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Comment by sdiupIGPWEfh | Hacker News Reader

> strict cheating policies that essentially made any group work verboten

If I had to guess, some polytechnic school or another?

With some classes even forbidding discussing work with other students, where each assignment required a signed (digitally or otherwise) affidavit listing everyone you consulted, acknowledging that if you actually listed anyone, you were admitting to violating the academic honesty policies and if you didn't list anyone yet had spoken with others you were of course also violating the academic honesty policies.

Where only consulting the professors or TAs was allowed, the TAs were never around, and the professors refused to help because if they gave you any hints, it would apparently give away the answer, which would be unfair to the other students.

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I had students that copied one-another's work; in fact I had few students that didn't copy. It made it impossible to mark their projects correctly, so I asked my more-experienced colleagues.

The best advice I got was to explain the difference between collaboration (strongly encouraged) and plagiarism (re-take the course if you're lucky). Forbidding collaboration is a disastrous policy, so an instructor shouldn't have a problem with giving the same mark to each member of a group of collaborators. You just have to test that each individual can explain what they've submitted.

My school auto-graded everything (file drop your code to a server by midnight & get a score back). I don't recall a single instance of TA/professor written or verbal feedback on code.

Yuh. I guess that's "modern times". I taught in the late eighties, and auto-grading wasn't a thing.

FWIW, I was a "temporary visiting lecturer", i.e. contract fill-in help. I had to write the syllabus (literally), the course plan, and the hand-outs. I also had to write all the tests and the exams; and I had to mark the exams, and then sit on the exam board through the summer holidays. The pretty girls would flutter their eyelashes at me, and ask for leniency. I suspect they took their cue from my louche colleague, who was evidently happy to take sexual advantage of his students in exchange for better marks.

[Edit] I liked this colleague; but I would not have introduced him to my wife or my daughter.

Yikes.

Actually not so modern, my college was auto-grading 20 years ago.

This was in the 1980's. We're talking 5 1/4" floppies, no internet, 64MB RAM. I had to review my students' work as dead-tree submissions or completed circuits or whatever.

(I certainly wasn't going to take digital submissions from them; that would mean floppy disks, and I regarded any disk that had been touched by any student as if it were infected with plague, because it almost certainly was. All the school systems were always infected).

I think you intended to write 64KB?

I taught a course "in a previous life" and while I wasn't anything close to as strict as you say here, I can tell you the flip side: students would copy, modify superficially (some, less superficially) and then claim "it's my work, we just talked, that's why the similarities!" (with some even having the nerve to say, "it's not copied, look, plagiarism detection software says similarity is less than x%!) Perhaps I was wrong but I really wanted the students who took the course to put in the work themselves. Just choose a different course/course set, you _knew_ this one was going to be hard!

So yeah, the guideline was that we'll be eventual judges of what was "too similar" and if you're concerned, just don't discuss implementation details with anyone. I realize it prevents honest colaboration, and that's bad too... but sometimes it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of situation.

What we did when correcting the homework is compare the signature of the assembly output (not manually of course). You can move functions around, rename them, change the names of variables, .... but the signature of the instructions remains the same.

We caught 2 guys, of course we didn't know who copied from whom, but we quickly found out by challenging each of them with a fizz-buzz kind of question.

Sure, but given how we all work in the real world.. there should be courses that are explicitly "group project" based.

Also, for whatever my purely anecdotal experience is worth, I'd say the general quality of a professor's teaching was negatively correlated with how hard-ass they were about anti-collaboration policies. That also held true for a couple classes I'd dropped and retaken with a different prof.

One might think I'm just rating easier professors higher, but no, there were definitely enough sub-par teachers with lax policies and forgiving grading who failed to impart what their course was supposed to cover. There were also tough professors I learned a lot from. It's just that I can't recall a single decent instructor among those obsessed with anti-collaboration policies.

I've taken course work at 6+ different universities, and in my experience different groups of international students have very different perspectives on what is cheating vs. collaboration. I think it's likely attributed to the western ideal of the individual vs. the collective.

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