No StackOverflow for you! Or: How to get away with <del><del>murder</del><ins>cheating</ins> </del><ins>public masturbation </ins>!



  • Saw this on reddit. Apparently after telling a CS class not to use StackOverflow, a student goes and does so anyway. Professor replies to question on SO more or less telling student to drop the class.

    I think this is going to be good. 🍿



  • In case it gets nazy-admin-ed away.

    First off, this is NOT a "pls do my homework" question. The kid did a lot of the work on his own, and asked about clarifications on specific issues.

    Second, the professor seems to be a HUGE dick. Especially since the student picked SO instead of going to the prof for consultations.

    Third and final, a pro tip: if an asshole authority figure that has power over your future tells you not to do something, DON'T. And if you do, make sure you don't get caught. An important life lesson for soon to be former CS student who posted the OP.



  • Agreed.

    If I were a teacher and see my students posting homework questions on forum, I'd recommand them to withdraw from the class too.

    In fact I've seen another professor who failed a student for posting homework question publicly when he explicitly demands his students not to do so.



  • @cartman82 said:

    Second, the professor seems to be a HUGE dick. Especially since the student picked SO instead of going to the prof for consultations.

    Whether it's SO or not is not the question.

    It's much like the "interview question" questions. If everyone post the question and answer on the web, it'll just leave the teacher no option but to give more complicated question in order to find out the progress of learning of his students.

    This is no good to everyone and I personally think it's a very selfish action.



  • SO handle is "DeathWish".

    Heh.



  • @cheong said:

    It's much like the "interview question" questions. If everyone post the question and answer on the web, it'll just leave the teacher no option but to give more complicated question in order to find out the progress of learning of his students.

    I couldn't disagree more. From my experience, I only need one afternoon in a 20-person classroom to know their skill levels.

    This professor is a representative why the kids that graduate from CS are just human interfaces to typewriters. On the other hand, this student has the needed qualities to succeed: humble and focused.


  • BINNED

    Heh. I love this part:

    I already found that another student is using variable names and style much like your FxDataModel.

    Reminds me of the stuff we had when I was at the Uni. They had some kind of a lexer setup that would check code for similarities to stop / reduce cheating, because there were something like 100 students in the class (yes, that's a :wtf: of a different kind) and there is no way in hell anyone could check it all by hand within time allotted (weekly assignments and such).

    Now, I never got into any kind of trouble (before you ask, I did do the work myself), but I was always slightly worried. We're talking about sub-500 LOC (if written well, of course) tasks. How unique can you get? Also, variable naming and coding style? There are certain conventions depending on the language / framework you're using, and there is a coding style you should probably use or everything will look like a mess. It's like me deciding to use underscored_names for functions in Qt where all native functions are camelCase. Of course I'll use camelCase otherwise my code will look like a right mess!

    So yeah, the issue of publicizing assignment code is one thing. Complaining about variable naming is a different issue, and I'd never think of docking someone for being consistent in the same way another student is. That's just silly.


  • Banned

    Reminds me of the time I was accused of cheating on geography test because I had the same error as my classmate who was sitting two desks away. It's not my fault all those teeny tiny bays around America look the same!


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    Aaaaand the whole problem has been resolved

    Filed Under: I was one minute late for the drama >.<'


  • FoxDev

    @Kuro said:

    Aaaaand the whole problem has been resolved

    given the professors reaction, i doubt it.

    the rest of it probably won't hit SO but i seriously doubt DeathWish is getting off that easy



  • 😆 yeah for inspiration by Stackoverflow

    Story time: We'd been assigned to write a summary of an obscure book I'd been largely unimpressed by when I looked at the example copy in class. Because I didn't want to buy this book, I looked for a PDF online. Didn't find any, so I had to borrow the book from a friend. What I did find online is a guy asking for a 300-word summary of said book. Exactly the assignement we were given.

    Because I was so pissed about the book I decided to publish a summary that was indeed 300 words but a bit on the derogatory side. As I learned later at least one guy opted for not reading the book but relied on a summary he'd found online. "Yeah it wasn't there at first but when I did another search a week later I found it." Good times.

    I later learned that the author of the book is a buddy of the teacher that assigned it. He liked my summary even less than I'd valued his book. He'd tried to get university tech staff to "remove it from the Internet". My name was in WHOIS so he walked around worried about a guy he didn't know was a student at his university until we finally met.



  • @cheong said:

    @cartman82 said:
    Second, the professor seems to be a HUGE dick. Especially since the student picked SO instead of going to the prof for consultations.

    Whether it's SO or not is not the question.

    It's much like the "interview question" questions. If everyone post the question and answer on the web, it'll just leave the teacher no option but to give more complicated question in order to find out the progress of learning of his students.

    This is no good to everyone and I personally think it's a very selfish action.

    I myself don't care if they find the answers to my questions on the internet. Because if they don't understand the answers they're given then they'll fail the exam anyway.
    And if they do understand them then more power to them - don't need to reinvent the wheel.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Onyx said:

    100 students in the class

    The class I'm setting up (for next year) will have about 230 in. It's a logistical nightmare, but I don't have to deal with that side too much.
    We're splitting them into three groups and then each of those into teams of about 6, just so that we can fit everyone in the rooms and keep the number of TAs down…



  • Oh please, I did 4 years at a university. Profs as "authority figures that have power over your future?" Complete bullshit.

    Half my profs couldn't even teach a 10:00 AM class sober.



  • When someone can fail you (or provide other "Academic Penalty")... then petty said professor might be - they have definite power over your future. Right, wrong or indifferent that is definite power.



  • Guess how many times someone in my life has asked my college GPA?

    Hint: it's 0. I did actually have one company that wanted a transcript AFTER I was already hired, but I never provided it because they didn't actually care.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Oh please, I did 4 years at a university. Profs as "authority figures that have power over your future?" Complete bullshit.

    Half my profs couldn't even teach a 10:00 AM class sober.

    But they could fuck you up pretty much on a whim, if they so desired.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Guess how many times someone in my life has asked my college GPA?

    Hint: it's 0. I did actually have one company that wanted a transcript AFTER I was already hired, but I never provided it because they didn't actually care.

    It helps when you're first entering the work force. Also, helps you jump over that first obstacle when someone in HR adds "college degree" requirement in job adds.

    For the rest of your life things are a little bit easier if you have this piece of paper, even if it means nothing in reality.



  • @cartman82 said:

    But they could fuck you up pretty much on a whim, if they so desired.

    ... how?

    @cartman82 said:

    For the rest of your life things are a little bit easier if you have this piece of paper, even if it means nothing in reality.

    I honestly don't think it's true. I don't have a piece of paper, and my career has been just fine.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    ... how?

    Make you do more work. Cost you time and money. Make you fail college. Leave you without degree for the rest of your life.

    @blakeyrat said:

    I honestly don't think it's true. I don't have a piece of paper, and my career has been just fine.

    You can do without a diploma. You'll do better with one.

    Also, IT is in a pretty special place right now. No regulatory requirements, no guilds/professional associations as barriers to entry. Also, it's workforce sellers' market, as opposed to pretty much any other industry.

    Doesn't mean it will stay this way forever, though.



  • @cartman82 said:

    Leave you without degree for the rest of your life.

    I can only imagine how much better-off I'd be now if I hadn't wasted 4 years of my life at that useless university.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I can only imagine how much better-off I'd be now if I hadn't wasted 4 years of my life at that useless university.

    You'd have a more classy twitter feed, with quotes from "great american writers" instead of video games. And you'd know all the European flags too.

    Totally worth it.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    FUN CHEATING STORIES TIMES:

    Excelling at Nothing
    My wife's first year teaching, she was assigned to teach a "computers 101" class. What is a mouse? How to use Word? She's Science, but doing that one course got her foot in the door at the school. She's pretty technically apt, so it wasn't much of a stretch for her to teach the course. I did help her mark one of the first round of assignments (she was very overworked). The assignment was creating an Excel spreadsheet. Pick some sort of product from any old ecomm website, create a bunch of columns, do some formulas, slap your name on top. Easy enough.

    So I come across one that seems suspect.
    👦 I think this student copied another. All the products they picked are the same.
    👧 They're allowed to pick the same sort of products
    👦 But the FONT they used is exactly the same. It isn't the Excel default font.
    👧 Maybe they both liked the same font?

    My wife's very nervous about accusing a student of cheating when she's the new teacher. She wants to be very sure.
    👦 Okay, so, you know when you scroll down in an Excel, then close Excel, it'll remember your scroll position? Both these files open to the exact same scroll position.
    :wife: That's still not proof they copied from each other.

    So by chance, I scroll up on both, and look at Row A which has the student name on it.
    👦 Well, when Student B copied from Student A, it scrolled down. And because it scrolled down, they obviously never bother to scroll back up to look at Row A. She forgot to take the other student's name off.
    👧 .... I'll talk to both of them tomorrow. Zero.

    Wrong IQ
    I took an online English course called "The Short Story". Each assignment was to read a short story, then go online to a forum. There were about 100 questions there. You picked 3, answered them, and posted your answers online. You also had to reply to at least two other answers from other students as a "discussion".

    One of the questions was about IQ Tests. Something like "What is an IQ test?". Someone posts an answer, and I happen to read it. It's-- interesting. Paraphrased from memory, something like "The Johnson(tm) IQ Test was invented by Dr. Soandso in 1998. It has become widely accepted as the best IQ test around. As seen on Oprah" And a bunch of other obvious marketing bullshit. So I do a quick Google for some choice phrases, and find some "omg what's your IQ hire us for employee interview" bullshit site. I then do a Google for "what is IQ test", and the first hit is-- that spammy site. (This was back in, I think, 2004).

    So I reply to the question with. "IQ test was invented in {insert correct information here}. What you posted was some scummy site hawking snakeoil. But that's what happens when you blindly copy and paste the first Google result you find without bothering to read it".

    I got a PM from the professor with a lol and "full marks". =)

    History Lesson
    This one was told to me by one of my profs. I'll assume it's true without checking Snopes. =)

    She had a student hand in a midterm exam. All of the answers were 100% correct-- for the previous year's version of the exam.


  • Banned

    There was a guy in my high school who, during the end-year exam, was copying the answers from iPad. As you can guess, the teacher easily spotted him.

    BTW I totally believe in the last story you posted, since it happened to two my friends too.



  • Oooooh, cheating stories! May I play, too?

    Chemistry
    The science teachers at our school (including me, of course) sometimes give our pupils homework in the form of: "Do a short essay about [relevant topic]". It's not to be too long and it's also not such a huge contributor to your overall grade, but there's one rule: No copy&paste.
    I've had one pupil argue with me because, while her answers were taken 100% from Wikipedia, she had given me a handwritten essay with faulty spelling, thus forgoing the "paste" part. Because she wrote it by hand. Or so the thought process went, I think.

    Science
    This class had a lot of pupils so I had to use a kind of visual cover in order to prevent cheating by simply looking at your neighbour's sheet. This visual cover is a hollow, triangular tent of sorts which you can fold back into a sheet form when not in use.

    So, after most of the pupils were done (and had already left the room), I set out to collect those covers while the last three pupils were still writing. Upon lifting the cover near one student, a mobile phone fell out - the guy had hidden the phone inside the cover in such a way that I wasn't able to see it from the front of the class...

    Cracked screen plus not exactly a passing grade.

    Math
    One guy left his cheat sheet inside the exam when he handed it in.



  • Okay, I have one great cheating story from college. Two guys, both Comp Sci majors, were roommates. We'll call them Alice and Bob (hey, it's the 21st Century...and we can make them gay so the opposite sex dorm roommates thing doesn't matter 🚎)

    Alice was a great student, Bob was terrible. Seriously, Bob was the kind of guy who couldn't identify a keyboard if you slapped him across the face with one. He had no business studying Computer Science, and if he ever graduated I guarantee he left a trail of carnage at every IT job he worked for.

    Bob learned to copy finished homework assignments from Alice's computer when she was out, and that was how he'd been passing classes. Eventually Alice suspected this, and set up bait. She left a folder on her desktop labeled something like "Programming2AssignmentWeek5". Inside it were some .java files, but instead of containing actual Java code, they just had text like "I'm a big poopyhead who cheats on assignments."

    Bob took the bait. He saw the folder, didn't even open it up or try to run it, zipped it up, and submitted it to his professor as his own work.

    Unfortunately I have no idea what the fallout was. This is a cliffhanger for everyone.


  • FoxDev

    @Rhywden said:

    I've had one pupil argue with me because, while her answers were taken 100% from Wikipedia, she had given me a handwritten essay with faulty spelling, thus forgoing the "paste" part. Because she wrote it by hand. Or so the thought process went, I thin

    hmm..... i like the creative thinking. ;-)

    @Rhywden said:

    the guy had hidden the phone inside the cover in such a way that I wasn't able to see it from the front of the class...
    bonus points if it was flappy bird on the screen instead of google or cheat sheet.

    @Rhywden said:

    One guy left his cheat sheet inside the exam when he handed it in.
    :headdesk:


    Okay my turn!

    hmm......

    I guess my greatest cheat ever was that A in Philosophy i have from college. I only ever went to the first class, never took the midterm or final or anything. Never dropped the class, ended up with a 4.0 (A)

    to this day i have NFC why, and i'm not going to ask.



  • Oh, I just remembered another great one...but instead of posting it here, I think this one will become a "Tales From The Interviewer (yay Markdown, I can't bold part of a word) story.



  • This post is deleted!


  • @accalia said:

    I guess my greatest cheat ever was that A in Philosophy i have from college. I only ever went to the first class, never took the midterm or final or anything. Never dropped the class, ended up with a 4.0 (A)

    to this day i have NFC why, and i'm not going to ask.

    That kind of happened to me with a lecture on paedagogics. Shortly after I began studying they changed the requirements for the courses a bit. However, the students who had begun studying before that change were still subject to the old rules (unless we wanted to "upgrade").

    For this particular lecture it meant that I myself was only required to be a breathing body in the room who didn't miss a lecture more than twice. This lecture was also optional for me which was the reason why I had not taken it until my final semester.
    Under the new rules, everybody had to take an exam to pass - there already had been exams in previous semesters. But, as I was only required to be present, did not take that too seriously.

    But I thought to myself: Hey, why don't you at least take a look at this thing? So I got myself the exam from last year, looked it over 10 minutes before we were doing the new one and noticed that it was strictly multiple choice. With something like 10 questions, total.

    The exam room was packed. 150 students. I was sitting in the front row so I got the exam sheet first. And was done about 2 minutes later because the questions were the same only in different order.

    The guy next to me muttered under his breath: "Oh, geeze, this is hard!"

    Meanwhile I was debating with myself if I should turn in the paper before the professor was done handing them out.

    Got the equivalent of a 3.6 on it.



  • @mott555 said:

    (yay Markdown, I can't bold part of a word)

    Interview­er





  • @blakeyrat said:

    I don't have a piece of paper, and my career has been just fine.

    Likewise.



  • @cheong said:

    If I were a teacher and see my students posting homework questions on forum, I'd recommand them to withdraw from the class too.

    It depends.

    If it were just the question, then yes.

    But this shows a lot of effort.

    Secondly.... Yes, yes the professor CAN damn the stealing student. He CAN damn them with about the same level of authority that he damned the posting student.

    To say he can damn this one for obvious reasons, and can't damn the other is pure retarded.

    Because given my "no SO" days, if two students turned in the same work, the professor would question both of them. I know, because it happened to me.


    @presidentsdaughter said:

    humble and focused.

    Exactly.

    In the business world, being stubborn enough to find the information you need to complete the task is the primary skillset for being a programmer.

    This professor is teaching the kid that being stubborn to work on your own, not admit when you don't know, and not work in a community environment, is exactly what businesses right now would condemn in a professor.

    @cartman82 said:

    You'll do better with one.

    Debatable. Highly debatable.


  • Banned

    @Rhywden said:

    This class had a lot of pupils so I had to use a kind of visual cover in order to prevent cheating by simply looking at your neighbour's sheet.

    Couldn't you simply make two variants of test? This is standard practice in Poland and it works very well.


  • Banned

    @accalia said:

    I guess my greatest cheat ever was that A in Philosophy i have from college. I only ever went to the first class, never took the midterm or final or anything. Never dropped the class, ended up with a 4.0 (A)

    to this day i have NFC why, and i'm not going to ask.


    Last year, I had discreet maths class where:

    • I wasn't attending the lectures
    • Didn't have a goddamn clue what's going on during the classes
    • Scored 0 points on exam (like, I actually was on exam, written something, but all wrong)
    • Skipped the make-up exam

    And still got 4.0.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @Onyx said:

    there were something like 100 students in the class (yes, that's a :wtf: of a different kind)

    @dkf said:

    The class I'm setting up (for next year) will have about 230 in. It's a logistical nightmare

    Where I studied, there were >800 students in some classes.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Guess how many times someone in my life has asked my college GPA?

    Hint: it's 0. I did actually have one company that wanted a transcript AFTER I was already hired, but I never provided it because they didn't actually care.

    I didn't say anything about GPA. There are more ways to punish than dropping your GPA a little.

    A failed class can hold you back. Stop you from taking future classes. Mess up your planned course schedule. Stop you from graduating on time.

    THAT is only if it's simply a "failed" class. There are other forms of "Academic Penalty" that could be used more severe - depending on the level of dick-itude this professor exudes. Expulsion? Loss of Scholarship based on grades? 50 lashes at high noon? Public acknowledgement that Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries?

    The world won't end with one failed class. GPA isn't "important" in the real world - unless you maybe have a 4.0 (or close) and even then it'll only be noticeable for maybe your first job.

    It only takes a few moments of thought to realize that one domino can affect many MANY more.



  • @Gaska said:

    @Rhywden said:
    This class had a lot of pupils so I had to use a kind of visual cover in order to prevent cheating by simply looking at your neighbour's sheet.

    Couldn't you simply make two variants of test? This is standard practice in Poland and it works very well.

    That works for simple problems. With the more complicated ones I'm usually more interested in the way to the solution.

    I mean, deriving the formula for the escape velocity can only be done in so many ways.For the more complicated problems I actually provide the answers for each partial task so that, if the pupil is stuck on a particular step, he/she could in principle skip this step and continue with the next one.



  • @Gaska said:

    Last year, I had discreet maths class where:

    • I wasn't attending the lectures
    • Didn't have a goddamn clue what's going on during the classes
    • Scored 0 points on exam (like, I actually was on exam, written something, but all wrong)
    • Skipped the make-up exam

    And still got 4.0.

    That's even better than my Linear Algebra class. Every test was worth 100 points, and every question worth 10. That would be fine if tests had 10 questions, but most didn't. So what happens if a test had fewer than 10 questions? You started with 100 points, and lost 10 for each one you got wrong (+/- partial credit). One memorable test had only two questions; I got one question (half the test) completely wrong, and I still got a score of 90%. The final grade in the class was, I guess, based on straight 90/80/70/60% -> A/B/C/D. By rights, I should have failed (or nearly failed) the class, because I really didn't understand it; instead, like you and @accalia, I got an A. I wasn't the only one who got the dubious benefit of a better grade than I deserved; during the final exam the instructor announced, "I've added up your grades so far. Nobody's getting less than a B, and there aren't very many of those."


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Rhywden said:

    I've had one pupil argue with me because, while her answers were taken 100% from Wikipedia, she had given me a handwritten essay with faulty spelling, thus forgoing the "paste" part. Because she wrote it by hand.

    You should've given her 50%, because she only violated half the rule.

    What? It's still an F.



  • While not as bad as this, my Physical Chemistry class did similar shenanigans on the final exam.

    First of all, it was what we call a "luggage exam" - meaning that you'd be allowed to arrive with a luggage of books and notes (usually those are the really hard exams). But the questions were all variants of the homework we had to do over the course of the semester. Thus if you did your homework you had already quite a good idea of how to solve the problems.

    That was not all, however. They also decided to let some other student from the university write this exam and base the "perfect" score on his score.

    This resulted in me writing an exam where I got a score of 120%.

    (To their defense I have to admit: If you had skipped homework then you'd have had hell of a time solving all that stuff)



  • @WernerCD said:

    GPA isn't "important" in the real world - unless you maybe have a 4.0 (or close) and even then it'll only be noticeable for maybe your first job.

    I still occasionally run into job applications or questionnaires that ask my GPA, even with well over 20 years of experience. I honestly don't even remember it any more, but some potential employers want to know.



  • One of my physics teachers sold physics cheat shirts (had the most useful equations upside down on the shirt). This was the only allowed cheat "sheet" for the exam.



  • I stopped caring about GPA when it became obvious 80% of applicants lied and put a 4.0 on their resumes. In fact, I'm much more likely to pay attention to non-4.0 GPAs.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @Rhywden said:

    First of all, it was what we call a "luggage exam" - meaning that you'd be allowed to arrive with a luggage of books and notes (usually those are the really hard exams).

    I always loved those exams. They actually test the skills the class is supposed to teach instead of your ability to memorize. Also, I'm ridiculously lazy and hate to memorize stuff I can easily deduce/look up if necessary.



  • @Gaska said:

    @Rhywden said:
    This class had a lot of pupils so I had to use a kind of visual cover in order to prevent cheating by simply looking at your neighbour's sheet.

    Couldn't you simply make two variants of test? This is standard practice in Poland and it works very well.

    Because we all know how revered the Polish are for their genius qualities...



  • @mott555 said:

    I stopped carrying about GPA

    While I understand why you'd stop doing that, they're not very heavy and take up no room at all to carry about with you.



  • Ugh. Lately I've been having a devil of a time typing similar-sounding, but incorrect words. No idea where that little problem came from.


  • FoxDev

    @xaade said:

    Debatable. Highly debatable.

    not so much.

    without that degree and without equivalent work experience it is rather hard to get past the guards of HR.

    once you get past HR though.... yeah.... none of us actually care about the paper, we care that you can do the job.


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