Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!princeton!allegra!alice!ark From: ark@alice.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.edu Subject: Re: Cheating on Programming Assignments Message-ID: <6812@alice.UUCP> Date: Mon, 20-Apr-87 08:51:37 EST Article-I.D.: alice.6812 Posted: Mon Apr 20 08:51:37 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 21-Apr-87 03:00:09 EST References: <248@rruxa.UUCP> <274@sdacs.ucsd.EDU> <211@axis.fr> <3891@utai.UUCP> <301@wolf.UUCP> Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Liberty Corner NJ Lines: 84 Summary: No I don't think expulsion is a little severe. In article <301@wolf.UUCP>, malice@wolf.UUCP writes: > In article <6799@alice.uUCp>, ark@alice.UUCP writes: > > I think the penalty should be very simple. If X copies from Y, > > then X should be expelled from school. Period. And so should > > Y, unless Y can prove that Y did not know that X had copied Y's > > work. > > don't you think that expulsion is a little severe? > even in our law system we don't sentence someone to the electric > chair for lying, cheating, and stealing on a first offense. > [read: first time caught] I've gotten a few flames about my original statement, and I think I'd like to modify it a little. I believe that deliberate academic cheating is totally unacceptable and inexcusable under any circumstances. Thus I think expulsion is entirely appropriate for a first offense, provided that guilt is established. I also believe that allowing someone else to copy your work should be punished as severely as copying someone else's work. So, that leaves two sticky issues, and I was a little too draconian with regard to them: How does one esablish guilt? How much responsibility does one have to guard one's work against copying by others? These are both tough questions and I don't have easy answers for them. I do, however, have one real-life anecdote. Once upon a time I taught a programming class at Stevens Institute. When I teach programming classes that are not completely elementary, I always give the same first assignment: write a program that prints the prime numbers less than 10,000 in five columns down the page, 50 lines per page, as many pages as needed. The purpose of this assignment is to weed out the people who don't know how to program at all and to force everyone in the class to establish access to a computer somewhere. I'm sure you'll agree it is not a particularly difficult assignment. Anyway, one student turned in a truly remarkable program: it began by defining three arrays with 997 elements each (there are 997 primes less than 10,000). Now, while I had never stated this explicitly as a requirement, I felt that such a program did not really solve the problem, as it could not have been written in the first place without already having solved it! So I decided the program could not rate more than a B. The total lack of comments and spaghetti code reduced the maximum grade from B to C. Since the program produced the correct output, I gave it a C. A few papers later I encountered another program that defined three arrays with 997 elements! Comparing the two programs revealed that they were identical up to identifier names. In all, I found five variations of this program. What to do? I started by trying to confirm my judgment. I made photocopies of the five listings after removing the students' names and showed them to a few colleagues. Everyone who saw them volunteered that these programs were clearly copied from each other. So I presented all the evidence to the department chairman. His action was, I believe, overly magnanimous: he called all five into his office and told them that if they dropped the course right now, he would be spared the trouble of filing formal disciplinary charges against them and they would be allowed to stay in school. I never saw them again. There are two things to realize about this incident. First, there was never any attempt to discover who had copied from whom. There was plainly collusion here and all were judged equally guilty. Second, I have no doubt that if formal charges had been lodged, all five would have been expelled. Finally, I went through a good part of that semester genuinely concerned that I might be beaten to a pulp by those five students or their friends. I think I did the right thing anyway. --Andrew Koenig