5 ms·

Good for him. It's perverse for the gatekeepers of an institution supposedly dedicated to increasing human knowledge to attempt to restrain its dissemination in

by ionfish 17y ago

Good for him. It's perverse for the gatekeepers of an institution supposedly dedicated to increasing human knowledge to attempt to restrain its dissemination in this fashion, and it's cheering to see the university backing the student here.

michael_dorfman 17y ago
I think the gatekeepers of the institution feel that human knowledge is not increased when homework answers are published on the web, rendering the assignments obsolete for future instances of the course.
- ckinnan 17y ago
  This seems like a reasonable concern. The situation is akin to publishing test questions and answers.
- mileszs 17y ago
  What is the chance they are doing anything new in a 100 level CS course? Interesting, perhaps, but new? Couldn't one find answers to most of the problems in 4+ languages with a single search? I understand the argument, to an extent, that the student is simply lowering the barrier to cheating, but isn't it he really just lowering it from just above the knee to just below the knee? It was easy to cheat 8 years ago (from what I remember), it's surely easier to cheat now, and it's certainly not because this one kid stood up for something in which he believes.
  - michael_dorfman 17y ago
    No, he's lowering it from just above the knee to the ankle. One link to his site, and you'd have all the answers to all the homework questions for the whole semester, presumably ready to print and hand in.
    - Jem 17y ago
      But the professors aren't stupid (one would assume). They're going to know about this guy, remember his site, and very easily compare the work? (Edit: I don't have all the answers, or an opinion on this piece, just playing devil's advocate)
      - michael_dorfman 17y ago
        Yeah, but why make it harder for the prof? What's the upside to allowing students to publish the answers?
        DougBTX 17y ago
        To encourage students to take pride in their work? Nowadays it is hardly any extra work for the prof either, any coursework of substance gets put through plagiarism detection anyway.
      - ori_b 17y ago
        This guy, yes. What if other people do the same without telling the profs? Although, honestly, people are going to hand down homework answers no matter what. Professors simply should assume that if the question isn't new, an answer has been made available to the students somewhere at some point.
    - pmorici 17y ago
      Anyone who thinks that has never heard of MOSS, http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/ http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/ in order to fool it you would have to know the material well enough that you would be able to complete the assignment w/o cheating anyways.
- dlnovell 17y ago
  The homework assignments are only rendered obsolete for cheaters... and hopefully the overwhelming majority of the students do their homework because they're trying to learn the material. Also, after "Intro to X Programming Language", there aren't going to be any trivial assignments and every (or nearly every) solution should be different. At NCSU they had software that would examine all code for assignments to detect people sharing code and trying to make trivial modifications such as changing variable and function names, and changing the order of code. I had quite a few friends get caught by it. The point of my rant is that some students are going to cheat no matter what. Having the solution posted online isn't going to really change how many people are cheating if it is made clear that the professor will be looking for cheaters.
  - Afton 17y ago
    I TA'd and taught an intro to unix course at UCSC a couple of times. We found that repeatedly pointing out the tools that we'd use to catch duplication (grep/sed/awk), and show how they worked was the only thing that reduced the cheating count (which sat at around 10%, but dropped drammatically with repetitions of how we'd find cheaters). tl;dr: "don't cheat, we'll find you" -> no effect on cheating. "These are the tools we'll use. Here's how they work" -> massive decrease in cheating.
    - protomyth 17y ago
      it could be your demo showed them how to cheat and avoid being flagged by the tools :)
      - Afton 17y ago
        Here's an example 1. write a sed script that strips out html-tags from arbitrary, well-formed HTML. It's pretty hard to fail to notice that 5 people used the one-liner from http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/unix/sed.html http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/unix/sed.html, but can't explain what the hold-space is. Also hard to hide the fact that you used the hold space!
- wallflower 17y ago
  In the past, having seen sizeable fraternity archives of Physics/Chemistry 101/201 tests, I can attest that professors reuse problems on tests all the time. Even if they change the initial parameters, its the same problem.
- lacker 17y ago
  Professors should already be using new problems in each instance of the class. In particular, frats and other student societies often pass things down, and you don't want to advantage them. Trying to stop people from posting knowledge on the web that is already public is ineffective and unfair.
  - grandalf 17y ago
    great point -- the prof is just being lazy. It would actually be a nice idea to build a website so that students could post old quizzes, homework assignments, etc., to help force profs to come up with something new each time.
    - michael_dorfman 17y ago
      Wow. what a colossal waste of professor's time! The prof isn't being lazy, he's being efficient-- he's carefully crafting a set of exercises that he hopes best serves the need of his students, and there shouldn't be any need to change them until the curriculum changes. Believe me, there are many better things he could be doing with his time than re-creating exercises....
      - grandalf 17y ago
        Well, as someone else pointed out, frats, etc., routinely create archives of past tests/quizzes, etc., for the benefit of their members. Some people are currently exploiting the "efficiency" you mention, which is in my opinion a bigger problem than the extra time needed to create fresh materials. What course could you imagine where it would take more than a few hours to create a fresh exam or batch of quizes? We're talking about undergraduate classes and any prof qualified to teach them could easily rattle off dozens of great (and unique) questions on a moment's notice. So not only do I not think it would be a waste of time, but it would result in fairer tests/quizes, less exploitation, and fresher and more topical material.
        jurjenh 17y ago
- scott_s 17y ago
  In every programming intensive course I took as an undergrad CS major, the programming projects were original. The themes are the same (the linked list project, the balanced binary tree project), but the professors came up with original project specs every time.
- jrockway 17y ago
  How does someone's solution to a problem make the problem obsolete? I have a friend who was an art student. Every major assignment was put into a public portfolio for future employers (etc.) to look at. This is considered standard for the field. It's also possible that someone else could look at her portfolio, copy her assignment, and turn it in as their own. Despite that, it's still her right to share her creative work with the world. As programming is just as creative as design, I don't see why programmers should be held to some other standard. We need jobs out of college too, and we are also proud of our work and want to show the world. If this makes the professor's life harder... well, that's so sad that I'm going to cry.
IsaacL 17y ago
Solutions to class assignments don't generally "increase human knowledge". The only people they will be useful to are students looking to cheat. A lot of people on BoingBoing were saying that the prof should generate a new assignment each time: that's really not realistic (pg mentioned this in on of his essays). I've just finished the first year of a CS degree, and I can see the advantage of having assignments that have been set for multiple years: they're more 'polished' IMO and better able to stretch actual CS skills and not just the production of boilerplate code.
- coolnewtoy 17y ago
  Actually, I really appreciate the assignments and solutions on the Stanford Engineering Everywhere courses. It's probably just as valuable as the lectures.

by ionfish 17y ago

michael_dorfman 17y ago

I think the gatekeepers of the institution feel that human knowledge is not increased when homework answers are published on the web, rendering the assignments obsolete for future instances of the course.

ckinnan 17y ago
This seems like a reasonable concern. The situation is akin to publishing test questions and answers.
mileszs 17y ago
What is the chance they are doing anything new in a 100 level CS course? Interesting, perhaps, but new? Couldn't one find answers to most of the problems in 4+ languages with a single search? I understand the argument, to an extent, that the student is simply lowering the barrier to cheating, but isn't it he really just lowering it from just above the knee to just below the knee? It was easy to cheat 8 years ago (from what I remember), it's surely easier to cheat now, and it's certainly not because this one kid stood up for something in which he believes.
- michael_dorfman 17y ago
  No, he's lowering it from just above the knee to the ankle. One link to his site, and you'd have all the answers to all the homework questions for the whole semester, presumably ready to print and hand in.
  - Jem 17y ago
    But the professors aren't stupid (one would assume). They're going to know about this guy, remember his site, and very easily compare the work? (Edit: I don't have all the answers, or an opinion on this piece, just playing devil's advocate)
    - michael_dorfman 17y ago
      Yeah, but why make it harder for the prof? What's the upside to allowing students to publish the answers?
      - DougBTX 17y ago
        To encourage students to take pride in their work? Nowadays it is hardly any extra work for the prof either, any coursework of substance gets put through plagiarism detection anyway.
    - ori_b 17y ago
      This guy, yes. What if other people do the same without telling the profs? Although, honestly, people are going to hand down homework answers no matter what. Professors simply should assume that if the question isn't new, an answer has been made available to the students somewhere at some point.
  - pmorici 17y ago
    Anyone who thinks that has never heard of MOSS, http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/ http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/ in order to fool it you would have to know the material well enough that you would be able to complete the assignment w/o cheating anyways.
dlnovell 17y ago
The homework assignments are only rendered obsolete for cheaters... and hopefully the overwhelming majority of the students do their homework because they're trying to learn the material. Also, after "Intro to X Programming Language", there aren't going to be any trivial assignments and every (or nearly every) solution should be different. At NCSU they had software that would examine all code for assignments to detect people sharing code and trying to make trivial modifications such as changing variable and function names, and changing the order of code. I had quite a few friends get caught by it. The point of my rant is that some students are going to cheat no matter what. Having the solution posted online isn't going to really change how many people are cheating if it is made clear that the professor will be looking for cheaters.
- Afton 17y ago
  I TA'd and taught an intro to unix course at UCSC a couple of times. We found that repeatedly pointing out the tools that we'd use to catch duplication (grep/sed/awk), and show how they worked was the only thing that reduced the cheating count (which sat at around 10%, but dropped drammatically with repetitions of how we'd find cheaters). tl;dr: "don't cheat, we'll find you" -> no effect on cheating. "These are the tools we'll use. Here's how they work" -> massive decrease in cheating.
  - protomyth 17y ago
    it could be your demo showed them how to cheat and avoid being flagged by the tools :)
    - Afton 17y ago
      Here's an example 1. write a sed script that strips out html-tags from arbitrary, well-formed HTML. It's pretty hard to fail to notice that 5 people used the one-liner from http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/unix/sed.html http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/unix/sed.html, but can't explain what the hold-space is. Also hard to hide the fact that you used the hold space!
wallflower 17y ago
In the past, having seen sizeable fraternity archives of Physics/Chemistry 101/201 tests, I can attest that professors reuse problems on tests all the time. Even if they change the initial parameters, its the same problem.
lacker 17y ago
Professors should already be using new problems in each instance of the class. In particular, frats and other student societies often pass things down, and you don't want to advantage them. Trying to stop people from posting knowledge on the web that is already public is ineffective and unfair.
- grandalf 17y ago
  great point -- the prof is just being lazy. It would actually be a nice idea to build a website so that students could post old quizzes, homework assignments, etc., to help force profs to come up with something new each time.
  - michael_dorfman 17y ago
    Wow. what a colossal waste of professor's time! The prof isn't being lazy, he's being efficient-- he's carefully crafting a set of exercises that he hopes best serves the need of his students, and there shouldn't be any need to change them until the curriculum changes. Believe me, there are many better things he could be doing with his time than re-creating exercises....
    - grandalf 17y ago
      Well, as someone else pointed out, frats, etc., routinely create archives of past tests/quizzes, etc., for the benefit of their members. Some people are currently exploiting the "efficiency" you mention, which is in my opinion a bigger problem than the extra time needed to create fresh materials. What course could you imagine where it would take more than a few hours to create a fresh exam or batch of quizes? We're talking about undergraduate classes and any prof qualified to teach them could easily rattle off dozens of great (and unique) questions on a moment's notice. So not only do I not think it would be a waste of time, but it would result in fairer tests/quizes, less exploitation, and fresher and more topical material.
      - jurjenh 17y ago
scott_s 17y ago
In every programming intensive course I took as an undergrad CS major, the programming projects were original. The themes are the same (the linked list project, the balanced binary tree project), but the professors came up with original project specs every time.
jrockway 17y ago
How does someone's solution to a problem make the problem obsolete? I have a friend who was an art student. Every major assignment was put into a public portfolio for future employers (etc.) to look at. This is considered standard for the field. It's also possible that someone else could look at her portfolio, copy her assignment, and turn it in as their own. Despite that, it's still her right to share her creative work with the world. As programming is just as creative as design, I don't see why programmers should be held to some other standard. We need jobs out of college too, and we are also proud of our work and want to show the world. If this makes the professor's life harder... well, that's so sad that I'm going to cry.

IsaacL 17y ago

Solutions to class assignments don't generally "increase human knowledge". The only people they will be useful to are students looking to cheat. A lot of people on BoingBoing were saying that the prof should generate a new assignment each time: that's really not realistic (pg mentioned this in on of his essays). I've just finished the first year of a CS degree, and I can see the advantage of having assignments that have been set for multiple years: they're more 'polished' IMO and better able to stretch actual CS skills and not just the production of boilerplate code.

coolnewtoy 17y ago
Actually, I really appreciate the assignments and solutions on the Stanford Engineering Everywhere courses. It's probably just as valuable as the lectures.