At Stanford, computer science students are big cheaters
bayarea.blogs.nytimes.com
bayarea.blogs.nytimes.com
Please just copy the headline from the article next time.
Quoth the article: There is a higher incidence of cheating people that are not CS majors — the ones that are new to the field and potentially find themselves being in a situation where they can’t handle the assignment.
Cheating is now pretty much rampant at even the most prestigious colleges. The only way to not detect it is to turn an actively blind eye towards it
The ignorance I encounter among fellow CS people in this area never ceases to amaze. A strange phenomena in a group of otherwise intelligent individuals.
Trust me when I say that you can evaluate a paper the same way you evaluate a program. In a functional sense you (the writer) can definitively say whether a paper will work or not [1]. Most people who make statements like the one I've quoted simply never have been taught the appropriate skills.
[1] Creative writing is a different story.
Of course. This is the same as saying that a CS student can better understand the reasoning of a program than the reasoning of a human being. As a rule programs are, in general, more predictable.
I will disagree with the idea that it is impossible to achieve high accuracy in predicting grades on paper. It's anecdotal evidence only, but I've never been off by more than half a letter grade on any paper in the last three years of taking English classes (it's my minor). That's 6 classes with 5 different professors. So probably 20 to 30 papers? Usually I get the exact grade right.
Might I be too bold in suggesting that CS students prefer the determinism of a grading script because they are worried how their code will hold up in the real world? Given the quality of code most CS students produce, that's actually not that bold of an assumption. Seems to me that CS students that do not favor how grading is done in English have that opinion because they aren't used to thorough assessment in CS [1].
[1] The notable exception being theory classes. Go theory! But in those classes you've got a living, breathing grader as well. :-p
EDIT: I realize I didn't really address your point. Yes, that is a fair characterization of the quote in the Times. The problem lies in assuming the grading script is doing as good of a job as your English professor in determining correctness. I bet if you increased the accuracy of the grading method for programs you would sacrifice on precision and students wouldn't be as confident about their programs. If you graded on coding style and design decisions, for example. So yes, CS students can be more confident. But confident of what? The fact that your program conforms to a script? That's not the same as being confidant that your program actually works.
/happy he's got a degree in philosophy and didn't do CS at Stanford.
Another solution is to use an unfamiliar language, such as Scheme.
I didn't mean that using a library is bad— in fact, learning how to effectively combine and structure your code to work with preexisting libraries is a skill that should be enforced in every CS department.
To clarify, I was referring to finding an exact solution to the problem (SCRAM state machine for example) and just plugging it in as the solution.
After college, you are rewarded.
Perhaps there is a better way to teach than giving an entire class the exact same assignment. I wonder if you might find the same results in the basic math classes, where non-math majors just have to "tough it out". I would think it's harder to catch copying because the work can't be easily analyzed by a computer.
A CS course isn't even like the real world programming jobs.