http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/3/cs50-cheating-cases-2017/
10% is too high for any course at any university.
Should serve as a wake-up call, at least. I wonder why this course in particular is so astonishingly prone to cheating.
One would have thought that the Govt 1310 scandal from a few years ago would have served as that wake-up call when ~125 students were brought before the Ad Board.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/education/harvard-forced-dozens-to-leave-in-cheating-scandal.html
I think they encourage everyone to take it, not just STEM majors. Also, I believe Yale uses it as well.
I watched a couple of the lectures online and did a couple of the exercises just for grins last year. Pretty good stuff, but not trivial.
It’s especially easy to cheat on a course like this because it’s also offered to the general public via the edx platform, which means there are literally tens of solutions for each problem posted online. And the fact that it’s a CS course means that there aren’t too many permutations in the way you can solve each problem.
Of course, why Harvard undergrads would endeavor to do is a wholly different concern, and a troubling one.
Here’s how CS50 defines academic dishonesty;
http://docs.cs50.net/2016/fall/syllabus/cs50.html#academic-honesty
What is it that they allegedly did? and how did Malan figure it out?
The probability that Malan himself discovered it → 0. I would assume, since CS50 uses a plagiarism checker for worked turned in, and since all work is take-home, that it was discovered that way.
Another possibility: a student who did not cheat reported it.
IMO, some collaboration that could be considered acceptable in other courses would be deemed academic dishonesty in CS50, thus it could be that some of these cases were inadvertent due to a failure to play close attention to the rules.
I do know that some students who take CS50 find themselves far outside their comfort zone - it could also be that some students resorted to “not reasonable” actions because they thought that was the only way they could pass.
That’s all conjecture though!
Of course, it makes you wonder how many of them cheated to get the stats they needed to get into Harvard. The odds that they suddenly decided to cut corners at age 18 are slim. Wouldn’t be surprised if a couple of them are our past SAT forum cheaters out here on CC.
@BldrDad I agree with the latter and that many students resort to plagiarism because they are in a bind, whether over their head or in a time crunch.
I disagree on the collaboration being inadvertent because the rules for CS-50 are well-defined. For example, another student can look at your code to help debug but you can’t look at another students as reference. And while it doesn’t say this explicitly, don’t use google to find the answer. If you do find the answer, you likely just broke the rules.
“I agree with the latter and that many students resort to plagiarism because they are in a bind, whether over their head or in a time crunch.”
Yup. I heard of an alleged case many years ago at a top university where the computer system was so slow that students couldn’t get their work done in a timely fashion, so a lot of them copied someone’s output (with the permission of that student). There were so many students with the same wrong answer to one question that one TA was marking the wrong answer as correct. In this case from what I heard no one got into trouble, and the problem that they were copying was an easy one, so that the reason to copy was just to avoid using the overloaded system.
Hopefully today this particular motivation doesn’t happen anymore with the widespread availability of compute power.
This does make one wonder how much cheating is going on, whether at universities or to get the grades to get into the top universities.
@Sportsman88 - I don’t think the rules are so black and white.
Reasonable: “Sending or showing code that you’ve written to someone, possibly a classmate, so that he or she might help you identify and fix a bug”
Not reasonable: “Giving or showing to a classmate a solution to a problem set’s problem when it is he or she, and not you, who is struggling to solve it.”
I personally think these rules overlap. If two students are both fixing bugs (which may or may not considered struggling, depending on the magnitude of the bugs and their ability to track down the problems and fix them), and view each other’s code, it’s possible that some actions that could be simultaneously considered reasonable and not reasonable. Any collaboration between students while working on problem sets risks falling afoul of these rules if they are not careful.
However, I seems unlikely that this sort of behavior would result in academic dishonestly proceedings. I suspect that @skieurope is correct, they were caught by a plagiarism checker, or possibly CS50 staff noticed similarities between solutions that were flagged as suspicious.
I wouldn’t look at anyone else’s code to help them until my work was complete. The person struggling can’t see another’s code. That’s what I take from both snippets above. Two struggling students shouldn’t help each other debug.
I do agree that they were likely caught by a plagiarism checker.
Basically do not help others if you have figured the solution out yourself. Helping others to debug code is fine but not providing a solution (i.e. code). Debugging code is a skill which is NOT taught during lectures in CS. A lots of code to most common CS problems/algorithms is available on Web. You can not just copy it and submit as your own work. This defeats the whole purpose of discovery of solution by you and associated learning in the process of problem solving.
My S took this class and says that Malan makes it crystal clear on the first day (and it’s in the syllabus) that ALL code will be run through an algorithm and checked for plagiarism. Says that it’s inexcusable that students knowingly copied code and submitted it. According to him, it’s common practice for students to go onto stack overflow and get the answers to problem sets – the savvy ones modify the code and the lazy ones copy, paste, and submit.
The problem may be that too many students take this class who get in way over their heads and plagiarize out of desperation. S says he remembers a fair number of students in the class who had no clue how to code and little ability to learn.