Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!sce!karam
From: karam@sce.UUCP (Gerald Karam)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: looking for cheating detectors
Message-ID: <414@sce.UUCP>
Date: 26 Jul 88 01:34:40 GMT
Article-I.D.: sce.414
References: <4513@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <2927@utastro.UUCP>
Reply-To: karam@sce.UUCP (Gerald Karam)
Distribution: comp.edu
Organization: Systems Eng., Carleton Univ., Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 34

In article <2927@utastro.UUCP> nather@utastro.UUCP (Ed Nather) writes:
>In article <4513@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>, narten@cs.purdue.EDU (Thomas Narten) writes:
>> Moral of the story: it's relatively easy to catch cheaters; the hard
>> part is figuring out what to do with them once they're in your office.
>
>Indeed.  Try to explain to them that what they did -- take someone else's
>debugged code and use it themselves -- is wrong.  It's what they'll do
>when they grow up, and it isn't called "cheating."  It's called "smart
>programming."
>
>I think it's unprofessional to short-change the real education of your
>students to make your teaching job easier.  But I recognize that this is a
>minority opinion.

Both original programming and reuse are exercises that students should
experience, here's why:

The development of good software engineering skills requires maturity 
coupled with staged levels of knowledge.  Typically the 1st year student
learning a programming language has little maturity or knowledge to
handle anything beyond writing new software to exercise new programming
skills.  You can beat the words design and reusability into them all you
want but it simply cannot be appreciated at this time (yes these are
generalizations).  As the 4 yrs of eng or compsci progress the student
no longer grapples with the details of syntax and "coming up with the
algorithm"; at this point the more abstract concepts of design, requirements
testing, reuse and other issues are introduced.  In the end the student
should have an understanding of the "real world" spoken of above. If he
doesn't then his education hasn't been completed, which is unfortunate.

Someone had to write the program that gets re-used in the real-world,
it didn't write itself, however that's for comp.ai :-)

gerald karam