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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>Remove the incentive to cheat, and save yourself the time trying to catch it (and punish it, despite an uncooperative administration).
I will weigh in on my wife's experiences, as she teaches computer engineering.<p>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.<p>A lot of these foreign students somehow have little programming skill despite undergraduate degrees in CS.<p>The cheating is obvious. She gives students 0's with no push back from administration if she thinks they are cheating. Some amazing stories:<p>- Students who turn in assignments with someone else's name of them<p>- Students who admit to cheating and do it again and again, never becoming more sophisticated at it.<p>- Students who get caught cheating 5 times and ask if there is any way they can pass the course.<p>- 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)<p>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.<p>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).<p>If you are a professor YMMV. This is how it is for my wife.
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.<p><i>Some of them simply don’t generalize, like creating new homework assignments from scratch each semester.</i><p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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 noticed this when I was TA'ing for a Prolog course at a London university. I was marking papers and it was obvious that a respectable chunk of the students on the course had simply copied from each other. I did not say anything to the course tutor, partly because I had no idea who was copying from whom, they all had the same code with the same mistakes and idiosyncracies in their papers. The year after that I TA'd again and I found the same code copied in the new year's students' papers. I looked online but I couldn't find the original source. This was before ChatGPT so an LLM wasn't the source.<p>The worst thing about it was that I could tell which students were really trying to do the job on their own. Most of the time their code bore all the hallmarks of a novice Prolog programmer, i.e. it was a convoluted mess that betrayed complete confusion about the language. For Prolog, this is normal and it does not indicate a student who is lazy or sloppy, only the difficult of the language. My first efforts in Prolog weren't any better. But now, the students that obviously copied from each other had papers that looked like they deserved a better mark than the ones who had obviously done the right thing and tried.<p>To be honest, I couldn't find it in me to give a bad mark to anyone (except for a couple of cases where the papers were basically blank where my hand was forced). I gave lots of feedback, trying to help anyone who wanted to learn, to learn, and gave them all a mark near the top 10-20%. I think the course was an elective anyway. My dad used to teach an elective course at a university and he was incredibly harsh about it, and I guess that left a sort of aversion.
The solution to plagiarism is the same for all subjects: abandon continuous assessment and have viva voce as a significant part of the final.<p>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.<p>Of course this is expensive, all the academics involved were permanent employees of the university, there were no graduate students doing slave labour tutoring.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I backspaced the comment I started typing, which was suggestions that required universities to rediscover ideals and backbone, and would like to instead ask a question...<p>For those who went to schools with strong honor codes, would you advocate that to others?<p>For example, did you find an environment of trust and respect, like you've not seen elsewhere?<p>For another example, do you have strong post-graduation alumni network, where someone in the alumni directory isn't just a possible foot in the door for sales ("hey, we went to the same school, can you grant me the courtesy of a call"), but that you can assume they are likely honest and have integrity?<p>Did it improve the quality of your education?<p>Were there downsides?
Discussed at the time:<p><i>Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16651099">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16651099</a> - March 2018 (118 comments)
Programming done in closed network lab.<p>This is why homework are NOW being done in-class: no takehomes.<p>In short, weekly exams, on-paper, in-person, in-class, on teacher's test form paper.<p>No phone. Calculator permitted.
Some allow open-book.<p>I too welcome back the 1980s.<p>Mimograph, anyone? * sniff * sniff *
I explicitly allow plagiarism and LLMs, but even give them reference solutions if they get stuck. Everything else seems either too much work or ineffective to find plagiarism. However, I do a short oral exam where I 'audit' the solution by picking out single lines and asking them to explain it in detail.
The real question is what is the point of education and what is the point of teaching those who do not want to learn?<p>Is the point of the homework to have students just do some work or is it a tool to encourage them to more deeply engage with the material? If it is the former, then what is wrong with using LLMs? If it is the latter, then students should be judged based on their understanding, which they have to demonstrate in a scenario where deception is very hard or near impossible.<p>The real problem is students not wanting to learn. And what is the point of educating people who do not want to learn?
Maybe all homework could come in two parts with a 70/30 split in the grade. Everyone gets assigned the first 70%, if their solution trips a plagiarism detector then they are automatically assigned the second 30% of the work. Better yet, it's communicated that it intentionally randomly selects some people for the second part of the work, even if they didn't plagiarize. Like random airport screening.<p>As long as it's clearly communicated in the syllabus, should be fine. If identical code submissions are so common then everyone should be doing the same quantity of work on average and it shouldn't be an issue if you automatically get assigned bonus problems.
This much be so much worse since LLMs.<p>The answer here is surely a monitored environment. An online editor/tester/compiler that logs not only the resulting code, but the way they got there. Anyone who pastes in 99% and just renamed the variables is trivially discovered. This probably works for far more than computer science.<p>It's not just a stick to beat kids with. You can work back to actually see where they're falling down, do seminars where you can open your environment to allow TAs and others to work on a single codebase collaboratively. This must exist already, no?
The ship has sailed. If Alice gives me her code, then I’ll just run it through an LLM and ask it to make it look different.<p>Wait, why don’t I just ask the LLM from the get go?<p>The ships are all gone from the harbor. Luckily for justice, there won’t be any jobs anyway for those degrees. Something about the universe is just doing quite a rug pull on so many things, fascinating times.
> Student incentives come from faculty<p>I'm pretty sure that student incentives come from having a degree that will instantly put you above 90% of non-degree-holder applicants after graduation, especially in this market.<p>Faculty can't compete with this, no matter how much they want education to be the goal; it's not, for most grads, and teachers should blame companies for that rather than students.<p>Plagiarism can be countered in comp sci settings by having in-person coding and bugfixing exams, which would also prepare students for real-world work much better than the 'turn in a big (music player app written in java) project at the end of the semester' model that programming classes in my comp sci program used.
Every one of these “woe is us” articles about academic cheating is fundamentally a tragedy of the commons issue.<p>The commons is the value of a university degree. No, not the education! The diploma.<p>There will always be some fraction of students that genuinely learn and earn their diplomas. Industry rewards them with higher salaries because the diploma <i>demonstrates</i> that they’re educated and self-motived intelligent people — grade A employees in other words.<p>So of course, some students will cheat and gain a diploma through copying others. This is inevitable, like the drug trade or prostitution.<p>If the percentage is low enough, nobody cares.<p>Okay, but… what if it’s a <i>little</i> higher? Those students might be highly profitable foreign students just looking to get a piece of paper so that they can get a better life back home.<p>What about a <i>bit</i> higher? Now the university is making bank, the foreign students are funding a new physics lab and a new pool! Awesome.<p>What if it’s 90%?<p>Now… it’s too late to rock the boat. The emperors nakedness <i>must</i> not be revealed! If industry catches on that almost all of the diploma-wielding graduates are actually C- instead of A+ the whole thing will implode.<p>That’s why universities are “helpless” against cheating! They <i>won’t</i> fix it, because if they do, the music stops.<p>We’re nearly there now. I walked through my old university and saw maybe 5% locals. I hardly heard a single conversation in English. This place is now graduating students in bulk that are functionally illiterate (in English), let alone the subject matter.<p>The song hasn’t stopped yet, but AI is fiddling with the buttons on the stereo.<p>There are no chairs.
Ah, that reminds me of my own university days.<p>Early on I've made the mistake of sharing my solutions with people I knew. Unfortunately they kept sharing the solution too, and so on.<p>Two times I was pulled into a profs office after the relevant lecture, to be questioned about it.<p>After it became clear that I was the author, and what happened, nothing ever came of it (for me).<p>Ironically both times the copiers supposedly failed to remove the git repo that was part of the handoff, so it was primarily about verifying I was the original author.<p>Lesson learned: "invisible" watermarks work, because people are generally lazy (also don't share graded work, just offer to help)
Anecdotally, before ChatGPT I was once asked to review 10 peers' homework in a computer science course, and 8 of them had the same or nearly the same answers. I couldn't believe plagiarism was that common, so I assumed they all just went to the same discussion section and used a solution provided by an over-helpful TA. Later I asked another student about it and he laughed and told me to keep quiet. So then I asked the instructor about it and he told me I should have failed them but didn't seem interested in taking any other action.
To the extent that the value of a university education is in the degree rather than the knowledge, cheating will remain rational. Since the business model of selling undergraduate programs depends on the value of most degrees as prerequisites to certain lucrative/prestigious careers, such programs are fundamentally broken. Don't try to save them by playing whack-a-mole with cheaters who understand the stakes of the game better than you do. That battle cannot be won.
I graduated in 2018 from a pretty competitive school and the way they dealt with this was that the lion's share of most course's grade was exam-based, in person, pencil and paper, proctored. Additionally, open notes were often allowed, and the tests were brutally difficult - I'm not sure anyone really could have cheated much in that setting. In project courses, I'm sure it happened a lot more, but I don't think many could have cheated in the program I was in, it was very difficult.<p>They'd even have different versions of the test in the same classroom test, which I found a little annoying because sometimes version "A" would be easier than B/C. And then they'd never do those questions ever again. It was probably a lot of work for them but they took academic dishonesty very seriously and there was a zero tolerance policy. Everyone made very certain to cover their asses to prevent even the appearance of cheating.
I studied CS in Germany and the entire issues seems completely unnecessary and foreign to me. Our exercises only mattered insofar as they qualified you for the end of semester exam, and that was done on paper and without electronic devices so you couldn't cheat and it's the only thing that mattered for your degree.<p>Why are adults at a university doing graded homework? They're responsible for their own learning, and if they want to cheat, well good luck on your exam. Our exercises in math and CS always were a few years old and kind of cycled through, so just copying old solutions was trivial, but what for, you're only hurting yourself. People who didn't learn just bombed out at the end. A university education is voluntary, people are there by their own choice.<p>Honestly this seems almost entirely like a byproduct of the privatized education system. University as children's daycare where everyone needs to pass and be tutored because there isn't an incentive to just filter people out.
I'll say it again: It's a culture problem, not an AI problem.<p>No one is going to stop the student and ask them why they cheated even if they were practically being asked to eat a tomato soup with a fork. It's easier to hide the problem under the rug and scapegoat.
A lot of hair pulling coming straight from the assumption that CS plagiarism is a problem.<p>You study to learn. Assignments are to help you learn and evaluate yourself. If you skip them in whatever manner only you suffer. Noone else. When you finish your studies and go to work noone will care about the grade you got, especially if you can't code your way out of a wet paper bag.
First semester, programming in C. We are submitting the assignments to the assistants. Female student in front of me hands out her floppy disk (this was early 2000). Assistant opens the single file that is on it, containing this single line:<p><pre><code> #include <stdio.h>
</code></pre>
Assistant: you did this completely yourself?
Her: yes!
Assistant: nobody helped you?
Her: no!
Assistant: are you sure?
Her: well, they helped me a little.
Assistant: gimme your index!<p>During the exam professor asked me why I called arguments of main argv and argc and if they can be called something else, I did know the answer, but I didn't know exactly what continue does because I wasn't using it in my code.