> Do not look at other students’ homework files and do not work with other students. At all.
This is a horrific policy. We work better with other people.
When I studied computer science, other students came to me for help. I helped them. We discussed problems together. I saw their code. They saw mine. No one copied: we shared approaches and style and thinking. I shared how I solved things. They learned my thinking. By explaining, I understood what I knew better. Sometimes I learned from them: an idea I wouldn’t have had alone, a new direction. All of us were better off. This was across multiple people.
It was in no way discouraged and so long as you wrote your work — while asking others for help was fine — you were okay.
Humans learn through teaching. We learn through discussion. We learn through interaction. Solitude — ‘do not work with other students. At all’ — is the exact opposite of a healthy learning environment.
I don’t care what their artificial intelligence policy is. I cannot state strongly enough how much I revolt against their human intelligence policy.
As for the lecturer’s warnings in slides: that reads like a trap.
naive to think people would follow this policy in the spirit in which it’s intended, but even then it clearly selects for the most social animals amongst your students instead of the most talented. And discussion alone is all it takes to describe the right approach, so if that’s the test, it’s meaningless to protect the mechanical syntax of implementation.
Clearly in this world the frats and the sorority members get the highest scores, and after that the best looking, the most amusing or charming etc.. so unless that’s the intent the whole approach is perhaps worth reconsidering.
If you want to teach to improve your understanding the normal thing is you become a TA so that access is open.. not open every assignment to ad hoc collaboration so you disadvantage half of the students on every assignment
It may be surprising to you but, caring about fairness and democratizing access to helpful resources doesn’t actually require any kind of disadvantage or a complex. What’s your deal though, since you want to attack that?
The course Programming in C, and other courses like Compilers, have this policy across many CS universities for many years now. It s a strict policy but it has its reasons. Assignments on early semesters are simple and short, and if students cooperate on the implementation, the result would be almost identical for everyone, while very few would have truly thought it out by themselves. Most students would not go easily through the process to struggle in order to think about the solution, if they could just copy the answer from someone else.
Thanks for the reply. I get that, and maybe I am approaching it from the perspective of someone who wanted to learn (my friends too), not someone who just wanted to pass.
But the situation I described included the basics. I specifically remember explaining pointers to a friend and working through a simple assignment on C pointers with them, for example. Absolute basics, yet collaborative working helped them greatly.
Perhaps your policy puts TAs there in that situation, and I understand that.
>> Do not look at other students’ homework files and do not work with other students. At all.
> This is a horrific policy. We work better with other people.
I think that line was in connect with quizzes, which are presumably online. Near the top of the article it says
> You may discuss assignments in a general way with other students, but you may not consult anyone else's work.
I'd be with you if they made everyone work in "clean rooms" but that is appropriate for quizzes and tests.
As someone who's graded lots of undergrads I can tell you that cheating is prolific. It's easy to identify who is copying code, but it is hard to prove. My wife teaches in another department and says the same thing. AI use has grown exponentially and it's really destructive to the education process. Though I have more complex thoughts on this and that it is just exacerbating larger problems that no one wants to actually solve because they'd be very hard to solve in a way you can have clear metrics for the bureaucrats (including industry). Proper evaluation is unfortunately always going to be fuzzy. Metrics are in contention with making a meritocracy, especially if you don't have a deep understanding of said metrics
Some of us are perfectly happy to learn in silence and solitude, and we thoroughly excel at doing so. Sorry that you don't. The broad sweeping "we humans" language gets a groan out of me. It's the sort of mentality that leads to unproductive gatherings in the working world where people want to force "learning through collisions/synergy".
I sat on a university student disciplinary panel. I assure you that your experiences are biased. There are plenty of people that flat-out copy each other.
GP was describing the platonic ideal of why we have universities instead of just textbooks, so I'd venture a guess that you're the one with a biased perspective here. Sure, some students cheat, and the appropriate penalty is throwing them out of the program. But pursuing that end to the point that you forbid students from engaging in normal collaborative learning is nuts.
As you point out, there are plenty of students who flat-out copy each other. Filtering out those students does plenty to enrich the remaining students, you don't need to go on witch hunts to find ever-more subtle cheating.
I agree. Here at U. Lisbon, we are following the recommendation by the recent MIT report: Evaluate students by talking with them, making it a social interaction, which they are lacking.
We need students to work together and share their experiences. Then we need each one to achieve the learning goals (and we should not assess work they did far from our eyes. We should assess their understanding and skills in front of us).
learning to think is orthogonal to american universities, who's goal is to get government money via fed backed loans to fund professors real hobby: doin cool science
standardized and written tests, online school, homework, etc is just a way for professors (and increasingly, just TA's) who have no interest in teaching, to get the job done with less time and more efficiently.
I had a CS professor who worked like this. We had assignments and tests, and they did have grades, but your overall grade in the course ultimately boiled down to convincing him that you understood the course material. As someone who excelled at the material, but could be a bit hit-or-miss on bothering to complete assignments, I loved it. Students who were used to optimizing their efforts and obsessing over each point hated it. It didn't come up in that course, but the issue with such a grading scheme is that sometimes students and professors really don't see eye-to-eye. Most of the time it's the professor's fault, holding some sort of prejudice. A grading scheme like I described would be disastrous for such students.
This is a good approach, and is used in some situations. But, it has challenges in terms of scalability. It is not impossible for larger enrollment courses (this course had 600 students), but there are certainly trade-offs in terms of consistency in grading, overall student experience, etc.
Sounds like to me maybe universities should stop focusing on being cash grabbing machines and instead properly teach with a useful instructor-to-student ratio?
Sorry, if your answer as to why using a beneficial pedagogical approach is your class sizes are too large, then it sounds like your class sizes are too large!
Given the professor's professional interest in cheating-catching tools, I'm suspecting wanting to get good, interesting data motivated a lot of their behavior here, even in ways he might not consciously realize.
I'll pile onto the agreement stack. Abso-100%-freaking-lutely. I worked with my friends through all our assignments, bouncing ideas off each other, talking through confusing bits, etc., and then doing the work ourselves. We didn't ask "how do you write this line of code", but "how are you approaching this problem?". I learned as much from the discussion as I did from the implementation. Throwing that out is absolute madness. No way.
It's important to note that the students are encouraged to interact with the many teaching assistants that we have available. And, while that slide is somewhat harsh in how it states it, the larger lecture discussion surrounding it makes it clear that students are permitted to discuss assignments in a general way. When you get into implementation details, that's where the academic integrity problem arises.
For people that haven't spent time teaching lower-level programming courses, policies like this may seem overly harsh. But, remember, they're not solving particularly advanced problems at this stage. Instead they're mastering fundamentals. An analogy I like to use is learning to play the piano. If someone else is doing it for you, you're not going to develop the skill.
The main reason for the policy is that many students are not able to walk the line between leading someone to a solution and giving them a solution. The teaching staff know how to do this. When students help each other in situations like this, many times they end up just providing code or allowing someone to look at their code (ultimately copying it), etc.
I appreciate your reply, and thankyou. It did strike me as harsh, yes, and I was rather horrified when I wrote the parent comment. But I think I was also responding to the tone of the article, which struck me as almost setting traps - that kind of emphasis on the student being responsible for understanding something broad yet not saying what it is specifically in the broad material they need to look out for, for example.
Yet I also understand your view -- students providing and copying code yet not learning and doing work themselves. I completely get that needs to be found. Yet, reading the article I felt truly scared for the students who might get caught up in this yet I don't think would have actually done anything wrong.
> Yet I also understand your view -- students providing and copying code yet not learning and doing work themselves. I completely get that needs to be found. Yet, reading the article I felt truly scared for the students who might get caught up in this yet I don't think would have actually done anything wrong.
I get that, and I think that is partly what drove a lot of the initial turmoil when this started. But, the important thing to recognize (and this could have been better emphasized for sure) is that it's really easy to tell whether someone caught up in this is cheating. A 5 minute discussion is all it takes. And, yeah, maybe some could BS their way through a discussion like that if they had a heads up, but at that point 1) they've now learned at least some of the material and 2) you're not going to catch everyone anyway. Processes like this are somewhat like a police officer catching people speeding. The enforcement alone discourages the behavior, to a degree, and you're never going to catch everyone.
vintagedave · · focus · HN ↗
This is a horrific policy. We work better with other people.
When I studied computer science, other students came to me for help. I helped them. We discussed problems together. I saw their code. They saw mine. No one copied: we shared approaches and style and thinking. I shared how I solved things. They learned my thinking. By explaining, I understood what I knew better. Sometimes I learned from them: an idea I wouldn’t have had alone, a new direction. All of us were better off. This was across multiple people.
It was in no way discouraged and so long as you wrote your work — while asking others for help was fine — you were okay.
Humans learn through teaching. We learn through discussion. We learn through interaction. Solitude — ‘do not work with other students. At all’ — is the exact opposite of a healthy learning environment.
I don’t care what their artificial intelligence policy is. I cannot state strongly enough how much I revolt against their human intelligence policy.
As for the lecturer’s warnings in slides: that reads like a trap.
ianjbutler · · focus · HN ↗
Clearly in this world the frats and the sorority members get the highest scores, and after that the best looking, the most amusing or charming etc.. so unless that’s the intent the whole approach is perhaps worth reconsidering.
If you want to teach to improve your understanding the normal thing is you become a TA so that access is open.. not open every assignment to ad hoc collaboration so you disadvantage half of the students on every assignment
UqWBcuFx6NV4r · · focus · HN ↗
ianjbutler · · focus · HN ↗
charamis · · focus · HN ↗
trillic · · focus · HN ↗
vintagedave · · focus · HN ↗
But the situation I described included the basics. I specifically remember explaining pointers to a friend and working through a simple assignment on C pointers with them, for example. Absolute basics, yet collaborative working helped them greatly.
Perhaps your policy puts TAs there in that situation, and I understand that.
godelski · · focus · HN ↗
As someone who's graded lots of undergrads I can tell you that cheating is prolific. It's easy to identify who is copying code, but it is hard to prove. My wife teaches in another department and says the same thing. AI use has grown exponentially and it's really destructive to the education process. Though I have more complex thoughts on this and that it is just exacerbating larger problems that no one wants to actually solve because they'd be very hard to solve in a way you can have clear metrics for the bureaucrats (including industry). Proper evaluation is unfortunately always going to be fuzzy. Metrics are in contention with making a meritocracy, especially if you don't have a deep understanding of said metrics
dolebirchwood · · focus · HN ↗
UqWBcuFx6NV4r · · focus · HN ↗
OkayPhysicist · · focus · HN ↗
As you point out, there are plenty of students who flat-out copy each other. Filtering out those students does plenty to enrich the remaining students, you don't need to go on witch hunts to find ever-more subtle cheating.
alcidesfonseca · · focus · HN ↗
We need students to work together and share their experiences. Then we need each one to achieve the learning goals (and we should not assess work they did far from our eyes. We should assess their understanding and skills in front of us).
calvinmorrison · · focus · HN ↗
standardized and written tests, online school, homework, etc is just a way for professors (and increasingly, just TA's) who have no interest in teaching, to get the job done with less time and more efficiently.
Oral exams solve this problem entirely
OkayPhysicist · · focus · HN ↗
luke0016 · · focus · HN ↗
gremlinunderway · · focus · HN ↗
Sorry, if your answer as to why using a beneficial pedagogical approach is your class sizes are too large, then it sounds like your class sizes are too large!
luke0016 · · focus · HN ↗
golly_ned · · focus · HN ↗
kstrauser · · focus · HN ↗
pyreko · · focus · HN ↗
So... what it says?
kstrauser · · focus · HN ↗
luke0016 · · focus · HN ↗
For people that haven't spent time teaching lower-level programming courses, policies like this may seem overly harsh. But, remember, they're not solving particularly advanced problems at this stage. Instead they're mastering fundamentals. An analogy I like to use is learning to play the piano. If someone else is doing it for you, you're not going to develop the skill.
The main reason for the policy is that many students are not able to walk the line between leading someone to a solution and giving them a solution. The teaching staff know how to do this. When students help each other in situations like this, many times they end up just providing code or allowing someone to look at their code (ultimately copying it), etc.
vintagedave · · focus · HN ↗
Yet I also understand your view -- students providing and copying code yet not learning and doing work themselves. I completely get that needs to be found. Yet, reading the article I felt truly scared for the students who might get caught up in this yet I don't think would have actually done anything wrong.
luke0016 · · focus · HN ↗
I get that, and I think that is partly what drove a lot of the initial turmoil when this started. But, the important thing to recognize (and this could have been better emphasized for sure) is that it's really easy to tell whether someone caught up in this is cheating. A 5 minute discussion is all it takes. And, yeah, maybe some could BS their way through a discussion like that if they had a heads up, but at that point 1) they've now learned at least some of the material and 2) you're not going to catch everyone anyway. Processes like this are somewhat like a police officer catching people speeding. The enforcement alone discourages the behavior, to a degree, and you're never going to catch everyone.