Comments: 333 +- News: Student Who Released Code From Assignments Accused of Cheating on Saturday June 13, @08:29AM
Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday June 13, @08:29AM
from the mights-and-maybes dept.
from the mights-and-maybes dept.
Death Metal sends in a story about Kyle Brady, a computer science major at San Jose State University, who recently ran into trouble over publishing the source code to his programming assignments after their due dates. One of Brady's professors contacted him and threatened to fail him if he did not take down the code. Brady took the matter to the Computer Science Department Chair, who consulted with others and decided that releasing the code was not an ethical violation. Quoting Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing:
"There's a lot of meat on the bones of this story. The most important lesson from it for me is that students want to produce meaningful output from their course-assignments, things that have intrinsic value apart from their usefulness for assessing their progress in the course. Profs — including me, at times — fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students, a model that fails when the students treat their work as useful in and of itself and therefore worthy of making public for their peers and other interested parties who find them through search results, links, etc. But the convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience — especially now, with universities ratcheting up their tuition fees and trying to justify an education that can put students into debt for the majority of their working lives."
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HEAD CRASH!! FILES LOST!!
Details at 11.
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Teachers wrong here (Score:5, Interesting)
The student released the source after the release date, which prevented any of his peers from cheating. In the computer science classes that I take, it's allowed to share the source code for your assignments as long as it isn't for a pending assignment and/or test.
The only reason that comes to mind for the teacher wanting the code to be taken down is because he was going to use the same assignments next year (Which is fairly common among teachers). Regardless, in this case it's his code and he has the right to do whatever he wants with it.
Unfortunately schools have become more about preparing you for standardized tests and such rather than giving you a real education with the information you actually will use in life (Which is why teachers always have to cover their asses). What Brady was trying to do was help his peers and kudos to him for doing so.
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:5, Insightful)
A: How reality doesn't work.
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:4, Insightful)
1) How to relate to people who have been given authority over you.
2) How to relate to peers.
3) How to relate to people with less power than you.
4) How to stay in one place for hours without going crazy or driving the people around you crazy.
#4 is very important if you ever want a desk job. Because very often large companies don't bother firing you even if you don't really do your job properly (or at all) - as long as you can sit down quietly and not go about destroying stuff or bothering everyone else. The boss may be saving you for when the CxO does one of those stupid "I don't care how well you're doing and how you do it, I want 5% workforce cuts". Then you come in handy because that means he can let you go and fewer of his other workers who actually work go
5) Oh yah, and to get an education... Whatever that is
Hmm I think I've also left out "how to relate to people you are attracted to" but this is Slashdot, and I never managed to learn that anyway
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, a person in a boss-like role issuing stupid and counterproductive directives solely for their own benefit is precisely how reality works, so perhaps the professor here should be commended for inculcating their students in the way the Real World works, rather than clinging to some sort of ivory-tower idealism. Certainly, in Reality, you would have to have several layers of bureaucracy sign off on the code release before you would be permitted to make it public.
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Re:"Real World" vs Academia (Score:5, Insightful)
Heavy theory or heavy practical would be quite useful in most applications, or even an even mix, but they're really trying to pump out too many people with degrees they shouldn't have. Here's an article [harvard.edu] from Harvard itself denouncing the grading systems of most universities.
I honestly think the problem isn't that colleges have lost touch with reality, so much that they've become too much like companies themselves. Colleges are largely supposed to teach the subjects to greater or lesser degree but they've become so wrapped with bureaucracy and Dilbert/Corporate-style inefficiency that we end up with this mess that we have today.
I started working on GCC and getting a copyright assignment from my school in order to work on it was like pulling teeth from a pissed off tiger during mating season. It was wrapped with college "policy" and reiteration of common knowledge while being thrown from department to department while no one actually helped. It was only after involving the FSF's lawyers did anything get done.
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:5, Interesting)
The only reason that comes to mind for the teacher wanting the code to be taken down is because he was going to use the same assignments next year (Which is fairly common among teachers). Regardless, in this case it's his code and he has the right to do whatever he wants with it.
Unfortunately schools have become more about preparing you for standardized tests and such rather than giving you a real education with the information you actually will use in life (Which is why teachers always have to cover their asses). What Brady was trying to do was help his peers and kudos to him for doing so.
+1 to that . I think (some not all ) educators need to get off there high horses and start being more innovative. Instead of always re-running assignment X for the past 5 years.
I remember a certain "educator" I had while I was going back to school in 2001. If I didnt code the way he saw fit (which in other terms) a way he could understand he would would fail me , code comments or no code comments. In the end it went up in front of the school Directors , and I had my current employer at the time backing me with some other clients that I was coding for , because otherwise I would have failed out. Luckily the board decided in my favor .
These certain types of educators that dont understand the depths of the own things they are "teaching" should either A.) be more innovative and come to terms with newer techs and their way of teaching or teaching style. B.) count their losses stfu and find a new line of work.
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this saying utter bullshit. I grew up among teachers and I hear complaints all the time about either stupid students or students with absolutely no manners.
As an Math undergrad I must say that all my teachers have a deep understanding of the things they are trying to teach me. Unfortunately, some teachers have problems relaying that information to me in a way that I can understand it and that's the major difficulty with teaching.
And yes, I have had some morons who didn't understand what they were teaching in high school. But there are rotten apples in every profession and I personally sickened by the negative attitude towards teachers around here.
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad apples stand out in every walk of life. The good, honest competent people (or at least the ones who aren't egregiously stupid) are almost invisible next to the loud and wrong idiots, who draw attention for being both loud and wrong.
I agree completely that teachers as a profession are maligned more often than is fair. I think much of that is due to their visibility to young people who aren't used to dealing with incompetent people in authority, and having their first taste of "hey, that guy's an idiot! I'm just a kid and I can see he's wrong!" That's a powerful memory maker for just about anyone, and it almost always happens with teachers first.
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:4, Insightful)
Bad apples stand out in every walk of life. The good, honest competent people (or at least the ones who aren't egregiously stupid) are almost invisible next to the loud and wrong idiots, who draw attention for being both loud and wrong.
Sort of like the typical Slashdot comment thread, you mean?
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:4, Interesting)
In math, to teach is to do. You can't teach math without solving math problems. And you quickly and easily check if you got it right (just plug in the variables and compute). Everything else has more subjective meanings of correct/incorrect and use more scarce resources than pencil-paper-calculator.
Many professions pay much better than teaching in college, naturally appealing to most people. That means there are two types of professors: Those that love to teach, and those that have the certificates but can't hold a job in the real world.
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:4, Insightful)
I have worked with a number of teachers in several institutions over the last 25 years. I am not a teacher myself; I have been involved in designing and implementing computer based curricular materials for several types of classes, mostly in health care training.
There are good teachers and there are bad teachers. But that isn't important.
What IS important is that there are good institutions whose policies attract good teachers and discourage bad teachers from hanging around. And there are some very bad institutions whose policies (think tenure, teaching contracts, and so on) attract bad teachers and allow them to create a very bad institutional culture that coddles and protects them.
One major difference between good institutions and bad ones is in the realm of performance measures.
Good institutions will be willing to talk about the policies they have wrt teaching performance, and show the procedures they use, and the procedures will involve some form of quantification that approximates what is in essence an unmeasurable quality. The majority of professional staff at the Really, Really Good institutions will invite discussions on ways to select better performance indicators or to process the raw results into the stuff that will lead to informed payroll and contract decisions.
In contrast, bad institutions will have either no performance measure policy, or will pay the concept lip service only: the "procedures" used to implement the "policy" will be so subjective as to be meaningless. There will also be a wall of resistance to discussing this topic across all of the professional staff who would be involved in meaningful performance measures.
BTW, the "publish or perish" approach is not a useful performance measure. A useful one might be tracking how many students of Teacher A's Tagalog 101 course got passing grades in Tagalog 201 the next year (indirectly using decisions by later teachers to judge the quality of Teacher A's performance).
Something I would really like to see tried in my state would be to require all teachers of K-12 students to produce one offer of employment from a private sector business every couple of years. While this might lead to losing a few good teachers who got offers they couldn't refuse, it would eliminate the deadwood teachers who truly fit the "them that can't, teach" clause. It would also motivate the lazy bastards who think they can slide by to retirement because they once developed a curriculum 10 years ago, and if it was good enough before the high speed Internet, it should be good enough forever.
One last caveat: All that a teacher ever does, no matter how good, is to teach; it is always up to to the student to learn. But this is slashdot, where we all spend one weekend a month teaching ourselves some new-to-us programming language, and sometimes actually learning from those weekends. So I'm preaching to the choir.
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:4, Insightful)
From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.
Note that's need not want or desire.
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:5, Insightful)
That sounds right, in a Michael-Ironside-in-Starship-Troopers kind of way. "If you can no longer do Foo, teach others how to do Foo". Do you have any references supporting that interpretation?
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:5, Insightful)
The student released the source after the release date, which prevented any of his peers from cheating
Prevented them from cheating this semester. I'm sure the reason the prof wanted it taken down is so he could easily just copy-n-paste next semester's assignment. This is a lazy instructor working to maintain his laziness.
Good profs at the very least work on a 4 semester rotation of courses where you're going to have to dig up a student from a few years ago at least before you have an easy "tweak and resubmit" assignment. Any instructor that dishes out the exact same projects semester after semester isn't showing any commitment, and certainly isn't staying with the times. Computer science is in such a continuous state of flux that any prof that isn't consistently reworking their coursework isn't doing their job.
Catching these sorts of cheats isn't too difficult either even if you don't want to start projects from scratch. Just a matter of properly adjusting the project. Make a few fundamental changes that make it look different, update as needed, and subtly tweak a few things. (make a small change to limits etc) This makes it fresh and new, and is fairly easy to spot a cheat since they will blatantly be meeting subtle goals from the wrong project.
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with this approach is the nature of collage assignments. If you ignore variable names and comments then there is only so many ways to write a short efficient bubble sort. Schools with hundreds of students submitting work results in a large number of students submitting the same basic program.
I think the best solution for this is to have students fill out some functions in a program that mostly works. That way the teacher could change a few things each year and prevent students from submitting a generic solution.
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:5, Funny)
The problem with this approach is the nature of collage assignments.
I vote this the most unwittingly insightful comment ever.
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with this approach is the nature of collage assignments. If you ignore variable names and comments then there is only so many ways to write a short efficient bubble sort.
I submit if you have to cheat to write a bubble sort you need to find a different major.
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:5, Interesting)
Good profs at the very least work on a 4 semester rotation of courses where you're going to have to dig up a student from a few years ago at least before you have an easy "tweak and resubmit" assignment. Any instructor that dishes out the exact same projects semester after semester isn't showing any commitment, and certainly isn't staying with the times. Computer science is in such a continuous state of flux that any prof that isn't consistently reworking their coursework isn't doing their job.
Depends on the school. I'm and adjunct professor at a local satellite campus, and I teach the same class every year. The topic is data structures, and not a lot changes year over year when you're talking about something so fundamental. I have changed my curriculum each year, but only because I have yet to find a book that I feel really treats the topic well. Each book has some high points and some glaring low points, but I dream of the day when my lectures actually become somewhat static. I spend way too much time tweaking my lecture notes.
Also, you don't seem to have considered that in some courses, each programming assignment builds on the one before. By posting his assignments, even after the due dates, he may be influencing his fellow students in the follow on assignments.
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a lazy instructor working to maintain his laziness.
Do not underestimate the work involved in preparing a new course. I teach for a few weeks every year, and can easily spend several days preparing a new one-hour lesson. Even recycled material needs updating and revising, and the preparation time is at least equal to the teaching time. Think of the time you spend to prepare a presentation at work. Now imagine spending your whole working day giving presentations, and doing the preparation in the evenings.
Teaching is a tough job, and only those who believe it's important stick at it. Some teachers are more talented than others, but I've yet to meet a lazy one. A lazy teacher will quickly move to an easier (and better paying) job.
Parent
CS in a state of flux? Please show me! (Score:4, Insightful)
Computer science is in such a continuous state of flux
Really?
Maybe I have a view of CS that's be artificially narrowed through only being taught the things I have been taught, but:
In the last ten years,
In short, how has CS changed?
The Church-Turing thesis still stands unchallenged. No one knows whether P equals NP. The parallel revolution is still in the future (even though algorithm guys study parallel algorithms). We still don't have quantum computing or biocomputing worth talking much about (yay, we can factor 21---into 4 and 6). By and large we still parse languages into a LALR(1) grammars like in... the 70's? User interfaces, they're still mouse-and-keyboard, Window/Icon/Menu/Pointer.
Exactly what do you mean when you say "Computer Science is in flux"? What's fluctuating?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:5, Interesting)
In the computer science classes that I take, it's allowed to share the source code for your assignments as long as it isn't for a pending assignment and/or test.
One of my teachers had a different approach: he'd let you do anything, as long as you were clear on what you wrote yourself, and what you didn't. OTOH, if he found the same snippet of code in two different assignments and both students tried to take credit for it, both failed.
None of us dared use large chunks of someone elses work.
Parent
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:4, Interesting)
This is probably not the case. At my University they own the rights to all code that is written as part of the educational program, not the students.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't blame faculty alone for courses being the way they are -- the students have learnt how to play the game. You work many old papers and basically end up memorising the classes of problems that can be asked. This behaviour leads to a sort of conundrum: if you keep setting new and interesting papers, you will start running out of problems that are within a certain difficulty level. Your students will hate you because they can't prepare for your tests they way they are used to. If you set similar papers (or recycle papers) the first-time difficulty of each paper remains the same, but the apparent difficulty of your subject decreases because your subject is easily gamed by people not interested in mastering the subject but rather passing your tests.
From the educator's perspective, testing is hard in computer-based subjects because a realistic test (like a project) is trivially easy to copy and testing within a realistic timeframe restricts you to such simple problems that you run into the problem above. There therefore didacticly valid reasons for wanting to keep the answers to problem sets a secret: there are less students with the self control of using the answers as a solid teaching aid than there are who will use them as a quick shortcut to doing the assignments, just like there are fewer students who can manage their time to meet a single deadline than students who need frequent deadlines to make sure that they stay up to date. Pretending that the students are all just there to maximise their mastery of the subject is unrealistic. Most students are doing courses to get the magic paper that will give them a job (or to please their parents or to figure out what to do or to get a husband/wife or many other motivations).
Parent
Victims of circumstance ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, instructors who reuse assignments and expect students to pay the price for that suck. On the other hand, those instructors are just as much the victims of circumstance as the students.
Simply put, instructors are not paid to develop courses and assess work in any manner that can be considered pedagogically sound. On top of that most professors (heck, even most school teachers) have responsibilities that extend beyond classroom teaching. So most of them are expected to use curricular materials that were developed once and used many times over, while reading at a speed more appropriate for an entertaining novel than a serious academic discourse. Instructors who go beyond that are virtually always sacrificing their own personal lives in order to improve the quality of education.
Teaching at any level is hard. Teaching in over crowded introductory university courses (that are often used to fund smaller upper year courses) is among the most challenging jobs that a professional can do. And, unfortunately, I doubt that battles like this one are doing anything to address the issue of the quality of education.
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Problem Solved Many Years Ago (Score:5, Interesting)
If it was common for students to write assignments -- say they had been given a design template -- then all of the scores would come back rather high. If the TA noticed an outlier, they would investigate. If two submissions came up sufficiently similar, they would investigate.
It was (of course) never explained in detail how it worked but I bet that today one could take this to many new levels with things like ANTLR [antlr.org] that might allow the program to check the inherent structure in code to avoid something trivial like different comments or variable names skewing the results.
Was it me who was in the professor's situation, I would bite the bullet and code the very basic above application using a web form submission for TAs and Professors. Then I would ask for help from other members of the department and make it a customizable growing project to protect the academic integrity of my school and students. Then I myself would put the opened source on there and run all my students assignments against it.
Problem solved, you can keep all your assignments static, you lazy bastards
Re:Problem Solved Many Years Ago (Score:5, Funny)
Then I would ask for help from other members of the department and make it a customizable growing project to protect the academic integrity of my school and students.
I'd set it as next year's assignment!
The following year would be "using the university's cheat-detector algorithm, submit the supplied program such that it successfully passes the detector without raising any investigative points".
The year after that, "improve the detector to successfully protect against accepting supplied programs A and B such that they are correctly detected as similar".
Repeat until retirement. (Why did I ever go for a job in the private sector, my talents are obviously wasted here!)
Parent
Re:Problem Solved Many Years Ago (Score:5, Funny)
Repeat until retirement.
Tenure is sufficient :)
Parent
FIRST! And welcome to fraternity file cabinets (Score:5, Interesting)
FIRST POST!! Oh, dear, you must have all had a good Friday night.
There's an old practice of fraternities at my college, where they kept file cabinets filled with old homework and course notes of all the classes their members took. I had wondered how some frat boys coasted through so many classes and got so much more sleep than those of us who struggled working to pay for college, paying for food, etc. Then I found out this was one of their most important reasons. It was a known practice, and one of the less publicly mentioned benefits of joining a fraternity.
Since small-scale publication of old hoomework and course notes, such as what I describe above, has been going on for centuries, it seems completely reasonable that larger scale publication be permitted.
Re:FIRST! And welcome to fraternity file cabinets (Score:4, Interesting)
My fraternity actually used to do this and we've all but stopped now since nobody uses it. The reason is that nearly all of our classes have started posting old exams, answer keys, course notes, and a few of the good teachers will even post past homework. Most classes also have homework weighted pretty lightly so that learning the material (as tested on the exams) is what really matters. With this setup, past homework of course can't be used for cheating, but sometimes seeing something worked out will help make a connection you might not have otherwise and past exams really help take away the horrible feeling of not knowing if you're prepared for a test or not. I will agree with previous posters that if students are able to use past resources to cheat, this is more the fault of a lazy professor than anything.
Also, back when we did keep study files, it was an "advertised" benefit of joining the house, not swept under the rug as you seem to describe. As far as I know, no one at the university ever had a problem with us or any other house/organization/random group of friends doing it. Now we mainly focus on the fact that we've got older members from a wide array of majors who are willing to help out younger members as needed.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:HR screeners without clue (Score:5, Funny)
...especially insufficiently clueful screeners in human resources departments.
This is absolutely true. If that HR wonk doesn't have that "degree requirement" checkbox marked, your resume takes a one-way trip to the trash can. With degree inflation being what it is, you'll need a Phd to work at McDonalds in ten years.
For that eventuality, I'm still working on my thesis titled: "Recidivism in McDonaldland: A Restorative Approach to the Hamburglar Problem".
Parent
and the dept head said (Score:4, Insightful)
And threatening to fail a student for reasons other than poor performance in the course is somehow not an "ethical violation"?
Re:and the dept head said (Score:5, Insightful)
And threatening to fail a student for reasons other than poor performance in the course is somehow not an "ethical violation"?
Depending on your metrics, cheating would result in excellent performance, but is a valid reason to fail a student.
The ethical issue here is whether publishing your schoolwork is enabling cheating.
The answer is that it is, but it's still not an ethical violation, because (to borrow a term from the land of law) there is substantial non-infringing use.
Parent
How to make assignments not recycled? (Score:5, Insightful)
Profs â" including me, at times â" fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students
For a first year course entitled "data structures and algorithsm" isn't this kind of unavoidable?
I mean, consider some of the projects on this student's website [kyle-brady.com]; things like sparse matricies, longest common substring, recursively solving an occupancy grid map, and so on.
How much variety can you put into an assignment to implement sparse matricies?
Of course, even without this student posting his assignments online, students could still google the problems and probably find working solutions, so taking down this one student's assignments isn't going to stop those who feel so inclined from just copying implementations they find through Google, so I'm not sure the teacher would have achieved much even if he had got this stuff taken down.
The Professor is an Idiot (Score:3, Insightful)
Kudos to SJSU for backing the student on this. Beeson is clearly out of line, and I hope that students will make a big stink if he tries to insert some idiotic no-publish clause in future assignments.
Re:The Professor is an Idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup....
I used to teach comp sci back when.... I had a single assigment that the students worked on all semester. We started out with the basics, and then added more and more features until we had a full-featured program.
While the assignment never changed, you really couldn't cheat as it would be really difficult to fake your way through months of ever more complex code development.
The class was typically small enough where I could talk to each student once in a while and probe their understanding of what they were doing.
Not only is the prof an idiot, he's a lazy bastard as well.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Good instructors don't recycle their work over and over.
Anyway, I could see if a lot of work went into developing the assignments. But it really didn't and there is no reason why the prof couldn't develop new and better assignments in response to new tech and student needs. That's part of teaching; you respond to your students, you grow and develop.
Recycling the same assignment from year to year doesn't say much for the prof and his own development and learning; telling your student to take down a website
Re:The Professor is an Idiot (Score:5, Informative)
Simply put: professors do not own their students' coursework.
Professors may not own their students' work, but you may want to check your facts. Many Universities lay claim to the work done by their students in an academic setting. IANAL, but typically the qualifiers for a school to own your work begin to appear when the work you do is done using significant university resources (namely doing work under the guidance of a prof, I know you'll say that many students don't get help from their profs other than the class...but sometimes to some schools this doesn't even matter). It's not that I necessarily agree with this practice, I don't. I've been "victimized" by my own university after it laid claim to a group project that my group had been working on for a school contest. Through a web of legalities the school considered us "students" to be "employees" (albeit employees who paid ~15-20k a year to 'work' at the school) and all employees were required to render IP they had developed in their respective programs to the university. Our app was fundamentally flawed and incomplete, so we opted not to fight the team of lawyers for something that was broken. The whole experience was rather disheartening. All these rules we'd "agreed" to were essentially a part of the shrinkwrap rules you agreed to/were bound to by being a part of the university. The school acted as though this was the modus operandi for a lot of schools, and I couldn't really be sure one way or the other. I recognize that my experience may have been unique, but I've seen similar stories like this, even on slashdot.
Back to what you were saying, professors probably aren't going to own a student's coursework. Universities, might, however, like in my case if they've set up a rats nest of rules to capture student IP.
Parent
Re:The Professor is an Idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah. In the US - and everywhere else, for that matter - all you need is more money than your opponent.
The university has more money than the student. Therefore, whatever the university says is the law.
Parent
Amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
Someday I hope to be a professor, teaching my own classes. The one thing I would like my students to do is respect me as someone who contributes strongly to their development as a person and as a professional. It surprises me that the teacher in question would rather claim idiotic copyright policies just to be able to avoid having to come up with new assignments. I can not think of any purpose this would achieve other than helping him be a lazy ass.
Even if there was a valid reason for him to ask the student to remove the code, I would expect a teacher to keep the student's intent in mind and try to be as accomodating as possible; clearly the student is taking his homework seriously enough and that is already a good thing that should be encouraged as much as possible.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Someday I hope to be a professor, teaching my own classes.
I am a professor teaching my own classes and I'm only too happy if my students share their working on how to do things. The point of assignments is to get students doing problems so that they have practice at solving things themselves. Unless they are extremely good this means that they will need help to do some of the assignments. As long as they try the questions themselves first the educational ojectives are satisfied since they have thought about it and will learn and understand how to do things better
I would never have "published" my undergrad code.. (Score:4, Funny)
...as I recall, the campus newspaper charged by the line for classified ads.
The Real Deal: Licensing for Schoolwork (Score:4, Interesting)
How about code released in books on Data Structures, Algorithms, Fundamental C programming? To my knowledge (do correct me if I am wrong), the code is usually licensed under the same copyright notice as the book itself. In some cases, the author changes this licensing and makes it available. One example is "Numerical Recipes in C" where the licensing terms of the code from the author(s) of the book is explicit [bytes.com] and can be found on a google search.
When it comes to university assignments, it is no news that the same template (if not the same course material itself) tends to get recirculated over a periodic basis. In some cases this period is annual and in others, the frequency is different. The debate raised is ages old. For most data structure or standard assignments of programming, you could find most of the code online. You could use this as a starting point or choose to write your own and learn your fundamentals. That's up to the student and the professor who is teaching and grading.
There is some truth in the statement (IMHO) that the Academia is shielded from the real commercial world. It works positive in some cases and is counterproductive in fields like Engineering (not Theoretical Computer Science.) In this specific case, if the University were to read all the fine print they have on students sharing course material (for which they pay for) and lecture notes and assignments, they would find the right solution. Bringing this (issue between a student and the professor) out to Open forums seems more of a publicity stunt that is going to get someone infamous for some and noticeable for a few others.
Focusing on the larger issue, a Varsity must be clear on how course-work and assignments from the students will be licensed and treated. They already have set legal precedents for most research work (which in some cases is funded by commercial bodies.) Hopefully this issue raises a flag and lets varsities understand and embrace Open Source, encourage students to use it particularly in programming assignments. At the very least they should at least reserve procedures to let a student obtain due permission for displaying his/her works online under appropriate licensing. In the absence of a precedent and clear guidelines, such confusion and unnecessary nerve wracking experiences between a Professor and a Student are more likely to surface. I hope not.
Outsourcing is the new method for cheaters (Score:3, Interesting)
CORY DOCTOROW IS NOT A "PROF." (Score:4, Informative)
A professor is someone with a PhD who is tenured at the university in question. Cory Doctorow, if I am to believe what I have read (blessed and purified by The Man Himself) [wikipedia.org], doesn't have so much as a bachelor's. The fact that he has been allowed into the front of university classrooms does not make him a "prof." That being said, we can't really hold that mistake against him as he does have all the education of a glass of water.
Me, I've been teaching university in the US and Japan for 6 years. I, too, am not a "prof." I was pretty stoked when I started this job in April and moved up from "Senior Lecturer" to "Assistant Professor." My former boss in the US runs an entire state university's Japanese program, and has done so for 20 years. Her title? "Lecturer." Why? No PhD, just a master's.
This right here is the core reason I loathe Cory Doctorow. He constantly blows himself up to be things he clearly is not. The moment my opinion of him turned for good was the moment in the talk he gave to Microsoft, wherein he described himself as a "half-lawyer." My buddy who just finished law school but hasn't found out if he passed the bar yet is a "half-lawyer." Some Drew Carey lookalike who writes about as well as you would expect from someone who graduated from a "free school," and who likes to pontificate endlessly about legal issues is not.
I would post this on Boing Boing, but I was banned for posting something similar.
Re:CORY DOCTOROW IS NOT A "PROF." (Score:5, Insightful)
A professor is someone with a PhD who is tenured at the university in question.
No. A professor is someone who is given the title by the institution, period. Most universities won't do this without a PhD or equivalent degree, true, but someone who has been given the title is properly referred to by the title. And if your job title is now "Assistant Professor," you are in fact now a "prof." I'm no bigger a Cory Doctorow fan than you are, but if he has been given a job title which includes the word "professor" by an accredited institution of higher learning (I have no idea of this is so) then he is too.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, no, it's not. "Visiting Professorships" are a bit like "honorary degrees."
In some place (UK, I think) you're only a "professor" if you fill an endowed chair. Now, here in the US, it differs a little by institution, but typically both tenured and tenure-track faculty (assistant, associate, and full professors) are considered "professors."
But a "visiting professorship" is usua