Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science (2018)

kevinchen.co

103 pointswonger_238 comments

We use honor pledges not to reduce cheating directly - but rather, to create incontrovertible evidence that the student was aware of the course policies. This supports those rare cases where a student chooses to fight a plagiarism case and claims ignorance of the policy, especially in cases where it may not be University-wide policy - e.g. a policy against AI usage. Students can argue they didn’t read the syllabus, missed the first day of class, etc. but have a harder time arguing they signed a pledge without reading it.

We regularly catch cheaters in our classes; I do so every term and report all the cases I see up to the dean. In my experience these have not resulted in catastrophic declines in teaching evaluations; the few unhappy with getting caught cheating are drowned out by the 80-90% who don’t cheat.

It is actually critically important that institutions take cheating seriously. Rampant, well-known cheating can tank the reputation of a program or institution, or at the very least serve to cheapen the value of the degree.

I think cheating is increasing over time. There are a number of reports about this I have read from individual universities. The problem is that if cheating becomes widespread enough, the schools don't have the power to do much about it when they rely on the tuition revenue. For example, this article https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/8/honor-council-w... makes the point that academic integrity violations are increasing while enforcement is decreasing. If you read the punishments given, they are basically along the lines of strongly worded letters.

A lot of the tier-3 schools are getting desperate due to declining enrollment. Demographic changes are killing them. Tolerating cheating might help them keep enrollment up for a few more years by attracting the laziest students but eventually this will wreck their reputation with employers and lead to a death spiral. If those schools want to survive then some will need to pivot to other business models, like become a trade school or corporate training center.

Interested, not skeptical: do you have sources or analysis you like which discuss the declining enrollment you mentioned?

You don't think prominent students from the ultra rich don't get kid gloves?

Trump went to Wharton.

United States culture celebrates and often elects grifters, whose core precept can be summarized as “either you’re running the con, or you’re the mark”. Cheating at academics is treated no differently, through a social lens, from attempting to scam a widow out of her insurance payout: simply attempting to run the con places you in a higher social caste than those marks who do not attempt any con, even if you fail. That the cheaters often get caught is much less relevant to them than the shame and shunning and demotion to the lesser caste that their peers would respond with if they did not try to grift their grades — even if they could graduate with a 4.3 without cheating at all! (I don’t personally subscribe to these beliefs, but it’s important to understand why ‘cheating is wrong’ is so contentious in U.S. culture, if only to be able to evaluate whether academic policies are designed effectively to decrease the rate of cheating per student capita.)

I don't think "cheating is wrong" is contentious in US culture. Why do you think this?

1) capitalism and the money is all you need has gradually worn down all other moral and ethical institutions over the decades. Without something like WWII to reset a popular ethos in a uniform manner, it's a gradual slide downward

2) maybe the universality of team sports in the United States, where again winning is all that matters and if you aren't bending the rules and burdening the referees, you aren't trying.

3) this all gets cranked up based on socioeconomic stress, which also is being steadily ratcheted up each decade.

I guess it depends on what you mean by contentious and by whom. The current US administration is a love letter to grifters, con artists, liars, and cheaters. And is staffed with many of the same kind of people.

It's a fairly long way from those people elected to the actions of individuals.

Given a few minutes of thought, it's not hard to imagine one side calling the other cheaters, while holding themselves to higher standards (even holding up those "others" as reasons why its important to be honest). That's just how politics seems to go.

I was thinking more of our cultural appreciation for con men, Robin Hood types, and so on. Many movies come to mind over the past several decades; Ocean’s Eleven, whatever that grass seed salesman movie was, etc. Also, I’d been considering the endless cheating in multiplayer games, whether video or IRL, for as long as humans have played games; and the tendency of United States drivers to cut in line in congested traffic, which is a less-considered form of cheating but still hits all the right points to count as such. Olympians and their endless doping scandals demonstrate that some authorities might think cheating is wrong, but athletes clearly aren’t so uniformly concerned about it. Still, you make a good point about politics demonstrating both the controversy and popularity with voters of cheating and grifting!

Those movies, stories, and games are popular _because_ we have an aversion to rule breaking, IMHO. The average person could never muster up the courage to steal a candy bar, let alone a treasure from a kingdom. It's a fun fantasy to live out precisely because we cannot bring ourselves to do it in the real world, and precisely because it wouldn't go well in the real world.

Being asocial myself, the aversion described comes across as an outcome of societal pressures, rather than any sort of innate characteristic. I still voluntarily adhere to the principles intended by it, but without ever feeling the aversion that typical vulnerability to social pressures confers. So, yes, I do agree that aversion holds true in some social environments — but not all. If one constructs a theoretical culture where lying to, conning, and stealing from outsiders is ethically neutral, then the opposite becomes true: courage is only required to steal a candy bar from an insider, else it’s ethically neutral and courage is not required. This isn’t a thought experiment; such cultures do exist within the United States and have numerous adherents both in U.S. politics and at home. One of the controversies around cheating on homework is whether it’s cheating or not; if a degree ultimately earned fraudulently is only used to exploit outsiders — e.g. including faceless corporate and government non-person entities — then it is not necessarily cheating under an “insiders-only” ethical framework at all. The threats of such frameworks are many and various, but right at the top of the list is “ethical concerns are only applicable to in-group members”, which neatly sidesteps the courage otherwise required to take advantage of a professor, college, etc. Thus the controversy: to say that “cheating is wrong” assumes not only that cheating is “wrong”, but that the ethical concerns implied by the label “cheating” are even applicable at all. Unfortunately, colleges tend not to engage at that level with students (other than those that self-select into philosophy!), and so punitive-only efforts are ineffective at shifting the underlying cultural issues.

It may be pre-conceptions, but after a while you know where to look. Its "imperial"-entitled cultures that produce the most hefty cheaters. "I belong to the cultural, god-chosen center of the universe therefore i excel" as an attitude.

And then there is face-culture, which assumes that everyone puts up a show anyway and the grades are created by a bribe competition of the families heads in some backroom.

There is a reason, why academia refuses to read a ton of papers from certain countries unless they get propelled by other trusted sources to the top of the heap. A mediocre, honest student is worth 20 fake doctors with accolades.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1296860.pdf

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10805-021-09391-8

US and California culture have lots of problems around arrogance and refusal to see or hear the rest of the world, but refusing to read research from American universities seems harsh. Because the most powerful state that has ever existed is the imperial, entitled culture you meant right?

Why are you projecting so hard? Afraid of something?

Instead of having a (useless in this context) knee-jerk reaction, you can read the links and find that the reported countries with the highest cheating in each link were France and UAE.

US and California are in the opposite side of that spectrum, with less cheating.

The actual Hacker News comment which I was responding to mentioned "imperial-entitled cultures ... the cultural, god-chosen center of the universe ... face culture" which sounds like he means China. The comment linked two papers, but not for specific facts, and they discuss five countries only one of which is a hotbed of fake research (the USA - psychology, enough said). There are only a million Bahrainis so I don't think anyone would need to have a policy of ignoring research by Bahrainis, but a lot of people talk smack about Indian and Chinese research.

As an undergrad student, I can tell you that cheating is rampant. It kind of sucks for those who don't and are genuinely curious because it's frustrating to see someone else easily passing with less effort spent.

What I think teachers could do is to come up with truly novel and strange assignments that require real curiosity and creativity (and some do, which is great). I can only assume this to get harder and harder with modern AI readily available to everyone but perhaps the key is to assign something that would take a long time even with these tools. It should be as hard as necessary which is only all the more fulfilling to a curious student.

I don’t know how this would work for CS, but in law school I had one professor that did final oral examinations as follows: there were about 15-20 cornerstone topics from the class that were possible exam questions and were announced a few weeks before finals. Then, during finals week(s), each student had a 30 minute block during which they would randomly select 3 of the 10 topics by pulling note cards and engaging in a conversation about the topic with the professor. If you knew the basics of the topic you were almost guaranteed a B or B+; if you demonstrated novel or expansive knowledge you got a higher grade… and you really had to not study to get a C+ or lower.

There are flaws in every method of measuring competency but I thought this was one of the better ones, and it is very difficult to cheat on. His exams were by far the least grumbled about and I don’t recall a single student that thought the method was unfair. And even though this required more upfront work from the professor he said it was ultimately less time consuming than grading written exams, and far more enjoyable.

I think the cost here is that conducting this examination for a small cohort of law students is much easier than a huge CS class. 300-person class sizes would mean you optimistically would spend 150 hours examining every student, notwithstanding scheduling conflicts.

I do like the idea, though. My parents from the former Soviet Union had oral examinations for their entire schooling.

Agree that time spent preventing cheating is preferable to time spent detecting or punishing cheating, and that all are terrible distractions from time spent actually teaching. In response to OP saying that honor pledges are unhelpful, GP only mentions that they can make the punishment part less painful and time-consuming, but I can personally confirm GP exhausts the prevention route (including putting out "novel and strange" assignments :) ) before trying to detect and punish cheating, at least in my experience.

I've heard many a story about professors treating it like a trap door, paying no attention to prevention and much more to detection/punishment to the point you'd think they're sadistic pleasure out of it. (I doubt they are, but you'd have to numb yourself to it in that position.) In certain ways, I guess this is better than pushing people through to the next class—giving them no option but to catch up quickly or cheat more—but it isn't great...

OP mostly talks about detection/punishment, but I think it's also the job of course staff to make cheating as impossible as possible before it happens. Engaging and novel assignments are great; putting more weight on exams is low-cost and acceptable.

There's this myth that cracking down on cheating tanks your ratings, but in reality, most students want a fair playing field and respect instructors who maintain standards

I read through the honor board reports at my law school once and they were disgusting. People blatantly cheated, then would make up some sort of excuse and the honor board would do nothing. The punishments for cheating should be certain and severe.

It’s not just about the reputation of the schools, it’s about society as a whole. A chronic problem in the third world is widespread cheating and low level corruption. The last straw that convinced my dad to leave our home country was a phone line installer asking for a bribe when he came to install a second line. If we don’t police our culture we will degenerate into that sort of behavior over time.

I don't condone cheating but it's a bit less of a concern in law school. Ultimately they still have to pass the bar exam. In the USA at least it's quite difficult to cheat on that, although I don't know whether the same applies in your home country.

It’s a much bigger concern in law school because the entire legal system is built on trust. (It’s a very specific, narrowly defined form of trust, but trust nonetheless.)

>Students can argue they didn’t read the syllabus, missed the first day of class, etc. but have a harder time arguing they signed a pledge without reading it.

I am confused as to why anyone would need to sign a pledge to provide proof that they are aware cheating is bad. If you don’t know that by the time you are in university, then tough luck. One would hope a defense of “I didn’t know cheating was frowned upon” would get you laughed out.

It is because many people hide behind "legal" when they want to dodge accusation of "unethical". And since the process of expulsion or other punishment is sort of legalistic, the institution needs legalistic defense.

Surely, cheating and fraud is already illegal? If you cheat on your taxes or cook the books or otherwise defraud others, the government doesn’t need a signed pledge to punish you.

Cheating in school generally wouldn't meet the definition of criminal fraud, depending on the facts of the particular case. Normally it's only an administrative issue.

Cheating on exam is fully legal. Likewise, cheating om your wife. Or, cheating in a card game.

As is expelling someone from a school (at least a college). It is not a legal right to be able to attend a school.

Also, cheating in a personal card game might not result in consequences, but in a casino it could result in prosecution:

https://www.8newsnow.com/investigators/group-accused-in-225k...

Same with cheating in a spouse, you won’t go to jail, but it will adversely affect you in divorce proceedings. Point being that society has some expectations of people knowing what the rules are without people signing a pledge.

I would refer back to my own "since the process of expulsion or other punishment is sort of legalistic, the institution needs legalistic defense". Universities do not allow their faculties and workers to expel students randomly and on whim. There is process about it, to prevent abuse of power.

Consent forms are normal in whole range of areas, because society does not expect people to know all the rules that exist.

The IRS wont accept your tax filings if they are not signed.

> but have a harder time arguing they signed a pledge without reading it.

This is easy to argue, people do it all the time (hello, TOS). So there is nothing incontrovertible about it.

It also contradicts the goal for pledges expressed by those setting this policy, they want to "strengthen the dedication to academic integrity" etc

If you’re arguing that then the answer is: too bad. These sorts of pledges are not 30 pages of legalese that you’re asked to agree to in the middle of a purchase. It’s usually a single page of plain language. If someone signs it without reading it they lose all rights to argue they weren’t aware. Choosing to remain unaware is not a defense.

Syllabus isn't legalese either, and not reading its first page that cheating is bad is exactly the same choice with the same "rights" attached. There is no magical difference here

You don’t countersign a syllabus.

Then add a signing requirement???

You are arguing for the sake of arguing.

Or you could just add it to the honor code, once, instead of multiple times each semester on what is typically a purely informational document.

Focus. The only goal here is creating a paper trail, and signing the honor code once does that and exactly that.

Sure, having a clear honor code is helpful. But individual instructors and courses have different policies on which tools are allowed and how students can collaborate.

If you sign something that says “I won’t do X”, and then you do X and argue you didn’t actually read what you signed, no one is going to take you seriously.

Two things can be true at once. You can take your pledge seriously, which is the happy path. And in the event that you choose the unhappy path, it can also be used as evidence that you understood the requirements. The overwhelming majority of my students choose the happy path.

Do you think that the pledge reduced the incidence of cheating, as students may have treated it as a warning that this class would enforce rules on cheating?

I took it seriously as a student. I remember during a no-book take home exam having forgotten some stupid little fact, and thinking “damn it would be such a little thing to look it up in the textbook” and feeling so much shame about even considering it, specifically because I had to handwrite an honor pledge on my work. (I didn’t cheat, by the way.)

That would be surprising to me. I wouldn't take seriously anything the university says, as opposed to does. Prospective cheaters probably take their cues about likely enforcement levels from fellow students who have seen [lack of] actual consequences.

How does it contradict, exactly?

To me it seems completely congruent with your quotation.

The institutions you refer to are rotten to the core obsessed with rankings, endowments, research funding, and keeping as many high paying students enrolled as possible.

What is the incentive to censure/eject a sucker, uh, student that is paying 50-100k per year for a social class badge?

These institutions are professional sports programs, have satellite universities in Saudi Arabian for oil money grift, use minimum wage labor for their putative core mission of education, have suspicious numbers of overseas and legacy but not legacy admissions.

Lost in the Harvard trump battle is the 50 billion endowment Harvard has, and how expensive it still is to go there, and how Harvard basically refuses to expand its enrollment.

I think this misses just one important nuance - cheating is often done out of desperation and it might bee important to try to understand that desperation before deciding on the degree of punishment. For instance, if the student is dealing with a recent diagnosis of e.g. depression or adhd. You really can't know the extent of anguish some might go through before deciding they "have to" cheat in order to hopefully have some semblance of normalcy in their future career.

Obviously cheating is unacceptable, but empathy can really help the student in this situation.

A person's true character comes out in hard times.

A disciplined character will handle hard times well. An undisciplined character will not.

Compassion exists, sure. But morality doesn't disappear just because something bad happens. Compassion should be sought after before resorting to cheating, not after.

A person's true character is not set in stone, nor can it be generally measured by a single incident.

It's very much like climate. And like climate, you can use it to certainly predict typical weather, such as a desert not gaining much rain.

If you are disciplined in morality and have a well-trained conscience, that will tend to follow you as long as you keep up the discpline.

Awful take.

Everyone is capable of murder in the right circumstances.

That doesn’t make everyone a murderer.

> Everyone is capable of murder in the right circumstances.

Citation needed. I don't think this is true, and if it was it wouldn't change anything. Notably, the individual level of circumstances required matters a lot, pragmatically even if you don't care in principle.

And there is some significant evidence that it is not true.

Think about training soldiers and the concept of “non-firers”. I’m not an expert on those things but the fact that training soldiers to kill is hard, and no one has a great solution even after a lot of effort, and passive combat personnel concepts even exist at all, I think gives evidence to the idea that not everyone can be a murderer, even under extreme circumstances.

“ Gen. S.L.A. Marshall once described war as “the business of killing”. And yet many war-fighters throughout history have gone out of their way to avoid it. Marshall himself estimated (though some say he exaggerated, or even fabricated) that only 15-25 per cent of infantry soldiers in the Second World War fired their weapons in any given battle. The rest were so-called “non-firers”; they had the opportunity to shoot at enemy soldiers but failed to do so. Marshall added that even those who did shoot often deliberately missed their target — they were so-called “mis-firers”. These “passive combat personnel”, as they are sometimes called, have long been a thorn in the side of military institutions. War is a “competition in death and destruction”, in the words of Henry Shue, and these individuals deliberately forego opportunities to score points for their own team.”

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/ned-dobos-military-training-...

To be fair, on the grand scale of possible circumstances that might drive someone to murder, being a soldier is relatively common but not that high. The more interesting cases involve intense personal hate, possibly for revenge for extreme injury, or reasons that blur the line with self-defense or defense of a loved one. But I think a lot of people would still require unfeasibly extreme circumstances, if they could do it at all.

Everyone is a monster, that is true. And I agree that anyone can _kill_ in the right circumstance (e.g. self defense, etc), but I strongly disagree that any disciplined moral character will easily become a murderer overnight.

However, the part you miss is the keyword discipline. To be discipline in morality means that you are aware you can be a monster and you actively choose not to be, even if it means what appears to be a negative outcome for you, relatively speaking.

Morality isn't free. It's not easy, and it requires diligent practice, aka it's a discipline.

By the time your in college, you should have enough discipline to not cheat. If you don't, you have a very untrained conscience.

So how would we expect the same student to handle a situation later in their academic career faced with the perceived choice between fudging a study or losing funding for their lab?

Properly aligned incentives need to be enforced from day 0.

Cheating is done by ppl who don't put in the effort and take the easy way out. Someone who is depressed wouldn't care enough to cheat. Too much empathy where it is not required has become the bane of society.

Well spoiler alert - I cheated in college! I have acute bipolar depression (undiagnosed back then) and fortunately my only punishment was to fail that class rather than expulsion. I'm now a successful software engineer with 12 years of career coding under my belt. I do good work and I don't cheat.

Sorry it wasn't harder to counter your response. I would really implore you to change your perspective and attitude. Other people generally aren't psychopaths trying to take shortcuts. they are as i said, often just very desperate.

I don't think anyone's advocating for death penalty for cheating.

I was referring to the whole "referral to the dean" thing which is again, totally fair in certain circumstances but also basically guaranteed to ruin that person's life.

I would argue that nothing is more destructive for academic and intellectual activities than what you propose.

It immediately replaces the ideal result, which is a true assessment, with a feelings-based assessment, and it undermines academic honesty for all students.

What must be done is to teach the students that failing an exam is OK, and help them recover the learning mindset. Evaluations are intended to measure the things learned and the things that need to improve. Evaluations are not a punishment.

No. The ones who make excuses instead of owning up to it should receive double the punishment.

Im fine with the other comments here but the insinuation that mental health issues and a desire to live a normal life are "making excuses" (as in making up excuses when the real cause is something like laziness) - well let me just say it's not a very polite way to approach the issue and would probably come across as gaslighting to anyone dealing with this.

Like i said, others have similar criticism to yours but don't include this dismissive bit.

Mental health issues aren’t an excuse to cheat. If you can’t do the work, tell the professor about your situation instead of breaking the rules. Everyone has shit to deal with—some single mom was up all night with the baby and still did her work on her own and followed the rules.

And that’s literally the reason to understand people and help them rather than punish. I hope you’ll never experience how shitty life circumstances can be, and how fragile your own mind can be.

What is the point of your last sentence? It reads like the Jehovah witnesses arguments.

You can understand people when they’re honest and ask for help up front, not when they make excuses after they get caught breaking the rules. The latter warrants only swift and sure punishment, to reinforce the social norms.

That's still an argument for being graceful with failures, not for excusing dishonesty. It's really, truly, not that complicated. Civilization cannot function properly when dishonesty is accepted. (ed: To be clear, this is not a hypothetical problem. We're already in trouble due to erosion of trust.)

Understanding dishonesty and forgiving in it in some cases is ok. Note it’s very different from the world where dishonesty is accepted. There are a lot of cases and a lot of circumstances, not all of them should be treated equally. Seeing it black and white especially in environment where, for example, the president do corruption all the time, only will increase sense of unjust, and dishonesty itself.

If the rules aren’t applied equally the similarly situated people, they will break down entirely. And pointing to supposed corruption elsewhere in society is how third worlders justify their own low level corruption in those countries.

> in some cases is ok. Note it’s very different from the world where dishonesty is accepted.

"In some cases", maybe. In a world where the majority of cases are effectively punished, we could start talking about that. Today, we live in the world where it's accepted, even when the offender is just an entitled college brat. We should change that.

Oh, and "but my boss/my friends/the president does it" remains exactly as valid excuse as it always has.

My school solved this quite well, I think. Homework wasn't graded. You were supposed to build a project or a series of projects. There was a practical exam at the end of the term where you were asked to make one big change to your homework project, and you were given 3 or 4 hours to do it in the computer room. It was really tough, and impossible to pass if you had not implemented everything yourself and knew things inside out.

This is a brilliant solution for a project-based course. It does take a decent amount of effort to go through each students project and give them an ask that you know isn’t ChatGPT-able.

Another great solution is to give an interview-like oral whiteboard interview for midterms/final. Quite time consuming (you can’t just assign the TA’s a grading prompt) but quite effective.

Brilliant solution. But how was the change that the student would be asked to implement evaluated for fairness?

The requested change was the same for everyone. They would have also run your project through a series of unit tests and would let you fix your code if they had encountered any bugs. Being able to implement the change was a necessary condition to prove you had authored the code and pass but, overall, the project would be graded based on architectural decisions, algorithms and data structures, coding style, etc. I guess this is not done at other schools because it's a hell lot of work for teachers and passing rates are low. It's quite brutal.

The passing rates at least seem solvable, by making the required changes a little easier. Is it not viable to do this with changes that are automatically testable, so it's not as hard on the teachers?

Or by grading on a curve, so that students who worked in good faith and seemed to know their code were given good grades, even if they did not 100% finish in the few hour timeframe.

I'm not a big fan of final exam/related serious pass/fail screens. Students have (probably) made a big investment in time and money and , absent pretty serious deficiencies, they should probably be able to eek out a gentleman's C.

It sounds to me like you're in favor of grading on effort.

I don't believe that investment made in time or money should factor in to assessing a student's mastery.

Grading on effort with a ceiling of a C is pretty different from grading on effort full stop.

Getting a 100% final grade doesn't indicate mastery.

Not really. But I'm generally not in favor of all or nothing end-of-term evaluations rather than mid-course correction feedback. And also not in favor of admitting students that will probably be out of their depth. As was the case with a course I TAd and did some tutoring for. (Not engineering.)

I don’t believe money should ever be a factor for students. In any way. Yet, when I was a student I was incredibly loud about “I am a paying customer of this institution and you’re gonna teach me. Late to class and not allowed in? Great, I paid for this class and I’ll take it up with whomever has the ability to reprimand you/fire you if you aren’t tenured/generally make your life hell.”

Money in education perverts everything. More generally money is the root of all evil, eh? But if you took my cash and I get nothing? Thats a very loud complaint and/or lawsuit.

On one theory of college, you get someone to hold you to certain standards (which many people have trouble holding themselves to) and then verify that you were held to those standards, providing a signal that you can meet high standards.

Somehow, I missed this theory and also just wanted to skip all my classes with no repercussions, but I wish it had been explained to me better.

Meanwhile I knew perfectly well that's the theory of a functioning academy and _still_ chose to skip class and get high/drunk with my friends.

Guess I'm a terrible person/s

Eh, you paid and agreed to terms and conditions.

> you took my cash and I get nothing?

If I book a hotel room then turn up a week later than my booking date trying to get a room I can expect to receive nothing.

Sure; but also the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I got my education and a couple of my professors got forced to be decent to their students. In my case it worked out. YMMV.

YMMV on the definition of “decent”. Arriving late to class is disruptive to all the other paying customers in the room so IMO it should be disincentivised. There are reasonable and unreasonable levels of disincentive, of course.

Agreed. I had a professor who’d whip whatever was on the desk at whomever was late. Some poor girl got hit with a stapler. So you know, that mileage is a highly variable thing!

That’s physical assault and i would report it to the police and then to the educational institution in that order. If the professor retaliates in any way i would further report that too.

> But if you took my cash and I get nothing? Thats a very loud complaint and/or lawsuit.

Maybe in america... but at the end of the day its not that hard to tell the customer to fuck off. The value proposition of a university is either the credential or self-improvement. Its not their customer service.

Having been the guy who got a couple of F's, and retook the exams in Sept and passed them to continue to my next years of studies and eventually my BSc I can say.. no! Do the work. Deserve the A/B/C. Get the A/B/C. I don't believe I'm the only one that suspects how the test will go, knows what the test result will be once I see the question, and know what I should have done to get that A/B/C mark.

I get it that shit happens in life (imagine someone having exams two days after they buried a father/mother/brother/sister), now THAT person, yeah, boost their results by 'one step' because if they got a 40% going through THAT, then they would have gotten 60% in a normal/BAU situation.

But don't hand out degrees to people who don't deserve them. It dilutes the degrees of those who do.

That's what incompletes are for. When life strikes - as it does - give the students a break and let them pick up where they left off with no penalty after the fan blades aren't covered in you know what any more.

(This is, at least, my policy. A grade reflects mastery and only mastery, but it's my job to help students get there and sometimes that means finding creative solutions.)

To be honest, I squeaked through undergrad in various ways. And my undergrad profs, etc. helped me with that. And things worked out and Alumni Affairs is probably happy with how things worked out. And I don't think the companies I've worked for have been that unhappy either.

Do the same in change for all?

E.g. implement a simple compiler for a C-ish language with only functions, if and while loops; as the big change, ask to add for loops.

I doubt the change was relevant. I would expect if they can reasonably make a change even if not totally ideal, the work as first submitted can be evaluated on it’s own as it is shown to be original work.

Changes were often designed to be impossible to perform if your architecture was not flexible, or to show your algorithms had poor time or space behavior. So, changes were designed both to test you were the author and to fail poorly designed projects.

I love this approach. It is both practical and constructive.

Do you have examples of projects used?

Nice. It required teachers that are good though. Maybe not anymore with AI

> It was really tough, and impossible to pass if you had not implemented everything yourself and knew things inside out.

... and required an awful lot of resources to grade, unsustainable for modern academia that has been perverted to be mostly a diploma mill.

No front but a "CS degree" is, for 99% of the people that have one, factually useless - people only do it because employers use it as a very efficient filter to weed out everyone who might have an issue with what big corporate demands - cogs in a wheel, not artisans with own opinions. The purpose of academia isn't science and advancing it anymore, it is raking in tuition money on one side and molding people to corporate drone conformity.

> No front but a "CS degree" is, for 99% of the people that have one, factually useless

I just don't understand how people can believe this. I learned most of my programming skills in college, and everyone I know did too. I could program before, but really poorly, because I didn't have fundamental computer science knowledge. Taking algorithms, theoretical comp sci, discrete structures - these transformed me from a code monkey to a real programmer.

>I learned most of my programming skills in college, and everyone I know did too. I could program before, but really poorly, because I didn't have fundamental computer science knowledge.

This, a lot of the self taught folks that sneer at degrees often struggle with things that were essentially solved by algorithms that are very familiar to people with an education.

> Taking algorithms, theoretical comp sci, discrete structures - these transformed me from a code monkey to a real programmer.

That's what I meant! Companies don't want "real programmers". They want cogs who mindlessly implement what some "architect" dreams up, no questions asked.

Land the architect role and you're set for life (or at least until AGI appears), but everything else is just destined to be either moved off to AI or be replaced by some sort of offshoring venture.

Being able to tell your architect that their design does not scale and provide evidence why is something companies do actually want.

…but does the hiring manager? They probably don’t want to deal with the political issues that arise from that situation. Besides, if someone has that capability, they’re looking for an architect position themselves.

I don't think you need to be an architect to do algorithmic complexity analysis.

> employers use it as a very efficient filter to weed out everyone who might have an issue with what big corporate demands - cogs in a wheel, not artisans with own opinions.

I think the simpler explanation is that the CS degree is supposed to be an independent verification that the student has learned and can employ fundamental aspects of CS.

I realize that verification can often be wrong (especially now with the ubiquity of LLMs), but I think the view that employers are simply looking for "cogs" and avoiding "artisans" is an arrogant and cynical take on what a degree is supposed to indicate.

> I think the simpler explanation is that the CS degree is supposed to be an independent verification that the student has learned and can employ fundamental aspects of CS.

When you have 5 positions open, and 100, 500, or even more people applying for that position, having a broad filter to help reduce the numbers it very useful. While that filter can be wrong, using it is likely to raise the average qualifications of the people in the pool, even if it does cut out some of the well qualified people.

I dropped out of school and made an artisan career for myself in engineering and loved it, it's who I am and can't pretend to be something different. But there is friction to navigate that way and not everyone will be able to make it work. Staying within the lines is the path of least resistance for most people.

Have you ever written about your story? I know I would be interested in reading it.

Okay, if you're interested:

- Mild autism, mild ADHD, undiagnosed until recently. Intersectionality leads to highly bespoke set of strengths, weaknesses, behaviors.

- Mensa-level IQ, smart enough and high enough performing to have done well despite friction (and no degree.)

- High need for autonomy in learning and work practices. Never consciously understood it until recently, but instinctively and awkwardly fought for it.

- Clash highly with scrum, agile, any high-process environment. Don't fit well in larger or more formal companies.

- High achieving, high output, quality output in good conditions, but low ambition for entrepreneurship, management, or advancing in an org's hierarchy.

- Earn trust early on at each company through high achievement but inevitable friction with management grows over time as I use the capital to secure high freedom, independence, optimal conditions for my own productivity and comfort.

- End up quitting jobs at the two year mark due to friction except for one where my accomplishments kept me around much longer.

- I interview well with people who just want to know someone is smart and gets it and is easy to get along with, interview poorly with people looking for a more specific and narrow profile.

- Good natured and likable, but don't form networking relationships. I like interacting with people and working alongside people, but need to be independent and do my work on my own. I'm not antisocial, but a lot of what teamwork and leadership and collaboration mean in engineering today are alien to me.

- Kind of selfish from a team point of view because I'm so individualistic and focused on my own work practice needs, but when I work with business or other end users I'm highly compassionate and driven to understand and solve their needs.

- It feels like I speak a different language as other smart people, other high performing engineers. I find things easy that others find hard, and vice versa. I feel pain points others don't, and vice versa. Ambitious and curious but not in a way that matches other high achievers. I solve problems others have struggled with, especially if they benefit from creative problem solving or a nonstandard solution. It's seen either a strength or a weakness depending on the situation and the people around me.

- My last job was the first one I've had that was defined more by the friction than the success but I still did good work and left on my own terms. It sucked, I haven't bothered with a job search since.

I don't think I want to work in engineering again. What it means to be a successful part of an engineering team has evolved too far away from my preferences and strengths and needs. I'm no longer interested in fighting it or faking it. I'd be happiest in whatever low profile job let me do my own thing. I don't mind dull business work or even rote work if I can do it or automate it my own way. Job descriptions are pretty homogenous and aren't written to expose what I'd really want or need in a job. I'm probably overqualified for the job that would fit me best for the rest of my career. But I have a lot of money saved and low living expenses and don't mind lower comp if it means having a job I'd like.

> End up quitting jobs at the two year mark due to friction

This resonates strongly with me.

I find past the two year mark at a company I wind up starting to burn out and causing friction with my management and teammates

Unfortunately I don't have the savings to retire or anything, and job hopping so frequently is a big challenge for me. I'd really like to find a way off of the treadmill and into less stressful day to day operating

It's cute that you think of Scrum as a "high-process environment". I assume you've never worked in a real high-process environment like avionics or medical devices. But that type of work isn't for everyone.

I worked in a startup where we spent in scrum meetings something like 40% of our time. And the software we wrote was a total disaster :D

The meetings were specifically for scrum/agile shit, so standups, planning, estimating, retrospective. I'm not including the meetings to design new features or so.

> I realize that verification can often be wrong (especially now with the ubiquity of LLMs), but I think the view that employers are simply looking for "cogs" and avoiding "artisans" is an arrogant and cynical take on what a degree is supposed to indicate.

Look at how many basic paper pusher bullshit jobs these days require some sort of academic degree (often enough, it's literally any academic degree). It's obvious that the true intention is to violate the ADA and other anti discrimination laws in spirit without violating it in a legal sense, because it's pretty obvious that minorities and those with any kind of disadvantages have markedly lower chances of acquiring an academic degree.

And even leaving that aside, "academic degree" is a good proxy for "doesn't use drugs to a degree he can't function, doesn't have too bad ADHD or other issues, is likely able to fulfill duties somewhat on time and has an attention span of larger than 30 seconds". This is stuff that companies had to risk hiring (and firing) on their own dime, so by requiring an academic degree they offload that cost onto the prospective employees.

It's impossible to know anyone's true intentions but the evidence indicates that most employers impose arbitrary college degree requirements mainly to cut down the number of applicants. This causes some false negative results but that's an acceptable cost. Many employers will drop the degree requirement when the labor market gets tight and they have trouble filling critical positions.

I took a similar exam where the grading was done by a TA trying a bunch of random test cases and recording how many passed. Hardly an awful lot of resources. For the purpose of stopping plagiarism, knowing that the solution was live-coded was enough.

My experience is exactly the opposite. I learned so much during my degree. I also did an MSc and PhD and I learned even more there. As to employers, most did not give two rotten figs abut my degrees. They cared about culture fit and a baseline of skill, and that's it. I think some employers and senior colleagues even looked down on me for having a CS degree.

That hasn't been my experience in my professional life at all. On the contrary people with no formal education are normally bad at their job, in my experience.

I'm a prof. The easy solution is to give very little weight to homework. The assignments should be designed to teach concepts. Concepts that are then tested in a controlled environment, where cheating is not possible.

Remove the incentive to cheat, and save yourself the time trying to catch it (and punish it, despite an uncooperative administration).

Problem is, homework is also what most closely matches real work. Tests are good for controlling the environment (we need them too!) but some students will just naturally be better at homework. Also, incentivizing students to put time and effort into the homework builds work ethic which will serve them well in the working world.

Personally, the best classes I had all had rigorous homework assignments. I would learn much more from them than studying for the tests. In fact, doing the homeworks would generally cover more than would be possible to test.

Plus I'm just glad to have built things like a DNS server, and inode filesysyem. Many small games and web servers. Database applications, shells, and compilers just to name a few. These are all things that give me confidence as a programmer.

Moreover, getting stuck in homework assignments and learning how to get unstuck is what, I think, propels you forward the most.

> Problem is, homework is also what most closely matches real work.

...I wonder if this is true. "Real work" sometimes requires you to perform in the moment. You can't always just pull an all-nighter to get it done if you're slow.

Also, the best way to do better on a test is to do homework to prepare for the test. And teachers can still assign homework to help students learn, they just can't necessarily use the results for assessment.

I guess tests are like being on call, supporting outages and the like, while homework more closely mirrors feature development. We also had a number of group assignments and labs which required on-demand work but were more project based than tests.

My main point is that while testing knowledge in small bits is useful for grading, it's less where I got value as a learner.

The biggest value I received in my undergraduate courses was from the classes where I built large projects. Building a compiler from scratch, piece by awful piece. Implementing a ray tracer, from splines to shaders. Even if I don't use compilers or graphics in my day-to-day work, it was my experience of building those larger-scale systems and working through the problems that benefited me.

As a teacher I just don't know how to replicate that experience in a world where half will skip the work, and all I'm able to do is a two-hour sanity check that they learned some concepts. How do I test for "the experience you developed spending four hours making that register allocator behave properly, to the point where you're intimately familiar with every failure mode"?

>How do I test for "the experience you developed spending four hours making that register allocator behave properly, to the point where you're intimately familiar with every failure mode"?

ask them to list and describe failure modes on your exam.

They’ll ask someone else to share a list. It won’t mean anything. To give an analogy: imagine we taught new drivers to drive from lectures and a written exam, without ever requiring them to log any hours in a car. It doesn’t work there, and it doesn’t work well anywhere else.

I really enjoyed how they did it in Tübingen, where I did my masters. You usually had to achieve a certain score on the homework (usually 50-75% of the overall points) in order to be qualified to take the exam. Additionally, if you did really well you got a few bonus points on the exam (something around 80/90%+). This incentivised you to take the homework seriously, especially if you want to get the bonus points. But you still have the written exam at the end as the "controlled environment" and something you have to prepare for, so you can not just listen to the slides once and then forget it after doing the single exercise

The grade system we implemented was a little program: you can pass the class if you get a passing grade on your HW and tests (weighted average); if you fail either HW or exams, you get the lower of the two.

This solution is heavily dependent on the material.

An intro to CS class where every answer is a few lines of pseudocode might be able to effectively teach the material by forcing everything on to the test.

A software engineering class that just test your knowledge of memorizing patterns and makes the project where you actually implement real software incorporating the patterns worth nothing would be useless to actually teaching students anything they can use after graduation.

Agreed. Generations of students had their degree classifications determined by a small number of final exams under exam conditions. Why did we move away from that, opening up all of these routes to score degree grading in non exam conditions?

Lectures were originally created as a way to share a single book. Since printing was expensive, a reader would stand at a lectern and read the material aloud. You might say "why don't we have all the students share a single book, that worked fine" but the truth is it was a crummy solution to a resource constraint problem.

Similarly, exam-only courses are an excellent way to teach huge numbers of students without the costly hassle of grading homework assignments. But that doesn't mean they're an optimal solution.

From my experience as a student and now a professor, nothing can possibly compare to the benefit you get from hands-on learning. You get so much more understanding from the 20 hours you spent making a complex system work, than you will ever get in three 3-6 hours of in-class instruction you'd get during the same timeframe. And I have no good idea how to test for all the skills you learn from "writing a tiny OS kernel from scratch in C" or "building a compiler" or "implementing a complicated cryptographic protocol and then realizing an attack on it." I do observe that my students who do the homework tend to do much better on the exams, but I'm concerned that the incentive to take shortcuts will be much too high if homework isn't required.

Just my personal theory, but maybe universities wanted to avoid being considered just pay-to-test institutions that couldn't justify their insane and continuously rising costs when the only thing that really mattered for a degree was passing an exam. Someone spending thousands of dollars just to skip every class but then show up and pass the exam test is not a good look for the university and could devalue the entire thing from the perspective of the public and potential future students. But if someone is required to go to every class nobody can easily claim the classes were pointless or bogus for passing exams and getting a degree because nobody can do that. Increases in overall schooling costs can also be explained away as more invested in classes whether it was true or not. And it makes people who were forced to attend classes whether they wanted to or needed to look disfavorably upon the potential for future students to be allowed to simply pass an exam by completely itself, in a sort of bucket of crabs situation where people think "I had to go through all this bogus stuff for my piece of paper, these younger kids should have to too!"

But I have zero qualifications for any of these opinions other than having been forced to attend a number of nearly worthless university classes that were pointless in the face of just reading the course book. Of course I also had some classes that were worth way more than just the book material, but probably half the classes I had to take I felt were dubiously useful to start with, not to mention the absolutely terrible actual class, and forcing people to attend to get a passing grade was just there to prevent 95% of the class being empty every week.

The easy bad solution: this also gives little incentive to do homework and thus actually learn, instead perpetuating the bad practice of cramming learning before one big "controlled environment" exam.

From my own university experience . . . admittedly, many years ago . . . for me, the assignments were a distraction from learning. Regardless, it's not the professor's job to force students to learn; it's the student's job to learn if they want to.

> for me, the assignments were a distraction from learning.

How? I can vaguely see it if the assignments were truly out of step with the material, but I cannot understand how relevant assignments are a distraction. In mathematics, and in all CS courses I have taught, assignments are at the core of what you are learning, and the best feedback (to yourself and your teacher) that you have a working knowledge of the material.

If I already understood the material, assignments became busywork that took time away from learning other things. I was not there for grades; I was there to learn. For this reason, I rarely did the assignments and I willingly took the hit to my grade. It is important to understand that not everybody learns in the same way. I have no problem with assignments as a method of learning. I have a problem with being "forced" to do them when I don't find them terribly helpful.

That's a separate issue, but then the solution is not to have assignments at all to avoid distraction, not have them without grading.

The other dichotomy is also strange, especially since the only person with an actual job is the professor - it is in fact his direct responsibility to structure the course, including incentives, to achieve the best learning.

The assignments just teach different things. Arguably the most important things, because they are what is most required to succeed at a job. The theory matters at work too, but actually writing code that works tends to be what matters most.

At the university level, should you really take students by the hand like that and trick them into learning? You have to learn to learn at some point.

How is your argument relevant to cheating? And why are the universities not at the university level since they mandate this practice?

You were saying that assignments are needed otherwise students won't do them and then fail the exam. That's what I was answering to. And it's relevant to cheating on assignments because the thread was about not grading assignments to avoid people cheating on assignments.

I don't understand your second question. Currently, university assignments are graded to hold students by the hand. I'm saying they shouldn't do that.

> And it's relevant to cheating on assignments because the thread was about

The thread was abou that, but your argument wasn't, it suggested an alternative reason for rejecting assignments, so would be true regardless of cheating, thus not related to this thread

It's related in the sense I think stopping cheating should take priority over taking students by the hand.

But I guess I let through that yes, I don't think we should take students by the hand at all and you're right that's a whole different debate.

No, that works well IME. If it's worth something towards the final grade, even 1%, most students will do it. It can be hard to persuade some of my students not to spend multiple hours attempting to get 0.1% more of the course grade by doing another quiz attempt when they've already achieved 90% - I think they're better off moving on to the next thing.

Make the homework compulsory but valid 0 points.

Then many will submit blank papers, or things so low effort that they're as good as good as.

Still needs to be passing...

The incentive to cheat is the money paid to participate in the undergraduate program plus the career expected to follow from it. Remove those and you will have no students. But what you describe wouldn't remove the incentive to cheat, just make cheating a different and presumably more difficult process. But as long as it's easier to cheat than not to cheat, rational students will continue to cheat.

That’s assuming the administration will allow you to administer the exams onsite which is increasingly not the case. Online students bring in more money.

I will weigh in on my wife's experiences, as she teaches computer engineering.

Plagiarism is now rampant - but for structural reasons. The university seemingly decided they want the money of foreign students, and started deciding that degrees from certain foreign universities counted as prerequisites for CS Masters programs.

A lot of these foreign students somehow have little programming skill despite undergraduate degrees in CS.

The cheating is obvious. She gives students 0's with no push back from administration if she thinks they are cheating. Some amazing stories:

- Students who turn in assignments with someone else's name of them

- Students who admit to cheating and do it again and again, never becoming more sophisticated at it.

- Students who get caught cheating 5 times and ask if there is any way they can pass the course.

- Students who despite being told there is no way to pass the course, request a call or in person meeting to discuss how they might be able to pass the course (she has never taken them up on this - one wonders what their pitch would be)

Cheaters who put a little effort in are undetectable. Or at least she suspects, but can prove nothing and grades the (not obviously plagiarized) code on its own merits. The general feeling is that barring these foreign students, cheating is there but not too widespread.

She does, indeed, have a bad rating on RateMyProfessor and does not care. Her administration still thinks highly of her because of her other work (such as running accreditation programs).

If you are a professor YMMV. This is how it is for my wife.

I get that it's easy to cheat on homework, but tests can be more locked-down. Is it possible to retroactively ding a homework grade if subsequent testing shows that the student truly does not know how to do the concept from the homework?

Obviously we all forget things over time, but if the homework was suspect from the beginning, and when the student is tested he has just no idea whatsoever, that could be grounds for taking back some of the homework credit.

The underlying problem is not plagiarism, but the fact that many problems are essentially solved and known solutions everywhere, and tying one's grades to how well one can regurgigate the solution or look it up online, instead of a reflection of one's mental skill and knowledge.

Some of them simply don’t generalize, like creating new homework assignments from scratch each semester.

As much as I'm loathe to suggest using AI in CS, that's actually something an LLM might be able to help with --- generating tons of pseudorandom variations on a theme.

I think making assignments completely for practice, and having 100% of the grade be the final exam, where there is zero computer use and pure brain use, outputting on pen-and-paper, will work. Anyone who tries to cheat will only cheat themselves and have the results of that exam reflect their actual understanding.

If you really want to dig into it, the problem is that there are a huge number of students who don't know anything at all about how or why to learn. If they actually wanted to learn and understood how exercises help them, the fact that they're all well-known problems really wouldn't be a big deal.

But universities are businesses now. They produce diplomas in exchange for money, and interrupting that with details like "this student shouldn't be here" costs them money they can't afford to lose.

> the problem is that there are a huge number of students who don't know anything at all about how or why to learn.

How much of this has to do with the students being generally still immature. Had I gone to school at this time, I almost certainly would have felt this way, or some compatible way that diminished my effort.

> and tying one's grades to how well one can regurgigate the solution or look it up online, instead of a reflection of one's mental skill and knowledge.

The homework is supposed to be for practice.

I’ve heard multiple stories of professors for undergrads who tried making homework optional, but the number of students failing exams increased dramatically because fewer people did the homework.

LLMs have short circuited a lot of student’s thought process and even sense of morals. A lot of students who wouldn’t copy a friend’s homework or even copy and paste from GitHub have started using LLMs to do their homework. I don’t really know what it is. Maybe a sense that because they’re using a tool that it’s not cheating? Thinking they’re less likely to get caught because it’s not identical to existing work?

I agree that weighting the exams most heavily is the only way out, but I’m sure we’re in for a struggle as universities see the shocking grade drops that come with that practice.

but the number of students failing exams increased dramatically because fewer people did the homework.

In a sane world that would be a "not our problem", as the horses have been brought to water and they just won't drink, but unfortunately institutions chasing pass rates metrics as a pure indicator of instructor skills pushes towards increased leniency in grading and that's another can of worms which I won't open here.

> I don’t really know what it is. Maybe a sense that because they’re using a tool that it’s not cheating? Thinking they’re less likely to get caught because it’s not identical to existing work?

That would make sense. The logic that they are not copying work from another student or copying someone else’s “efforts” so to speak.

Another aspect is how easy it is. It’s not having to find someone to copy it from, or search online and so on. It’s “just open an llm chat window and ask”.

The worst part is those that don’t cheat will hear how so and so uses llms to do homework and nails all the answers unpunished while they are barely managing, trying to do honest work. That stuff is soul killing.

> I’ve heard multiple stories of professors for undergrads who tried making homework optional, but the number of students failing exams increased dramatically because fewer people did the homework.

Just let them fail.

>but the number of students failing exams increased dramatically

It's their problem.

And possibly because they told developers use AI on the job.

I'm seeing in work that developers are producing code they don't understand. I think overall AI is making it harder for them to learn because the temptation is to just use what ever it produces. Especially when this is combined with measuring productivity on tickets closed.

> having 100% of the grade be the final exam, where there is zero computer use and pure brain use, outputting on pen-and-paper

This is very common in British universities

Same thing for the Brazilian university I went to. Homework was optional, and there were "filter" classes like Calculus at the start of all STEM subjects where if you are not taking it seriously you are going to fail. Not a single final exam, I think we had 3 exams during the semester. Which was good so that the first exam was able to scare people straight.

And an university is not a school. Nobody should be forced to take it, if you are not interested in learning just go home. But at the same time, a quality university should have a high barrier so that only people that actually learned and have demonstrated to have learned the required subjects, in a setting where cheating is almost impossible, should be able to get a diploma.

In my german university, it was the same, pen and paper. The math prof had us do a small pre exam halfway in the semester, to be allowed to do the real exam at all.

Those who didn't took it serious, learned early that they won't get far.

In many areas of computing, I hate setting pen and paper exams.

Asking people to write Java (or whatever) on paper is crazy, it doesn't really line up with anything you would ever do in the real world, and expecting people to memorize the signatures of functions feels like a total waste of time.

On the other hand, we have to accept that LLMs are I think, at this point, better than over half of all 1st year University students, so we can't let students use LLMs, without either letting half of students pass with no effort, or making tests harder and failing half of students -- and that isn't a long term solution, as I imagine LLMs are just going to keep getting better.

Couldn't you have an exam room with raspberry pi's flashed with a fresh install of debian (or whatever) and no internet and just say you are allowed to lookup anything that's preinstalled on the system plus a PDF of the go to reference for whatever language you are asking them to program in.

This is an absurd argument. You could make the exact same argument about addition (5+9 is definitely 'solved') and yet we still make children practice, practice, practice this stuff.

I took computer science for a year before flunking out. My parents pushed me into college. My father didn't want me to join the Navy like he had done, when he was a young man. A lot of conversations about my future earning potential with an undergraduate degree took place in the lobbies of payday loan joints.

I plagiarized quite a bit in school. I'm not proud of it. Desperation and poor role models can create all sorts of negative outcomes, though. I was taught how to survive, not how to live ethically.

You can try to filter the plagiarists, sure. But uh, I'm not sure if it will work. The plagiarists are in league with each other.

I don't like cheating, but honestly I find your behavior hard to judge.

The reality, to me, seems to be that universities sell credentials with learning as a sort of sideshow or window dressing.

I've met a lot of excellent engineers who didn't have degrees. I have met a lot of terrible ones who did. I can tell you which group has an easier time getting hired... and I don't think I am focusing on edge cases. The system is broken.

So do whatever you have to to get that permission slip to work from the education-industrial complex. By all means, please learn your trade as well, but let's not pretend like "knowledge" is what you are paying six figures for at a university. Knowledge is available for free. It's certification that costs as much as a house.

Yours is probably the most important comment. It's always important to understand why the person is doing the wrong thing. It's a serious lack of integrity to cheat, and what child is born dishonest? Something pushed these young people to these levels and that's the real thing that, no pun intended, needs examination.

The solution to plagiarism is the same for all subjects: abandon continuous assessment and have viva voce as a significant part of the final.

When I studied applied physics eons ago we had tutorials in term time and a substantial essay to complete in the long vacation but these were between the student and the tutor and had no effect on the final class of degree; that was determined by a series of final exams (open note), the report of the final year laboratory project and its oral defence. My project report was more than a hundred typewritten pages with numerous diagrams and I had to defend it to my project supervisor and the head of department. I don't think a plagiarist could have done it.

Of course this is expensive, all the academics involved were permanent employees of the university, there were no graduate students doing slave labour tutoring.

In my opinion the plague of plagiarism is a direct consequence of attempts to get education on the cheap and of valuing the diploma more than the education itself.

> Then, we apply another filter, keeping only the cases that contain indisputable evidence — for example, hundreds of lines copied right down to the last whitespace error. We have virtually eliminated false positives at this point.

My friends who teach used the same level of filtering in the past: They suspected a lot of students from copying from each other, but they only took action on the cases where it was so undeniably obvious that it would be an open and shut case.

In the era of LLMs, that degree of precision is completely gone. However, the other signal is amplified: They have more students than ever getting 100s on homework and completely failing any exams. In the past it seems that many of the plagiarizers at least learned something, however minimal, in the process of copying homework and then trying to turn it into something that looked less suspicious. The LLM users are so brazen that they just submit the prompt, copy the output, and call it a day.

> The LLM users are so brazen that they just submit the prompt, copy the output, and call it a day. Is this not what all the potential employers claim to want anyway? I sometimes wonder how many of us are employed to actually make things, and how many of us serve as ways to convince investors that the AI money bonfire was not a bonfire.

I noticed this when I was TA'ing for a Prolog course at a London university. I was marking papers and it was obvious that a respectable chunk of the students on the course had simply copied from each other. I did not say anything to the course tutor, partly because I had no idea who was copying from whom, they all had the same code with the same mistakes and idiosyncracies in their papers. The year after that I TA'd again and I found the same code copied in the new year's students' papers. I looked online but I couldn't find the original source. This was before ChatGPT so an LLM wasn't the source.

The worst thing about it was that I could tell which students were really trying to do the job on their own. Most of the time their code bore all the hallmarks of a novice Prolog programmer, i.e. it was a convoluted mess that betrayed complete confusion about the language. For Prolog, this is normal and it does not indicate a student who is lazy or sloppy, only the difficult of the language. My first efforts in Prolog weren't any better. But now, the students that obviously copied from each other had papers that looked like they deserved a better mark than the ones who had obviously done the right thing and tried.

To be honest, I couldn't find it in me to give a bad mark to anyone (except for a couple of cases where the papers were basically blank where my hand was forced). I gave lots of feedback, trying to help anyone who wanted to learn, to learn, and gave them all a mark near the top 10-20%. I think the course was an elective anyway. My dad used to teach an elective course at a university and he was incredibly harsh about it, and I guess that left a sort of aversion.

I backspaced the comment I started typing, which was suggestions that required universities to rediscover ideals and backbone, and would like to instead ask a question...

For those who went to schools with strong honor codes, would you advocate that to others?

For example, did you find an environment of trust and respect, like you've not seen elsewhere?

For another example, do you have strong post-graduation alumni network, where someone in the alumni directory isn't just a possible foot in the door for sales ("hey, we went to the same school, can you grant me the courtesy of a call"), but that you can assume they are likely honest and have integrity?

Did it improve the quality of your education?

Were there downsides?

My school recently had to change the honor code because there was so much cheating but the administration and student senate don't like bringing that up. The honor code for 100 years previously had been weaker, to the point of not having proctors for exams. The student senate opposed changes to the honor code. There's been an exponential increase in honor code violations and yet less enforcement because, imo, the school can't afford to suspend so many people.

I think what's happening is kind of dark. Universities might be slowly returning to what they were a long time ago which is a place of learning. In recent times they have been selling prestige to credentialists. It turns out that those people don't really need to take the classes especially with the internet and AI now being resources. So the universities are stuck between earning more revenue yet having decreasing academic integrity versus having lower revenue and catering to a smaller group of people.

The honor code itself doesn't really seem to change how people behave. Anecdotally, I hear that cheating increases every year from whispers of CS profs and TAs. I feel like if you are going to use AI to cheat, as one example, why not skip the university altogether? I think the lack of academic integrity will lead to that in some form or another.

Sorry to hear about the cheating.

Do you know, as cheating increased, was there peer pushback against the cheaters, such as overt disapproval that lowers the cheater's social status?

Or, were cheaters secretive from fellow students, so mostly only profs and TAs could tell?

If cheaters were secretive from fellow students, was it out of fear of hurting their peer social status, or fear of being ratted out and facing school disciplinary action?

I don't know anyone caught personally but profs would make announcements about how they found a lot of GPT answers or plagiarism. I've heard profs say they find a lot of cheating but also students are given so many warnings and opportunities to fix it. You can choose to take a 0 on an assignment if you report yourself by the end of the quarter which probably masks it. Usually that doesn't even hurt your grade when 75% is exams. I don't know if it's true but the school bought software (unless that was a made up threat) to find plagiarism that includes sources like code from stackoverflow.

The school seems to keep it private who is caught but I also don't think anyone is punished harshly. Despite all of this I am not aware of anyone being suspended or expelled. I assume there were people who would cheat on actual exams so exams now have proctors and there are assigned seats. The school wouldn't have insisted on proctors being in the honor code without a reason.

I think the fear of getting caught/ratted out is more salient. Use of GPT is so pervasive, just in general, that there's probably more cheating than there is not. Imagine people who rely on GPT for tasks like what they should eat suddenly not using it for hw. I think most just want their A- and their degree and to move on.

>I feel like if you are going to use AI to cheat, as one example, why not skip the university altogether?

That same reason people used other methods to cheat in the past, a degree is valuable to have in the job market. I honestly doubt cheating is even increasing, they are just lazier about it now.

I think the part about the job market is what's interesting. If employers know most of the grads with degrees just use AI at their university, they might not value the degree as much (maybe). If the employer wanted the degree, that might mean anyone who can use AI can do the job and that might lower barriers to entry. Also, some people might just try to bypass needing the degree altogether because of the cost so universities might have to lower tuition to continue to bring students in. The AI makes it more clear the university is just offering a piece of paper. But like I was saying if you actually enjoyed the subject and wanted to learn that would be a different group of people from the ones who just want a degree and rectifying those two groups at the same place would be hard.

>But like I was saying if you actually enjoyed the subject and wanted to learn that would be a different group of people from the ones who just want a degree and rectifying those two groups at the same place would be hard.

Agreed, but mostly people that just want to learn already aren't going to college for that.

Honor only works if individual participants hold themselves to a higher standard. Once you have a couple of folks who are in it to maximize their return, FOMO guarantees that it quickly becomes an arms race.

I saw a lot of cheating, but at the same time everyone I became friends with and still keep in my network was super trustworthy.

Some people will cheat. Honor code or not. But, especially if you go to a very good school, the people who don't need to cheat or don't want to, will always be worth knowing.

I'm confused about why formal honor codes are in this conversation. If they had any significant effect on plagiarism, we wouldn't be having this conversation. I don't know if my university had a strong honor code because it never once came up in conversation.

Strong (not formal) honor codes are in the conversation because my intended arguments for solutions to the plagiarism problems are predicated on there being value to a culture of honorable conduct in a university. So I was looking for real world examples.

Strong honor codes aren't the norm, so I don't think you could say we wouldn't be having this conversation if they had any significant effect on plagiarism.

In my recent class many people were using AI and I know people don’t think this way, but just totally defeats the purpose of taking the class.

Discussed at the time:

Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16651099 - March 2018 (118 comments)

Programming done in closed network lab.

This is why homework are NOW being done in-class: no takehomes.

In short, weekly exams, on-paper, in-person, in-class, on teacher's test form paper.

No phone. Calculator permitted. Some allow open-book.

I too welcome back the 1980s.

Mimograph, anyone? * sniff * sniff *

I explicitly allow plagiarism and LLMs, but even give them reference solutions if they get stuck. Everything else seems either too much work or ineffective to find plagiarism. However, I do a short oral exam where I 'audit' the solution by picking out single lines and asking them to explain it in detail.

> I do a short oral exam

I tried that, but some students who had cheated became really aggressive when it turned out they did not have a single clue how their AI-generated solutions worked and still demanded a pass. We now do more written exams where we have some distance.

I think written examinations are the only solution, and "distance" is the right word.

Also, oral examinations are costly to administer. This work needs to be done with a panel, to avoid complaints. And the panel members cannot include TAs, who are after all just students themselves. A 10-minute examination can have start-up problems, and doesn't allow for in-depth followup questions.

With a panel of say 3 professors replacing 1 professor, and interviews of say 1 hour replacing what might be 20 minutes of grading, we are talking about quite a lot of increased workload.

I guess I’m missing something. Isn’t it a direct “failed” if they become aggressive towards the professors?

Those students had already failed before that, but you still have to get them out of your office somehow.

Perhaps oral exams leave too much room for ambiguity

I can understand where you are coming from, but in the cases we had to deal with, there was absolutely no room for ambiguity. To put things into perspective, those were students who did not know what a HashMap is or could not derive the algorithmic complexity of two nested for-loops, yet somehow cheated their way into a master's level course. With the current level of oversight, degrees obtained after 2022 are basically worthless.

Wow. Why not have written exams?

But to be fair, there is no ambiguity in this extreme example but ambiguity can be misused by either party in other cases where it is not so cut and clear.

> Why not have written exams?

That is what we do now. Some reasons why we preferred oral exams before:

1. In order to write a written exam, you have to create a written exam.

2. Scheduling is more difficult. You have to reserve a room for the exam, ensure that the date does not collide with other exams, and students have to plan their vacations around it. For oral exams, you only have to schedule two people, which allows for much greater flexibility.

3. During oral exams, you can probe a bit deeper if you notice that a student did not understand the question correctly, but still knows the solution. In contrast, in a written exam, there is no way for the student to recover from an initially incorrect understanding.

4. It is much easier to cheat on a written exam, especially since there have been all kinds of technological improvements, like ear canal earphones, tiny cameras, glasses with integrated AI assistants, polarized smart watches and who knows what else.

Oral exams are the best way to exam because they allow for ambiguity and are very very hard to fake.

At universities with a large international student population, oral exams can be difficult for those students who don’t speak English well or speak with a very heavy accent. If it’s a more theoretical course, you can probably give a whiteboard exam where they can work out a proof in front of you.

Maybe language translation is a case where an AI should be allowed during exams.

I'm sure there were (pre-LLM, non-plagiarized) assignments I turned in at college where I would fail this.

"Umm... this is how I've always done it" / "I copied it from my solution for assignment 1 and I no longer remember why I did it that way" / "there was an error and somebody suggested this as a workaround in the Github issue" are all perfectly valid answers in my opinion.

Maybe all homework could come in two parts with a 70/30 split in the grade. Everyone gets assigned the first 70%, if their solution trips a plagiarism detector then they are automatically assigned the second 30% of the work. Better yet, it's communicated that it intentionally randomly selects some people for the second part of the work, even if they didn't plagiarize. Like random airport screening.

As long as it's clearly communicated in the syllabus, should be fine. If identical code submissions are so common then everyone should be doing the same quantity of work on average and it shouldn't be an issue if you automatically get assigned bonus problems.

The real question is what is the point of education and what is the point of teaching those who do not want to learn?

Is the point of the homework to have students just do some work or is it a tool to encourage them to more deeply engage with the material? If it is the former, then what is wrong with using LLMs? If it is the latter, then students should be judged based on their understanding, which they have to demonstrate in a scenario where deception is very hard or near impossible.

The real problem is students not wanting to learn. And what is the point of educating people who do not want to learn?

This much be so much worse since LLMs.

The answer here is surely a monitored environment. An online editor/tester/compiler that logs not only the resulting code, but the way they got there. Anyone who pastes in 99% and just renamed the variables is trivially discovered. This probably works for far more than computer science.

It's not just a stick to beat kids with. You can work back to actually see where they're falling down, do seminars where you can open your environment to allow TAs and others to work on a single codebase collaboratively. This must exist already, no?

Basically all the coding interview sites are exactly this: editor, compiler, tester, record and replay every keystroke.

Why hasn’t anyone used them for a CS class? No idea, maybe cost?

And I can’t help but think if they did people would find a way to make the cut and paste look like organic typing…

It's not so hard to type in the problem to a chatgpt on your second monitor or an iPad next to your screen and just retype the answer with some alterations

Some certifications I’ve taken make you do a full room scan, including using a mirror to see the computer itself if you’re using a laptop, to ensure there is nothing you could cheat with. Normally a human reviews it before they open the test for you. In addition they have you install a browser extension that fails a check if there is more than one monitor along with a host of other items.

These are obviously extreme measures, but it is possible to try and enforce enhanced levels of proctoring. And I’m not saying I like the idea of doing this for all coding interviews, just that I guarantee people would go through with this if it meant a chance to get into big tech.

That is extreme, I don’t think I would accept installing a browser extension with full access for a job interview. It trips my scam detector too hard.

I guess if I wanted the job badly enough I’d spin up a vm for it.

Occasions where I've written a meaningful amount of code, linearly and not refactored it a dozen times are probably in single digits in a 25 year career. Nobody gets it right first time, every time.

You could ask it to write you bad code and refactor a few times. But, honestly, manually copying that code over and over again is probably educational gold.

Copying text from another screen looks very different from coming up with a solution live. Lots of breaks, erasing, rewritings are all missing when copying.

The ship has sailed. If Alice gives me her code, then I’ll just run it through an LLM and ask it to make it look different.

Wait, why don’t I just ask the LLM from the get go?

The ships are all gone from the harbor. Luckily for justice, there won’t be any jobs anyway for those degrees. Something about the universe is just doing quite a rug pull on so many things, fascinating times.

Yeah reading this I couldn't help but think how irrelevant all their plagiarism detection code is now. There's no misspellings, suspect white-space, esoteric naming in any cheater's code now.

LLM ocassionally screws up and left enough trace.

Every one of these “woe is us” articles about academic cheating is fundamentally a tragedy of the commons issue.

The commons is the value of a university degree. No, not the education! The diploma.

There will always be some fraction of students that genuinely learn and earn their diplomas. Industry rewards them with higher salaries because the diploma demonstrates that they’re educated and self-motived intelligent people — grade A employees in other words.

So of course, some students will cheat and gain a diploma through copying others. This is inevitable, like the drug trade or prostitution.

If the percentage is low enough, nobody cares.

Okay, but… what if it’s a little higher? Those students might be highly profitable foreign students just looking to get a piece of paper so that they can get a better life back home.

What about a bit higher? Now the university is making bank, the foreign students are funding a new physics lab and a new pool! Awesome.

What if it’s 90%?

Now… it’s too late to rock the boat. The emperors nakedness must not be revealed! If industry catches on that almost all of the diploma-wielding graduates are actually C- instead of A+ the whole thing will implode.

That’s why universities are “helpless” against cheating! They won’t fix it, because if they do, the music stops.

We’re nearly there now. I walked through my old university and saw maybe 5% locals. I hardly heard a single conversation in English. This place is now graduating students in bulk that are functionally illiterate (in English), let alone the subject matter.

The song hasn’t stopped yet, but AI is fiddling with the buttons on the stereo.

There are no chairs.

I went to a state school and would never even get in now.

Stanford has a problem but I was never going to get into a school that the prestige matters. This just doesn't matter for the vast majority of students.

In the long run, the state school problem is easily fixed by an AI first, ultra low tuition, accredited option.

I actually just looked at my state school thinking of going back in my 50s but the tuition makes it a complete non-starter.

I just think of how cheap we could do an AI first class with 1 or 2 in person, controlled exams like any license exam that cheating is just not going to be an issue.

The prestigious schools have a much more difficult problem but there are pretty simple ways to have in person exams that most people are not going to cheat on.

> Student incentives come from faculty

I'm pretty sure that student incentives come from having a degree that will instantly put you above 90% of non-degree-holder applicants after graduation, especially in this market.

Faculty can't compete with this, no matter how much they want education to be the goal; it's not, for most grads, and teachers should blame companies for that rather than students.

Plagiarism can be countered in comp sci settings by having in-person coding and bugfixing exams, which would also prepare students for real-world work much better than the 'turn in a big (music player app written in java) project at the end of the semester' model that programming classes in my comp sci program used.

Ah, that reminds me of my own university days.

Early on I've made the mistake of sharing my solutions with people I knew. Unfortunately they kept sharing the solution too, and so on.

Two times I was pulled into a profs office after the relevant lecture, to be questioned about it.

After it became clear that I was the author, and what happened, nothing ever came of it (for me).

Ironically both times the copiers supposedly failed to remove the git repo that was part of the handoff, so it was primarily about verifying I was the original author.

Lesson learned: "invisible" watermarks work, because people are generally lazy (also don't share graded work, just offer to help)

Anecdotally, before ChatGPT I was once asked to review 10 peers' homework in a computer science course, and 8 of them had the same or nearly the same answers. I couldn't believe plagiarism was that common, so I assumed they all just went to the same discussion section and used a solution provided by an over-helpful TA. Later I asked another student about it and he laughed and told me to keep quiet. So then I asked the instructor about it and he told me I should have failed them but didn't seem interested in taking any other action.

To the extent that the value of a university education is in the degree rather than the knowledge, cheating will remain rational. Since the business model of selling undergraduate programs depends on the value of most degrees as prerequisites to certain lucrative/prestigious careers, such programs are fundamentally broken. Don't try to save them by playing whack-a-mole with cheaters who understand the stakes of the game better than you do. That battle cannot be won.

If most companies collectively decided to stop using "university degree" to gatekeep access to their jobs, then so many university problems would disappear overnight. Cheating would plummet. Proportionally more people would be there to learn instead of just going through the motions in order to get the "permission to work" paper. Fewer people would go to university to overall. Fewer people going would mean fewer people starting out life crippled with student debt.

Yes, there are probably some jobs where you really want to make sure the person you're hiring mastered some niche skill, like medicine and law. And these roles already have their own standardized testing and certification. We don't need to require a college degree for general office paper pushing jobs.

I studied CS in Germany and the entire issues seems completely unnecessary and foreign to me. Our exercises only mattered insofar as they qualified you for the end of semester exam, and that was done on paper and without electronic devices so you couldn't cheat and it's the only thing that mattered for your degree.

Why are adults at a university doing graded homework? They're responsible for their own learning, and if they want to cheat, well good luck on your exam. Our exercises in math and CS always were a few years old and kind of cycled through, so just copying old solutions was trivial, but what for, you're only hurting yourself. People who didn't learn just bombed out at the end. A university education is voluntary, people are there by their own choice.

Honestly this seems almost entirely like a byproduct of the privatized education system. University as children's daycare where everyone needs to pass and be tutored because there isn't an incentive to just filter people out.

I graduated in 2018 from a pretty competitive school and the way they dealt with this was that the lion's share of most course's grade was exam-based, in person, pencil and paper, proctored. Additionally, open notes were often allowed, and the tests were brutally difficult - I'm not sure anyone really could have cheated much in that setting. In project courses, I'm sure it happened a lot more, but I don't think many could have cheated in the program I was in, it was very difficult.

They'd even have different versions of the test in the same classroom test, which I found a little annoying because sometimes version "A" would be easier than B/C. And then they'd never do those questions ever again. It was probably a lot of work for them but they took academic dishonesty very seriously and there was a zero tolerance policy. Everyone made very certain to cover their asses to prevent even the appearance of cheating.

Meanwhile, doing nothing is rewarded with peace and better reviews

I'll say it again: It's a culture problem, not an AI problem.

No one is going to stop the student and ask them why they cheated even if they were practically being asked to eat a tomato soup with a fork. It's easier to hide the problem under the rug and scapegoat.

Are you saying that college homework/assignments are unreasonably hard? I don't think so, after all people were successfully completing them before ChaptGPT.

Yes, it took a long time and some sleepless nights (unless the student has perfect time management). This is all by design, you can't learn without it.

Yes, some people got bad grades. This happens, after all what even is the point of grading if everyone gets good grades.

What is the problem that you think is "being hidden under the rug"?

A lot of hair pulling coming straight from the assumption that CS plagiarism is a problem.

You study to learn. Assignments are to help you learn and evaluate yourself. If you skip them in whatever manner only you suffer. Noone else. When you finish your studies and go to work noone will care about the grade you got, especially if you can't code your way out of a wet paper bag.

You don't think it's a problem for the university to graduate students who don't know the material?

It's a problem for those students. But it's self inflicted by their choices.

EDIT: sorry, I misread your question....

I think it's a problem for the university because it might mislead universities into keeping terrible teachers on the payroll because too many of their students are getting too high grades because they copy because teacher was unable to teach them or motivate them.

This problem is solved cheaper and easier just by monitoring teachers directly.

Another problem I can see is that if a lot of particularly terrible students graduate suddenly it might spoil the reputation of the university, but it's a problem with increase of the cheating level, not with the cheating level itself, it's already calculated into university's reputation.

It really doesn't matter all that much because the main source of university graduates success and as a result university's reputation comes from how picky they are when admitting students. Good freshmen usually make good graduates.

When students are taught nearly every university does similarly good as long as they try to do a decent job and not just scam people.

I don't see any other problems. And I see zero incentive for the university to reduce cheating. This would just reduce the number of graduates and they can already do that on admission if they want that. Unless they can somehow earn money from catching cheating students.

Heck, top universities even admit more on the affluence of the student's family not on how smart they are. And that's because affluent graduates are also sought after by the business so this works for everybody.

I think the person who wrote that article is cynical enough to understand the incentives to not care about cheating too much at the level of individual teacher but they are not cynical enough to understand that at institutional level there's also lack of incentive to care about that because university is not really about teaching and grading. It's for selecting and it doesn't need to be 100% accurate to be useful and valuable.

That was not my question.

Part of the value of a degree is the University vouching that the student has learned the topic to their standards.

Different Universities have different standards and everyone knows this. It’s why a degree from Stanford is a stronger signal than a degree from an average institution. It doesn’t guarantee the Stanford grad is better, but it’s a strong signal that people know they can trust.

If a University starts allowing cheating (by ignoring it) the value of their degree will fall over time. Not at all once, but these things get noticed.

The argument in the article isn't that they should prevent more cheating from happening, but they should work hard to reduce cheating.

> If a University starts allowing cheating (by ignoring it) the value of their degree will fall over time. Not at all once, but these things get noticed

This also means that any effort put into reducing cheating would lead to benefits (if any) far removed from the actions undertaken.

Right. There are two problems. The first is that the entity being paid for teaching is the one evaluating how good a job they did. The second is how to measure how well someone knows a topic.

You judgement depends a lot on the cultural environment.

There exist quite a lot of countries in which it is very common that the respective company will look a lot at your marks.

The problem is that others cheating their way to a diploma devalues the diploma for those that earned it legitimately.

Devaluation happens only if they start cheating more. If they cheat as much as they used to there's no devaluation. And appreciation of diploma value if cheating was reduced is just not worth the effort.

First semester, programming in C. We are submitting the assignments to the assistants. Female student in front of me hands out her floppy disk (this was early 2000). Assistant opens the single file that is on it, containing this single line:

    #include <stdio.h>

Assistant: you did this completely yourself? Her: yes! Assistant: nobody helped you? Her: no! Assistant: are you sure? Her: well, they helped me a little. Assistant: gimme your index!

During the exam professor asked me why I called arguments of main argv and argc and if they can be called something else, I did know the answer, but I didn't know exactly what continue does because I wasn't using it in my code.

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