I think it's important for CS students to learn to get help from the programming community. I've seen far too many programmers fresh out of college reinventing the wheel simply because they had no idea that places like this exist!

-sam

I think it's important for CS students to learn to get help from the programming community. I've seen far too many programmers fresh out of college reinventing the wheel simply because they had no idea that places like this exist!

Concur. The problem is finding a balance between not helping the OP at all and helping the OP too much. From past experience, though, I think we're pretty good at finding that balance.

Edit: Perhaps a bit more diligence is required. :-(

--
Yours in pedantry,
F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
"Anything you put in comments is not tested and easily goes out of date." -- tye

Let me grab two recent homework discussions, Homework help and Need help on part of homework. It looks to me like people get fully working answers to homework questions pretty easily. I don't see that we're striking a very good balance there at all!

D'accord.

One of life's great lessons is knowing when to seek help and advice. IMO, a much more important lesson than anything taught on any CS course.

Another of life's great lessons is learning how to learn, and the greater part of that, is to know how to effectively research a problem.

Many of us didn't have the internet through which to do our research, so we had to use our local library. Just as I would expect any half-competent lecturer to be able to recognise the difference between:

• my have learned something from reading a text.
• my having copied a text verbatim, or with just enough inconsequential changes to try to conceal it's origins.

so I would expect them to be able to recognise when a student has learnt from code found (or solicited) on the internet, and code produced as a result of lessons learnt from stuff found on the internet.

If I, as a lecturer, had any doubts one way or the other, then I don't think I would find it hard to pose one or two simple verbal questions of the student to decide one way or the other.

The last, and possibly most important of life's great lessons involved here is that in the end, if you cheat on exams, it is unlikely to have ill-consequences for either your lecturer, or fellow students in the long term.

Cheating on exams is ultimately, cheating yourself.

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks.

"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
"Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algorithm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon

--I think it's important for CS students to learn to get help from the programming community. I've seen far too many programmers fresh out of college reinventing the wheel simply because they had no idea that places like this exist!

Reinventing the wheel is part of a proper education. I agree wholeheartedly that familiarity with support communities benefits the seasoned programmer, but I'd rather hire the engineer whose marks are reflective of his or her innate programmatic abilities versus his or her resourcefulness. That is, however, simply a personal preference.

Given what I've seen happen before when people post some broken code, I'm not inclined to take a generous interpretation of what he's looking for. He may claim to be looking for refinements, but he'll likely get a complete rewrite that is an order of magnitude better than anything he could write - and he won't understand what makes it better. Given the levels of academic dishonesty on campuses today (not that it is a new problem), I'm not inclined to believe that he would tell his instructors that he got outside help, even if he said he would (which he hasn't).

I agree that it is important for CS students to learn to get help from the programming community in appropriate ways. And my opinion is that asking other people to debug your code is not an appropriate kind of help to ask for.

Knowing that not everyone agrees with me won't change my opinion. I already know that some don't agree with me, but I have reasons for my opinion and until they are addressed...

First I just want to clear up a few misconceptions: 1.Your comments Tilly has DEEPLY HURT and OFFENDED me (I re-read my post twice and I still don't know how people came to the conclusion that my purpose here is to cheat) I am not asking anyone to do my work for me or refine it I just want someone to EVALUATE my code,better my understanding and maybe grade me on my code that's all. 2. Please feel free to reap posts and downlevel (is that the correct term?)of anyone who modifies my code. 3. If I wanted to cheat I could have said nothing about my situation and simply posted code to be modified. 4. I really do have a sincere interest in learning perl and mastering it for the long term 5. This site was recommended by my lecturer (and I suspect he is a member here) 6. I want to apologize about the test node. I am very sorry about the inconvinence this may have caused. 7. I WILL PASS THIS COURSE..................... So to Tilly and company are we cool?

I agree that he'll likely receive a complete re-write from some monks. Although he could have been sneakier and not mentioned that it was for school. I believe he was honestly looking (or will be) for opinions.