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Comment by apsurd | Hacker News Reader

>> For students, it is not clear that the code they generate is their property

Honest question, who's code would it be then?

A lot of university coding assignments are based on starter code provided by an instructor, often with step-by-step instructions for how to proceed. For example, the Pac-Man projects used in Berkeley's AI class (http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs188/pacman/pacman.html) consist of a lot of pre-written scaffolding to set up a GUI, handle user input, etc., and even the AI portions are broken down in a well-thought-out way into just a few well-specified methods that students have to implement. This is an extreme example but the general pattern is common; my undergrad classes in compilers, OS, architecture, and networks all had project specifications provided by the instructor, sometimes with significant starter code.

I don't know how this works legally -- whether the code written belongs to the student or is considered a derivative work of the course materials -- but if you're trying to evaluate someone's abilities to design and build interesting programs, code written in this fashion is certainly less valuable than a project done entirely independently.

Isn't the same true for using all frameworks then? Surely people don't think every Rails app was written from the ground up?

FWIW I am indeed all lovey dovey about Open Source. I think all code should be "Open and Free". Of course I know that Google's algorithms benefit from being guarded, but a professor's scaffolding? Call me idealistic but I thought education was about you know... education? The more the merrier?

Rails has an explicit, permissive license. Most of the sample/starter code for school projects does not.

Yes, but Rails is a known quantity; everyone is aware of what's provided for you in a Rails app and can judge accordingly. It's harder to judge someone's work when you know it was written as a school project but you don't know which parts were theirs or how much guidance they were given.

As far as the educational values involved, many profs distribute their handouts and assignments relatively freely, e.g. the Berkley Pac-Man projects I linked above, but are wary of having solutions floating around online since that enables cheating. Personally I think this is probably a lost cause, but you can at least understand why they might be resistant to the idea of having students' solutions posted on github (and it's not reasonable to say that teachers should re-develop new projects every year; coming up with good projects is a huge amount of work and it usually makes much more sense to have a single set of course materials that you continue optimizing/refining over time).

Of course none of this is meant to apply to open-ended, student-driven class projects, or to work that students do on their own time while being enrolled in a university. I think most people would agree that such work is unambiguously the property of the students that produced it.

the university's

EDIT: here's an example: http://legalblogwatch.typepad.com/legal_blog_watch/2011/01/w...

I'm not shooting the messenger, but if that is indeed the case, Universities are in quite a sad state =(

Not really. You write pacman as the lecturer tells you, the templates and direction (s)he gave you are not yours.

After two weeks sweat, take what you have learnt and write a game using pygame, or a browser based seduction game using anonymous twitter accounts and pinterest images. Anything really.

That's yours, the skills you have learnt are yours. Thank your lecturer publicly when you IPO

Why? Some prof worked hard to create the starter code for many assignments so the student could focus on a few key parts. After the student completes the few key parts of the assignment it is obvious it is a derivative work of the professor.

Also posting the solution online would obviously make it difficult to use for the next year and I don't think it is productive to make a professor remake an assignment every year when the could be focusing on refining lecture content.

At the risk of sounding difficult, all work is derivative and I think that's a beautiful thing, not a thing meant to be haggled over and fussed about.

But I do get the point of your second paragraph. Ideally students go to class for the sake of learning, so it doesn't make sense to blatantly cheat, but such is not often the case IRL.

It'd be great if the prof made the starter code available on github and the student's code was committed to a fork. It'd be quite easy to tell then who's work is whom's.

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