How Easy Is It To Cheat In CS? 684
Pinky3 writes "The New York Times has an article on cheating in CS at Stanford. Here is a classic quote from one student: 'I wasn't even thinking of how it [sic] easy it would for me to be caught,' he said. One interesting strategy discussed is for the professor to make the final count for more of the final grade each time cheating is discovered. Share your experiences as a student and/or as an instructor."
first post (Score:5, Funny)
I cheated and copied this post from another article.
He has a great career in front of him (Score:5, Funny)
From TFA: Mr. de la Torre was taking the computer science class for a second time in his junior year when he cheated. After he was disciplined, he resigned from his position as student body vice president in November
He shouldn't have resigned, I think he has the makings of a great politician...
CSIt's easy... (Score:5, Funny)
Cheating in CS? (Score:5, Funny)
Wall hacks and aim bots, that's how...
Maybe cheating in CS is easy... (Score:4, Funny)
... but also cheating in CS:S is not that difficult.
Valve should really stop those nasty cheaters.
Now that I've posted a reply, I'm going to RTFA.
Re:first post (Score:5, Funny)
Re:CSIt's easy... (Score:3, Funny)
But when I googled 'define:CS' I found the most appropriate definition: 'Caugt Stealing'
Cheaters (Score:3, Funny)
How can I reach theeese keeeeeeeds???
Re:CSIt's easy... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:On The Other Hand (Score:5, Funny)
In university my friend and I worked together on the same assignment. We were in different tutor groups so we believed it wouldn't be detectable. Indeed it wasn't but he got 80/100 and I got 40/100! Mother f$@%^&. It's not like I could complain about it but my friend thoroughly enjoyed it.
Re:Maybe cheating in CS is easy... (Score:5, Funny)
reading the article is definitely cheating. If you cant divine the information from the summary , at least try to infer it. The low uid guys only read the first three letters of the headline.
Re:which snappy comback to choose? (Score:3, Funny)
A - You're talking about CS students here. No need to include the possibility of "she."
B - Is that you, Tiger?
Re:Who cheats who (Score:5, Funny)
Some times not even later.
As a CS student my buddy and I (we were working as teams) were tired of people copying our stuff. We shared with anyone who wanted to, and had full read access for anyone to our code, so we didn't make it hard for them to copy. Still, it was annoying to do the work and then have others just copy and hand in.
Our assignments required print-outs delivered with the software (yes, this is before there was even an internet) and we suspected people just copied our software, compiled it (which incidentally at the time could take hours) and ran it without even looking at it. So, just for fun, we inserted into our own code the equivalent of a system call to "rm -rf $HOME/*" (yes, this is before we got our Pyramid Unix boxes, so it was not exactly that). We did this two days before the assignment was to be delivered. It took less then an hour before we heard the first "WHAT THE F#CK HAPPENED???". Five teams were unable to deliver their assignments.
Interestingly two of the teams complained about our behavior to the professor. His only reaction was to ask if they had some serious mental problems (or the polite equivalent). I am sure today we would have been sued and the morons would have won since we "hacked" their accounts.
Re:On The Other Hand (Score:2, Funny)
Dear god, anything but a copy and paste programmer. We had one here and the results and the results are devastating
So, did they let you keep working there, anyway?
Re:On The Other Hand (Score:3, Funny)
We had one here and the results and the results are devastating.
Good example! :)
Re:He has a great career in front of him (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Who cheats who (Score:4, Funny)
Journalism (Score:5, Funny)
Usually makes sense to establish what CS is in any article headline to establish defined context.
So it used to be a lot easier to cheat in CS. I used to use an old wallhack that I hex edited and was able to use for years without detection. When they switched from WON to Steam, it all became harder.
You meant computer science?
Re:Who cheats who (Score:5, Funny)
When I took CS101 I was well beyond the level of the class, so, in order to make the programming assignments interesting, I added extra functionality on top of what was requested. Little stupid stuff mostly, but I tried to make it clever, and since the testing was automated, it didn't matter as long as it was to spec.
The last project was to write a program to simulate one of those stupid "digital pets"; it had to have a pet object, and various, feed, cuddle, punish, methods, etc.
One of the boundary conditions was that the pet had to starve if you didn't feed it, but the program was set so that you could have as many pets as you wanted at the same time...Well, I decided to put a little rock 'n roll in there, and if one pet hadn't been fed for a certain amount of time, he had a chance to start a "pet deathmatch", and try to eat another pet.
The code for the combat and the actual fight was massive. Most peoples code was a couple of pages...mine was closer to 50.
I printed it out at one point, so I could take it to dinner and work on some bug, and someone swiped it off the printer, and subsequently copied the WHOLE THING and turned it in for the assignment.
Re:On The Other Hand (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I caught several cheaters (Score:5, Funny)
Regarding your first scenario: My favorite story on that front was from my dad, who teaches math at a private high school. He handed out a midterm with multiple versions, and within a few minutes had a student raising his hand to tell him "Mike's test is different than mine!"
Re:Who cheats who (Score:2, Funny)
Great job, there!
My CS roommate was taking a (non-CS) test, one in which you use a pencil and fill in the dot of the correct answer, i.e.,
A( ) B( ) C( ) D( ) E( )
He was annoyed that someone was looking at his answer sheet, so he "rotated right 3" all his answers.
When my roommmate finished, he just sat there until five minutes before the end of the test, then corrected all his answers.
The cheater had left as soon as his answer sheet was completely filled out...
Cheater got what he deserved.
Re:Who cheats who (Score:3, Funny)
That was what was so funny.
Anyway it wasn't obsession. I had time on my hands, and I'd never worked with Java before (this was a long time ago), so I was teaching myself stuff, and having fun, meeting people..."Hey does your program work?" "Sure" "Run it and let me see...Okay, Okay, O...What...The...Fuck?"
Re:On The Other Hand (Score:3, Funny)
My father once taught computer science to high school students. His approach was to grade the assignment, and divide the points equally among all the students who handed in substantially identical work. (One good assignment, total grade 90%. Handed in by three people -- everyone gets 30%.) The problem didn't usually recur.
Slight permutations of the assignment also provide interesting results, as each student hands in identical answers to different questions.
My friend had an interesting tale when a student came up to him (He is an English teacher) and complained that she got a 0% (everything wrong) even though her friend had the exact same answers.
His response:
Did she have the exact same questions?
She had copied her friends answers verbatim without checking that they had the same exam. It was multiple choice, so the beauty was that she scored even lower than if she had just picked all off column 'B'.
Re:Who cheats who (Score:1, Funny)
Nice, so very nice.
I remember back in the day working on a C++ program for a software engineering course late one night. Another student (Who we will call Bob) was notorious for looking over peoples shoulders to grab whatever bits of code he could. This guy was notorious for going from person to person and getting enough working code cobbled together to work. One day this guy got up from his terminal in the computer lab to go to the bathroom and forgot to lock his terminal. A buddy of mine (Who we will call Joe) scooted over to Bob's terminal and inserted some print statements in Bob's code along the lines of cout "Screw you Professor Mike"; cout "Bite my ass you arrogant jerk"; etc.
Bob returns a few minutes later and then proceeds to save the program to floppy, print out a hard copy and then leaves to slip the "completed" assignment under the professors office door.
When the professor returned the graded assignments about a week later, everyone but Bob got his back. I can still remember the look on Bob's face when the professor said "I'll need to see you after class". It was worth every damn time Bob bothered people.
Re:Journalism (Score:4, Funny)
I thought the same thing and I never even played CS.
Re:Who cheats who (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who cheats who (Score:4, Funny)
When I took CS101 I was well beyond the level of the class, so, in order to make the programming assignments interesting, I added extra functionality on top of what was requested. Little stupid stuff mostly, but I tried to make it clever, and since the testing was automated, it didn't matter as long as it was to spec.
The last project was to write a program to simulate one of those stupid "digital pets"; it had to have a pet object, and various, feed, cuddle, punish, methods, etc.
One of the boundary conditions was that the pet had to starve if you didn't feed it, but the program was set so that you could have as many pets as you wanted at the same time...Well, I decided to put a little rock 'n roll in there, and if one pet hadn't been fed for a certain amount of time, he had a chance to start a "pet deathmatch", and try to eat another pet.
The code for the combat and the actual fight was massive. Most peoples code was a couple of pages...mine was closer to 30.
I printed it out at one point, so I could take it to dinner and work on some bug, and someone swiped it off the printer, and subsequently copied the WHOLE THING and turned it in for the assignment.
Oh, thanks for the reminder (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Who cheats who (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Who cheats who (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who cheats who (Score:1, Funny)
break
Re:Who cheats who (Score:1, Funny)
Or recursion [youtube.com]