Student Who Released Code From Assignments Accused of Cheating 333
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."
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:5, Insightful)
A: How reality doesn't work.
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"?
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: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.
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: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.
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.
Re:Real-world skills (Score:2, Insightful)
If, as a professional, you misrepresented the source of the work, it would be just as unethical as the student misrepresenting the source of the work they copied.
Re:Amazing (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 when they see a solution and then work through it themselves.
Of course some students may just copy the answer but I use online assignments with differing sets of numbers to minimize this. Besides the exams are worth far more than the assignments and copying without understanding will have a big impact on exam results.
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:2, Insightful)
There is an old saying - "Those who can - do. Those who can't - teach."
Not saying that there aren't professors out there who can do what they are teaching. What I'm getting at is you ran into one of the large number that actually fit the old saying perfectly.
Teacher is right (Score:2, Insightful)
I heartily agree.
to give another example, text's often come with problems. It's unethical to personally use an answer key. And personally I think it's unethical to make it easy to access an answer key. I say this because in the school I went to all the chinese language versions of the books were the teacher's edition with the answer key.
The reason that is important is this. I beleive most students will no cheat if they believe their peers are not cheating. Part of what goes into making that assessment is a students appreciation of how easy it would be for the other students to cheat. If it seems like theirs barrier they relax. If the other kids have the answer keys in their hands they get worried and some will assume the others must be cheating and do so themselves.
thus supressing avenues for easy access to cheating materials is a good thing.
Some posters have said "well why cant the professor tweak his assignments and then look for answers that were off the old sets".
Professors should be able to reuse their prolelm sets without having to try to constantly be worried about how to outfox cheating.
It would have been much easier for the student who wanted to publish his assignment because of their intrinsic value could very well tweak these so they don't correspond to the assignment much more easily. So me thinks this excuse for publishing assignement keys is a ruse.
Re:The Professor is an Idiot (Score:2, Insightful)
Not only is the prof an idiot, he's a lazy bastard as well.
You're very quick to judge, when the story doesn't tell the teacher's side. There may be acceptable reasons why he took this decision - until those are made known you really should know better than to dive in and start criticising people.
Maybe it's best that your teaching is all in the past tense
College debt - poor economic choices (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:1, Insightful)
No such thing!
Re:The Professor is an Idiot (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 says a lot about how ignorant you are about the web, Streisand effect, and a few other minor tidbits that have come along since the heyday of COBOL.
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.
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).
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.
Re:CORY DOCTOROW IS NOT A "PROF." (Score:3, Insightful)
I like Doctorow's writing, and I used to enjoy reading and posting on boingboing. What drove me away from boingboing was their habit of deleting posts, etc. The problem is that Doctorow (a) is the world champion at self-promotion, (b) encourages people to form a community on boingboing, rather than treating it as a personal blog, (c) has a habit of getting into controversies, and (d) has folks working on boingboing who delete posts that he doesn't like.
There would be nothing wrong with d, deleting posts, if it weren't for b and c. If you try to take the other side on one of the controversies, your post gets deleted. That means it's not really a community, it's cheerleading section.
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:1, Insightful)
efficient bubble sort
Ahem... oxymoron?
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.
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.
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.
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
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:2, Insightful)
While I generally agree with your perspective about teachers, please keep in mind three things.
1. Math is a core competency that does not fundamentally change. Adding, Subtracting, Multiplication, Division... even Calculus and beyond... has not changed, and it won't. What you learned in school will still be correct when you retire. The body of knowledge may grow and evolve, but the core won't change.
2. There are many other focus areas like this.
3. Computer science is NOT one of them! What I took in college 20 years ago may still form a foundation for my knowledge, but it's not relevant to today's students.
This makes the field of computer science different and necessitates teachers keeping up with the industry... something most CS prof's simply do not and can not do. Some - perhaps even many - are great and will do everything possible to give their students relevant, current information.
I think that the negative attitude toward teachers you perceive is geared toward a narrow slice of the profession.
J
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.
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.
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.
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?
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:1, Insightful)
Your sitting around here talking about bad apples when this discussion is about bad oranges. Your field of study is vastly different in many regards. Sure, these people might be being rude, but there is something that disgusts me far worse. That is of course, negative attitudes towards expression. You can carry on how you like, but as for myself, I am not going to go around telling people that I am sickened by their opinions.
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Only if the code was owned by the company. Most employment contracts are work-for-hire, which means that the company gets to keep the fruits of your labor (intellectual and physical) in exchange for providing you with a salary or hourly wage.
This was not a work-for-hire situation. Therefore, legally, the student would have had ownership of the code, and so wouldn't have had to get permission from anyone to publish it. A closer analogy would have been your boss complaining about code that you developed and published on your own time, with your own resources, while away from work.
Re:CORY DOCTOROW IS NOT A "PROF." (Score:3, Insightful)
I have no idea why you think a PhD is a formal requirement for being a professor. Of course, most professors do have a PhD, but it's not completely unprecedented for people to be so obviously brilliant as undergraduates they get an academic post before doing a PhD and so, in time, become a professor without ever getting a doctorate; Quentin Skinner [wikipedia.org] is an example.
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:3, Insightful)
I really don't see anything wring with influencing your felllow students. Learning from each other is as valuable (maybe even more valuable) than learning from a book or teacher. Assuming that he did not do things the wrong way. But even if he did things the wrong way you could discuss what is wrong about his implementation and why it is wrong. Those discussions can be very helpful (whether you're explaining or trying to understand why it is wrong)
I think that the focus should not be on secrecy, it should be on openness. In the end every student is(should) there be there because they want to learn something and they should realize that by copying the work of someone they are going to get in trouble later on. Students will talk to each other and assignments that change very little will be shared anyway, so you'll might as well be open about it and motivate the students to do their own work and stimulate them to work together. That way you'll develop the skills to work together; have more fun because you can share your frustration of not knowing how to handle a certain problem (and finding out that your friends can't either) and you'll learn more because you're enjoying yourself.
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know. Others have reported colleges that require the signing of an agreement that everything you do as a student belongs to the college. Since the decision was "That wasn't unethical" (and I didn't read the original article) the matter of whether the college owned the code didn't come up. (I'm sure it should have. But I think that requiring such an agreement is itself unethical, so...)
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?
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering that it was developed while at the institution, as part of a course taught by the institution, likely using the institution's resources, that seems like a particularly poor analogy.
Seeing as how this was a programming class it's highly likely the student used his own computer not the school's. Heck some colleges are requiring new students in all majors to buy a computer, some include a fee for a laptop.
Falcon
Re:Teachers wrong here (Score:3, Insightful)
I could not have agreed more. All too often I hear people complain about the stupidest things in the workforce and they don't appreciate they are employed at all. For example, my job has a "coffee club" that costs $6 a month to join if you want to use the break room coffee machine (just regular cheap walmart coffee machine, nothing fancy). A few new hires were use to free coffee at their old jobs and complained loudly about our policy, even "stealing" cups of coffee that the rest of us either paid for or decided not to join the club and therefore did not drink coffee. While no one was fired over it, months later we all remember those involved and it has permanently tarnished their record. All over $6 a month.
While I understand where this kid is coming from, is it really worth it? Why was he battling so hard to put the code online? Just for the principle? What did he hope to gain by going above his professor's head, to make the professor look stupid in front of his peers? Think next year's professor will remember what this kid thinks of authority? Not saying anything bad will happen, but if it did the kid would always have to wonder...
I think that's why military people are great in the workforce. They've been trained to do things without question. They have to be, you can't have a dozen men saying "I really don't wanna go up that hill, I hear gunfire and might get hurt. I'll talk to the CO about this when we get back".