The Cheatpocalypse
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Long post, but worth it. Truly amazing amount of brazen cheating right in front of the professor's eyes:
https://crumplab.com/articles/blog/post_994_5_26_22_cheating/index.html
Fortunately for me I was also able to apply my data-analysis skills to the problem of figuring out who did what. I spend most of my research life using the statistical programming language R to do all sort of things, and I knew I would be able to input the WhatsApp chat and write some scripts to help me with my cheating detective work.
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@boomzilla The fuck nobody ever considered the prof was on the group chat he was goddamn fucking invited to?
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@Applied-Mediocrity kids today, eh?
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@boomzilla Not read everything yet but that one is very appropriate for this site:
I had nothing better to do so I wrote an R program to help me fill out the forms. Who knew I could automate pdf text entry from R. You learn something new everyday.
To quote a wise man, we "love the smell of the
s in the morning..."
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The thing I find most sad, in a way, is the last line, "None of them suggested it was me." It never occurred to any of the students that the instructor might have been just lurking quietly, listening to everything that went on. Even though some of the students in the first semester had been just lurking quietly, listening (blah blah blah), none of them thought that the instructor might have been doing that as well.
EDIT: two icons for this:
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At my most mystified, I proceeded to release a class announcement warning students not to plagiarize the academic integrity assignment.
Stupid fucks just can't help themselves...
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But, I gave one third chance. I messaged the student that they had plagiarized the assignment from a website. I sent the link. They immediately wrote back and said I had the wrong link and that they copied it from a different website.
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@loopback0 I mean, how dumb do you have to be to literally admit to plagiarising the answer to 'how can I demonstrate I'm not plagiarising'?
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@Arantor said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@loopback0 I mean, how dumb do you have to be to literally admit to plagiarising the answer to 'how can I demonstrate I'm not plagiarising'?
In fairness, he's a college student. His brain has been continuously de-oxygenated since he got to campus, due to other demands on his blood.
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@izzion I wouldn't know, never went to university...
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@izzion said in The Cheatpocalypse:
His brain has been continuously de-oxygenated since he got to campus,
Not to mention ethanolated.
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@Arantor said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@loopback0 I mean, how dumb do you have to be to literally admit to plagiarising the answer to 'how can I demonstrate I'm not plagiarising'?
Well, he knew he was caught, but maybe he thought the prof didn't know about the scraper site he actually used that copied from the site the prof did use.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@boomzilla The fuck nobody ever considered the prof was on the group chat he was goddamn fucking invited to?
You'd be amazed.
There are students that never fail to be amazed when somebody knows how to use freaking Google. (Yes, idiots, searching on Google something one can do. Your code was so obviously plagiarized that one could have found the original on fucking Altavista.)
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- laundry list of typing rules because every cog's code must look exactly like every other cog's code
- simplistic algorithm assignment (write a bubble sort! reverse a string! print prime numbers from 1 to 100!)
: Why does everybody's code look like this Google example? I know! They must be cheating! It's the only possible explanation!
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@Zenith said in The Cheatpocalypse:
- laundry list of typing rules because every cog's code must look exactly like every other cog's code
- simplistic algorithm assignment (write a bubble sort! reverse a string! print prime numbers from 1 to 100!)
Yeah ... nope, not the case in the specific instance I was thinking of when writing the above.
FWIW- if you ever get past like the first year or so, you won't be writing bubble sorts or reversing strings. If you still do, go look for a different place.
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@cvi I earned my degree when we still had actual computer science departments. Now many of them are just glorified Git, Jira, and camel casing workshops.
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@Zenith said in The Cheatpocalypse:
- laundry list of typing rules because every cog's code must look exactly like every other cog's code
- simplistic algorithm assignment (write a bubble sort! reverse a string! print prime numbers from 1 to 100!)
: Why does everybody's code look like this Google example? I know! They must be cheating! It's the only possible explanation!I have some experience from both sides, and... Nope.
No matter how simple the assignment is, it's actually quite easy to tell if someone just copy-pasted it. Of course it's also relatively easy to just copy the solution and "personalize" it, but it requires some effort. And that's enough to pass the "101 Computer Science Introduction for Electrical Engineers" course.
Actually, something similar to this article happened to me - as a PhD student, I lived in a dorm and someone asked in the IRC channel for the solution (sources) to copy. Funnily enough, he was genuinely puzzled by my answer that I already have 8 of them and (after the obvious followup question) that I "collect them". Sadly, the conversation ended there (presumably some good samaritan explained the situation in a private message).
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And another story about plagiarism, this time from my undergrad years. The "Digital Electronics for Computer Science" course had a practical part with lots of measurements (including funny stuff like oscilloscopes, and less funny stuff with just voltmeters etc) and we had to write and submit "reports" (I am missing a lot of english terms here).
Let's see... ok, I know this one. I've seen this incorrectly indented paragraph three times already, just today.
(random other student) Uhm...
Well, the numbers look OK, graph is fine. Passed! But learn to work with Word, FFS.
Next!
(me): Here.
Let's see...
omg
wtf
Is that LaTeX?!??
Uhm, yes, why?
That must have took ages to write! So much work!
You know you can just download the reports from the shared drive? Everyone else does that!
....
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@HardwareGeek said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in The Cheatpocalypse:
Is that LaTeX?!??
Uhm, yes, why?
It's a lingua franca
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@Gribnit said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@HardwareGeek said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in The Cheatpocalypse:
Is that LaTeX?!??
Uhm, yes, why?
It's a lingua franca
Oui, mais pourquoi?
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@HardwareGeek said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@izzion said in The Cheatpocalypse:
His brain has been continuously de-oxygenated since he got to campus,
Not to mention ethanolated.
I prefer to call it methyl carbinol, but yeah.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in The Cheatpocalypse:
Is that LaTeX?!??
Uhm, yes, why?I was in math. The instruction at the start of my first year was to not ever consider turning anything in that was not in LaTeX.
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@Luhmann said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@Gribnit said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@HardwareGeek said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in The Cheatpocalypse:
Is that LaTeX?!??
Uhm, yes, why?
It's a lingua franca
Oui, mais pourquoi?
Wth gibberish is
??
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@HardwareGeek said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@izzion said in The Cheatpocalypse:
His brain has been continuously de-oxygenated since he got to campus,
Not to mention ethanolated.
I prefer to call it methyl carbinol, but yeah.
Deoxymonoethylether?
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@PleegWat said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in The Cheatpocalypse:
Is that LaTeX?!??
Uhm, yes, why?I was in math. The instruction at the start of my first year was to not ever consider turning anything in that was not in LaTeX.
Yeah, that's my basically my excuse, too (well, actually, Computer Science)
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@Kamil-Podlesak
I only know a fun story not exactly about cheating, but faking experimental data. There was a lab class in the physics department. The task in question was very simple - measure a hundred or so resistors, plot a histogram and check if the values are normal-distributed and fit within the specified tolerance.One guy either arrived late or didn't know how to use a multimeter, anyway he didn't obtain any actual data. When he got home (the students could edit the report at home), he ran some script generating random numbers from the predicted normal distribution and put the results in his report. Next week, he got an F. He went to the professor to ask what's wrong with his report. It was so perfect, how could he fail this?
Turns out, the resistors he got were from 2 different batches with different means, and if he really measured anything, his histogram would have two "humps". It didn't.
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Since others are talking about their own cheating stories, my favorite from college (circa 2004) has to be from a comp sci class where people were assigned a lunar lander problem. I forget the language they were asked to do it in, but it was a certain obscure language which wasn't very popular, and thus was a little bit immune from the typical "google the answer."
Some students did find some results for the algorithm they wanted, which the professor actually said was acceptable, just as long as they didn't just blatantly copy-paste from some stack overflow question or whatever.
One group of students came across the very specific answer to their problem: A lunar lander example in the very language they were assigned. Jackpot! The article, variable names, comments, and such were all in Swedish, though, hence why it was so hard to find. They got to work adapting it to their assignment.
Meanwhile someone I'll call Kevin, who was notorious for... just generally being an asshat, didn't even bother reading anything. He just saw the URL being passed around, put that in his browser, CTRL+A CTRL+C CTRL+V then sent it straight to the professor, proudly saying just as much to his peers.
Uuuh, Kevin... did you actually read the code?
Huh? Dude, go to the URL, read the code, and then see what you sent the professor. ...Dude pleaded with the professor not to read the attachment he had emailed and would send a corrected version by the due date later that night.
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@Arantor said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@izzion I wouldn't know, never went to university...
I did, and still wouldn't know. I graduated still being a virgin.
:zwj:
However, I concur with that one:
@HardwareGeek said in The Cheatpocalypse:
Not to mention ethanolated.
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@topspin said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@Arantor said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@izzion I wouldn't know, never went to university...
I did, and still wouldn't know. I graduated still being a virgin.
:zwj:
It has only been very recently that my personal status in such things has changed.I still would probably not have been that brain-dead though...
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@topspin said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@Arantor said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@izzion I wouldn't know, never went to university...
I did, and still wouldn't know. I graduated still being a virgin.
:zwj:Hmm. In my case that would depend on whether "graduated" happened when I finished all my course requirements or when I sat in a big tent while wearing "academic dress", and listened to Tip O'Neil blithering about whatever it was he was blithering about.
If the latter, then I wasn't a (EDIT: finish sentence)virgin at graduation, but ...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Cheatpocalypse:
It has only been very recently that my personal status in such things has changed.
Congratulations for graduating!
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@sebastian-galczynski said in The Cheatpocalypse:
Turns out, the resistors he got were from 2 different batches with different means, and if he really measured anything, his histogram would have two "humps". It didn't.
It reminds me about a possibly-apocryphal-but-credible story.
Someone needed some resistors with a precise value, and had a big batch of resistors with ±5% tolerance in stock. He thought "The distribution is likely normal. So I'll just measure them and use the ones closest to the center value".
Except when he did, he found that while all being in tolerance, none of them were close to the center value: they were all significantly above or below it.
The explanation was that the manufacturer had
ed him, and sold the resistors close the center value as ±1% precision for a higher price. And the lesson was: don't rely on characteristics that are not explicitly documented, even if they seem natural. After all, the resistors were only advertised as being within ±5% tolerance, and they were.
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@Zerosquare said in The Cheatpocalypse:
It reminds me about a possibly-apocryphal-but-credible story.
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The explanation was that the manufacturer haded him, and sold the resistors close the center value as ±1% precision for a higher price. And the lesson was: don't rely on characteristics that are not explicitly documented, even if they seem natural. After all, the resistors were only advertised as being within ±5% tolerance, and they were.This is essentially what chip manufacturers do.
Explainer: What is Chip Binning?
You bought a new CPU and it seems to run cool, so you try a bit of overclocking. The GHz climb higher. Did you hit the silicon...
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Yes. But for chips, it's pretty well-known (thanks to overclockers). And since the manufacturing processes for them are constantly improving, after some time you actually have a chance to get a chip that can run faster than its advertised frequency, because there's no longer enough "slow" chips to fill the demand in the lower bins.
(A long time ago, I had a 366 MHz-rated Celeron processor that worked perfectly fine at 550 MHz, without even needing any extra cooling.)
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@Zerosquare said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Cheatpocalypse:
It has only been very recently that my personal status in such things has changed.
Congratulations for graduating!
It took many, many steps. But it happened nonetheless!
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@Dragoon said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@Zerosquare said in The Cheatpocalypse:
It reminds me about a possibly-apocryphal-but-credible story.
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The explanation was that the manufacturer haded him, and sold the resistors close the center value as ±1% precision for a higher price. And the lesson was: don't rely on characteristics that are not explicitly documented, even if they seem natural. After all, the resistors were only advertised as being within ±5% tolerance, and they were.This is essentially what chip manufacturers do.
Also, power distribution. In some places in Europe, voltage is still 220V even 20 years after it was officially raised to 230V. In other places (even within the same country), it was 230V even 10 years before it was officially raised.
All within tolerance -> everything is fine.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@PleegWat said in The Cheatpocalypse:
I was in math.
Masochism is explained
.
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@error bah!
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@boomzilla beatings will continue until enthusiasm improves.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in The Cheatpocalypse:
All within tolerance -> everything is fine.
Until you turn on the kettle, then it falls below 180V
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@sebastian-galczynski said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in The Cheatpocalypse:
All within tolerance -> everything is fine.
Until you turn on the kettle, then it falls below 180V
Yikes! That's a wiring problem if there is such a voltage drop when there's a reasonable current draw.
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@dkf said in The Cheatpocalypse:
Yikes! That's a wiring problem if there is such a voltage drop when there's a reasonable current draw.
In some remote locations, several km from the transformer, you can either buy a thicker wire (expensive) or move the transformer (very expensive). Many such cases in the mountains on the Slovak border.
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@sebastian-galczynski It does mean you've got a really low maximum load on that power circuit. The resistance in the wires is somewhere close to 20% of the total resistance in the circuit (back of an envelope calculations say about 2.5Ω with the kettle being around 19Ω) with that sort of voltage drop, meaning that there's significant resistive heating along the whole length of the wires. Which will be insulated because otherwise there's no way they'll be safe, but that will keep a lot of the heat in...
IOW, yikes!
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@dkf said in The Cheatpocalypse:
significant resistive heating along the whole length of the wires.
Spread over kilometers of wire it's literally nothing. Note that the heating power per unit of cable length only depends on the cross section and current. You don't go over the limit just because the cable is long. And the cross-section is perfectly fine for more than one kettle.
@dkf said in The Cheatpocalypse:
Which will be insulated because otherwise there's no way they'll be safe
Not necessarily. There's still a substantial amount of traditional "bare wires on poles" type of grid, even for low voltage. They're being replaced with insulated cables, but often still hanging on poles because digging is expensive.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@Dragoon said in The Cheatpocalypse:
@Zerosquare said in The Cheatpocalypse:
It reminds me about a possibly-apocryphal-but-credible story.
...
The explanation was that the manufacturer haded him, and sold the resistors close the center value as ±1% precision for a higher price. And the lesson was: don't rely on characteristics that are not explicitly documented, even if they seem natural. After all, the resistors were only advertised as being within ±5% tolerance, and they were.This is essentially what chip manufacturers do.
Also, power distribution. In some places in Europe, voltage is still 220V even 20 years after it was officially raised to 230V.
The way I heard it, that was a compromise to accommodate the difference between the UK (240V +/- 10V) the rest of the EU (220V +/- 10V), with the compromise being 230V +/- 20V, so that nobody needed to change. Now that we in the EU are rid of the UK, there's no need for this nonsense any more.
EDIT: forgot the
icon.
