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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

How I dealt with student plagiarism:

    10% homework
    25% quizzes
    25% midterm
    40% final exam

On rare occasions, plagiarism might have helped a borderline student move from a C+ to a B-. But I suspect it hurt more students than it helps - the plagiarism bonus on homework is usually offset by the lack of practice penalty on exams.

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I dislike quizs and exams because I view them as memorisation tests. I do badly while those people who can memorise everything so well, don't understand what they're doing.

Do you allow books or computers? I'd think the internet would make it too easy as it'd allow people to communicate.

Some more pet peeves:

* Expected to write perfect code on paper despite students using the IDEs and documentation throughout coursework and tutorials. Professor's response "Practice writing on paper before exam/quiz"

* Timed exam/quizs and it's on paper. I write far more slowly on paper than computers. In fact, I can type for many hours but after one or two hours on paper, I'm exhausted. Professor's response "Too bad / Not enough computers for everyone"

I taught math, not CS, and my exams required very little memorization. An example:

http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/spring2009/midterm.pdf

The majority of the points are obtained via understanding.

As for your experience, one can certainly come up with bad tests. Also, tests aren't perfectly fair. But overall, I'd rather penalize people for being unable to work outside their comfort zone than penalize people for not cheating.

I agree that writing code on paper is annoying, but a few things that made it bearable for me were:

- At my school, exams that required writing code by hand were open book and open note (and occasionally even open-laptop with wifi off): no memorization necessary.

- A wide range of syntax errors were acceptable without any penalty to your grade. The questions were designed to test understanding of data structures, algorithms, and good program design, and that was what the grade was based on, not syntax.

- These code-by-hand exams were really good preparation for job interviews that require you to code by hand (or on a whiteboard, which to me is even scarier). I don't know why interviewers don't let you type your code in an IDE instead of writing on a whiteboard, but since they don't, it's nice to have some practice writing code by hand under pressure.

edit: confusing punctuation

This is how almost every CS and EE class was for me in college. Sure, I could have cheated on all the homework, but if I didn't understand the material, I was going to flunk the final exam. I think cheating is a bigger problem for classes with large assignments you work on outside of class and fewer exams.

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