I'm of the opinion that the value of Coursera's courses comes from the learning opportunity, not the certification. I think they should simply allow cheating and not issue certificates. Alternatively, allow cheating and continue to issue certificates while letting employers decide the true value of the certificates.<p>The point of Coursera (to me) isn't to pad my resume, it's to learn from courses not always offered at my university.
Universities put a lot of time and effort into managing cheating, and we surely only scratch the surface. This is soul-crushing, no-fun, give-up-and-work-at-Google kind of work for professors. Everyone hates it.<p>The decision we have to make is the level of resources to put in. We've tried emphasizing the honor code and putting resources into teaching quality. This leads to endemic cheating. We've tried cracking down very hard on detection, and this leads to massive work for the instructors, lots of busted students and a general "meh" from the administration. Finding the right balance is really tough.<p>I don't get it - it never occurred to me to cheat as an undergrad. But then I had UK-style end of year finals instead of homework-heavy classes and constant grading, and I was never optimizing GPA from class to class. There are problems with mega-finals for some students, but they sure make cheating hard.<p>The online services can't possibly defeat cheating. The main defence they can have is proctored exams at physical locations, which kills some of the online advantage, and even then they have the ID problem. The Open University has worked out how to deal with this pretty well but it's not cheap. The new online services can and should be different to this, and focus on the massive ultra-low-cost learning opportunities. It's going to be interesting to see if they come up with something really new, and not just distance-ed 3.0.
Actually, this is valuable data.<p>As a potential employer, I care more about the candidate's ethics (or lack thereof) than their ability. I could always teach them, but I could never trust them.<p>Coursera should just publicly identify cheaters so I can cross check against resumes or certifications. Problem solved.
Cheating without consequences hurts everyone taking the class. I'm disappointed to see so many comments implying it's fine to just let that go.<p>My thought on this comes from a good chunk of direct experience: I've taught a number of courses to undergrads at NYU, as well as having about 5 summers of teaching experience in programming and cryptography at summer camps including CTY.<p>Imagine all students are given a button that says "give me an A," and they can press it if they choose, or do all the course work and possibly get a worse grade. Even if you chose to do the work because you were self-motived, you'd still be tempted to press the A button to guarantee a good grade.<p>That's an exaggeration, but the point is the same. The easier it is to get _any_ kind of validation without real work, the harder it is to learn.<p>It is harder to stay motivated, and the feedback received becomes less meaningful. It is even disappointing to simply know many of your fellow students probably cheated without consequences.<p>I do believe in seeing answers after doing the work, but it is just common sense to avoid posting them before things are due, and to support clear communications between the instructors and students about the details of posting answers.
I have to wonder if those posting solutions on github are actually doing it in an effort to cheat. I made a similar mistake recently with a project I completed in my computer architecture course. When the professor contacted me about it, it seemed obvious. But at the time, all I was thinking about was "yay, public code!" Obviously, I took it down right away. I wonder how many people are doing the same thing. Cheating a Coursera course just doesn't make much sense.
If it's this easy to "cheat" on these assignments, then maybe the professors should sit down and think about how to properly craft assignments. It's clear to me that traditional assignment grading will not work in an online/anonymous environment - appealing to a code of honor will not help if they want the certificate of completion to actually hold meaning.<p>I don't have any actual suggestions other then when I was in school the assignments were worth about 10-15% of our final grade because of this very reason (shared solutions). Actual knowledge was tested in other ways: presentations, quizzes, exams, etc.<p>Revoking the completion certificate for everyone else is NOT a way to build trust with the community at large - use those large academic brains and come up with a better solution.
The certificates, IMHO, are meaningless in the context of these online courses. Considering this, I find the measure exaggerated.<p>I use github as a central place to store almost everything I write outside work, so it comes pretty natural for me to version code for problems I've been working on there.<p>Disclaimer: I'm not involved in the Scala course, so I don't know how the actual assigments were structured.
I'm taking a different Coursera course right now. I completed the first homework assignment on my own, but I would have loved to see how other people solved the problem. I definitely felt like I had some ugly hacks in my solution. Posting solutions online would be a great way for me to learn.<p>I'd recommend that they get rid of the certificate. There is no way to prove that 1) the person who took the course is who they say they are, and 2) they didn't cheat. Copying and pasting from a solution online is only one way to cheat. You could also have a friend finish the assignment. Maybe some day we can get past the point where education is simply a list of achievements, and more about who you have become as a person.
"I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke" people to enroll in a free online course that (presumably) nobody forced them to take and then submit homework done by someone else.<p>Rather than trying to fight cheating (which is impossible), Coursera should emphasize the point that these courses are not resume busters but for learning.
You have to expect that they kinds of programmers this course would attract will want stick the code they've put hours outside of work into in some kind of source repository.<p>With the ubiquity of free (public only) github accounts, I'm not entirely sure what else they expected might happen.
I think that something a lot of people who read this are forgetting (and please correct me if I'm wrong) is that most of us have 4 year degrees and/or jobs in Software Engineering (or at least Engineering).<p>These courses are meant to be a segue into free courses offered online that people can use in lue of a 200k four year degree. While this form of education isn't there yet, it's use builds the reputation of these online courses.<p>If cheating runs rampant in the courses (more so than in person classes) it has a chance to negate the reputation of these sites. This could set back "free" education for years.<p>While I don't think that Cheaters should have an affect on what we can learn and take away from these classes, but it will have an affect on how much employers (like edw519) trust the courses. If they don't trust the online classes, then people who don't have a formal education won't be able to use these freely offered classes to raise their earning power.<p>It's sad how much a few bad apples can spoil.
One of the hints for assignment 2 is:<p>"Most of the solutions for this assignment can be written as one-liners. If you have more, you probably need to rethink your solution. In other words, this assignment needs more thinking (whiteboard, pen and paper) than coding ;-)."<p>Is it not entirely possible that they're getting some false positives?
The fact that people publicly posting their work would get expelled disappoints me. During the Machine Learning class on Coursera, I did all of the programming exercises myself. After submitting the assignments and getting 100% scores, I would browse other people's GitHub repositories to see how they completed the assignment, which taught me more about both Octave syntax and machine learning and helped me to vectorize some of the more tricky algorithms (use Octave's native matrix operations rather than slower for loops).<p>The people who submit exact copies of assignments they find online should absolutely be penalized. To expel those who publish their work seems overly harsh.
It's to be expected there will be cheating. Even in normal brick and mortar school s there were always cheaters. Hell, even the tour de france got turned into a dopers ball. So yes, this is a bummer and all the naysayers of these free opensource online classes now just have more ammo. But as someone who's life has not allowed them the path to Stanford/Upenn/University of Toronto, etc, I am putting in the work and bothering to actually learn and extremely grateful for the opportunity. So bummer, sure, but shame on the cheaters.
A lot of comments here are suggesting that the staff should allow the violations of the academic honesty rules and deal with matters by some other means.<p>It's my understanding that, in this case, this is not possible. There are real students at EPFL who are using the Coursera system to take this very same course for credit. If some random resume-padder creates a public repository on github for doing the homework, then a simple google search by an actual student at EPFL could easily find it.<p>I don't see how they have any choice but to bring the hammer down.
I personally did not enjoy the threat of expulsion in my inbox this morning. As, like probably many other, but the code up on Github because, well this is just what I do with code.<p>I've signed up for this class because I was interested in learning something. Cheating would obviously not teach me anything, so why even take the class in the first place?<p>The Coursera certification currently holds no or little value. Maybe if they gain enough traction, someday, having many coursera certificates could have some value when applying for a job. This is not currently the case. I understand that they want to be in the position at some point in the future and that if they don't enforce these rules now, doing so later will be hard. Nevertheless, threatening to ban users in not a winning move for any startup.<p>A better solution would be to offer an alternative to Github, maybe even a partnership with Github. If they hosted their own git repository and used that as the submission system, they users could get source control, as well as a simple mean of distributing assignments.<p>This felt like a poor PR move from coursera.
I would think it would be better to let the course go on, and mail the certificates and give each one a unique identifier. Then make an annotation at cousera of which students were caught cheating. Then give employers the ability to check if a certificate is from an honest student or one who was caught cheating. Everyone wins.
When discussing online courses, a recurring theme is that of the "value" of online certifications, versus "real life" certifications. By taking action against cheaters, Coursera is trying to preserve the value of their certification. I wonder how it will affect it.<p>Do people really care about online certifications anyway?<p>For me, the main advantage of the weekly assignments, is that it stops me from procrastinating, like I might if I were to learn by myself with a book... I don't really care about the certification itself. I guess I can add it to my resume, like the SCJP, but I don't think employers will care much.
I see several comments on this submission relate the issue of cheating in a Coursera course to the issue of presenting a false credential to an employer when seeking a job. People seeking jobs as programmers had better be ready to do a programming sample under conditions controlled by the hiring company to prevent cheating. The reason to be ready for that is that work-sample tests are the best validated procedure for hiring workers for jobs in general, and any company that takes a scientific approach to hiring will make work-sample tests a big part of its hiring procedures.<p>The long story about why companies should use work-sample tests to hire job applicants, including programmers, can be found in the online FAQ I post from time to time here on HN, last posted five days ago.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543</a><p>Of course, because some (many?) people cheat, work-sample tests work best if the companies using them make sure that cheating is not possible during the test. If you want to get a job at a company that doesn't hire cheats or fakers, be ready to show what you know in a work-sample test.
Well, obviously cheating is bad. And obviously breaking an ethics code is bad. I think an issue with what's going on here is that, in this case, there are conflicting natures between education and programming.<p>To be a good programmer, you need to be efficient. Writing 100% unique code is not efficient. It's not even good. It's bad. Good developers research solutions to solved problems. Good solutions have been used and tested by dozens, if not hundreds, of other developers in just as many different use-cases.<p>So, as a DEVELOPER, it's GOOD to research and find an existing solution to your problem. It's even good to go on places like Stack Overflow and post your problem and let someone else solve it for you.<p>But, as a STUDENT, doing these things is BAD. Taking credit for someone else's work isn't good. And letting other people do your work for you is cheating.<p>So, how do you resolve being a STUDENT DEVELOPER? Do you follow practices that would make you a bad developer? Or do you follow practices that would make you a bad student?<p>What I see is a complication in proving that the student understands the concepts they need to understand for the course. If you just go out and copy other people's code, but never take the time to understand it, then the course is worthless. Remember that the knowledge and understanding gained is the purpose of the course. Assignments, quizzes, whatever - these are just measurement tools, they are not the purpose behind the course.<p>I feel that we probably just need a different way to determine whether or not a student understands the concepts of the course. Is there a way to determine a student's understanding or comprehension outside of assignments, tests, and quizzes? Something that isn't replicable student to student?
I'm taking this course, and have no idea what the motivation for the cheaters was. But, it would be nice to have some sort of forum where you could discuss your answers after you had successfully completed the homework. I know my code is correct, but I think I would learn even more by seeing other people's solutions. Something like the forums on the Project Euler site would be fantastic.
Well, this seems like one of those social problems where a technical solution might be available.<p>1) Figure out the number of students taking course n.<p>2) For the first assignment, figure out the number of questions m you want.<p>3) Make a question bank of size M.<p>4) Satisfy the constraint n < (M-m)!<p>5) You now can uniquely identify uploaders via the set of answers they upload.<p>If you're willing to kick people out of the class and mark them as cheaters, you can now do so without worrying they're trying to frame someone else.<p>This can be refined--maybe make it so that the question bank is large enough that several people conspiring will be unable to randomly generate a sequence of questions that's been given to a real person, so they can't randomly screw people for shits and giggles. You could also make the questions differently phrased, making it harder to Google them. Depending on how many cheaters there are, you can also just make a question bank that's large enough that any given question is unlikely to have been uploaded by a cheater, though that rapidly blows up the size of the necessary question pool if you do have a significant proportion of cheaters.
Shame on the cheaters, but I don't see how they're hurting anyone but themselves.<p>In the spirit of the Platonic ideal of the Academy it seems beneficial to freely share and exchange ideas.
Searching Github for assignments is pretty easy, but I wonder how they'd be able to detect duplicates other then when every source is 100% equal to another student's.
The most frightening thing about this is the number of people that want a black list of names. what's the next step? stoning them in public, making them wear a special hat?<p>The job of coursera is to provide access to learning and there it should stop. Coursera should not provide certificate of any kind, most people go there to learn not to become certified on anything, Cheaters will go way if there is no certificate since their purpose is not to learn.
If they're going to issue certificates that people respect, they should do it like EdX is planning: paid formal testing at exam centers.<p>For connecting top students with recruiters, they're already looking at contributions to forums as well as homework/test scores. It shouldn't be too hard to see who's really engaged with the material.<p>Getting uptight about people sharing work seems counterproductive and hopeless.
I would have went the other way and forced <i>everyone</i> to develop in public via github (or similar, in fact it wouldn't need to be private if Coursera had access to the git repository). I'd guess it would be more work to try and painstakingly recreate a unique and authentic looking sequence of commits than it would to just do it yourself, probably teach some good habits too.
I think people who copied are not lying to anyone but themselves, if they can't even modify it a little so it won't be an exact copy, they won't survive as programmers anyway as no one will keep them.<p>the people who share? I'm sure most of them simply put in as they put any code they do on their GH account. which is by default public.<p>solution: people should use bitbucket, it has free private repos.
So, what exactly is the point in cheating on these assignments? IIRC there is no academic credit available and all you receive is a non accredited certificate.<p>Surely the only point in doing the assignments in the first place is to satisfy yourself that you have understood and can apply the material?
I found it annoying when people were submitting answers to Stripe's CTF before the end date - just seemed to cheapen the experience - and would imagine for someone not cheating in the class that they might feel the same way.<p>(on a side note - did anyone get their CTF tshirt yet?)
I wonder how much work it is to monitor the students, it must be hard to tell if there's cheating, assuming the published solution is well written and tought. If they have to look at past submissions to detect sudden peaks in grades it's got to be a burden.
Coursera could offer an on site test ($) for the employer.<p>The perspective employee would login and take a test based on the courses that they have completed. The score would then be sent to employee and employeer and ranked along side others who have completed the course.
I do this course to learn, and I enjoy trying to solve things on my own, cheating on this is cheating yourself. If I was in a point I need this to boost my resume, I would ask myself if I'm in the right profession.
I get why they have a problem with this but it seems weird to punish the students for behaving like real world programmers. The entire FOSS movement could be written off as cheating with this mentality.
>If we find that solutions continue to be posted, we will reconsider offering certificates of completi<p>Wait, so they didn't know this was going to happen?
so people who have submitted copies will still get certificates?<p>that's kinda amusing. [edit: thanks for the reply (have an upvote); missed that. that's more reassuring.]