in reply to Homework threads aren't necessarily evil

As said by others, a good interesting homework question, be it from someone at school or at work, benefits other readers as well. A cheater won't get far in technical profession anyway (it's another story with other professions) and should the person a "cheater" actually learn something and apply the knowledge to do something useful in life, that's only a win-win situation for us. So, we might as well keep and even answer the good homework question for the sake of competent learners.

Besides, the responsibility of catching a cheater lays squarely on the teacher at school and the school system. At least, it should be obvious to catch some with great performance discrepancy between take-home assignment and in-class exam or any kind of in-person quiz.

(That reminded me a post a while ago that told an anecdote where a job interviewee claimed to be chromatic but failed to explain most of "his" own code, let alone the fact that many people do know who chromatic is.)


__________________
Update: I slipped my mind. Thanks blue_cowdawg for reminding me. I forgot how many phony consultants I've encountered and forgot some people don't actually have to do work for professional advancement, just cunningly claiming credit.

Update: The anecdote mentioned above came from Re: CPAN Authorhood

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Re: Re: Homework threads aren't necessarily evil
by blue_cowdawg (Monsignor) on Jul 24, 2003 at 19:07 UTC

          A cheater won't get far in technical profession anyway

    Sadly, I have far too much personal experience to the contrary. I used to work for someone who was a "cheater" to the extreme. He was an RF engineer whose designs for RF compenent systems only worked because he had technicians that re-worked his designs until they worked. He would then fault the techies when his designs were unworkable.

    My experience with the man directly was that he would take credit for my work directly. (I designed/built automated test systems for him) He would tell upper management that he designed the systems and wrote the software and that I didn't know what I was doing.

    He was found out the day we got a new VP who could see through his BS and he couldn't explain how one of the test systems I built worked to the VPs satisfaction. The VP then asked me and I gave him the correct answers.

          the responsibility of catching a cheater lays squarely on the teacher at school and the school system.

    This is why there are now ethics classes in schools. Seems that cheating is considered by our society as being OK as long as you don't get caught. Unfortunately for my students using Perl Monks to cheat with was not an option since I made it clear to them that I monitor Perl Monks as well as several other online communities.

    Peter L. BergholdBrewer of Belgian Ales
    Peter@Berghold.Netwww.berghold.net
    Unix Professional
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      "He was found out the day we got a new VP who could see through his BS and he couldn't explain how one of the test systems I built worked to the VPs satisfaction. The VP then asked me and I gave him the correct answers."

      Ah the power of Karma once again shows true...what goes around, does indeed come around ;-)

      That is perhaps the most valuable ethics lesson to be learned from this thread.

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Re: Re: Homework threads aren't necessarily evil
by rir (Vicar) on Jul 24, 2003 at 18:49 UTC
    the responsibility of catching a cheater lays squarely on the .. teacher ... and the school...

    Yikes!

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