Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!rutgers!gatech!mcnc!ece-csc!ncsuvx!cscadm!mauney
From: mauney@cscadm.ncsu.edu (Jon Mauney)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: looking for cheating detectors
Message-ID: <2030@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu>
Date: 25 Jul 88 13:44:54 GMT
References: <1403@sbcs.sunysb.edu> <2920@utastro.UUCP>
Sender: nntp@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu
Reply-To: mauney@cscadm.UUCP (Jon Mauney)
Organization: Computer Science Faculty, NCSU, Raleigh NC
Lines: 20

In article <2920@utastro.UUCP> nather@utastro.UUCP (Ed Nather) writes:
>
>What on earth are you teaching?  A class on re-inventing the wheel?  Perhaps
>your students would benefit from a course on how to "cheat" -- how to find
>and use code someone else has written and debugged.

Besides all the ethical and pedagogical points already raised in response
to this, there is another very important difference between the class
assignment and the "real world".  In a classroom there is no challenge
to finding a program that is ostensibly written to your specifications.
Thus, a student that copies a program has not gained experience from the
challenge of writing it from scratch, nor from the challenge of tracking
down a suitable program and modifying it to suit.  All he or she does
is ask a friend, or scavenge the file system or trash cans, and then
make some cosmetic changes to the variables and comments.

There is value in individual assignments, in collaboration, and in
creative reuse of code.  There is no value in simple program copying.

Jon Mauney     mauney@cscadm.ncsu.edu