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Issue #239 June 2010
Is It Cheating or Is It Collaboration?
by Steve Ciarcia
I know I have been hard on students in the past. Over the years, I’ve accused various graduating classes of being dumber than shoe leather and others of downright laziness. But I assure you: it was meant to motivate, not demean. I cringe at the thought of America becoming a third-world technical power due to an education process that often seems to emphasize quantity over quality. But, in the defense of hard-working students, I wonder if the system is sometimes also stacked against them.
Recently, a graduate student complained to me that he felt some of his professors were on a witch hunt about plagiarism and cheating. To make his point, he asked one of the plagiarism scanning packages to check the sentence, “My favorite programming language is solder,” which I used a few months ago. When asked if it was original or not, red flags immediately indicated that I had plagiarized it and that the saying had originated in the early 1980s.
The scanning software was correct. It is not original. However, the dummy who wrote the scanning program that might be deciding the fate of others didn’t go far enough. Yes, it was first used in the early 1980s, but that was by me too! It may not be “original” when I say it today, but it is absolutely not plagiarism because I’m the guy who wrote the “original” line back then.
While this example may be questionable, it got my attention. I’m not convinced that all the claims of cheating and plagiarism in computer science and engineering classes are entirely valid—not because I deny that there is copied code and circuits circulating in classes, but because the witch hunt to find it contradicts the reality of life outside the classroom, especially when something determined to be “cheating” in one place is often considered “intelligent collaboration” in another.
The problem is that before the Internet, issues about cheating were exclusively about ethics and morality. Today, especially with regard to the Internet and certainly in colleges, it has morphed into a myriad list of prohibitions about sources. When these embargos prevent using online examples or knowledge from others, I question the point of the exercise. What is the purpose of all this formal education if it discourages a sense of teamwork and collaboration that students absolutely need for later success? Cheating should be about the ethics and morality of content use (i.e., copyright, license, and permissions) and not simply about its syntax and acquisition.
Engineering and computer science students aren’t more dishonest than others. They are just more apt to be caught violating the “rules” because their professors are more likely able to use automated tools that scan and detect coincidences among sources. One frequently used excuse is that students should be learning the mechanics of problem solving (i.e., do it all themselves with no other sources) before the world of collaboration is open to them. Especially with computer science classes, the concentration on “mechanics” is about evaluating a student’s unique problem-solving skills and programming technique. Yeah, right. And, it has nothing to do with avoiding all the work associated with changing test problems and homework assignments from previous semesters.
It’s been a long time since I was in college, but a change in one of my classes made all the difference in my success. Back in my day, closed-book exams were the norm. If you didn’t remember the correct formulas (the “mechanics”), you were screwed. Then, one semester, a professor declared that his exams would be “open book” from then on. Certainly, it meant that he had to change exam questions and homework assignments each semester, but his logic was that engineering careers were “open book.” Educate engineers to solve problems, not memorize formulas.
If educators are so worried about students copying past solutions, change the questions! If they are worried about students working together, then simply have students declare the names of other collaborators when they submit their work. And, if educators demand to know a student’s unique contribution when collaborating, ask them! Certainly, the easiest way to determine the stars and duds in a design committee (college or business) is to interview them individually and ask each to explain their logic, technique, and contribution.
I realize there is a fine line separating the arguments in all this, but what makes an outstanding engineer or scientist is ultimately performance. Out in the real world, no one fixates on the mechanics of exactly how great people arrive at great solutions.
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