5 ms·

I've wished that students would be required to hand their semester long project to the person next to them each week.

by heelix 3y ago

fsckboy 3y ago
that would be a cool semester long project assignment: everybody has to plan/architect their own software project, and then work on implementing them, but you don't work on your own project, that you just manage.
steveBK123 3y ago
Almost every CS course I took went the other way and had strict cheating policies that essentially made any group work verboten. There was 1 group project in 1 course I took in 4 years. My spouse on the other hand took an explicitly IT program and they had group projects, engaging with real world users, building real solutions, etc.
- sdiupIGPWEfh 3y ago
  > strict cheating policies that essentially made any group work verboten If I had to guess, some polytechnic school or another? With some classes even forbidding discussing work with other students, where each assignment required a signed (digitally or otherwise) affidavit listing everyone you consulted, acknowledging that if you actually listed anyone, you were admitting to violating the academic honesty policies and if you didn't list anyone yet had spoken with others you were of course also violating the academic honesty policies. Where only consulting the professors or TAs was allowed, the TAs were never around, and the professors refused to help because if they gave you any hints, it would apparently give away the answer, which would be unfair to the other students.
  - virgilp 3y ago
    I taught a course "in a previous life" and while I wasn't anything close to as strict as you say here, I can tell you the flip side: students would copy, modify superficially (some, less superficially) and then claim "it's my work, we just talked, that's why the similarities!" (with some even having the nerve to say, "it's not copied, look, plagiarism detection software says similarity is less than x%!) Perhaps I was wrong but I really wanted the students who took the course to put in the work themselves. Just choose a different course/course set, you _knew_ this one was going to be hard! So yeah, the guideline was that we'll be eventual judges of what was "too similar" and if you're concerned, just don't discuss implementation details with anyone. I realize it prevents honest colaboration, and that's bad too... but sometimes it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of situation.
    - toolslive 3y ago
      What we did when correcting the homework is compare the signature of the assembly output (not manually of course). You can move functions around, rename them, change the names of variables, .... but the signature of the instructions remains the same. We caught 2 guys, of course we didn't know who copied from whom, but we quickly found out by challenging each of them with a fizz-buzz kind of question.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      Sure, but given how we all work in the real world.. there should be courses that are explicitly "group project" based.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    I had students that copied one-another's work; in fact I had few students that didn't copy. It made it impossible to mark their projects correctly, so I asked my more-experienced colleagues. The best advice I got was to explain the difference between collaboration (strongly encouraged) and plagiarism (re-take the course if you're lucky). Forbidding collaboration is a disastrous policy, so an instructor shouldn't have a problem with giving the same mark to each member of a group of collaborators. You just have to test that each individual can explain what they've submitted.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      My school auto-graded everything (file drop your code to a server by midnight & get a score back). I don't recall a single instance of TA/professor written or verbal feedback on code.
      - denton-scratch 3y ago
        Yuh. I guess that's "modern times". I taught in the late eighties, and auto-grading wasn't a thing. FWIW, I was a "temporary visiting lecturer", i.e. contract fill-in help. I had to write the syllabus (literally), the course plan, and the hand-outs. I also had to write all the tests and the exams; and I had to mark the exams, and then sit on the exam board through the summer holidays. The pretty girls would flutter their eyelashes at me, and ask for leniency. I suspect they took their cue from my louche colleague, who was evidently happy to take sexual advantage of his students in exchange for better marks. [Edit] I liked this colleague; but I would not have introduced him to my wife or my daughter.
        steveBK123 3y ago
        Yikes. Actually not so modern, my college was auto-grading 20 years ago.
        denton-scratch 3y ago
        This was in the 1980's. We're talking 5 1/4" floppies, no internet, 64MB RAM. I had to review my students' work as dead-tree submissions or completed circuits or whatever. (I certainly wasn't going to take digital submissions from them; that would mean floppy disks, and I regarded any disk that had been touched by any student as if it were infected with plague, because it almost certainly was. All the school systems were always infected).
  - skeeter2020 3y ago
    I've taken course work at 6+ different universities, and in my experience different groups of international students have very different perspectives on what is cheating vs. collaboration. I think it's likely attributed to the western ideal of the individual vs. the collective.
  - sdiupIGPWEfh 3y ago
    Also, for whatever my purely anecdotal experience is worth, I'd say the general quality of a professor's teaching was negatively correlated with how hard-ass they were about anti-collaboration policies. That also held true for a couple classes I'd dropped and retaken with a different prof. One might think I'm just rating easier professors higher, but no, there were definitely enough sub-par teachers with lax policies and forgiving grading who failed to impart what their course was supposed to cover. There were also tough professors I learned a lot from. It's just that I can't recall a single decent instructor among those obsessed with anti-collaboration policies.
- WWLink 3y ago
  That's crazy! My uni had senior design projects, and labs. Shoot, my community college had those, too. Most of our classes had lab projects, and sometimes the lab projects were group projects. We were encouraged to help each other out. I can't imagine a class where collaboration was totally against the rules. And I mean, that went with everything. In my EE classes we did lots of collaboration. We had study groups, homework groups, etc. It was a lot of fun. I'm sad to hear there are places where they straight up make that against the rules. My uni also had engineering ethics classes - in my major it was mandatory to take 2 of them. I think it makes sense and should be more common for software engineers. A lot of software is used to operate planes, cars, medical equipment, and nowadays also help make decisions that can have life-threatening consequences.
accurrent 3y ago
The university I went to had this. We had to maintain an application that was built by our seniors and then hand that off to the next batch.
- akoboldfrying 3y ago
  I'm impressed by the closeness to reality, but curious how they could assess performance consistently?
  - tasuki 3y ago
    "the students are getting worse every year"
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  This is a really good idea, but I would hate to have to do it... unless I was the senior who got to do the original greenfield development!
  - robinson7d 3y ago
    Worst of all: the first seniors get to refactor the professor’s code.
ReactiveJelly 3y ago
Me too. All throughout my education, group projects and speeches were both these scary, uncommon things that you could afford to fuck up, and I skated by on individual talent. Now I'm an adult, several years into my career, wishing that the schools had done a bigger quantity of low-stakes group projects instead. It's a muscle that was never exercised
usrusr 3y ago
Not each week, but at my university, they had enough focus on the science part that most semester long solo projects were semester long and solo only in name. Students were assigned some component or incremental stage of some larger project spanning years and multiple PhDs, not some assignment for assignment's sake. That certainly did not make them perfect learning environments because students were left to their own in how they solve cooperation (postgrads running those macro projects might be considered PO, but not technical leads, and just as clueless as the rest) but the "pass on to the next each week" approach would have exactly the same gaps.
spiffytech 3y ago
My university did this - each semester's class inherited the code base the last semester had worked on. As a learning tool it was a disaster. The code had never been touched by a skilled engineer, just years of undergrads pulling all-nighters. That meant it didn't teach what good maintenance looked like. Students just piled their hacks on top of someone else's hacks so they could hit the deadline. It wasn't a good way to learn to write quality software (even if reality sometimes looks this way). It was also the only software engineering course in our CS curriculum.
- idlephysicist 3y ago
  > ... just piled their hacks on top of someone else's hacks so they could hit the deadline. This sounds oddly familiar... hmm.

I've wished that students would be required to hand their semester long project to the person next to them each week.

by heelix 3y ago

I've wished that students would be required to hand their semester long project to the person next to them each week.

that would be a cool semester long project assignment: everybody has to plan/architect their own software project, and then work on implementing them, but you don't work on your own project, that you just manage.

steveBK123 3y ago

Almost every CS course I took went the other way and had strict cheating policies that essentially made any group work verboten. There was 1 group project in 1 course I took in 4 years. My spouse on the other hand took an explicitly IT program and they had group projects, engaging with real world users, building real solutions, etc.

sdiupIGPWEfh 3y ago
> strict cheating policies that essentially made any group work verboten If I had to guess, some polytechnic school or another? With some classes even forbidding discussing work with other students, where each assignment required a signed (digitally or otherwise) affidavit listing everyone you consulted, acknowledging that if you actually listed anyone, you were admitting to violating the academic honesty policies and if you didn't list anyone yet had spoken with others you were of course also violating the academic honesty policies. Where only consulting the professors or TAs was allowed, the TAs were never around, and the professors refused to help because if they gave you any hints, it would apparently give away the answer, which would be unfair to the other students.
- virgilp 3y ago
  I taught a course "in a previous life" and while I wasn't anything close to as strict as you say here, I can tell you the flip side: students would copy, modify superficially (some, less superficially) and then claim "it's my work, we just talked, that's why the similarities!" (with some even having the nerve to say, "it's not copied, look, plagiarism detection software says similarity is less than x%!) Perhaps I was wrong but I really wanted the students who took the course to put in the work themselves. Just choose a different course/course set, you _knew_ this one was going to be hard! So yeah, the guideline was that we'll be eventual judges of what was "too similar" and if you're concerned, just don't discuss implementation details with anyone. I realize it prevents honest colaboration, and that's bad too... but sometimes it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of situation.
  - toolslive 3y ago
    What we did when correcting the homework is compare the signature of the assembly output (not manually of course). You can move functions around, rename them, change the names of variables, .... but the signature of the instructions remains the same. We caught 2 guys, of course we didn't know who copied from whom, but we quickly found out by challenging each of them with a fizz-buzz kind of question.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Sure, but given how we all work in the real world.. there should be courses that are explicitly "group project" based.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  I had students that copied one-another's work; in fact I had few students that didn't copy. It made it impossible to mark their projects correctly, so I asked my more-experienced colleagues. The best advice I got was to explain the difference between collaboration (strongly encouraged) and plagiarism (re-take the course if you're lucky). Forbidding collaboration is a disastrous policy, so an instructor shouldn't have a problem with giving the same mark to each member of a group of collaborators. You just have to test that each individual can explain what they've submitted.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    My school auto-graded everything (file drop your code to a server by midnight & get a score back). I don't recall a single instance of TA/professor written or verbal feedback on code.
    - denton-scratch 3y ago
      Yuh. I guess that's "modern times". I taught in the late eighties, and auto-grading wasn't a thing. FWIW, I was a "temporary visiting lecturer", i.e. contract fill-in help. I had to write the syllabus (literally), the course plan, and the hand-outs. I also had to write all the tests and the exams; and I had to mark the exams, and then sit on the exam board through the summer holidays. The pretty girls would flutter their eyelashes at me, and ask for leniency. I suspect they took their cue from my louche colleague, who was evidently happy to take sexual advantage of his students in exchange for better marks. [Edit] I liked this colleague; but I would not have introduced him to my wife or my daughter.
      - steveBK123 3y ago
        Yikes. Actually not so modern, my college was auto-grading 20 years ago.
        denton-scratch 3y ago
        This was in the 1980's. We're talking 5 1/4" floppies, no internet, 64MB RAM. I had to review my students' work as dead-tree submissions or completed circuits or whatever. (I certainly wasn't going to take digital submissions from them; that would mean floppy disks, and I regarded any disk that had been touched by any student as if it were infected with plague, because it almost certainly was. All the school systems were always infected).
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  I've taken course work at 6+ different universities, and in my experience different groups of international students have very different perspectives on what is cheating vs. collaboration. I think it's likely attributed to the western ideal of the individual vs. the collective.
- sdiupIGPWEfh 3y ago
  Also, for whatever my purely anecdotal experience is worth, I'd say the general quality of a professor's teaching was negatively correlated with how hard-ass they were about anti-collaboration policies. That also held true for a couple classes I'd dropped and retaken with a different prof. One might think I'm just rating easier professors higher, but no, there were definitely enough sub-par teachers with lax policies and forgiving grading who failed to impart what their course was supposed to cover. There were also tough professors I learned a lot from. It's just that I can't recall a single decent instructor among those obsessed with anti-collaboration policies.
WWLink 3y ago
That's crazy! My uni had senior design projects, and labs. Shoot, my community college had those, too. Most of our classes had lab projects, and sometimes the lab projects were group projects. We were encouraged to help each other out. I can't imagine a class where collaboration was totally against the rules. And I mean, that went with everything. In my EE classes we did lots of collaboration. We had study groups, homework groups, etc. It was a lot of fun. I'm sad to hear there are places where they straight up make that against the rules. My uni also had engineering ethics classes - in my major it was mandatory to take 2 of them. I think it makes sense and should be more common for software engineers. A lot of software is used to operate planes, cars, medical equipment, and nowadays also help make decisions that can have life-threatening consequences.

accurrent 3y ago

The university I went to had this. We had to maintain an application that was built by our seniors and then hand that off to the next batch.

akoboldfrying 3y ago
I'm impressed by the closeness to reality, but curious how they could assess performance consistently?
- tasuki 3y ago
  "the students are getting worse every year"
skeeter2020 3y ago
This is a really good idea, but I would hate to have to do it... unless I was the senior who got to do the original greenfield development!
- robinson7d 3y ago
  Worst of all: the first seniors get to refactor the professor’s code.

ReactiveJelly 3y ago

Me too. All throughout my education, group projects and speeches were both these scary, uncommon things that you could afford to fuck up, and I skated by on individual talent. Now I'm an adult, several years into my career, wishing that the schools had done a bigger quantity of low-stakes group projects instead. It's a muscle that was never exercised

usrusr 3y ago

Not each week, but at my university, they had enough focus on the science part that most semester long solo projects were semester long and solo only in name. Students were assigned some component or incremental stage of some larger project spanning years and multiple PhDs, not some assignment for assignment's sake. That certainly did not make them perfect learning environments because students were left to their own in how they solve cooperation (postgrads running those macro projects might be considered PO, but not technical leads, and just as clueless as the rest) but the "pass on to the next each week" approach would have exactly the same gaps.

spiffytech 3y ago

My university did this - each semester's class inherited the code base the last semester had worked on. As a learning tool it was a disaster. The code had never been touched by a skilled engineer, just years of undergrads pulling all-nighters. That meant it didn't teach what good maintenance looked like. Students just piled their hacks on top of someone else's hacks so they could hit the deadline. It wasn't a good way to learn to write quality software (even if reality sometimes looks this way). It was also the only software engineering course in our CS curriculum.

idlephysicist 3y ago
> ... just piled their hacks on top of someone else's hacks so they could hit the deadline. This sounds oddly familiar... hmm.