I don’t know and have not verified either way but at first “read” I felt the wording to be simply not UC-ish if that makes sense. Husband is grad so receive tons of communication from the school … this bit seemed off. Who knows ?
The tone of the instructors’ email indicates pretty clearly that there could have been no mistake about what was acceptable. And how could there have been? This was a test, wasn’t it? It wasn’t a preparatory collaboration in learning things but a measurement of things actually learned. There could have been no ambiguity about that. No more than if you were sitting in a large examination hall with someone’s shoulder close enough to look over. Don’t do it! Scratch your head and scribble your anwers on your own. Well, a wing and a prayer may be necessary and are acceptable.
Yes. The course syllabus is quite clear on which assignments can be worked on in groups, which not etc. And it links directly to their Academic Honesty page which is unequivocal. Academic Honesty — CS121 Main Page 1.0 documentation
My son feels the same way about his undergrad coursework at UChicago. He told me recently that anyone should be able to get close to 100% on their psets because there are study group, office hours, TA sessions etc at your disposal to ensure that you come up with the right solution and maximize understanding. Not sure he would care for the amount of solo work in 121; however, apparently the resources were still abundant this year to help the student - actually, even more than they usually are due to the difficulties of Covid - and students always had a confidential forum to submit code for feedback and help anyway. 121 had converted to online format very successfully and that minimizes any legitimate excuse for cheating. It’s a very challenging intro course but so are many others at UChicago.
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I don’t believe this related just to one test:
"Towards the end of the quarter, the CS 121 instructors conduct a final review of all the coursework to identify possible cases of cheating… You knowingly shared your code with another student, even if you did not intend for that code to be used or copied (except as allowed in the two pair assignments, PA #2 and PA #4). "
Note that 2 assignments were excepted.
Well, it’s not exactly from the Communications Office 
Internal communications can be a bit more up front. We are alums too and I enjoy contrasting the communication styles between internal and external. This e-mail wasn’t meant for general consumption by the cyber crowd, although I’m sure they figured it would make its way there.
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Correct. The CS 121 class has very specific instructions for how you can do your ongoing assignments. As mentioned upthread, the resources were there to help. Had these students just opted to sweat through it like everyone else in the class did, they’d be sweating less right now.
I’m sure collaboration in learning is always encouraged whether in computer science or some other subject, but this appears to be related to some coursework (or exams) that are meant to be worked on independently. Even in a most collaborative environment, students are required to work independently on exams, and perhaps some other coursework, in order to measure how much they’ve learned. A student who cheated not only demonstrates the lack of mastery of the subject, but also took unfair advantage of his/her fellow students in the class who did not cheat.
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At D’s school, any project or problem set that allows for collaboration (which is a lot in engineering), requires the name of all group members to appear on the submitted assignment. It’s never submitted as an individual.
But “pair assignments” sound like what the name implies - a project actually meant to be carried out by two students working together and presumably turned in jointly. And the test here was something more definitive than a mid-term assignment. It was a final. I don’t think it likely that any student could innocently have imagined that collaboration would be acceptable at that stage of the game. It would render one’s grade in the course meaningless. It’s possible, alas, that a U of C student could cheat on a final exam - but not be so dumb as to think he was not cheating.
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Back in the dark ages when I was in college and taking Intro CS, it was rumored that a classmate had gotten help on a take-home exam that was supposed to be worked on solo. In those days, one really had to put out the effort to get help! No internet, no e-mail . . . and no real ability to trace if the helper wasn’t related to the college. I don’t know the details, but I do know that this suspect was effectively shunned by the everyone else in the class, on top of whatever other official consequences might have occurred. Our campus took the academic honesty pledge very seriously. I was actually shocked to arrive to grad school at UChicago only to find cheating to be a genuine problem in my programs of study. I doubt it was worse than at other top research universities, however. My undergrad at a much smaller LAC with a different student culture.
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If the cheating was SO massively wide-spread, I wonder whether the kids fully understood what is considered cheating. Or whether the kids simply justified known wrongdoing as “well everyone else is doing it” and “it’s not that bad”.
I can see kids getting stuck on an issue and talking to classmates or a student who previously took the class for help, and not realizing that the explanations crossed over into prohibited help. The language “working with another student, even if you made individual alterations to it” is what struck me here.
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The campus culture is really important for academic honesty. Smaller colleges may have some advantage in building that culture. Caltech has a well-known honor code and it’s just one sentence: “No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community.” That honor code is part of the culture there. Even applicants are asked to think about and write about it in their applications and it is also the most important part of new student orientation. All exams (well-known for their difficulties) are almost always open-book and take-home, and the only restriction is that each student has to work on them alone in adherence to the honor code. At Caltech, all libraries except the main library are unstaffed and students can check out books by themselves (but they need to sign and leave their contact details in case other borrowers need the books). In the old days (not sure if that’s still the case today with eletronic keypads), everyone had a master key (not officially distributed but duplicated by almost everyone) to enter any building and/or room on campus. One almost never hears about abuses of those privileges.
“Smart” is not the same as common sense (which is both more valuable and rare these days) so yes.
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Omg the cheating, especially now during covid and remote learning is so rampant it’s a joke. If they don’t realize it by now and haven’t figured out means to which to adapt things on their end as well it is just going to get worse. Often times the cheaters get away and those who don’t cheat are penalized.
My daughter, at another elite school last spring was in a Linear Algebra class where there was so much cheating on the final that it was found that all 4 test questions were posted on Chegg and later reported to the professor.
The professor basically did nothing and felt she did such a great job teaching and that semester the students just happened to work so much harder that their grades on the final were so far above avg they didn’t cheat at all. A couple did receive an email suspecting them of cheating off one question posted to chegg and their punishment was to take their grade as it was before the final or get a few, yes a “few” points only off this test. The test was optional to begin with and you only took it to go for a higher grade so clearly that was not a punishment. So, the cheating brought grades way up and for those that didn’t cheat, they had the normal expected grades hence there wound up being no curve as there normally would be and some kids actually had their grades lowered, even though she told them if you took the final your grade most likely wouldn’t be lowered.
It was a whole cluster. It worked out for my daughter ultimately because she had a conversation in writing with the prof before taking the final about whether or not she should take it and the professor strongly encouraged her to take it and said if she had at least x her grade wouldn’t change. So initially the grade went down but upon showing her that email the professor agreed and raised it since she had that score on the test.
The point really is that cheating is rampant, many professors are doing nothing or don’t care. Also, not everyone is cheating yet many are being accused of it. Just happened to my friend’s kid who thought he was going to be kicked out. Professor accused him because of some “algorithm” that kicked his name and another student’s name out after a test. Turns out the professor never looked or compared the two tests. He had claimed they were communicating during the test. It was completely unprofessional and caused great anxiety.
Programming is hard to monitor but there are ways to avoid it and they will be able to think up things for next semester to do a better job to prevent cheating.
There was an article about the wipe spread cheating at TAMU this week too. Texas A&M investigates cheating case involving Chegg website | The Texas Tribune
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It’s so disheartening to know that profs wouldn’t care. I’ve had this conversation with a prof or two and it’s true - some of them really don’t care. Many of them had to deal with their university not having their back in the days when they actually DID care and did try work toward a consequence for a cheater. The process was and probably still is a major pain in the butt. In some cases university administrators can be pretty spineless and will kick the issue right back to the prof to see about lessening the consequence. One guy I know once had to deal with some cheater’s dad on the phone. Parents will also lawyer-up the kid and play hardball. It’s just shameful. By the way, these are stories from 30 years ago. I’m sure it’s worse now and perhaps many profs just feel that given the existence of the internet they are playing a losing game to chase down a cheater - it takes time away from research and other faculty pursuits and the outcome will still be pretty lenient. @1NJParent is right - you need a supportive student culture where the majority don’t cheat and everyone wants consequences for the cheater. I’ve always admired UChicago’s firm stance in the face of some pretty amazing cheating stories and they should continue to treat this issue as the serious academic matter that it is. But that won’t stop a whole lot of kids from cheating. It seems that some lessons learned at the University of Chicago don’t kick in when they should.
Other than that, the administration and faculty should seriously re-examine the role that remote learning has played in easing the ability to cheat. These past two quarters - particularly this one - has hopefully been a valuable learning tool for everyone in charge of teaching and learning. Also, it’s probably NOT a good idea to over-subscribe your first year class the way that UChicago did this year because with higher numbers there is just that much more cheating potential. They certainly didn’t hire the necessary additional administrators to deal with it - if anything, it’s a smaller number due to hiring freezes.
Totally agree with this and all schools especially prestigious ones truly need to re-evaluate. I have 3 kids currently in school. 2 in college, 1 in high school. I think the high school one actually is the most restrictive during remote for cheating. For tests they’re required to have a device on their desk at all times showing their work and then their camera (computer) on them as well at the same time. The teachers all use a lockdown browser so the kids can’t search the internet or anything else other than see the test in front of them. So, all eyes are on the students at all times during the tests. It’s pretty serious, lol. The cheating they caught was a kid asking alexa for answers to a test because he forgot to put mute on and some other thing.
For one of my daughters in a prestigious business school, they use proctorio but also instead of having so many tests they also just have them do a ton of group projects and when she had some quizzes she had group quizzes, some were also solo. The groups would be maybe 4-5 people. So what if they 5 of them had the same grade on the quiz. Other tests might be essay tests. Much harder to cheat on those.
That takes me to my last kid who is in the most prestigious school and where the cheating is the absolute worst. Rampant and this is the one where it often just goes on ignored. I don’t know if they just can’t think out of the box or what but there have to be better ways. She had some in person classes this semester so it was less of a problem in those, but for kids with online classes, that’s where there are problems. They don’t use a proctoring system, there’s always stuff on chegg, maybe part of it is professors just recycling material and what not and it just seems like there is no real effort to do anything about it. One class got rid of the curve altogether this semester. That’s fine, except again for a school that usually has major grade deflation on purpose, what happens to a student that doesn’t cheat and gets hurt by the course that doesn’t curve this semester because the professor is accounting for all the kids that do cheat. The non-cheaters again are hurt the most and cheaters don’t have sever penalties. My daughter had a quiz in some class and had 3 different people ask if she wanted to do it together! What the hell, it’s just so blatant. Good thing she had a conflict, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she would’ve said yes if she didn’t. I think it starts to become the mentality that you have to do it in some fashion just to stay on par with everyone else. My daughter is in CS and has told me how they know if someone cheats or copies code. It’s over my head but it’s not that hard for them so kids copying that are stupid.
D didn’t have any “normal” test once covid hit. Profs intentionally made exams that were ‘cheat’ proof. No more right/wrong answers, just complicated “how would you solve this dilemma based on what you’ve learned in class” questions. Some profs moved fully to project based learning.
Besides being very difficult, the main draw back was the lag time in grading. Obviously a ton more work for the professors and TAs.
The lag time in grading this fall has been extraordinary. My son is still waiting on three of his four courses. A couple of them still owed the class an essay or a few labs from several weeks ago! Grades were supposedly due yesterday . . .
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For my son, in 3 of his 5 courses, only 1/2 of his course work has been marked and he’s writing his final exams this week.