We use honor pledges not to reduce cheating directly - but rather, to create incontrovertible evidence that the student was aware of the course policies. This supports those rare cases where a student chooses to fight a plagiarism case and claims ignorance of the policy, especially in cases where it may not be University-wide policy - e.g. a policy against AI usage. Students can argue they didn’t read the syllabus, missed the first day of class, etc. but have a harder time arguing they signed a pledge without reading it.
We regularly catch cheaters in our classes; I do so every term and report all the cases I see up to the dean. In my experience these have not resulted in catastrophic declines in teaching evaluations; the few unhappy with getting caught cheating are drowned out by the 80-90% who don’t cheat.
It is actually critically important that institutions take cheating seriously. Rampant, well-known cheating can tank the reputation of a program or institution, or at the very least serve to cheapen the value of the degree.
I think cheating is increasing over time. There are a number of reports about this I have read from individual universities. The problem is that if cheating becomes widespread enough, the schools don't have the power to do much about it when they rely on the tuition revenue. For example, this article https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/8/honor-council-w... makes the point that academic integrity violations are increasing while enforcement is decreasing. If you read the punishments given, they are basically along the lines of strongly worded letters.
A lot of the tier-3 schools are getting desperate due to declining enrollment. Demographic changes are killing them. Tolerating cheating might help them keep enrollment up for a few more years by attracting the laziest students but eventually this will wreck their reputation with employers and lead to a death spiral. If those schools want to survive then some will need to pivot to other business models, like become a trade school or corporate training center.
United States culture celebrates and often elects grifters, whose core precept can be summarized as “either you’re running the con, or you’re the mark”. Cheating at academics is treated no differently, through a social lens, from attempting to scam a widow out of her insurance payout: simply attempting to run the con places you in a higher social caste than those marks who do not attempt any con, even if you fail. That the cheaters often get caught is much less relevant to them than the shame and shunning and demotion to the lesser caste that their peers would respond with if they did not try to grift their grades — even if they could graduate with a 4.3 without cheating at all! (I don’t personally subscribe to these beliefs, but it’s important to understand why ‘cheating is wrong’ is so contentious in U.S. culture, if only to be able to evaluate whether academic policies are designed effectively to decrease the rate of cheating per student capita.)
It may be pre-conceptions, but after a while you know where to look. Its "imperial"-entitled cultures that produce the most hefty cheaters. "I belong to the cultural, god-chosen center of the universe therefore i excel" as an attitude.
And then there is face-culture, which assumes that everyone puts up a show anyway and the grades are created by a bribe competition of the families heads in some backroom.
There is a reason, why academia refuses to read a ton of papers from certain countries unless they get propelled by other trusted sources to the top of the heap. A mediocre, honest student is worth 20 fake doctors with accolades.
US and California culture have lots of problems around arrogance and refusal to see or hear the rest of the world, but refusing to read research from American universities seems harsh. Because the most powerful state that has ever existed is the imperial, entitled culture you meant right?
As an undergrad student, I can tell you that cheating is rampant.
It kind of sucks for those who don't and are genuinely curious because it's frustrating to see someone else easily passing with less effort spent.
What I think teachers could do is to come up with truly novel and strange assignments that require real curiosity and creativity (and some do, which is great). I can only assume this to get harder and harder with modern AI readily available to everyone but perhaps the key is to assign something that would take a long time even with these tools. It should be as hard as necessary which is only all the more fulfilling to a curious student.
I don’t know how this would work for CS, but in law school I had one professor that did final oral examinations as follows: there were about 15-20 cornerstone topics from the class that were possible exam questions and were announced a few weeks before finals. Then, during finals week(s), each student had a 30 minute block during which they would randomly select 3 of the 10 topics by pulling note cards and engaging in a conversation about the topic with the professor. If you knew the basics of the topic you were almost guaranteed a B or B+; if you demonstrated novel or expansive knowledge you got a higher grade… and you really had to not study to get a C+ or lower.
There are flaws in every method of measuring competency but I thought this was one of the better ones, and it is very difficult to cheat on. His exams were by far the least grumbled about and I don’t recall a single student that thought the method was unfair. And even though this required more upfront work from the professor he said it was ultimately less time consuming than grading written exams, and far more enjoyable.
Agree that time spent preventing cheating is preferable to time spent detecting or punishing cheating, and that all are terrible distractions from time spent actually teaching. In response to OP saying that honor pledges are unhelpful, GP only mentions that they can make the punishment part less painful and time-consuming, but I can personally confirm GP exhausts the prevention route (including putting out "novel and strange" assignments :) ) before trying to detect and punish cheating, at least in my experience.
I've heard many a story about professors treating it like a trap door, paying no attention to prevention and much more to detection/punishment to the point you'd think they're sadistic pleasure out of it. (I doubt they are, but you'd have to numb yourself to it in that position.) In certain ways, I guess this is better than pushing people through to the next class—giving them no option but to catch up quickly or cheat more—but it isn't great...
OP mostly talks about detection/punishment, but I think it's also the job of course staff to make cheating as impossible as possible before it happens. Engaging and novel assignments are great; putting more weight on exams is low-cost and acceptable.
There's this myth that cracking down on cheating tanks your ratings, but in reality, most students want a fair playing field and respect instructors who maintain standards
I read through the honor board reports at my law school once and they were disgusting. People blatantly cheated, then would make up some sort of excuse and the honor board would do nothing. The punishments for cheating should be certain and severe.
It’s not just about the reputation of the schools, it’s about society as a whole. A chronic problem in the third world is widespread cheating and low level corruption. The last straw that convinced my dad to leave our home country was a phone line installer asking for a bribe when he came to install a second line. If we don’t police our culture we will degenerate into that sort of behavior over time.
I don't condone cheating but it's a bit less of a concern in law school. Ultimately they still have to pass the bar exam. In the USA at least it's quite difficult to cheat on that, although I don't know whether the same applies in your home country.
>Students can argue they didn’t read the syllabus, missed the first day of class, etc. but have a harder time arguing they signed a pledge without reading it.
I am confused as to why anyone would need to sign a pledge to provide proof that they are aware cheating is bad. If you don’t know that by the time you are in university, then tough luck. One would hope a defense of “I didn’t know cheating was frowned upon” would get you laughed out.
It is because many people hide behind "legal" when they want to dodge accusation of "unethical". And since the process of expulsion or other punishment is sort of legalistic, the institution needs legalistic defense.
If you’re arguing that then the answer is: too bad. These sorts of pledges are not 30 pages of legalese that you’re asked to agree to in the middle of a purchase. It’s usually a single page of plain language. If someone signs it without reading it they lose all rights to argue they weren’t aware. Choosing to remain unaware is not a defense.
Two things can be true at once. You can take your pledge seriously, which is the happy path. And in the event that you choose the unhappy path, it can also be used as evidence that you understood the requirements. The overwhelming majority of my students choose the happy path.
The institutions you refer to are rotten to the core obsessed with rankings, endowments, research funding, and keeping as many high paying students enrolled as possible.
What is the incentive to censure/eject a sucker, uh, student that is paying 50-100k per year for a social class badge?
These institutions are professional sports programs, have satellite universities in Saudi Arabian for oil money grift, use minimum wage labor for their putative core mission of education, have suspicious numbers of overseas and legacy but not legacy admissions.
Lost in the Harvard trump battle is the 50 billion endowment Harvard has, and how expensive it still is to go there, and how Harvard basically refuses to expand its enrollment.
I think this misses just one important nuance - cheating is often done out of desperation and it might bee important to try to understand that desperation before deciding on the degree of punishment. For instance, if the student is dealing with a recent diagnosis of e.g. depression or adhd. You really can't know the extent of anguish some might go through before deciding they "have to" cheat in order to hopefully have some semblance of normalcy in their future career.
Obviously cheating is unacceptable, but empathy can really help the student in this situation.
A person's true character comes out in hard times.
A disciplined character will handle hard times well. An undisciplined character will not.
Compassion exists, sure. But morality doesn't disappear just because something bad happens. Compassion should be sought after before resorting to cheating, not after.
So how would we expect the same student to handle a situation later in their academic career faced with the perceived choice between fudging a study or losing funding for their lab?
Properly aligned incentives need to be enforced from day 0.
Cheating is done by ppl who don't put in the effort and take the easy way out. Someone who is depressed wouldn't care enough to cheat. Too much empathy where it is not required has become the bane of society.
I would argue that nothing is more destructive for academic and intellectual activities than what you propose.
It immediately replaces the ideal result, which is a true assessment, with a feelings-based assessment, and it undermines academic honesty for all students.
What must be done is to teach the students that failing an exam is OK, and help them recover the learning mindset. Evaluations are intended to measure the things learned and the things that need to improve. Evaluations are not a punishment.
My school solved this quite well, I think. Homework wasn't graded. You were supposed to build a project or a series of projects. There was a practical exam at the end of the term where you were asked to make one big change to your homework project, and you were given 3 or 4 hours to do it in the computer room. It was really tough, and impossible to pass if you had not implemented everything yourself and knew things inside out.
This is a brilliant solution for a project-based course. It does take a decent amount of effort to go through each students project and give them an ask that you know isn’t ChatGPT-able.
Another great solution is to give an interview-like oral whiteboard interview for midterms/final. Quite time consuming (you can’t just assign the TA’s a grading prompt) but quite effective.
The requested change was the same for everyone. They would have also run your project through a series of unit tests and would let you fix your code if they had encountered any bugs. Being able to implement the change was a necessary condition to prove you had authored the code and pass but, overall, the project would be graded based on architectural decisions, algorithms and data structures, coding style, etc. I guess this is not done at other schools because it's a hell lot of work for teachers and passing rates are low. It's quite brutal.
I doubt the change was relevant. I would expect if they can reasonably make a change even if not totally ideal, the work as first submitted can be evaluated on it’s own as it is shown to be original work.
> It was really tough, and impossible to pass if you had not implemented everything yourself and knew things inside out.
... and required an awful lot of resources to grade, unsustainable for modern academia that has been perverted to be mostly a diploma mill.
No front but a "CS degree" is, for 99% of the people that have one, factually useless - people only do it because employers use it as a very efficient filter to weed out everyone who might have an issue with what big corporate demands - cogs in a wheel, not artisans with own opinions. The purpose of academia isn't science and advancing it anymore, it is raking in tuition money on one side and molding people to corporate drone conformity.
> No front but a "CS degree" is, for 99% of the people that have one, factually useless
I just don't understand how people can believe this. I learned most of my programming skills in college, and everyone I know did too. I could program before, but really poorly, because I didn't have fundamental computer science knowledge. Taking algorithms, theoretical comp sci, discrete structures - these transformed me from a code monkey to a real programmer.
> employers use it as a very efficient filter to weed out everyone who might have an issue with what big corporate demands - cogs in a wheel, not artisans with own opinions.
I think the simpler explanation is that the CS degree is supposed to be an independent verification that the student has learned and can employ fundamental aspects of CS.
I realize that verification can often be wrong (especially now with the ubiquity of LLMs), but I think the view that employers are simply looking for "cogs" and avoiding "artisans" is an arrogant and cynical take on what a degree is supposed to indicate.
I took a similar exam where the grading was done by a TA trying a bunch of random test cases and recording how many passed. Hardly an awful lot of resources. For the purpose of stopping plagiarism, knowing that the solution was live-coded was enough.
My experience is exactly the opposite. I learned so much during my degree. I also did an MSc and PhD and I learned even more there. As to employers, most did not give two rotten figs abut my degrees. They cared about culture fit and a baseline of skill, and that's it. I think some employers and senior colleagues even looked down on me for having a CS degree.
That hasn't been my experience in my professional life at all. On the contrary people with no formal education are normally bad at their job, in my experience.
I'm a prof. The easy solution is to give very little weight to homework. The assignments should be designed to teach concepts. Concepts that are then tested in a controlled environment, where cheating is not possible.
Remove the incentive to cheat, and save yourself the time trying to catch it (and punish it, despite an uncooperative administration).
Problem is, homework is also what most closely matches real work. Tests are good for controlling the environment (we need them too!) but some students will just naturally be better at homework. Also, incentivizing students to put time and effort into the homework builds work ethic which will serve them well in the working world.
Personally, the best classes I had all had rigorous homework assignments. I would learn much more from them than studying for the tests. In fact, doing the homeworks would generally cover more than would be possible to test.
Plus I'm just glad to have built things like a DNS server, and inode filesysyem. Many small games and web servers. Database applications, shells, and compilers just to name a few. These are all things that give me confidence as a programmer.
> Problem is, homework is also what most closely matches real work.
...I wonder if this is true. "Real work" sometimes requires you to perform in the moment. You can't always just pull an all-nighter to get it done if you're slow.
Also, the best way to do better on a test is to do homework to prepare for the test. And teachers can still assign homework to help students learn, they just can't necessarily use the results for assessment.
The biggest value I received in my undergraduate courses was from the classes where I built large projects. Building a compiler from scratch, piece by awful piece. Implementing a ray tracer, from splines to shaders. Even if I don't use compilers or graphics in my day-to-day work, it was my experience of building those larger-scale systems and working through the problems that benefited me.
As a teacher I just don't know how to replicate that experience in a world where half will skip the work, and all I'm able to do is a two-hour sanity check that they learned some concepts. How do I test for "the experience you developed spending four hours making that register allocator behave properly, to the point where you're intimately familiar with every failure mode"?
>How do I test for "the experience you developed spending four hours making that register allocator behave properly, to the point where you're intimately familiar with every failure mode"?
ask them to list and describe failure modes on your exam.
I really enjoyed how they did it in Tübingen, where I did my masters. You usually had to achieve a certain score on the homework (usually 50-75% of the overall points) in order to be qualified to take the exam. Additionally, if you did really well you got a few bonus points on the exam (something around 80/90%+). This incentivised you to take the homework seriously, especially if you want to get the bonus points. But you still have the written exam at the end as the "controlled environment" and something you have to prepare for, so you can not just listen to the slides once and then forget it after doing the single exercise
The grade system we implemented was a little program: you can pass the class if you get a passing grade on your HW and tests (weighted average); if you fail either HW or exams, you get the lower of the two.
This solution is heavily dependent on the material.
An intro to CS class where every answer is a few lines of pseudocode might be able to effectively teach the material by forcing everything on to the test.
A software engineering class that just test your knowledge of memorizing patterns and makes the project where you actually implement real software incorporating the patterns worth nothing would be useless to actually teaching students anything they can use after graduation.
Agreed. Generations of students had their degree classifications determined by a small number of final exams under exam conditions. Why did we move away from that, opening up all of these routes to score degree grading in non exam conditions?
Lectures were originally created as a way to share a single book. Since printing was expensive, a reader would stand at a lectern and read the material aloud. You might say "why don't we have all the students share a single book, that worked fine" but the truth is it was a crummy solution to a resource constraint problem.
Similarly, exam-only courses are an excellent way to teach huge numbers of students without the costly hassle of grading homework assignments. But that doesn't mean they're an optimal solution.
From my experience as a student and now a professor, nothing can possibly compare to the benefit you get from hands-on learning. You get so much more understanding from the 20 hours you spent making a complex system work, than you will ever get in three 3-6 hours of in-class instruction you'd get during the same timeframe. And I have no good idea how to test for all the skills you learn from "writing a tiny OS kernel from scratch in C" or "building a compiler" or "implementing a complicated cryptographic protocol and then realizing an attack on it." I do observe that my students who do the homework tend to do much better on the exams, but I'm concerned that the incentive to take shortcuts will be much too high if homework isn't required.
Just my personal theory, but maybe universities wanted to avoid being considered just pay-to-test institutions that couldn't justify their insane and continuously rising costs when the only thing that really mattered for a degree was passing an exam. Someone spending thousands of dollars just to skip every class but then show up and pass the exam test is not a good look for the university and could devalue the entire thing from the perspective of the public and potential future students. But if someone is required to go to every class nobody can easily claim the classes were pointless or bogus for passing exams and getting a degree because nobody can do that. Increases in overall schooling costs can also be explained away as more invested in classes whether it was true or not. And it makes people who were forced to attend classes whether they wanted to or needed to look disfavorably upon the potential for future students to be allowed to simply pass an exam by completely itself, in a sort of bucket of crabs situation where people think "I had to go through all this bogus stuff for my piece of paper, these younger kids should have to too!"
But I have zero qualifications for any of these opinions other than having been forced to attend a number of nearly worthless university classes that were pointless in the face of just reading the course book. Of course I also had some classes that were worth way more than just the book material, but probably half the classes I had to take I felt were dubiously useful to start with, not to mention the absolutely terrible actual class, and forcing people to attend to get a passing grade was just there to prevent 95% of the class being empty every week.
The easy bad solution: this also gives little incentive to do homework and thus actually learn, instead perpetuating the bad practice of cramming learning before one big "controlled environment" exam.
From my own university experience . . . admittedly, many years ago . . . for me, the assignments were a distraction from learning. Regardless, it's not the professor's job to force students to learn; it's the student's job to learn if they want to.
No, that works well IME. If it's worth something towards the final grade, even 1%, most students will do it. It can be hard to persuade some of my students not to spend multiple hours attempting to get 0.1% more of the course grade by doing another quiz attempt when they've already achieved 90% - I think they're better off moving on to the next thing.
The incentive to cheat is the money paid to participate in the undergraduate program plus the career expected to follow from it. Remove those and you will have no students. But what you describe wouldn't remove the incentive to cheat, just make cheating a different and presumably more difficult process. But as long as it's easier to cheat than not to cheat, rational students will continue to cheat.
That’s assuming the administration will allow you to administer the exams onsite which is increasingly not the case. Online students bring in more money.
I will weigh in on my wife's experiences, as she teaches computer engineering.
Plagiarism is now rampant - but for structural reasons. The university seemingly decided they want the money of foreign students, and started deciding that degrees from certain foreign universities counted as prerequisites for CS Masters programs.
A lot of these foreign students somehow have little programming skill despite undergraduate degrees in CS.
The cheating is obvious. She gives students 0's with no push back from administration if she thinks they are cheating. Some amazing stories:
- Students who turn in assignments with someone else's name of them
- Students who admit to cheating and do it again and again, never becoming more sophisticated at it.
- Students who get caught cheating 5 times and ask if there is any way they can pass the course.
- Students who despite being told there is no way to pass the course, request a call or in person meeting to discuss how they might be able to pass the course (she has never taken them up on this - one wonders what their pitch would be)
Cheaters who put a little effort in are undetectable. Or at least she suspects, but can prove nothing and grades the (not obviously plagiarized) code on its own merits. The general feeling is that barring these foreign students, cheating is there but not too widespread.
She does, indeed, have a bad rating on RateMyProfessor and does not care. Her administration still thinks highly of her because of her other work (such as running accreditation programs).
If you are a professor YMMV. This is how it is for my wife.
I get that it's easy to cheat on homework, but tests can be more locked-down. Is it possible to retroactively ding a homework grade if subsequent testing shows that the student truly does not know how to do the concept from the homework?
Obviously we all forget things over time, but if the homework was suspect from the beginning, and when the student is tested he has just no idea whatsoever, that could be grounds for taking back some of the homework credit.
The underlying problem is not plagiarism, but the fact that many problems are essentially solved and known solutions everywhere, and tying one's grades to how well one can regurgigate the solution or look it up online, instead of a reflection of one's mental skill and knowledge.
Some of them simply don’t generalize, like creating new homework assignments from scratch each semester.
As much as I'm loathe to suggest using AI in CS, that's actually something an LLM might be able to help with --- generating tons of pseudorandom variations on a theme.
I think making assignments completely for practice, and having 100% of the grade be the final exam, where there is zero computer use and pure brain use, outputting on pen-and-paper, will work. Anyone who tries to cheat will only cheat themselves and have the results of that exam reflect their actual understanding.
If you really want to dig into it, the problem is that there are a huge number of students who don't know anything at all about how or why to learn. If they actually wanted to learn and understood how exercises help them, the fact that they're all well-known problems really wouldn't be a big deal.
But universities are businesses now. They produce diplomas in exchange for money, and interrupting that with details like "this student shouldn't be here" costs them money they can't afford to lose.
> the problem is that there are a huge number of students who don't know anything at all about how or why to learn.
How much of this has to do with the students being generally still immature. Had I gone to school at this time, I almost certainly would have felt this way, or some compatible way that diminished my effort.
> and tying one's grades to how well one can regurgigate the solution or look it up online, instead of a reflection of one's mental skill and knowledge.
The homework is supposed to be for practice.
I’ve heard multiple stories of professors for undergrads who tried making homework optional, but the number of students failing exams increased dramatically because fewer people did the homework.
LLMs have short circuited a lot of student’s thought process and even sense of morals. A lot of students who wouldn’t copy a friend’s homework or even copy and paste from GitHub have started using LLMs to do their homework. I don’t really know what it is. Maybe a sense that because they’re using a tool that it’s not cheating? Thinking they’re less likely to get caught because it’s not identical to existing work?
I agree that weighting the exams most heavily is the only way out, but I’m sure we’re in for a struggle as universities see the shocking grade drops that come with that practice.
but the number of students failing exams increased dramatically because fewer people did the homework.
In a sane world that would be a "not our problem", as the horses have been brought to water and they just won't drink, but unfortunately institutions chasing pass rates metrics as a pure indicator of instructor skills pushes towards increased leniency in grading and that's another can of worms which I won't open here.
> I don’t really know what it is. Maybe a sense that because they’re using a tool that it’s not cheating? Thinking they’re less likely to get caught because it’s not identical to existing work?
That would make sense. The logic that they are not copying work from another student or copying someone else’s “efforts” so to speak.
Another aspect is how easy it is. It’s not having to find someone to copy it from, or search online and so on. It’s “just open an llm chat window and ask”.
The worst part is those that don’t cheat will hear how so and so uses llms to do homework and nails all the answers unpunished while they are barely managing, trying to do honest work. That stuff is soul killing.
> I’ve heard multiple stories of professors for undergrads who tried making homework optional, but the number of students failing exams increased dramatically because fewer people did the homework.
And possibly because they told developers use AI on the job.
I'm seeing in work that developers are producing code they don't understand. I think overall AI is making it harder for them to learn because the temptation is to just use what ever it produces. Especially when this is combined with measuring productivity on tickets closed.
Same thing for the Brazilian university I went to. Homework was optional, and there were "filter" classes like Calculus at the start of all STEM subjects where if you are not taking it seriously you are going to fail. Not a single final exam, I think we had 3 exams during the semester. Which was good so that the first exam was able to scare people straight.
And an university is not a school. Nobody should be forced to take it, if you are not interested in learning just go home. But at the same time, a quality university should have a high barrier so that only people that actually learned and have demonstrated to have learned the required subjects, in a setting where cheating is almost impossible, should be able to get a diploma.
In many areas of computing, I hate setting pen and paper exams.
Asking people to write Java (or whatever) on paper is crazy, it doesn't really line up with anything you would ever do in the real world, and expecting people to memorize the signatures of functions feels like a total waste of time.
On the other hand, we have to accept that LLMs are I think, at this point, better than over half of all 1st year University students, so we can't let students use LLMs, without either letting half of students pass with no effort, or making tests harder and failing half of students -- and that isn't a long term solution, as I imagine LLMs are just going to keep getting better.
Couldn't you have an exam room with raspberry pi's flashed with a fresh install of debian (or whatever) and no internet and just say you are allowed to lookup anything that's preinstalled on the system plus a PDF of the go to reference for whatever language you are asking them to program in.
This is an absurd argument. You could make the exact same argument about addition (5+9 is definitely 'solved') and yet we still make children practice, practice, practice this stuff.
I took computer science for a year before flunking out. My parents pushed me into college. My father didn't want me to join the Navy like he had done, when he was a young man. A lot of conversations about my future earning potential with an undergraduate degree took place in the lobbies of payday loan joints.
I plagiarized quite a bit in school. I'm not proud of it. Desperation and poor role models can create all sorts of negative outcomes, though. I was taught how to survive, not how to live ethically.
You can try to filter the plagiarists, sure. But uh, I'm not sure if it will work. The plagiarists are in league with each other.
I don't like cheating, but honestly I find your behavior hard to judge.
The reality, to me, seems to be that universities sell credentials with learning as a sort of sideshow or window dressing.
I've met a lot of excellent engineers who didn't have degrees. I have met a lot of terrible ones who did. I can tell you which group has an easier time getting hired... and I don't think I am focusing on edge cases. The system is broken.
So do whatever you have to to get that permission slip to work from the education-industrial complex. By all means, please learn your trade as well, but let's not pretend like "knowledge" is what you are paying six figures for at a university. Knowledge is available for free. It's certification that costs as much as a house.
Yours is probably the most important comment. It's always important to understand why the person is doing the wrong thing. It's a serious lack of integrity to cheat, and what child is born dishonest? Something pushed these young people to these levels and that's the real thing that, no pun intended, needs examination.
The solution to plagiarism is the same for all subjects: abandon continuous assessment and have viva voce as a significant part of the final.
When I studied applied physics eons ago we had tutorials in term time and a substantial essay to complete in the long vacation but these were between the student and the tutor and had no effect on the final class of degree; that was determined by a series of final exams (open note), the report of the final year laboratory project and its oral defence. My project report was more than a hundred typewritten pages with numerous diagrams and I had to defend it to my project supervisor and the head of department. I don't think a plagiarist could have done it.
Of course this is expensive, all the academics involved were permanent employees of the university, there were no graduate students doing slave labour tutoring.
In my opinion the plague of plagiarism is a direct consequence of attempts to get education on the cheap and of valuing the diploma more than the education itself.
> Then, we apply another filter, keeping only the cases that contain indisputable evidence — for example, hundreds of lines copied right down to the last whitespace error. We have virtually eliminated false positives at this point.
My friends who teach used the same level of filtering in the past: They suspected a lot of students from copying from each other, but they only took action on the cases where it was so undeniably obvious that it would be an open and shut case.
In the era of LLMs, that degree of precision is completely gone. However, the other signal is amplified: They have more students than ever getting 100s on homework and completely failing any exams. In the past it seems that many of the plagiarizers at least learned something, however minimal, in the process of copying homework and then trying to turn it into something that looked less suspicious. The LLM users are so brazen that they just submit the prompt, copy the output, and call it a day.
> The LLM users are so brazen that they just submit the prompt, copy the output, and call it a day.
Is this not what all the potential employers claim to want anyway? I sometimes wonder how many of us are employed to actually make things, and how many of us serve as ways to convince investors that the AI money bonfire was not a bonfire.
Readit News
We regularly catch cheaters in our classes; I do so every term and report all the cases I see up to the dean. In my experience these have not resulted in catastrophic declines in teaching evaluations; the few unhappy with getting caught cheating are drowned out by the 80-90% who don’t cheat.
It is actually critically important that institutions take cheating seriously. Rampant, well-known cheating can tank the reputation of a program or institution, or at the very least serve to cheapen the value of the degree.
And then there is face-culture, which assumes that everyone puts up a show anyway and the grades are created by a bribe competition of the families heads in some backroom.
There is a reason, why academia refuses to read a ton of papers from certain countries unless they get propelled by other trusted sources to the top of the heap. A mediocre, honest student is worth 20 fake doctors with accolades.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1296860.pdf
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10805-021-09391-8
What I think teachers could do is to come up with truly novel and strange assignments that require real curiosity and creativity (and some do, which is great). I can only assume this to get harder and harder with modern AI readily available to everyone but perhaps the key is to assign something that would take a long time even with these tools. It should be as hard as necessary which is only all the more fulfilling to a curious student.
There are flaws in every method of measuring competency but I thought this was one of the better ones, and it is very difficult to cheat on. His exams were by far the least grumbled about and I don’t recall a single student that thought the method was unfair. And even though this required more upfront work from the professor he said it was ultimately less time consuming than grading written exams, and far more enjoyable.
I've heard many a story about professors treating it like a trap door, paying no attention to prevention and much more to detection/punishment to the point you'd think they're sadistic pleasure out of it. (I doubt they are, but you'd have to numb yourself to it in that position.) In certain ways, I guess this is better than pushing people through to the next class—giving them no option but to catch up quickly or cheat more—but it isn't great...
OP mostly talks about detection/punishment, but I think it's also the job of course staff to make cheating as impossible as possible before it happens. Engaging and novel assignments are great; putting more weight on exams is low-cost and acceptable.
It’s not just about the reputation of the schools, it’s about society as a whole. A chronic problem in the third world is widespread cheating and low level corruption. The last straw that convinced my dad to leave our home country was a phone line installer asking for a bribe when he came to install a second line. If we don’t police our culture we will degenerate into that sort of behavior over time.
I am confused as to why anyone would need to sign a pledge to provide proof that they are aware cheating is bad. If you don’t know that by the time you are in university, then tough luck. One would hope a defense of “I didn’t know cheating was frowned upon” would get you laughed out.
This is easy to argue, people do it all the time (hello, TOS). So there is nothing incontrovertible about it.
It also contradicts the goal for pledges expressed by those setting this policy, they want to "strengthen the dedication to academic integrity" etc
To me it seems completely congruent with your quotation.
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What is the incentive to censure/eject a sucker, uh, student that is paying 50-100k per year for a social class badge?
These institutions are professional sports programs, have satellite universities in Saudi Arabian for oil money grift, use minimum wage labor for their putative core mission of education, have suspicious numbers of overseas and legacy but not legacy admissions.
Lost in the Harvard trump battle is the 50 billion endowment Harvard has, and how expensive it still is to go there, and how Harvard basically refuses to expand its enrollment.
Obviously cheating is unacceptable, but empathy can really help the student in this situation.
A disciplined character will handle hard times well. An undisciplined character will not.
Compassion exists, sure. But morality doesn't disappear just because something bad happens. Compassion should be sought after before resorting to cheating, not after.
Properly aligned incentives need to be enforced from day 0.
It immediately replaces the ideal result, which is a true assessment, with a feelings-based assessment, and it undermines academic honesty for all students.
What must be done is to teach the students that failing an exam is OK, and help them recover the learning mindset. Evaluations are intended to measure the things learned and the things that need to improve. Evaluations are not a punishment.
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Another great solution is to give an interview-like oral whiteboard interview for midterms/final. Quite time consuming (you can’t just assign the TA’s a grading prompt) but quite effective.
E.g. implement a simple compiler for a C-ish language with only functions, if and while loops; as the big change, ask to add for loops.
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Do you have examples of projects used?
... and required an awful lot of resources to grade, unsustainable for modern academia that has been perverted to be mostly a diploma mill.
No front but a "CS degree" is, for 99% of the people that have one, factually useless - people only do it because employers use it as a very efficient filter to weed out everyone who might have an issue with what big corporate demands - cogs in a wheel, not artisans with own opinions. The purpose of academia isn't science and advancing it anymore, it is raking in tuition money on one side and molding people to corporate drone conformity.
I just don't understand how people can believe this. I learned most of my programming skills in college, and everyone I know did too. I could program before, but really poorly, because I didn't have fundamental computer science knowledge. Taking algorithms, theoretical comp sci, discrete structures - these transformed me from a code monkey to a real programmer.
I think the simpler explanation is that the CS degree is supposed to be an independent verification that the student has learned and can employ fundamental aspects of CS.
I realize that verification can often be wrong (especially now with the ubiquity of LLMs), but I think the view that employers are simply looking for "cogs" and avoiding "artisans" is an arrogant and cynical take on what a degree is supposed to indicate.
Remove the incentive to cheat, and save yourself the time trying to catch it (and punish it, despite an uncooperative administration).
Personally, the best classes I had all had rigorous homework assignments. I would learn much more from them than studying for the tests. In fact, doing the homeworks would generally cover more than would be possible to test.
Plus I'm just glad to have built things like a DNS server, and inode filesysyem. Many small games and web servers. Database applications, shells, and compilers just to name a few. These are all things that give me confidence as a programmer.
...I wonder if this is true. "Real work" sometimes requires you to perform in the moment. You can't always just pull an all-nighter to get it done if you're slow.
Also, the best way to do better on a test is to do homework to prepare for the test. And teachers can still assign homework to help students learn, they just can't necessarily use the results for assessment.
As a teacher I just don't know how to replicate that experience in a world where half will skip the work, and all I'm able to do is a two-hour sanity check that they learned some concepts. How do I test for "the experience you developed spending four hours making that register allocator behave properly, to the point where you're intimately familiar with every failure mode"?
ask them to list and describe failure modes on your exam.
An intro to CS class where every answer is a few lines of pseudocode might be able to effectively teach the material by forcing everything on to the test.
A software engineering class that just test your knowledge of memorizing patterns and makes the project where you actually implement real software incorporating the patterns worth nothing would be useless to actually teaching students anything they can use after graduation.
Similarly, exam-only courses are an excellent way to teach huge numbers of students without the costly hassle of grading homework assignments. But that doesn't mean they're an optimal solution.
From my experience as a student and now a professor, nothing can possibly compare to the benefit you get from hands-on learning. You get so much more understanding from the 20 hours you spent making a complex system work, than you will ever get in three 3-6 hours of in-class instruction you'd get during the same timeframe. And I have no good idea how to test for all the skills you learn from "writing a tiny OS kernel from scratch in C" or "building a compiler" or "implementing a complicated cryptographic protocol and then realizing an attack on it." I do observe that my students who do the homework tend to do much better on the exams, but I'm concerned that the incentive to take shortcuts will be much too high if homework isn't required.
But I have zero qualifications for any of these opinions other than having been forced to attend a number of nearly worthless university classes that were pointless in the face of just reading the course book. Of course I also had some classes that were worth way more than just the book material, but probably half the classes I had to take I felt were dubiously useful to start with, not to mention the absolutely terrible actual class, and forcing people to attend to get a passing grade was just there to prevent 95% of the class being empty every week.
Plagiarism is now rampant - but for structural reasons. The university seemingly decided they want the money of foreign students, and started deciding that degrees from certain foreign universities counted as prerequisites for CS Masters programs.
A lot of these foreign students somehow have little programming skill despite undergraduate degrees in CS.
The cheating is obvious. She gives students 0's with no push back from administration if she thinks they are cheating. Some amazing stories:
- Students who turn in assignments with someone else's name of them
- Students who admit to cheating and do it again and again, never becoming more sophisticated at it.
- Students who get caught cheating 5 times and ask if there is any way they can pass the course.
- Students who despite being told there is no way to pass the course, request a call or in person meeting to discuss how they might be able to pass the course (she has never taken them up on this - one wonders what their pitch would be)
Cheaters who put a little effort in are undetectable. Or at least she suspects, but can prove nothing and grades the (not obviously plagiarized) code on its own merits. The general feeling is that barring these foreign students, cheating is there but not too widespread.
She does, indeed, have a bad rating on RateMyProfessor and does not care. Her administration still thinks highly of her because of her other work (such as running accreditation programs).
If you are a professor YMMV. This is how it is for my wife.
Obviously we all forget things over time, but if the homework was suspect from the beginning, and when the student is tested he has just no idea whatsoever, that could be grounds for taking back some of the homework credit.
Some of them simply don’t generalize, like creating new homework assignments from scratch each semester.
As much as I'm loathe to suggest using AI in CS, that's actually something an LLM might be able to help with --- generating tons of pseudorandom variations on a theme.
I think making assignments completely for practice, and having 100% of the grade be the final exam, where there is zero computer use and pure brain use, outputting on pen-and-paper, will work. Anyone who tries to cheat will only cheat themselves and have the results of that exam reflect their actual understanding.
But universities are businesses now. They produce diplomas in exchange for money, and interrupting that with details like "this student shouldn't be here" costs them money they can't afford to lose.
How much of this has to do with the students being generally still immature. Had I gone to school at this time, I almost certainly would have felt this way, or some compatible way that diminished my effort.
The homework is supposed to be for practice.
I’ve heard multiple stories of professors for undergrads who tried making homework optional, but the number of students failing exams increased dramatically because fewer people did the homework.
LLMs have short circuited a lot of student’s thought process and even sense of morals. A lot of students who wouldn’t copy a friend’s homework or even copy and paste from GitHub have started using LLMs to do their homework. I don’t really know what it is. Maybe a sense that because they’re using a tool that it’s not cheating? Thinking they’re less likely to get caught because it’s not identical to existing work?
I agree that weighting the exams most heavily is the only way out, but I’m sure we’re in for a struggle as universities see the shocking grade drops that come with that practice.
In a sane world that would be a "not our problem", as the horses have been brought to water and they just won't drink, but unfortunately institutions chasing pass rates metrics as a pure indicator of instructor skills pushes towards increased leniency in grading and that's another can of worms which I won't open here.
That would make sense. The logic that they are not copying work from another student or copying someone else’s “efforts” so to speak.
Another aspect is how easy it is. It’s not having to find someone to copy it from, or search online and so on. It’s “just open an llm chat window and ask”.
The worst part is those that don’t cheat will hear how so and so uses llms to do homework and nails all the answers unpunished while they are barely managing, trying to do honest work. That stuff is soul killing.
Just let them fail.
It's their problem.
I'm seeing in work that developers are producing code they don't understand. I think overall AI is making it harder for them to learn because the temptation is to just use what ever it produces. Especially when this is combined with measuring productivity on tickets closed.
This is very common in British universities
And an university is not a school. Nobody should be forced to take it, if you are not interested in learning just go home. But at the same time, a quality university should have a high barrier so that only people that actually learned and have demonstrated to have learned the required subjects, in a setting where cheating is almost impossible, should be able to get a diploma.
Asking people to write Java (or whatever) on paper is crazy, it doesn't really line up with anything you would ever do in the real world, and expecting people to memorize the signatures of functions feels like a total waste of time.
On the other hand, we have to accept that LLMs are I think, at this point, better than over half of all 1st year University students, so we can't let students use LLMs, without either letting half of students pass with no effort, or making tests harder and failing half of students -- and that isn't a long term solution, as I imagine LLMs are just going to keep getting better.
I plagiarized quite a bit in school. I'm not proud of it. Desperation and poor role models can create all sorts of negative outcomes, though. I was taught how to survive, not how to live ethically.
You can try to filter the plagiarists, sure. But uh, I'm not sure if it will work. The plagiarists are in league with each other.
The reality, to me, seems to be that universities sell credentials with learning as a sort of sideshow or window dressing.
I've met a lot of excellent engineers who didn't have degrees. I have met a lot of terrible ones who did. I can tell you which group has an easier time getting hired... and I don't think I am focusing on edge cases. The system is broken.
So do whatever you have to to get that permission slip to work from the education-industrial complex. By all means, please learn your trade as well, but let's not pretend like "knowledge" is what you are paying six figures for at a university. Knowledge is available for free. It's certification that costs as much as a house.
When I studied applied physics eons ago we had tutorials in term time and a substantial essay to complete in the long vacation but these were between the student and the tutor and had no effect on the final class of degree; that was determined by a series of final exams (open note), the report of the final year laboratory project and its oral defence. My project report was more than a hundred typewritten pages with numerous diagrams and I had to defend it to my project supervisor and the head of department. I don't think a plagiarist could have done it.
Of course this is expensive, all the academics involved were permanent employees of the university, there were no graduate students doing slave labour tutoring.
In my opinion the plague of plagiarism is a direct consequence of attempts to get education on the cheap and of valuing the diploma more than the education itself.
My friends who teach used the same level of filtering in the past: They suspected a lot of students from copying from each other, but they only took action on the cases where it was so undeniably obvious that it would be an open and shut case.
In the era of LLMs, that degree of precision is completely gone. However, the other signal is amplified: They have more students than ever getting 100s on homework and completely failing any exams. In the past it seems that many of the plagiarizers at least learned something, however minimal, in the process of copying homework and then trying to turn it into something that looked less suspicious. The LLM users are so brazen that they just submit the prompt, copy the output, and call it a day.