i.e., no cheating). If that happens, then the school may lose accreditation for programs that you are associated with (i.e., if all the nursing majors fail their certification exam, your nursing program may get nuked). Then you get nuked. Third, whether you like it or not, your relationships with your students is something you have to deal with. Students who don't cheat have a tendency to get really upset if they find out you turn a blind eye to cheating. Happy cheating customers leads to unhappy honest customers. Fourth, if your fellow faculty members feel like you're going easy on the students to get favorable reviews (or because you're lazy or because you hate confrontation), they can make life unpleasant for you, too. They also aren't too happy if they teach upper level courses and you send a bunch of garbage students their way.
russfink 4y ago
Adjunct instructor here. Before I came into the program, cheating was on the rise. When given programming assignments, students would go to Geeks for geeks and download solutions, some of them mostly correct, and submit those for credit. One remedy was to try to make programming assignments harder and harder. Eventually, they got so hard that we were asking people new to computer science to implement a full arbitrary length integer calculator using nothing but a single tape Turing machine (in Java, not BF). Eventually, some of us came to the realization that you can never prove that somebody is cheating. People have been known to hire tutors to do their assignments for them. There is just no end. As a result, we evaluate students on four dimensions. Programming assignments,* homework assignments, but also class discussions and group participation. Those last two count for a small, but non-trivial percentage of the grade, and are usually enough to separate and identify those who understand what they are doing, from those who are just "following along" solutions that they find on the internet. * one addition to programming assignments includes an analysis write up. Tell me in human words what is happening. Why do you see that effect. What is the running time. And separately, comment your code to tell me how it works. Those two parts count significantly towards the grade. Any other professors here, what have you found that works?
- leeoniya 4y ago
  > one addition to programming assignments includes an analysis write up. when i was interviewing candidates this was the fastest way to filter those who understood and those who didnt. ask someone to talk you through how to solve some real-life problem. to look at a stack trace and describe what they see, or to run a profile and trace through the cause of a hotspot/contention. show them an issue and have them live debug to root-cause and fix. it's okay if they use the internet, SO, etc. -- that's how we all do it. see what they have to look up! just listening to the amount of depth someone can verbally communicate during novel problem solving (including additional questions they ask you) turns a 60min interview that wastes time into a 10min one that tells you if you can move on. a favorite one of mine was to ask the candidate to describe in as much detail as possible what happens between a keystroke typed into a google search box and the search results appearing. the diversity of replies is facinating. some will tell you "google returns results from its database", others will ask you if you want them to first describe how the keyboard works at an electrical level through the USB or bluetooth driver stack. "Never memorize something that you can look up." --someone smart
ren_engineer 4y ago
yeah Copilot really changes nothing here, all these basic questions can be found with a quick Google search. The reason Copilot is so good at these types of questions is lazy professors assigning the same basic stuff so there is a ton of training data. instead of writing an article crying about it, the professor could try making some unique questions to test knowledge of the underlying concepts
duxup 4y ago
At that point should we count grades at all, other than a basic evaluation for the student’s personal use?
chiefalchemist 4y ago
True story. I got my CS degree pre-internet. I did well with programming. Some of my friends / peers were less talented. In one of my 300 level courses the assignment was more difficult than usual. I naturally figued it out. They struggled. Evetually I gave a copy of my code / solution to Friends Group A and also to another Group B. They didn't know each other. I said, "Be careful! If you copy, disguise it."* Deadline comes. Everyone hands in their work. The following week, we go to lecture. Prof walks in and writes a list of names on the board. I knew each name. I knew what was happening. I waited for the shoe to drop (i.e., my name on the list). The shoe never dropped** I believe they were all given Ds. Not sure why they didn't fail (F). * In retrospect, this was a stupid on my part. If they knew how to alter enough it's likely they'd be able to write it themselves. That is, I all but suggested they walk on water. ** Also in retrospect, the TAs + prof had to realize I was the source. The class was big but not that big. And if only some completed the assignment correctly, the source had to be not difficult to identify. I'm not sure why I was never pulled aside and spoken to. Thank gawd.
chrismarlow9 4y ago
If someone is just looking to fill a course requirement and has no interest in being a programmer, my response is "meh, whatever". If someone is cheating and actually expects to land a decent CS job, my response is "good luck on the leetcode questions and the 5-7 hours of questions you'll have to answer between the intro call, panels, and an offer". And if someone magically manages to get all that way without actually learning the material they will get absolutely crushed at work. Meetings where you have to give your professional opinion will induce fits of anxiety. Making changes to your code based on feedback and not having any idea what the feedback means. Even just the amount of work alone that needs to be done at most tech places crushes great engineers. Without the knowledge it will just stack up on you even further.
- oxfordmale 4y ago
  You underestimate the human ability to get away with incompetence. Unfortunately many of those cheaters manage to get in roles where they can hide their inadequacies, either by slacking of their colleagues that do actual work or by sucking up to the right managers.
  - chrismarlow9 4y ago
    Oh it definitely happens, I'm not saying it doesn't. But in those examples you mention I would say there are more people who are bad at their job than just the IC who "faked it".
tux1968 4y ago
> is the purpose of the course to measure the student or to teach the student? The very basis of the scientific method is measurement. If you can not measure your learning progress, how are you to know if your training methods are adequate or failing? I really don't understand this idea that testing and measuring students is a problem. Even the dreaded "teaching to the test", sounds like a good idea. If doing so would somehow exclude important learning, that just identifies an area where the testing needs to be improved.
Kamq 4y ago
> this is information that you're going to need if you actually want to go into the field and if you're using copilot here you are damaging yourself in the long run When you say into the field, do you mean academia or industry? Because the things copilot does for you are absolutely not the things you need to know yourself to be in industry. They're, for the most part, things we tried to put in libraries (or more ideally language standard libraries for a lot of things). The fact that is solves a lot of interview questions just means our interview process was absolutely garbage. And I'm skeptical of the academic side of this as well. It sounds like professors from the early 60s being annoyed that students have compilers (another tool that saves a ton of work and repetition). Y'all are forgetting that this is the ultimate lazy man's field. This isn't the first time the basics have been swept away and replaced with something easier to work with (and hopefully won't be the last).
- mannykannot 4y ago
  > They're, for the most part, things we tried to put in libraries. We need some people who can do things like making those libraries. It also seems plausible that the people who have at least some of the knowledge and judgement to do that effectively will, on average, be more effective on more mundane tasks as well. Larry Wall is one who wrote (somewhat drolly) about the virtues of laziness, but there was nothing lazy about what he did.
  - Kamq 4y ago
    > We need some people who can do things like making those libraries. Do we? For things as simple as copilot tends to put out? Why? Do you also believe we need to keep people around that do other automated things? Plowing fields by hand? Hand compiling higher level languages (as the first lisp compiler was bootstrapped)? I mean, keep the information around. Don't go burning textbooks on subjects just because we automated something. But, what exactly is the value proposition of having students do these things? > It also seems plausible that the people who have at least some of the knowledge and judgement to do that effectively will, on average, be more effective on more mundane tasks as well. And your claim is also that this is the only way to get the requisite knowledge and judgement? Have students take in a string from stdin with a format that changes every semester, munge it around, and do things with it instead. > Larry Wall is one who wrote (somewhat drolly) about the virtues of laziness, but there was nothing lazy about what he did. As someone who has done string munging in C, I'm not entirely convinced that creating perl isn't an effort saving defense mechanism (only half joking).
croes 4y ago
At the end if the it is to get a job. And cheating students often get better grades as most other students who don't cheat. They may lose in the long run, but the non cheaters aren't even allowed to run

GrumpyYoungMan 4y ago

> "...this is information that you're going to need if you actually want to go into the field..." That has never, ever stopped anyone motivated to cheat. Even here on highly-educated HN, you get posters with open disdain for what they learned in college. > "... at the end of the day is the purpose of the course to measure the student or to teach the student?" Both. Otherwise, the college diploma really does become the meaningless scrap of sheepskin that its detractors claim it is.

zeta0134 4y ago

There's more to this: it used to be that a college degree carried with it something of a soft guarantee that the student could achieve a baseline level of work on their own. This acted as a useful filter for employers. If cheating runs rampant that filter becomes meaningless, and once the student has successfully cheated their way into the work force, their incompetence can (depending on field) do very real damage to the lives of others. Because of this, there will always be considerable pressure to detect cheating and remove offending parties from the program, be that the students copying answers from the internet, or the institutions failing to detect the problem before handing out a degree.

buscoquadnary 4y ago
A college degree used to signal competence. Now it signals you have the ability to show up and avoid doing something to get kicked out for 4 years. I feel we'd probably get the same value to society if we just made grades 9-12 optional. It would remove the people that don't want to be there, improve the quality of instruction, and college would actually be a meaningful achievement so we no longer have requirements for entry level jobs to require a Master's degree.
- sarchertech 4y ago
  In many states school is already optional after age 16.

busyant 4y ago

> The most effective policy might not be to try and mechanically prevent cheating, but to explain that, this is information that you're going to need if you actually want to go into the field and if you're using copilot here you are damaging yourself in the long run. I don't teach CS, but I teach an online course in a STEM field. I give out a similar message ("you're only hurting yourself in the long run"). My anecdotal evidence is that my warning does nothing--I have trap questions on various quizzes/exams and the frequency of cheating hasn't changed with or without the warning. My suspicion is that the students who cheat feel this way: "This is just some bullshit hoop that I have to jump through, so it's okay if I cheat. I'll figure out the important stuff when the time comes." I mean, they're delusional, but I understand the mindset for cheating. edit: amusing story. Faculty members in my department are required to take an on-line course on how to handle hazardous waste. There are a few hours worth of videos to watch and a test that you need to pass at the end. Last year, one of the faculty members took the test, compiled the answers and emailed them around to everyone else (to save them the time for this "bullshit task."). I said to him, "Isn't this precisely the kind of shit that makes every faculty member angry when the students do it?" That being said, it was a bullshit test.

randomdata 4y ago
> I mean, they're delusional, but I understand the mindset for cheating. Parental (other similar) pressure can indeed be quite strong. Absent of that pressure they wouldn't be there in the first place, so perhaps it is not so much being delusional as a rational response to their environment? If they cheat their way through the parents are happy and then they can return to the life they otherwise would have lived. The time lost is unfortunate in some respects, but at the same time if you're cheating, the time investment likely isn't that great and an acceptable cost given the circumstances. > the kind of shit that makes every faculty member angry I find it curious that the customer using the product in an unintended way would be upsetting to the vendor. What drives such emotions? In my businesses, I couldn't care less how the customer uses my product. If they're happy, I'm happy.
- busyant 4y ago
  > I find it curious that the customer using the product in an unintended way would be upsetting to the vendor. What drives such emotions? In my businesses, I couldn't care less how the customer uses my product. If they're happy, I'm happy. There's a lot more going on here than maybe you realize. First, the students are not your only customers. The administration is also one of your customers. If you make the course TOO difficult and fail everyone, your "administration customer" will find a way to get rid of you. Conversely, if you make the course too easy and everyone gets to cheat and everyone gets an "A", then many students who pass your class may not pass various professional certification exams that are more rigorously controlled (i.e., no cheating). If that happens, then the school may lose accreditation for programs that you are associated with (i.e., if all the nursing majors fail their certification exam, your nursing program may get nuked). Then you get nuked. Third, whether you like it or not, your relationships with your students is something you have to deal with. Students who don't cheat have a tendency to get really upset if they find out you turn a blind eye to cheating. Happy cheating customers leads to unhappy honest customers. Fourth, if your fellow faculty members feel like you're going easy on the students to get favorable reviews (or because you're lazy or because you hate confrontation), they can make life unpleasant for you, too. They also aren't too happy if they teach upper level courses and you send a bunch of garbage students their way.

russfink 4y ago

Adjunct instructor here. Before I came into the program, cheating was on the rise. When given programming assignments, students would go to Geeks for geeks and download solutions, some of them mostly correct, and submit those for credit. One remedy was to try to make programming assignments harder and harder. Eventually, they got so hard that we were asking people new to computer science to implement a full arbitrary length integer calculator using nothing but a single tape Turing machine (in Java, not BF). Eventually, some of us came to the realization that you can never prove that somebody is cheating. People have been known to hire tutors to do their assignments for them. There is just no end. As a result, we evaluate students on four dimensions. Programming assignments,* homework assignments, but also class discussions and group participation. Those last two count for a small, but non-trivial percentage of the grade, and are usually enough to separate and identify those who understand what they are doing, from those who are just "following along" solutions that they find on the internet. * one addition to programming assignments includes an analysis write up. Tell me in human words what is happening. Why do you see that effect. What is the running time. And separately, comment your code to tell me how it works. Those two parts count significantly towards the grade. Any other professors here, what have you found that works?

leeoniya 4y ago
> one addition to programming assignments includes an analysis write up. when i was interviewing candidates this was the fastest way to filter those who understood and those who didnt. ask someone to talk you through how to solve some real-life problem. to look at a stack trace and describe what they see, or to run a profile and trace through the cause of a hotspot/contention. show them an issue and have them live debug to root-cause and fix. it's okay if they use the internet, SO, etc. -- that's how we all do it. see what they have to look up! just listening to the amount of depth someone can verbally communicate during novel problem solving (including additional questions they ask you) turns a 60min interview that wastes time into a 10min one that tells you if you can move on. a favorite one of mine was to ask the candidate to describe in as much detail as possible what happens between a keystroke typed into a google search box and the search results appearing. the diversity of replies is facinating. some will tell you "google returns results from its database", others will ask you if you want them to first describe how the keyboard works at an electrical level through the USB or bluetooth driver stack. "Never memorize something that you can look up." --someone smart

ren_engineer 4y ago

yeah Copilot really changes nothing here, all these basic questions can be found with a quick Google search. The reason Copilot is so good at these types of questions is lazy professors assigning the same basic stuff so there is a ton of training data. instead of writing an article crying about it, the professor could try making some unique questions to test knowledge of the underlying concepts

duxup 4y ago

At that point should we count grades at all, other than a basic evaluation for the student’s personal use?

chiefalchemist 4y ago

True story. I got my CS degree pre-internet. I did well with programming. Some of my friends / peers were less talented. In one of my 300 level courses the assignment was more difficult than usual. I naturally figued it out. They struggled. Evetually I gave a copy of my code / solution to Friends Group A and also to another Group B. They didn't know each other. I said, "Be careful! If you copy, disguise it."* Deadline comes. Everyone hands in their work. The following week, we go to lecture. Prof walks in and writes a list of names on the board. I knew each name. I knew what was happening. I waited for the shoe to drop (i.e., my name on the list). The shoe never dropped** I believe they were all given Ds. Not sure why they didn't fail (F). * In retrospect, this was a stupid on my part. If they knew how to alter enough it's likely they'd be able to write it themselves. That is, I all but suggested they walk on water. ** Also in retrospect, the TAs + prof had to realize I was the source. The class was big but not that big. And if only some completed the assignment correctly, the source had to be not difficult to identify. I'm not sure why I was never pulled aside and spoken to. Thank gawd.

chrismarlow9 4y ago

If someone is just looking to fill a course requirement and has no interest in being a programmer, my response is "meh, whatever". If someone is cheating and actually expects to land a decent CS job, my response is "good luck on the leetcode questions and the 5-7 hours of questions you'll have to answer between the intro call, panels, and an offer". And if someone magically manages to get all that way without actually learning the material they will get absolutely crushed at work. Meetings where you have to give your professional opinion will induce fits of anxiety. Making changes to your code based on feedback and not having any idea what the feedback means. Even just the amount of work alone that needs to be done at most tech places crushes great engineers. Without the knowledge it will just stack up on you even further.

oxfordmale 4y ago
You underestimate the human ability to get away with incompetence. Unfortunately many of those cheaters manage to get in roles where they can hide their inadequacies, either by slacking of their colleagues that do actual work or by sucking up to the right managers.
- chrismarlow9 4y ago
  Oh it definitely happens, I'm not saying it doesn't. But in those examples you mention I would say there are more people who are bad at their job than just the IC who "faked it".

tux1968 4y ago

> is the purpose of the course to measure the student or to teach the student? The very basis of the scientific method is measurement. If you can not measure your learning progress, how are you to know if your training methods are adequate or failing? I really don't understand this idea that testing and measuring students is a problem. Even the dreaded "teaching to the test", sounds like a good idea. If doing so would somehow exclude important learning, that just identifies an area where the testing needs to be improved.

Kamq 4y ago

> this is information that you're going to need if you actually want to go into the field and if you're using copilot here you are damaging yourself in the long run When you say into the field, do you mean academia or industry? Because the things copilot does for you are absolutely not the things you need to know yourself to be in industry. They're, for the most part, things we tried to put in libraries (or more ideally language standard libraries for a lot of things). The fact that is solves a lot of interview questions just means our interview process was absolutely garbage. And I'm skeptical of the academic side of this as well. It sounds like professors from the early 60s being annoyed that students have compilers (another tool that saves a ton of work and repetition). Y'all are forgetting that this is the ultimate lazy man's field. This isn't the first time the basics have been swept away and replaced with something easier to work with (and hopefully won't be the last).

mannykannot 4y ago
> They're, for the most part, things we tried to put in libraries. We need some people who can do things like making those libraries. It also seems plausible that the people who have at least some of the knowledge and judgement to do that effectively will, on average, be more effective on more mundane tasks as well. Larry Wall is one who wrote (somewhat drolly) about the virtues of laziness, but there was nothing lazy about what he did.
- Kamq 4y ago
  > We need some people who can do things like making those libraries. Do we? For things as simple as copilot tends to put out? Why? Do you also believe we need to keep people around that do other automated things? Plowing fields by hand? Hand compiling higher level languages (as the first lisp compiler was bootstrapped)? I mean, keep the information around. Don't go burning textbooks on subjects just because we automated something. But, what exactly is the value proposition of having students do these things? > It also seems plausible that the people who have at least some of the knowledge and judgement to do that effectively will, on average, be more effective on more mundane tasks as well. And your claim is also that this is the only way to get the requisite knowledge and judgement? Have students take in a string from stdin with a format that changes every semester, munge it around, and do things with it instead. > Larry Wall is one who wrote (somewhat drolly) about the virtues of laziness, but there was nothing lazy about what he did. As someone who has done string munging in C, I'm not entirely convinced that creating perl isn't an effort saving defense mechanism (only half joking).

croes 4y ago

At the end if the it is to get a job. And cheating students often get better grades as most other students who don't cheat. They may lose in the long run, but the non cheaters aren't even allowed to run