14 ms·

Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science (2018)

• nextos 1y ago
  My school solved this quite well, I think. Homework wasn't graded. You were supposed to build a project or a series of projects. There was a practical exam at the end of the term where you were asked to make one big change to your homework project, and you were given 3 or 4 hours to do it in the computer room. It was really tough, and impossible to pass if you had not implemented everything yourself and knew things inside out.
  • sebmellen 1y ago
    Brilliant solution. But how was the change that the student would be asked to implement evaluated for fairness?
    • nextos 1y ago
      The requested change was the same for everyone. They would have also run your project through a series of unit tests and would let you fix your code if they had encountered any bugs. Being able to implement the change was a necessary condition to prove you had authored the code and pass but, overall, the project would be graded based on architectural decisions, algorithms and data structures, coding style, etc. I guess this is not done at other schools because it's a hell lot of work for teachers and passing rates are low. It's quite brutal.
      • ghaff 1y ago
        I'm not a big fan of final exam/related serious pass/fail screens. Students have (probably) made a big investment in time and money and , absent pretty serious deficiencies, they should probably be able to eek out a gentleman's C.
        • kaonwarb 1y ago
          It sounds to me like you're in favor of grading on effort. I don't believe that investment made in time or money should factor in to assessing a student's mastery.
          • Henchman21 1y ago
            I don’t believe money should ever be a factor for students. In any way. Yet, when I was a student I was incredibly loud about “I am a paying customer of this institution and you’re gonna teach me. Late to class and not allowed in? Great, I paid for this class and I’ll take it up with whomever has the ability to reprimand you/fire you if you aren’t tenured/generally make your life hell.” Money in education perverts everything. More generally money is the root of all evil, eh? But if you took my cash and I get nothing? Thats a very loud complaint and/or lawsuit.
            • afavour 1y ago
              Eh, you paid and agreed to terms and conditions. > you took my cash and I get nothing? If I book a hotel room then turn up a week later than my booking date trying to get a room I can expect to receive nothing.
              • Henchman21 1y ago
                Sure; but also the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I got my education and a couple of my professors got forced to be decent to their students. In my case it worked out. YMMV.
                • afavour 1y ago
                  YMMV on the definition of “decent”. Arriving late to class is disruptive to all the other paying customers in the room so IMO it should be disincentivised. There are reasonable and unreasonable levels of disincentive, of course.
      • andrewflnr 1y ago
        The passing rates at least seem solvable, by making the required changes a little easier. Is it not viable to do this with changes that are automatically testable, so it's not as hard on the teachers?
        • apparent 1y ago
          Or by grading on a curve, so that students who worked in good faith and seemed to know their code were given good grades, even if they did not 100% finish in the few hour timeframe.
    • WrongAssumption 1y ago
      I doubt the change was relevant. I would expect if they can reasonably make a change even if not totally ideal, the work as first submitted can be evaluated on it’s own as it is shown to be original work.
      • nextos 1y ago
        Changes were often designed to be impossible to perform if your architecture was not flexible, or to show your algorithms had poor time or space behavior. So, changes were designed both to test you were the author and to fail poorly designed projects.
    • riffraff 1y ago
      Do the same in change for all? E.g. implement a simple compiler for a C-ish language with only functions, if and while loops; as the big change, ask to add for loops.
  • jwilber 1y ago
    This is a brilliant solution for a project-based course. It does take a decent amount of effort to go through each students project and give them an ask that you know isn’t ChatGPT-able. Another great solution is to give an interview-like oral whiteboard interview for midterms/final. Quite time consuming (you can’t just assign the TA’s a grading prompt) but quite effective.
  • mschuster91 1y ago
    > It was really tough, and impossible to pass if you had not implemented everything yourself and knew things inside out. ... and required an awful lot of resources to grade, unsustainable for modern academia that has been perverted to be mostly a diploma mill. No front but a "CS degree" is, for 99% of the people that have one, factually useless - people only do it because employers use it as a very efficient filter to weed out everyone who might have an issue with what big corporate demands - cogs in a wheel, not artisans with own opinions. The purpose of academia isn't science and advancing it anymore, it is raking in tuition money on one side and molding people to corporate drone conformity.
    • busyant 1y ago
      > employers use it as a very efficient filter to weed out everyone who might have an issue with what big corporate demands - cogs in a wheel, not artisans with own opinions. I think the simpler explanation is that the CS degree is supposed to be an independent verification that the student has learned and can employ fundamental aspects of CS. I realize that verification can often be wrong (especially now with the ubiquity of LLMs), but I think the view that employers are simply looking for "cogs" and avoiding "artisans" is an arrogant and cynical take on what a degree is supposed to indicate.
      • add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
        I dropped out of school and made an artisan career for myself in engineering and loved it, it's who I am and can't pretend to be something different. But there is friction to navigate that way and not everyone will be able to make it work. Staying within the lines is the path of least resistance for most people.
        • ode 1y ago
          Have you ever written about your story? I know I would be interested in reading it.
          • 1y ago
  • ttoinou 1y ago
    Nice. It required teachers that are good though. Maybe not anymore with AI
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • Shorel 1y ago
    I love this approach. It is both practical and constructive. Do you have examples of projects used?
• scotty79 1y ago
  A lot of hair pulling coming straight from the assumption that CS plagiarism is a problem. You study to learn. Assignments are to help you learn and evaluate yourself. If you skip them in whatever manner only you suffer. Noone else. When you finish your studies and go to work noone will care about the grade you got, especially if you can't code your way out of a wet paper bag.
  • hackyhacky 1y ago
    You don't think it's a problem for the university to graduate students who don't know the material?
    • scotty79 1y ago
      It's a problem for those students. But it's self inflicted by their choices. EDIT: sorry, I misread your question.... I think it's a problem for the university because it might mislead universities into keeping terrible teachers on the payroll because too many of their students are getting too high grades because they copy because teacher was unable to teach them or motivate them. This problem is solved cheaper and easier just by monitoring teachers directly. Another problem I can see is that if a lot of particularly terrible students graduate suddenly it might spoil the reputation of the university, but it's a problem with increase of the cheating level, not with the cheating level itself, it's already calculated into university's reputation. It really doesn't matter all that much because the main source of university graduates success and as a result university's reputation comes from how picky they are when admitting students. Good freshmen usually make good graduates. When students are taught nearly every university does similarly good as long as they try to do a decent job and not just scam people. I don't see any other problems. And I see zero incentive for the university to reduce cheating. This would just reduce the number of graduates and they can already do that on admission if they want that. Unless they can somehow earn money from catching cheating students. Heck, top universities even admit more on the affluence of the student's family not on how smart they are. And that's because affluent graduates are also sought after by the business so this works for everybody. I think the person who wrote that article is cynical enough to understand the incentives to not care about cheating too much at the level of individual teacher but they are not cynical enough to understand that at institutional level there's also lack of incentive to care about that because university is not really about teaching and grading. It's for selecting and it doesn't need to be 100% accurate to be useful and valuable.
• ivape 1y ago
  The ship has sailed. If Alice gives me her code, then I’ll just run it through an LLM and ask it to make it look different. Wait, why don’t I just ask the LLM from the get go? The ships are all gone from the harbor. Luckily for justice, there won’t be any jobs anyway for those degrees. Something about the universe is just doing quite a rug pull on so many things, fascinating times.
  • wvenable 1y ago
    Yeah reading this I couldn't help but think how irrelevant all their plagiarism detection code is now. There's no misspellings, suspect white-space, esoteric naming in any cheater's code now.
  • charlieyu1 1y ago
    LLM ocassionally screws up and left enough trace.
• TheHideout 1y ago
  Maybe all homework could come in two parts with a 70/30 split in the grade. Everyone gets assigned the first 70%, if their solution trips a plagiarism detector then they are automatically assigned the second 30% of the work. Better yet, it's communicated that it intentionally randomly selects some people for the second part of the work, even if they didn't plagiarize. Like random airport screening. As long as it's clearly communicated in the syllabus, should be fine. If identical code submissions are so common then everyone should be doing the same quantity of work on average and it shouldn't be an issue if you automatically get assigned bonus problems.
• throwaway20174 1y ago
  In my recent class many people were using AI and I know people don’t think this way, but just totally defeats the purpose of taking the class.
• egberts1 1y ago
  Programming done in closed network lab. This is why homework are NOW being done in-class: no takehomes. In short, weekly exams, on-paper, in-person, in-class, on teacher's test form paper. No phone. Calculator permitted. Some allow open-book. I too welcome back the 1980s. Mimograph, anyone? * sniff * sniff *
• dvh 1y ago
  First semester, programming in C. We are submitting the assignments to the assistants. Female student in front of me hands out her floppy disk (this was early 2000). Assistant opens the single file that is on it, containing this single line: #include <stdio.h> Assistant: you did this completely yourself? Her: yes! Assistant: nobody helped you? Her: no! Assistant: are you sure? Her: well, they helped me a little. Assistant: gimme your index! During the exam professor asked me why I called arguments of main argv and argc and if they can be called something else, I did know the answer, but I didn't know exactly what continue does because I wasn't using it in my code.
• neilv 1y ago
  I backspaced the comment I started typing, which was suggestions that required universities to rediscover ideals and backbone, and would like to instead ask a question... For those who went to schools with strong honor codes, would you advocate that to others? For example, did you find an environment of trust and respect, like you've not seen elsewhere? For another example, do you have strong post-graduation alumni network, where someone in the alumni directory isn't just a possible foot in the door for sales ("hey, we went to the same school, can you grant me the courtesy of a call"), but that you can assume they are likely honest and have integrity? Did it improve the quality of your education? Were there downsides?
  • glitchc 1y ago
    Honor only works if individual participants hold themselves to a higher standard. Once you have a couple of folks who are in it to maximize their return, FOMO guarantees that it quickly becomes an arms race.
  • aprilthird2021 1y ago
    I saw a lot of cheating, but at the same time everyone I became friends with and still keep in my network was super trustworthy. Some people will cheat. Honor code or not. But, especially if you go to a very good school, the people who don't need to cheat or don't want to, will always be worth knowing.
  • onetimeusename 1y ago
    My school recently had to change the honor code because there was so much cheating but the administration and student senate don't like bringing that up. The honor code for 100 years previously had been weaker, to the point of not having proctors for exams. The student senate opposed changes to the honor code. There's been an exponential increase in honor code violations and yet less enforcement because, imo, the school can't afford to suspend so many people. I think what's happening is kind of dark. Universities might be slowly returning to what they were a long time ago which is a place of learning. In recent times they have been selling prestige to credentialists. It turns out that those people don't really need to take the classes especially with the internet and AI now being resources. So the universities are stuck between earning more revenue yet having decreasing academic integrity versus having lower revenue and catering to a smaller group of people. The honor code itself doesn't really seem to change how people behave. Anecdotally, I hear that cheating increases every year from whispers of CS profs and TAs. I feel like if you are going to use AI to cheat, as one example, why not skip the university altogether? I think the lack of academic integrity will lead to that in some form or another.
• ninalanyon 1y ago
  The solution to plagiarism is the same for all subjects: abandon continuous assessment and have viva voce as a significant part of the final. When I studied applied physics eons ago we had tutorials in term time and a substantial essay to complete in the long vacation but these were between the student and the tutor and had no effect on the final class of degree; that was determined by a series of final exams (open note), the report of the final year laboratory project and its oral defence. My project report was more than a hundred typewritten pages with numerous diagrams and I had to defend it to my project supervisor and the head of department. I don't think a plagiarist could have done it. Of course this is expensive, all the academics involved were permanent employees of the university, there were no graduate students doing slave labour tutoring. In my opinion the plague of plagiarism is a direct consequence of attempts to get education on the cheap and of valuing the diploma more than the education itself.
• Aurornis 1y ago
  > Then, we apply another filter, keeping only the cases that contain indisputable evidence — for example, hundreds of lines copied right down to the last whitespace error. We have virtually eliminated false positives at this point. My friends who teach used the same level of filtering in the past: They suspected a lot of students from copying from each other, but they only took action on the cases where it was so undeniably obvious that it would be an open and shut case. In the era of LLMs, that degree of precision is completely gone. However, the other signal is amplified: They have more students than ever getting 100s on homework and completely failing any exams. In the past it seems that many of the plagiarizers at least learned something, however minimal, in the process of copying homework and then trying to turn it into something that looked less suspicious. The LLM users are so brazen that they just submit the prompt, copy the output, and call it a day.
  • Wobbles42 1y ago
    > The LLM users are so brazen that they just submit the prompt, copy the output, and call it a day. Is this not what all the potential employers claim to want anyway? I sometimes wonder how many of us are employed to actually make things, and how many of us serve as ways to convince investors that the AI money bonfire was not a bonfire.
• downboots 1y ago
  I'll say it again: It's a culture problem, not an AI problem. No one is going to stop the student and ask them why they cheated even if they were practically being asked to eat a tomato soup with a fork. It's easier to hide the problem under the rug and scapegoat.
  • theamk 1y ago
    Are you saying that college homework/assignments are unreasonably hard? I don't think so, after all people were successfully completing them before ChaptGPT. Yes, it took a long time and some sleepless nights (unless the student has perfect time management). This is all by design, you can't learn without it. Yes, some people got bad grades. This happens, after all what even is the point of grading if everyone gets good grades. What is the problem that you think is "being hidden under the rug"?
    • downboots 1y ago
      No
• Labov 1y ago
  I took computer science for a year before flunking out. My parents pushed me into college. My father didn't want me to join the Navy like he had done, when he was a young man. A lot of conversations about my future earning potential with an undergraduate degree took place in the lobbies of payday loan joints. I plagiarized quite a bit in school. I'm not proud of it. Desperation and poor role models can create all sorts of negative outcomes, though. I was taught how to survive, not how to live ethically. You can try to filter the plagiarists, sure. But uh, I'm not sure if it will work. The plagiarists are in league with each other.
  • ivape 1y ago
    Yours is probably the most important comment. It's always important to understand why the person is doing the wrong thing. It's a serious lack of integrity to cheat, and what child is born dishonest? Something pushed these young people to these levels and that's the real thing that, no pun intended, needs examination.
  • Wobbles42 1y ago
    I don't like cheating, but honestly I find your behavior hard to judge. The reality, to me, seems to be that universities sell credentials with learning as a sort of sideshow or window dressing. I've met a lot of excellent engineers who didn't have degrees. I have met a lot of terrible ones who did. I can tell you which group has an easier time getting hired... and I don't think I am focusing on edge cases. The system is broken. So do whatever you have to to get that permission slip to work from the education-industrial complex. By all means, please learn your trade as well, but let's not pretend like "knowledge" is what you are paying six figures for at a university. Knowledge is available for free. It's certification that costs as much as a house.
• jiggawatts 1y ago
  Every one of these “woe is us” articles about academic cheating is fundamentally a tragedy of the commons issue. The commons is the value of a university degree. No, not the education! The diploma. There will always be some fraction of students that genuinely learn and earn their diplomas. Industry rewards them with higher salaries because the diploma demonstrates that they’re educated and self-motived intelligent people — grade A employees in other words. So of course, some students will cheat and gain a diploma through copying others. This is inevitable, like the drug trade or prostitution. If the percentage is low enough, nobody cares. Okay, but… what if it’s a little higher? Those students might be highly profitable foreign students just looking to get a piece of paper so that they can get a better life back home. What about a bit higher? Now the university is making bank, the foreign students are funding a new physics lab and a new pool! Awesome. What if it’s 90%? Now… it’s too late to rock the boat. The emperors nakedness must not be revealed! If industry catches on that almost all of the diploma-wielding graduates are actually C- instead of A+ the whole thing will implode. That’s why universities are “helpless” against cheating! They won’t fix it, because if they do, the music stops. We’re nearly there now. I walked through my old university and saw maybe 5% locals. I hardly heard a single conversation in English. This place is now graduating students in bulk that are functionally illiterate (in English), let alone the subject matter. The song hasn’t stopped yet, but AI is fiddling with the buttons on the stereo. There are no chairs.
  • rxtexit 1y ago
    I went to a state school and would never even get in now. Stanford has a problem but I was never going to get into a school that the prestige matters. This just doesn't matter for the vast majority of students. In the long run, the state school problem is easily fixed by an AI first, ultra low tuition, accredited option. I actually just looked at my state school thinking of going back in my 50s but the tuition makes it a complete non-starter. I just think of how cheap we could do an AI first class with 1 or 2 in person, controlled exams like any license exam that cheating is just not going to be an issue. The prestigious schools have a much more difficult problem but there are pretty simple ways to have in person exams that most people are not going to cheat on.
• dang 1y ago
  Discussed at the time: Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16651099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16651099 - March 2018 (118 comments)
• userbinator 1y ago
  The underlying problem is not plagiarism, but the fact that many problems are essentially solved and known solutions everywhere, and tying one's grades to how well one can regurgigate the solution or look it up online, instead of a reflection of one's mental skill and knowledge. Some of them simply don’t generalize, like creating new homework assignments from scratch each semester. As much as I'm loathe to suggest using AI in CS, that's actually something an LLM might be able to help with --- generating tons of pseudorandom variations on a theme. I think making assignments completely for practice, and having 100% of the grade be the final exam, where there is zero computer use and pure brain use, outputting on pen-and-paper, will work. Anyone who tries to cheat will only cheat themselves and have the results of that exam reflect their actual understanding.
  • chowells 1y ago
    If you really want to dig into it, the problem is that there are a huge number of students who don't know anything at all about how or why to learn. If they actually wanted to learn and understood how exercises help them, the fact that they're all well-known problems really wouldn't be a big deal. But universities are businesses now. They produce diplomas in exchange for money, and interrupting that with details like "this student shouldn't be here" costs them money they can't afford to lose.
    • eyesofgod 1y ago
      > the problem is that there are a huge number of students who don't know anything at all about how or why to learn. How much of this has to do with the students being generally still immature. Had I gone to school at this time, I almost certainly would have felt this way, or some compatible way that diminished my effort.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    > and tying one's grades to how well one can regurgigate the solution or look it up online, instead of a reflection of one's mental skill and knowledge. The homework is supposed to be for practice. I’ve heard multiple stories of professors for undergrads who tried making homework optional, but the number of students failing exams increased dramatically because fewer people did the homework. LLMs have short circuited a lot of student’s thought process and even sense of morals. A lot of students who wouldn’t copy a friend’s homework or even copy and paste from GitHub have started using LLMs to do their homework. I don’t really know what it is. Maybe a sense that because they’re using a tool that it’s not cheating? Thinking they’re less likely to get caught because it’s not identical to existing work? I agree that weighting the exams most heavily is the only way out, but I’m sure we’re in for a struggle as universities see the shocking grade drops that come with that practice.
• riedel 1y ago
  I explicitly allow plagiarism and LLMs, but even give them reference solutions if they get stuck. Everything else seems either too much work or ineffective to find plagiarism. However, I do a short oral exam where I 'audit' the solution by picking out single lines and asking them to explain it in detail.
  • threeducks 1y ago
    > I do a short oral exam I tried that, but some students who had cheated became really aggressive when it turned out they did not have a single clue how their AI-generated solutions worked and still demanded a pass. We now do more written exams where we have some distance.
    • simianwords 1y ago
      Perhaps oral exams leave too much room for ambiguity
      • threeducks 1y ago
        I can understand where you are coming from, but in the cases we had to deal with, there was absolutely no room for ambiguity. To put things into perspective, those were students who did not know what a HashMap is or could not derive the algorithmic complexity of two nested for-loops, yet somehow cheated their way into a master's level course. With the current level of oversight, degrees obtained after 2022 are basically worthless.
        • simianwords 1y ago
          Wow. Why not have written exams? But to be fair, there is no ambiguity in this extreme example but ambiguity can be misused by either party in other cases where it is not so cut and clear.
          • threeducks 1y ago
            > Why not have written exams? That is what we do now. Some reasons why we preferred oral exams before: 1. In order to write a written exam, you have to create a written exam. 2. Scheduling is more difficult. You have to reserve a room for the exam, ensure that the date does not collide with other exams, and students have to plan their vacations around it. For oral exams, you only have to schedule two people, which allows for much greater flexibility. 3. During oral exams, you can probe a bit deeper if you notice that a student did not understand the question correctly, but still knows the solution. In contrast, in a written exam, there is no way for the student to recover from an initially incorrect understanding. 4. It is much easier to cheat on a written exam, especially since there have been all kinds of technological improvements, like ear canal earphones, tiny cameras, glasses with integrated AI assistants, polarized smart watches and who knows what else.
• bradley13 1y ago
  I'm a prof. The easy solution is to give very little weight to homework. The assignments should be designed to teach concepts. Concepts that are then tested in a controlled environment, where cheating is not possible. Remove the incentive to cheat, and save yourself the time trying to catch it (and punish it, despite an uncooperative administration).
  • ssl232 1y ago
    Agreed. Generations of students had their degree classifications determined by a small number of final exams under exam conditions. Why did we move away from that, opening up all of these routes to score degree grading in non exam conditions?
    • AngryData 1y ago
      Just my personal theory, but maybe universities wanted to avoid being considered just pay-to-test institutions that couldn't justify their insane and continuously rising costs when the only thing that really mattered for a degree was passing an exam. Someone spending thousands of dollars just to skip every class but then show up and pass the exam test is not a good look for the university and could devalue the entire thing from the perspective of the public and potential future students. But if someone is required to go to every class nobody can easily claim the classes were pointless or bogus for passing exams and getting a degree because nobody can do that. Increases in overall schooling costs can also be explained away as more invested in classes whether it was true or not. And it makes people who were forced to attend classes whether they wanted to or needed to look disfavorably upon the potential for future students to be allowed to simply pass an exam by completely itself, in a sort of bucket of crabs situation where people think "I had to go through all this bogus stuff for my piece of paper, these younger kids should have to too!" But I have zero qualifications for any of these opinions other than having been forced to attend a number of nearly worthless university classes that were pointless in the face of just reading the course book. Of course I also had some classes that were worth way more than just the book material, but probably half the classes I had to take I felt were dubiously useful to start with, not to mention the absolutely terrible actual class, and forcing people to attend to get a passing grade was just there to prevent 95% of the class being empty every week.
• nneonneo 1y ago
  We use honor pledges not to reduce cheating directly - but rather, to create incontrovertible evidence that the student was aware of the course policies. This supports those rare cases where a student chooses to fight a plagiarism case and claims ignorance of the policy, especially in cases where it may not be University-wide policy - e.g. a policy against AI usage. Students can argue they didn’t read the syllabus, missed the first day of class, etc. but have a harder time arguing they signed a pledge without reading it. We regularly catch cheaters in our classes; I do so every term and report all the cases I see up to the dean. In my experience these have not resulted in catastrophic declines in teaching evaluations; the few unhappy with getting caught cheating are drowned out by the 80-90% who don’t cheat. It is actually critically important that institutions take cheating seriously. Rampant, well-known cheating can tank the reputation of a program or institution, or at the very least serve to cheapen the value of the degree.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • throwaway314155 1y ago
    I think this misses just one important nuance - cheating is often done out of desperation and it might bee important to try to understand that desperation before deciding on the degree of punishment. For instance, if the student is dealing with a recent diagnosis of e.g. depression or adhd. You really can't know the extent of anguish some might go through before deciding they "have to" cheat in order to hopefully have some semblance of normalcy in their future career. Obviously cheating is unacceptable, but empathy can really help the student in this situation.
    • TesterVetter 1y ago
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    • Jevon23 1y ago
      [flagged]
    • ThunderSizzle 1y ago
• SyrupThinker 1y ago
  Ah, that reminds me of my own university days. Early on I've made the mistake of sharing my solutions with people I knew. Unfortunately they kept sharing the solution too, and so on. Two times I was pulled into a profs office after the relevant lecture, to be questioned about it. After it became clear that I was the author, and what happened, nothing ever came of it (for me). Ironically both times the copiers supposedly failed to remove the git repo that was part of the handoff, so it was primarily about verifying I was the original author. Lesson learned: "invisible" watermarks work, because people are generally lazy (also don't share graded work, just offer to help)
• Barrin92 1y ago
  I studied CS in Germany and the entire issues seems completely unnecessary and foreign to me. Our exercises only mattered insofar as they qualified you for the end of semester exam, and that was done on paper and without electronic devices so you couldn't cheat and it's the only thing that mattered for your degree. Why are adults at a university doing graded homework? They're responsible for their own learning, and if they want to cheat, well good luck on your exam. Our exercises in math and CS always were a few years old and kind of cycled through, so just copying old solutions was trivial, but what for, you're only hurting yourself. People who didn't learn just bombed out at the end. A university education is voluntary, people are there by their own choice. Honestly this seems almost entirely like a byproduct of the privatized education system. University as children's daycare where everyone needs to pass and be tutored because there isn't an incentive to just filter people out.
• oliwarner 1y ago
  This much be so much worse since LLMs. The answer here is surely a monitored environment. An online editor/tester/compiler that logs not only the resulting code, but the way they got there. Anyone who pastes in 99% and just renamed the variables is trivially discovered. This probably works for far more than computer science. It's not just a stick to beat kids with. You can work back to actually see where they're falling down, do seminars where you can open your environment to allow TAs and others to work on a single codebase collaboratively. This must exist already, no?
  • plasticchris 1y ago
    Basically all the coding interview sites are exactly this: editor, compiler, tester, record and replay every keystroke. Why hasn’t anyone used them for a CS class? No idea, maybe cost? And I can’t help but think if they did people would find a way to make the cut and paste look like organic typing…
    • aldanor 1y ago
      It's not so hard to type in the problem to a chatgpt on your second monitor or an iPad next to your screen and just retype the answer with some alterations
      • PNewling 1y ago
        Some certifications I’ve taken make you do a full room scan, including using a mirror to see the computer itself if you’re using a laptop, to ensure there is nothing you could cheat with. Normally a human reviews it before they open the test for you. In addition they have you install a browser extension that fails a check if there is more than one monitor along with a host of other items. These are obviously extreme measures, but it is possible to try and enforce enhanced levels of proctoring. And I’m not saying I like the idea of doing this for all coding interviews, just that I guarantee people would go through with this if it meant a chance to get into big tech.
        • 1y ago
• constantcrying 1y ago
  The real question is what is the point of education and what is the point of teaching those who do not want to learn? Is the point of the homework to have students just do some work or is it a tool to encourage them to more deeply engage with the material? If it is the former, then what is wrong with using LLMs? If it is the latter, then students should be judged based on their understanding, which they have to demonstrate in a scenario where deception is very hard or near impossible. The real problem is students not wanting to learn. And what is the point of educating people who do not want to learn?
• SwtCyber 1y ago
  Meanwhile, doing nothing is rewarded with peace and better reviews
• fwipsy 1y ago
  Anecdotally, before ChatGPT I was once asked to review 10 peers' homework in a computer science course, and 8 of them had the same or nearly the same answers. I couldn't believe plagiarism was that common, so I assumed they all just went to the same discussion section and used a solution provided by an over-helpful TA. Later I asked another student about it and he laughed and told me to keep quiet. So then I asked the instructor about it and he told me I should have failed them but didn't seem interested in taking any other action.
• RajT88 1y ago
  I will weigh in on my wife's experiences, as she teaches computer engineering. Plagiarism is now rampant - but for structural reasons. The university seemingly decided they want the money of foreign students, and started deciding that degrees from certain foreign universities counted as prerequisites for CS Masters programs. A lot of these foreign students somehow have little programming skill despite undergraduate degrees in CS. The cheating is obvious. She gives students 0's with no push back from administration if she thinks they are cheating. Some amazing stories: - Students who turn in assignments with someone else's name of them - Students who admit to cheating and do it again and again, never becoming more sophisticated at it. - Students who get caught cheating 5 times and ask if there is any way they can pass the course. - Students who despite being told there is no way to pass the course, request a call or in person meeting to discuss how they might be able to pass the course (she has never taken them up on this - one wonders what their pitch would be) Cheaters who put a little effort in are undetectable. Or at least she suspects, but can prove nothing and grades the (not obviously plagiarized) code on its own merits. The general feeling is that barring these foreign students, cheating is there but not too widespread. She does, indeed, have a bad rating on RateMyProfessor and does not care. Her administration still thinks highly of her because of her other work (such as running accreditation programs). If you are a professor YMMV. This is how it is for my wife.
  • apparent 1y ago
    I get that it's easy to cheat on homework, but tests can be more locked-down. Is it possible to retroactively ding a homework grade if subsequent testing shows that the student truly does not know how to do the concept from the homework? Obviously we all forget things over time, but if the homework was suspect from the beginning, and when the student is tested he has just no idea whatsoever, that could be grounds for taking back some of the homework credit.
• ang_cire 1y ago
  > Student incentives come from faculty I'm pretty sure that student incentives come from having a degree that will instantly put you above 90% of non-degree-holder applicants after graduation, especially in this market. Faculty can't compete with this, no matter how much they want education to be the goal; it's not, for most grads, and teachers should blame companies for that rather than students. Plagiarism can be countered in comp sci settings by having in-person coding and bugfixing exams, which would also prepare students for real-world work much better than the 'turn in a big (music player app written in java) project at the end of the semester' model that programming classes in my comp sci program used.
• antithesizer 1y ago
  To the extent that the value of a university education is in the degree rather than the knowledge, cheating will remain rational. Since the business model of selling undergraduate programs depends on the value of most degrees as prerequisites to certain lucrative/prestigious careers, such programs are fundamentally broken. Don't try to save them by playing whack-a-mole with cheaters who understand the stakes of the game better than you do. That battle cannot be won.
  • ryandrake 1y ago
    If most companies collectively decided to stop using "university degree" to gatekeep access to their jobs, then so many university problems would disappear overnight. Cheating would plummet. Proportionally more people would be there to learn instead of just going through the motions in order to get the "permission to work" paper. Fewer people would go to university to overall. Fewer people going would mean fewer people starting out life crippled with student debt. Yes, there are probably some jobs where you really want to make sure the person you're hiring mastered some niche skill, like medicine and law. And these roles already have their own standardized testing and certification. We don't need to require a college degree for general office paper pushing jobs.
• YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
  I noticed this when I was TA'ing for a Prolog course at a London university. I was marking papers and it was obvious that a respectable chunk of the students on the course had simply copied from each other. I did not say anything to the course tutor, partly because I had no idea who was copying from whom, they all had the same code with the same mistakes and idiosyncracies in their papers. The year after that I TA'd again and I found the same code copied in the new year's students' papers. I looked online but I couldn't find the original source. This was before ChatGPT so an LLM wasn't the source. The worst thing about it was that I could tell which students were really trying to do the job on their own. Most of the time their code bore all the hallmarks of a novice Prolog programmer, i.e. it was a convoluted mess that betrayed complete confusion about the language. For Prolog, this is normal and it does not indicate a student who is lazy or sloppy, only the difficult of the language. My first efforts in Prolog weren't any better. But now, the students that obviously copied from each other had papers that looked like they deserved a better mark than the ones who had obviously done the right thing and tried. To be honest, I couldn't find it in me to give a bad mark to anyone (except for a couple of cases where the papers were basically blank where my hand was forced). I gave lots of feedback, trying to help anyone who wanted to learn, to learn, and gave them all a mark near the top 10-20%. I think the course was an elective anyway. My dad used to teach an elective course at a university and he was incredibly harsh about it, and I guess that left a sort of aversion.
• JohnMakin 1y ago
  I graduated in 2018 from a pretty competitive school and the way they dealt with this was that the lion's share of most course's grade was exam-based, in person, pencil and paper, proctored. Additionally, open notes were often allowed, and the tests were brutally difficult - I'm not sure anyone really could have cheated much in that setting. In project courses, I'm sure it happened a lot more, but I don't think many could have cheated in the program I was in, it was very difficult. They'd even have different versions of the test in the same classroom test, which I found a little annoying because sometimes version "A" would be easier than B/C. And then they'd never do those questions ever again. It was probably a lot of work for them but they took academic dishonesty very seriously and there was a zero tolerance policy. Everyone made very certain to cover their asses to prevent even the appearance of cheating.