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The homework assignments are only rendered obsolete for cheaters... and hopefully the overwhelming majority of the students do their homework because they're tr

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!

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!