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Comment by commanda | Hacker News Reader

I worked for 5 semesters as an undergrad teaching assistant in the CS department of my university. We had generally 1 to 2 cases of cheating per semester in classes of up to 150 students and ~10 assignments. We identified them using Moss[1] which we ran over all submitted assignments. This plagiarism rate now pales in comparison to the rate the OP has seen.

I wonder why there's such a huge gap between my experience and this professor's; undergrad vs. graduate school? CS vs. business school? Moss vs. Turnitin? Arizona vs. New York?

1. http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/

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My guess? CS vs business school. You can't bullshit a compiler.

An engineer pal of mine eventually went back for an MBA at a top-tier business school. He said that in 2 years, he learned exactly one thing that he wouldn't have figured out on his own with a little thought. (It was the law of comparative advantage, which blew my mind as well.) The rest was building a rolodex and gaining skill in presenting smoothly.

His experience made me pretty suspicious of the intellectual content business schools. Given that, cheating makes a twisted sort of sense. And of course, if one plans to go on to create mortgage-backed securities or asset-stripping leveraged buyouts, one probably has an ends-justify-the-means attitude by the time graduate school rolls around.

I'm one of those people who want to genuinely learn yet was obsessed with having a perfect GPA. Here's something I experienced ...

Many years ago, when I first started grad school in CS, I wanted to learn graphics programming and enrolled in a course cross-listed between undergrads and grad students. I got the first assignment and was shocked at the amount of code needed to be written (and I consider myself to be a strong hacker!). I only got 80% of the functions working and got a lame mark for the assignment. Then assignment 2 comes along - even more complex and code-heavy than the first! During this time, I happened to go to the undergrad lab for something. What do I see? Multiple groups of undergrads (fours and five students per computer) with what seemed to be like copies of the assignments from the previous year. I subsequently verified that the prof had been using the same assignments every year. It was also a reality check for the amount of plagarism that happens in CS labs (during my undergrad days, I thought it was extremely rare). I was pretty disgusted by the state of affairs and ended up dropping this particular course. My loss.

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