Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!ut-sally!husc6!harvard!ksr!alcatraz!benson From: benson@alcatraz.ksr.com (Benson Margulies) Newsgroups: comp.edu Subject: Re: Cheating on Programming Assignments Message-ID: <83@ksr.UUCP> Date: Tue, 28-Apr-87 07:45:49 EDT Article-I.D.: ksr.83 Posted: Tue Apr 28 07:45:49 1987 Date-Received: Wed, 29-Apr-87 07:22:10 EDT References: <248@rruxa.UUCP> <274@sdacs.ucsd.EDU> <211@axis.fr> <645@ihu1e.ATT.COM> <3891@utai.UUCP> <1368@uwmacc.UUCP> <551@maccs.UUCP> Sender: nobody@ksr.UUCP Reply-To: benson@ksr.UUCP (Benson Margulies) Organization: Kendall Square Research, Cambridge MA Lines: 68 In article <551@maccs.UUCP> ns@maccs.UUCP (Nicholas Solntseff) writes: >At McMaster cheating is considered as Academic Dishonesty and is a case of >plagiarism, i.e., passing someone else's work as your own without attribution. > >Our students are told that discussion between any number of students is NOT >discouraged, provided that students leave such a meeting WITHOUT anything >written down. Working from memory is akin to copying the IBM BIOS purely >from external specifications! Closer collaboration is acceptable provided that >ALL students have their name on all material handed in. > I disagree. I'm not the only person I know with a pretty good medium term memory for detail. In a system like that, I would have a great advantage over some other people, because I'm capable of retaining an hour's conversation more or less verbatim. Hardly seems fair at all. I want to rattle the cage on the "institutional reputation" justification for worrying about the problem. As an interviewer, I have never asked someone about their grades. I ask them what sort of projects they have done, and to tell me about them. Someone who cheated their way through school would either (a) make a fool of themself, (b) have learned something in spite of it, or (c) demonstrate that they are a mamagement candidate, on the basis of having taking the "coordinate and organize" job in group work. In fact, I once refused to interview for a job when the recruiter told me that the hiring individual wanted my grades. My grades are fine, thank you very much, but anyone who cares what they were now that I have been working for several years is not someone I want to work for. So from my point of view as am employer, I say "let 'em cheat!" and leave it to me to sort out the result. As for the AT&T problem, I bet that asking grades is as potentially discriminating as anything else, since that nasty university may have had discriminatory cheating enforcement policies. On the other hand, much of the anti-cheating discussion seems to understand that students are more like adult offenders than like juveniles. I have precisely mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I would have thrown a fit had MIT not had a fundamental principle of "If you are sure that you know what you want, you can do it, (almost) whatever it is." On the other hand, there were certainly some confused people there who needed such complete freedom like a hole in the head. Somehow, university has to take care of both types. How many cheaters are truly dishonest, and how many are confused, desperate, or mislead? Those of you faculty that complain about cheating, what's your TA to student ratio? How accessible is help? Are there tutorials? Does anyone on the entire campus think its their business to check in on your students' general state of affairs, or do you wait for them to cheat or dive off of a tower? Rather than spending brain-power on defining cheating, writing programs to detect it, and arguing about how to punish it, \I/ think that you should be spending your time on building a learning environment in which its irrelevant. You are bound to succeed on helping at least some of your students. At the margins, its more important to help one confused individual than to catch one cheater. Benson I. Margulies Kendall Square Research Corp. harvard!ksr!benson All comments the responsibility ksr!benson@harvard.harvard.edu of the author, if anyone.