This doesn't strike me as unreasonable, given that they likely maintain the same syllabus for a number of years, and having multiple solutions for academic assignments out there in the wild will encourage less diligent students to neglect their own education.
There's also the question of plagiarism. As an undergrad, I'd often post my work on my site when I handed it in. I stopped this practice when I got a 0 on a major bit of coursework (cost me a grade boundary in my degree...), as their software found it online, on my site, and they refused to view my work as anything but plagiarism. This action potentially saves students from the same fate.
It seems fairly clear that the repos listed violate the ethical rules that the university has set, and it's entirely possible that it will aid plagiarists.
That said, the DMCA does not prohibit students from encouraging others to neglect their own education, it exists to enforce copyright. IANAL, but their case that they own the copyright over the repos because their syllabus includes the questions being solved doesn't seem very solid.
It's not visible due to the takedowns, but if the students are including the original copyrighted work in its entirety, with their own original additions bundled in, it seems like the DMCA should apply. That's why commentary stuff like MST3K either only distributes their own additions or pays license fees to the copyright holders.
Granted. In that case, this seems fairly easy for the folks who own the repos: Strip the university's IP from their code and re-release. It's a bit obnoxious because it'll gut the git history, but they have a clear path forward.
A strategy that my university (Purdue) uses for this is to distribute some "stub" code to get you started. Beyond being there to help the students (and giving instructors an idea of the structure of your code if you need to ask for help), it also means that the university owns a portion of the copyright for on the code.
I don't see any mentions of the words "share", "distribute", "post", "online", "github", etc.
What I do see, is a lot of talk about plagiarizing other student's work and passing it off as your own.
The github repos did not do this -- other students did this. You punish the students who commit the act of plagiarism -- not the source. You don't ban a book because somebody plagiarized it.
"As described in the Student Code, aiding someone else's cheating also constitutes cheating. Leaving your program in plain sight or leaving a computer without logging out, thereby leaving your programs open to copying, may constitute cheating depending upon the circumstances. Consequently, you should always take care to prevent others from copying your programs, as it certainly leaves you open to accusations of cheating."
> thereby leaving your programs open to copying, may constitute cheating depending upon the circumstances
Did the university contact each student and request to have the student remove the repo? Unlikely given the sheer volume of repos in the takedown request.
Irregardless, the University should have measures to deal with this internally if they felt so strongly about this cheating rule.
Their rules don't state that they need to. Had they chosen to enforce their ethics code internally and take internal action against the students, they'd have been within the bounds of that policy.
That said, they didn't do that: they used the DMCA. Their use of the DMCA is a strange choice in my opinion, but is likewise valid if the repos contain original work created by the university as part of the problem set.
They said "+a large portion of the uploaded code is copyrighted by the University of"
I am assuming that they gave a framework, or something similar to use. That code was included in the repository. It sounds like DMCA us the right course of action.
Your second point is utterly infuriating. That an institution whose mission is to educate people would refuse to allow the observations of a person to refute the obviously incorrect observations of a machine is astounding to me.
There's nothing infuriating about it. Students are usually prohibited from posting homeworks and/or solutions online because courses reuse material from previous years. Students can consider themselves lucky if the only fallout from this is the DMCA takedown because at Princeton this would be considered a violation of the honor code, which has very serious implications.
You're missing the point... madaxe_again was disciplined for plagiarizing themself, because someone decided to ignore the reality of the software having caught madaxe_again's own website.
I look forward to hearing what revenge madaxe_again exacted on the culprit.
The closest thing to this that happened to me not being allowed to take a graduate-level class based on a piece of software that I helped develop, because I was an undergrad. That was dealt with by disabling said software for the instructor until the stupidity ended.
You are missing the point. Student not allowed to make their homeworks public and this is for a very good reason. It helps other students looking to plagiarize, and students have a responsibility to make a reasonable effort to prevent this. And while I can't comment on what these particular students were told, I can guarantee you that all the instructors I know make it a point to tell their students that they are not allowed to put their homeworks up online.
Another issue to consider is that the homeoworks are not student property, they largely belong to the instructor. A lot of effort goes into producing interesting and educational homeworks, and it's all lost if students can just google the answers. If you disagree with the idea that homeworks are instructor property, ask yourself if it would be okay if an instructor at Princeton just reused (without permission) the homeworks from a course at Harvard.
madaxe_again said that the University gave him a zero for plagiarizing a website when he was the one that controlled that website. Whether or not it is legitimate to post solutions online, this is not what madaxe claims to have been penalized for.
In my opinion, arbitrarily shoehorning a perceived infraction into a preexisting rule that it doesn't fit so that you can punish behavior that you hadn't thought to disallow before the fact is an abuse of university policies.
If madaxe is recounting the event accurately, then I think that the university is more in the wrong. University policies are hard enough to follow in situations like this when the university sticks to the letter of the policy. Plus, universities can always go back to update policies as they see new behaviors that they would like to disallow. But if the university uses whatever policies that they do have on the books to punish arbitrary behaviors that they don't disallow, then it puts the student in the situation of having to predict how this practice will impact them in the future. This is essentially impossible, and quite defeats the entire purpose of having policies written down in the first place. If this practice is common, then the policies are merely legitimacy theater, and are in fact illegitimate.
The situation is further confounded by the power dynamics at play. Tanking a students GPA is a pretty tremendous bludgeon, and outside of retaining a lawyer, a bludgeon against which students have little defense. This power discrepancy demands discretion on the part of the university. There is a level of injustice in the act of a university wielding this power against a student without a grounding in legitimate policy.
Plagiarism laws aren't just about whether you copied from someone else. A lot of times, certainly in all the universities I've been part of, they will penalize you if you did not take reasonable precautions to ensure that others did not copy from you. There's nothing unreasonable about this.
As far as the rest of your comment goes, maybe there are some cases when students are unfairly penalized for hard-to-follow policies. But the instance here seems pretty clear cut. I also think shady behavior from students more often than not goes unpunished, so your fears of a power-drunk university arbitrary destroying students' GPA just for the heck of it, seem unjustified.
> madaxe_again said that the University gave him a zero for plagiarizing a website when he was the one that controlled that website.
Many university "plagiarism" policies prohibit all of (And this has been true since before the web was a thing):
(1) plagiarizing others by copying their work,
(2) "plagiarizing" yourself by turning in work of your own that is not original work exclusively for the course it is prepared for without explicit advance permission to reuse previous work (or use one piece of work for two simultaneous classes), or
(3) facilitating plagiarism by other by way of publishing work done for class assignments without explicit advance permission.
> Tanking a students GPA is a pretty tremendous bludgeon, and outside of retaining a lawyer, a bludgeon against which students have little defense.
Most universities have procedures to resolve student complaints about irregularities in grading, application of policies, etc., short of requiring a lawsuit against the university, which do not generally require legal counsel to make use of.
It wasn't prohibited - this was 2002, and they were only just getting up to speed with this internet thing. It wasn't exactly work that could have easily been plagiarised - 20,000 word research paper on Minkowski, Kaluza-Klein, etc.
I had no revenge, I just ended up with a worse than hoped for degree, a deeper distrust of authority, and utter contempt for university "education", which would be better described as "conformation".
Do you really think that what you did was acceptable? It's equivalent to putting up your essay on a public notice board. Do you think the latter would've been acceptable behavior?
Maybe the punishment was a little harsh, but I think it'd be hard to argue you weren't in the wrong.
> a deeper distrust of authority, and utter contempt for university "education", which would be better described as "conformation"
Based on what you've said so far, to me you sound immature and are rationalizing your immaturity by blaming "the system."
I think it was perfectly acceptable, yes. I wrote a paper on a topic of my choice, I handed it in, and I then posted it to my site, as a blog post.
There was nothing that prohibited this, and I had posted data (astronomical observations & images) and assignments to my site for years previous to this incident.
Frankly, I would suggest that your thinking is extremely immature, if your first course of action is to call someone else immature, and to respect all authority unquestioningly - shows a lack of development of thought, and an absence of critical thinking.
A lot of universities have policies surrounding using work you've done for other classes in subsequent classes too. For instance, if you write a paper for one class and use it in whole, or in part in a different class.
I think posting finished homework online is a silly thing to do regardless. There's no reason to do that. I'd wager students get informed of these policies well before it gets anywhere close to where this went.
Students are not allowed to post the work that they do to the Internet. madaxe_again did post the work they did to the Internet. They were incorrectly punished for plagiarism - it was their own work - but they could have been punished for posting homework to the Internet.
So yell at madaxe_again for publishing proprietary stuff, not plagiarism.
The internal justice system made two errors, not zero. That's never okay, especially if it claims to be errorless ( shawn-furyan put it better than I did)
Would you be okay with getting a fine in the mail for having done something that is logically impossible to do (such as plagiarizing from yourself), regardless if you had to pay a different fine for a different issue or not?
EDIT: I can't answer to the post below, for some reason, thanks for the correction on self plagiarism!
It wasn't against any regulation in 2002 - but I suppose you think I deserved this because... What, I should have known that in the future it'd be against the rules? Cool logic man. Report yourself for punishment, being called Dan might be against the rules one day.
In 2002 at Durham (UK), it wasn't prohibited at all. They'd only just started using anti-plagiarism software. It also wasn't really a very plagarisable piece of work - big research paper on supersymmetry.
Finally, the publication date on my website was several days after I handed it in - so I assume you, like they, believe I have a secret time machine?
At the same time though, what's the institution going to do? Teachers are already underpaid as it is, and you want them to manually check results from the websites their anti-plagiarism software finds to identify the owner and check if it's the student that submitted the work? Good luck with that, also given that websites are often not tied to single identifiable persons.
Professors at universities are not typically in the same financial boat as teachers at public K-12 schools. They usually earn in the range of 70k-80k (at least they did when I went to school 5+ years ago).
Also, they usually have undergrads who will do free manual labor for them.
Lessig predicted this when he said "code is law." Look at all of the craziness around youtube's content match. It's easier to put a computer in charge of decision-making regardless of the effects.
A friend of mine, who is a lawyer, explained to me that Italian law holds itself to be complete and applicable to any circumstance faultlessly, at any given point in time. He agreed that this is logically absurd on its face, since Italian law is amended all the time, same as in every other country. I thanked him profusely for freeing me from bothering to follow it.
I obey American law because I gave my word that I would, upon entering the country as an adult. I do not obey Italian law because the Italian state never asked me to, and even managed to fail to to secure my consent despite me offering. Due to the the aforementioned bit of utter idiocy, I consider Italian law impossible to follow, so why bother trying?
If code is law, law is code, and this one is one of those things that keeps dumping a stack trace at you and clogging the logs (also, I hate debugging Android apps).
> will encourage less diligent students to neglect their own education.
That seems like a student's issue -- not the University's. Give an in-class closed-book closed-note exam and the students who did not bother to actually learn the subject will fail.
> I stopped this practice when I got a 0 on a major bit of coursework (cost me a grade boundary in my degree...), as their software found it online, on my site, and they refused to view my work as anything but plagiarism
It seems you did not fight this hard enough. It would be easily proven it was your work and posted after you began work on the assignment. It's actually customary now at the local University by me for the professors to encourage use of Github and the like.
In the end -- the University might "own" copyright over the exact phrasing of the questions that spawned the code solutions -- but they do not own the solutions themselves.
Actively forbidding students from learning and using version control is egregious.
The argument that other students might plagiarize so all the code solutions must come down is simply ridiculous.
I'm also upset that Github redacts the contact information from the DCMA Takedown requester. Students should have an option to directly contact the individual at their University and challenge this.
There are a lot of people in this thread stating that students are not allowed to post homework solutions online and therefore this is fair -- I have never seen in any syllabus nor student conduct agreement anything forbidding posting of a student's own solutions online. A lot of student code is online - and sometimes is even used as part of their first resume after university to land their first real job.
Posting homework you did and own copyright of online is not breaking any rules. It's breaking rules to copy/plagiarize that code and attempt to pass it as your own.
Actively forbidding students from learning and using version control is egregious.
Students are definitely not forbidden from using version control. In fact, version control is encouraged. What they are forbidden from doing is making their repositories publicly viewable.
As described in the Student Code, aiding someone else's cheating also constitutes cheating. Leaving your program in plain sight or leaving a computer without logging out, thereby leaving your programs open to copying, may constitute cheating depending upon the circumstances. Consequently, you should always take care to prevent others from copying your programs, as it certainly leaves you open to accusations of cheating. If somebody else hands in code identical to yours, you may be penalized!
Laws (and I'm considering honor code policies to fall in that category) are not programs. They intentionally have some ambiguity so that humans can interpret the meaning. Here, the intent is clearly that students should not share their work. They need not explicitly forbid all forms that such sharing could take.
As I posted above to your other comment, the Honor Code does in fact warn against publicizing your work:
"As described in the Student Code, aiding someone else's cheating also constitutes cheating. Leaving your program in plain sight or leaving a computer without logging out, thereby leaving your programs open to copying, may constitute cheating depending upon the circumstances. Consequently, you should always take care to prevent others from copying your programs, as it certainly leaves you open to accusations of cheating."
I think it should have been easily provable that you owned the website and that your code matched, any sort of escalation beyond initial talking with professor should have resolved that. If not that is absolutely ridiculous.
This was 2002. They didn't understand that people could have their own websites - they kept on going "but we did not set this up for you, there is no other way to have a website". Not in terms of regulations, but ignorance and an unwillingness to listen to a mere peasant, uh, undergraduate.
a large portion of the uploaded code is copyrighted by the University of Illinois. Therefore, the repositories identified below constitute a violation of U.S. Copyright laws, in particular section(s) 1201(a)(2) and/or 1201(b)(1) of Title 17 of the United States Code, commonly referred
to as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or "DMCA".
I've caught so many attempts at cheating in my courses that I feel the need to provide a guide to students.
You may not use code you found on the web, even if modified.
You may not use code you found on the web, even if it's GPL'd.
Do not turn in code with a matching md5sum for your friend's assignment.
You can't simply change comments and spacing. I can tokenize your input to eliminate these differences.
You can't just change variable names. I'm going to diff a token stream of your assignment against others.
You can't just move definitions around. Same reason as before.
You can't copy only part of an assignment. Same reason as before.
If you're going to cheat, you need to rewrite the assignment from scratch.
'''
Yes it's common to have software which can find plagiarism like that. However, if the student actually does these things (change all variable names and move code around) it will be hard for an examination board to decide whether this is a false positive or real plagiarism.
The DMCA notice is likely incomplete. "a large portion of the uploaded code" can not in any reasonable way be specific enough to identify the infringing material.
Thanks to it being incomplete, the owner of the github accounts can not create a defense, nor try make any changes for compliance. That should be a clear sign that the notice is unreasonable vague in the description and thus need to be denied until a complete notice has been sent.
It would likely be trivial to win on the grounds of fair use for educational purposes. Upper education that relies on graded homework is, in my opinion, broken anyway. In engineering, my greatest course experiences were those where the answers were given in full when the exercises were assigned. The feedback you get by checking yourself while you are doing the work is immensely more valuable than getting graded papers returned weeks after you've done them.
This, of course, allows people who don't want to learn to avoid learning, but it's the university's job to certify that you have learned things and make available the resources to learn. Policing you to learn with the graded assignments game leads to a lot of people who are really good at playing, not so good at having interest in their work or the actual material. (I knew so many people who succeeded through grey-ethical finding answers through peers and instructor's guides ... 10 people collaborating to each to 1/10th of the assignment, etc.)
Their README suggests they only redact personally identifying info, but I assumed that was in reference to the submitter (if an individual), as the other repos didn't receive any redaction.
The University has no ownership?? Does the Public library have ownership if I build a program based on a book "CS241 System Programming - Here and Now" .. The Preferssor has not written or updated the work of Mr Chou - and therefore has no standing as to DMCA - It's all a UofI Buff - and GitHub folded .. https://github.com/mukichou/cs241-2
At my university we reviewed and assessed each others code to identify issues and help each other out. It is possible that I am misunderstanding if this applicable for this specific course. My presumption is that a vast majority of students are going to school to acquire gainful employment and jobs often require some level of code reviewing. While I do not support direct copying of someone else's homework or the distribution of a github link containing the answers to homework to students (this did not happen here but would be evidence of assisting cheating). It seems that the benefits of teaching students about version control and in depth peer code review outweigh the negative consequences of this type of "cheating". ianamartin earlier in this thread provided this link: http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/ which is honestly the "best" solution to this particular issue.
Kind of amazing this is against the universities own stance on copyright ownership:
"Works created independently and at the student’s own initiative for traditional academic purposes are owned by the student, but the University retains certain rights to use such works. These include class notes, reports, papers, and works prepared by the student as part of the requirements for a University degree, such as a thesis or dissertation. Note that it is the copyright only that is owned by the student. The fact that the student owns the copyright does not influence whether or not the student owns the underlying intellectual property. For example, if a thesis describes research performed in a professor’s laboratory, the University has a right to own the underlying intellectual property (e.g. laboratory notebooks, original records of the research and any resulting inventions or software.)"
As this is an issue of copyright violation, I don't have any issue with this. A DMCA complaint fixes just this.
A few years ago I got an email from a TA in a subject I took the year before, that they wanted me to take down solutions I hosted on Github. However, there was no provided code in the assignment, and it was basically implementations of previously known algorithms (A* among others). Not a formal takedown request, but they said I should understand that they had to use the same assignments each year, and if I were providing solutions this could be hard. My answer was that if they are worried about plagiarism, it's better that my solutions are public, as they can be checked against.
It's not a copyright violation though, or at least not inherently. The statement of a homework problem is essentially an API, and if those are copyrightable then we're in big trouble as an industry.
Well, we can't see the code that is taken down here, but if assignment had a lot of set up code, and the assignment was to fill in some functions, there can be a copyright violation. If these repositories only included student made code, then I agree that there is a problem.
I'm a student in CS@Illinois and I took this class last semester. For assignment one, they gave us a library and the following where we had to make a working shell (sorry for formatting):
log_t Log;
/**
* * Starting point for shell.
* */
int main(int argc, char ** argv) {
/**
* * Analyze command line arguments
* */
while(1)
{
/**
* * Print a command prompt
* */
/**
* * Read the commands
* */
/**
* * Print the PID of the process executing the command
* */
/**
* * Decide which actions to take based on the command (exit, run program, etc.)
* */
}
return 0;
}
The provided code is rather sparse (by design), but the University holds copyright on it.
You can use four leading spaces at the start of each line for a code block.
What you've posted doesn't look substantial enough to be copyrightable to me; the idea of writing a main containing a while loop is certainly not original to the university, and the comments would presumably not be present in this repo since they'd've been replaced by working code. I sure hope the university of Illinois doesn't own the copyright on any shell I write from now on, because that would be ridiculous.
I can speak to this since I actually took this class last semester (Fall 2014).
Homework boilerplate is distributed to students through private SVN. This typically includes some method headers or libraries. We then complete the assignment to specifications and commit it through SVN, where it is graded programmatically. Therefore, we can't modify some of the headers.
The class has been taken over by a new professor. As such, it is being totally restructured and the assignments are largely being changed now. However, when I took the class with 250+ other students, plagiarism was rampant.
As far as I'm aware, the course staff has indeed contacted individual repo owners on Github for take down.
This seems reasonable to me. Pretty much every academic code of conduct requires students not to publish solutions to homework problems. This doesn't prevent the use of git, just git public repositories.
Rather than just issue DMCA takedown notices, it might be useful for the University of Illinois to provide students with access to private git repositories. Of course, I suspect many students have drank the "github is your resume" kool-aid and would be less likely to use private repositories.
Sharing of previous semester code (or quizzes, exams, etc) should enhance the learning process, not hinder it.
This is a bad and lazy policy for a school. Instructors should be creating assignments that cover the same material but are sufficiently different from one semester to the next that cheating isn't a problem.
When I was in school 15+ years ago, we had officially sanctioned ways of sharing materials from previous semesters of coursework. Is that uncommon?
Disclaimer: I went through college and currently teach part time. I wish something like github was around when I was in college - I only got into self-hosted SVN repos near my senior years. As a professor - I believe in transparency when it comes to my classes.
tl;dr; What should have happened is that UofI should have worked with github to turn those repos into (free) private ones. That way the content is removed from the public and search indexes and the students can still use/review the material they created in the class later on if they want to.
I have only taught 3 classes/2 subjects - object oriented (heavy programming), and operating systems (light usage). I run my own source code hosting service and will pre-provision private repos for them (for free obviously). I also encourage them to get private repos from github (you can get it for free if you need it for a class) if they don't like mine (I am not one of those teachers who force them to use their book or service - students are free to use whatever resource they want....just maybe not CVS or RCS...).
I strongly recommend private because obviously I don't want other students to copy their work (but I do encourage collaboration for homework). However, most of my assignments are pretty open-ended to the point where I would notice obvious plagiarism. A few students have created public git repos because they aren't familiar with github or even git - which I am perfectly fine with. I would rather change my assignments than force a student to take down their git repo (which I should probably do anyways). The last thing that I would want is for a student to have a negative association with using source code hosting services like github.
Some comments suggest that the university may claim ownership over the code - which may be BS depending on how the code was acquired. The university may have paid some guy off the street to write this code and the university hired a professor and said "you will use this code to teach your class". If this was the case - then I could be ok with this takedown. If a professor wrote it in their spare time for the class and the university is trying to claim ownership - then I have a problem with it.
This does make me wonder - how many students requested private repos for their classes and shoved the code there? They won't have their code taken down obviously - so the only people who are punished are those trying to learn and understand the class and git/github.
This is more of a service issue where the University probably doesn't provide a standard git repo so students need to either set one up or have fun merging by hand. Unfortunately they have chosen a public GitHub repo rather than a private repo like BitBucket.
Really if the class they're in provided a git repo they wouldn't have this issue.
Seems like a reasonable way to even the playing field between independent students and members of academic and social fraternities, which traditionally handed down homework and intelligence on professors that was extremely valuable to a busy student.
APIs shouldn't be copyrightable as they're necessary for interfacing. The solution to a homework problem shouldn't be a derivative work of the problem, and so it should be possible to distribute the solution in a way that doesn't infringe on the university's copyright.
Seems a bit weird to me that university has copyright over homework done by students (which is my understanding because otherwise this DMCA would be baseless). It hasn't been the case at my university.
In CS assignments, there's usually a good amount of starter code that would be copyrighted by the university. As the takedown notices states, "a large portion of the uploaded code is copyrighted by the University of Illinois". It doesn't claim copyright over the student's work, but the portion of the code that is under their copyright.
/**
* Initializes the binary tree data structure.
*
* You may assume that:
* - This is the first function called for each instance of btree_t.
* - The btree_t pointer is a valid, non-NULL pointer.
*
* @param b
* A pointer to the binary tree data structure.
*/
void btree_init(btree_t *b)
{
}
Happens quite often actually - there's been plenty of cases where a student made something for a school assignment, but wasn't allowed (somehow) to turn that into a business because the code legally belongs to the school. Most companies have a similar clause in their contracts (i.e. anything you write during working hours belongs to the company)
Many universities have this policy, but given that students have to pay (!) to enroll in a university it strikes me as odd that the university would then presume to take control of all the work they produce.
"Control of all the work they produce" is an exaggeration. The University asserts copyright to the boilerplate code on which these assignments are based. Nobody claims to own your sophomore year English essays.
As a method of preventing plagiarism, it makes sense. Getting the copyright for the code into the university's possession gives them legal standing to do things like this.
Ideally, of course, there'd be a process for getting exemptions - I know I would have been irate if my alma mater had claimed ownership of the year's worth of work I spent on my senior thesis project. But that's also code where the risk of plagiarism is relatively low-impact, what with it being specific to that particular project.
Answers to problem sets, though? Pfft, let them have it. I never had a reason to look at any of it ever again, so the value of retaining ownership to me is virtually nil. Whereas the value of having even a slight incremental improvement in the protections universities use to help me not have to spend quite so much time worrying about whether the kids I'm looking at hiring might have cheated their way through college without ever picking up proper problem-solving skills? Priceless.
"Getting the copyright for the code into the university's possession"
There is no copyright transfer agreement nor is this a work for hire. This case at UIUC appears to be a copyright issue related to school provided materials which were further modified by the students.
My final year project had a stipulation - if you took the output to market, the university would get 50%, your academic advisor 25% and you "get" to keep 25%.
Oddly enough, University of Illinois makes an IP claim exception for the ECE senior design. Students own 100%. The only exception is if the student team has help from a professor or research group that is outside the normal labs and tools offered by the class.
"a large portion of the uploaded code is copyrighted by the University of Illinois." seems to suggest the homework involved working on an existing codebase.
To me it says they assert copyright over a large portion, but I would look for something more firm on actual copyright status of uploaded code. Other schools apparently use stub code for assignments so classwork is derivative, but I haven't seen that is the case here.
What this is is an instance of an institution that doesn't want to create a new syllabus every year. Students pay tens of thousands of dollars for a modern education but the instructors simply rely on years old assignments year after year. And somehow this are worried about ethics?
Is it really that hard or asking too much for this lazy department to tweak the code so that it's different from prior years?
Maybe. Point is, people posted their homework online, allowing others - also during the same year - to just copy the work. They could do that offline too, but either way it's just not cool. The students in question should probably be reprimanded as well if they were told it wasn't permitted to post the solutions online. We have an assessment as part of our hiring process, there too it's not permitted by applicants to make their solutions public - and making a new assignment would cost us a lot of money in terms of lost billable hours, especially if it would have to be done for every applicant.
Tweaking your assignments but keeping the main thrust is more efficient and probably provides better experiences. The bugs get worked out, the professors and instructors have worked through it.
The real issue is that students keep this stuff and pass it down year to year.
I remember taking ECE 451 at Illinois and someone had taken photographs of the solutions that were posted on the wall for students to look it.
There are way to identify weak students even when they google all the answers. Base your grades on assignments, tests, projects, presentations, pop quiz, etc.. you will see the pattern.
I agree completely. I didn't go to school for computer science or anything fancy like that. I studied Music Theory. Frankly, I think those luddites in the music building have done a pretty good job of tackling the plagiarism problem, and it's something that can be learned from by others.
At the beginning stages of a music theory course, you are learning the very basic rules. How did Bach's music work? That's where pretty much everyone starts. And you learn how his music worked by finishing his stuff. The early exercises (which I think are analogous here to having some code or library provided) are basically, "Here's the first part of a piece of music by Bach. Finish it in the style of Bach."
Then you go from there, gradually, with less and less hand-holding.
Is it possible to plagiarize these things? Of course! You can just look up the piece and finish it the way that Bach did.
There are some students who did things like that. The professors never bothered to say anything. They didn't have to. Because by the end of the class, you are all on your own. "Write a short piece of music in the style of Bach with the following features: . . . ."
There's also the question of plagiarism. As an undergrad, I'd often post my work on my site when I handed it in. I stopped this practice when I got a 0 on a major bit of coursework (cost me a grade boundary in my degree...), as their software found it online, on my site, and they refused to view my work as anything but plagiarism. This action potentially saves students from the same fate.