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Comment by oliwarner | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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