Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

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Not sure whether this anecdote fits the thread well, but does address "don't copy and paste from a website to, well, anywhere without examining what you just pasted":

I was administering a final exam to a programming class. Exam was done on class computers, so with me in the front of the room most of the time I couldn't actually see what everyone was doing (and given the nature of the class, if you cheated it probably wouldn't really help you anyway).

Grading one student's submission, the wording of most of the "essay" questions seemed ... odd. Nothing objectively wrong, but everyone has their own writing style and his answers weren't, well, his. Scrolling thru one particular answer there were some blank lines after the answer ... and then a URL. The URL contained much of the test question. Checking the unfamiliar site, it was a paid technical-question-answering service, base price for answers $30 and rising depending on depth, quality & speed of answer. Copying-and-pasting the purchased answers added the source URL to the selected text, proving malicious plagiarism on the final exam. I figure he spent at least $300 to fail that exam and get one strike per the school's "three strikes and you're out" policy.

Does your school really have a "three strikes and you're out" policy for plagiarism? It seems like that would almost encourage cheating, up to the point where someone gets their second strike.

He failed the exam. I assume that "three strikes and you're out" means out of the school.

At the schools I went to, I don't think a single plagiarism incident would get a student kicked out. They would fail the assignment or the class.

At my school, it was made very explicit that you'd be immediately expelled for plagiarism (subject to appeal, IIRC, but yes: One strike.)

As it should be. The whole system is underpinned by the assumption that no one can cheat. Everyone knows tons of people cheat, but any university who has a "n-strike" policy for academic dishonesty (aka fraud), is purely in it for the money. To students who busted their asses to graduate legitimately, it's a hard slap in the face.

I think I know what you're saying. Still I wonder if perhaps the students that worked diligently and honestly gained more in the long run.

I was this kind of student, to the bemusement of people at my year. And I can say we like to tell ourselves that - that by honest learning we somehow gained more. But to be honest, what you do at work is so different than what you learn at university that in retrospect, you may just cheat your way through bullshit exams. If you're an autodidact, it could be even better for you, since you won't waste so much time learning nonsense to pass arbitrary performance bars.

I'm not encouraging cheating here. But I learned that sometimes you have to accept that you hold to some rules just because morality, and you don't need to invent practical reasons to justify it to yourself and others. Sometimes following the rules leaves you worse off, but the world where people follow those rules is better for everyone than the world where they don't, and I want to live in the former.

I feel much the same way. Especially centered around worthless electives classes when I was studying maths. If I was interested in "Movies & Music," I would be reading about it already, and it's completely unrelated to my subject matter.

That's way too hardline, surely some people are wrongly accused or some cases are borderline. This sort of "zero tolerance" nonsense always just ends up removing human judgement and common sense from the equation.

Also the idea that "the system is underpinned by the notion nobody can cheat" is absurd. Cheating is rampant! Even in the ivy leagues. Especially in the ivy leagues! But people still value college degrees.

Cheating is rampant, but that doesn't mean that we all as a society don't still ignore that fact! It's a beautiful display of cognitive dissonance. There's no way to know if someone truly achieved their degree, so you have to test them, which is one of the reasons the degree was valuable. You shouldn't have to test someone if they had certain credentials. They've passed their rigorous training program.

I'm not really a fan of no tolerance policies; I would rather the system be re-evaluated so that credentialing and training are the goals of the system, not pushing as many credit hours through the administration as possible. :)

A system where you fail the exam and three strikes and you're out != ignoring the problem.

I probably have super skewed view on the matter, but what is the point of expelling someone for cheating? Not everyone learns the same way and not everyone needs the same set of skills/knowledge. I feel like people put way too much value on a degree considering what real world is like.

So far in my short SW engineering career I haven't used a single thing I "learned" from my B.Sc degree, but what school did was to let me hang around with same minded people for few years which encouraged us to work on side projects together which taught us way more than any class.

That being said, I didn't cheat either, but I don't think cheating once is a good grounds for expelling someone.

> I probably have super skewed view on the matter, but what is the point of expelling someone for cheating?

Devaluing the degrees of everyone who didn't cheat, both economically and socially.

discourages other people?

As your instructor you are asking me to certify, on my professional reputation and honor, that you know the material and can be expected to perform to minimum standards. If you cheat, you are untrustworthy, disrespectful, incompetent, and willing to engage in behavior which can cost a company millions - or even get people killed. He11 yeah I'll want you expelled.

In a US university I have noticed that some international students (I was one too) took a very liberal attitude towards cheating, I won't name any specific countries (think East though) and noticed students from those countries played fast loose when it came to cheating. Maybe I am being prejudiced or that particular school had a knack for picking cheaters from some countries but not from others. Anyway just my observation.

I went to university both in Spain and Canada, and the approach to cheating is very different. In Spain cheating is pretty much acceptable as long as you don't get caught. And even if you do get caught, usually all that happens is that you fail the exam and you have the option to retake it a month later. I don't know about the rest of Europe.

My anecdata: I did some work at an Australian university engineering department and there was a cultural disconnect with some of the Chinese students; they did not understand that the university wanted them to figure out problems individually -- supposedly they would get together with the smartest students to figure out the answers, and then share them among themselves.

Usually these policies work where the first strike is a zero on the assignment, the second strike is a F in the class, and the third strike is getting expelled from the school.

"Three strikes" would be 3 major offenses like flagrant plagiarism/cheating. I was rather surprised buying answers to a final exam wasn't sufficient for expulsion. Didn't dig into the policy details further.

My school gives undergrads one warning before kicking you out for academic dishonesty. However, we've been repeatedly reminded that graduate students know better and we'll get kicked out for a first instance of plagarism

And I thought it was ridiculous when someone had cut and pasted a page from an Oracle manual in response to a set of pre-screening questions for a hiring round, headers included (for a generic SQL question we expected a one sentence answer to).

At least that guy didn't pay for it - to my knowledge at least (he did cut and paste most of his answers from various places, though, and got many of them wrong, including an word-for-word copy of an answer from a forum where the answer he had quoted was torn to pieces by other commenters right below).

Isn't the first place you would go to the Oracle manual? I use stack overflow all the time these days (documentation pages before that existed), not quite cutting and pasting but close enough.

> Isn't the first place you would go to the Oracle manual?

If I knew the answer, or had a decent notion of the answer? Hell no.

The thing is, if you came to me and said "I know everything in this book", I'd say "so let's save money and buy the book instead of hiring you."

Interview questions are an opportunity for you to show what you are worth. If you're worth less than a book, it's not a good sign.

The most important skill is to know how to look something up.

No one knows everything; or even a majority of things. How fast you can find an answer is what determines your productivity. Whether its via a book, a man page, google, stack overflow, or asking the right people doesn't matter.

Shouldn't interviewers be asking about things that wouldn't be answerable in a book?

Yeah, but most of those kinds of questions take a long time to answer.

They should be asking things that are relevant to the job.

See, now you just broke the entire recruitment process.

There's a difference. I interviewed one guy who when asked about what a product does, read the introduction to the manual.

For a basic SQL question? No. I'd never even seen an Oracle manual prior to that, and I haven't since.

If I needed specifics about Oracle, sure. I don't expect to ever need that.

But the more important aspect was that the full, complete answer to the question we raised took a single, short sentence. It was not clear from the page he had cut and pasted whether or not he even understood the question, so even if he hadn't copied it without telling us the source we'd not have considered it an acceptable answer.

Keep in mind that if the paste buffer includes a newline, everything preceding that newline will be executed. Pasting into an intermediate buffer, like a text editor, would be advisable.

Ouch. Double fail.

trust but verify ;-)

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