A lot of solutions end up looking similar, as the automated marking system requires certain method names and the questions often have answers that are only a line or two at this early stage of the class.
Early questions are things like: if membership of a set is a function mapping between an integer and a boolean, how would you define the membership of a singleton set? Modulo the spaces and variable names, every student's answer was probably the same!
So detecting who has copied their solution is probably difficult.
My thoughts too. I just don't see how there could be much variation in the first place, especially among more experienced participants who can easily find the most optimal way to write a given function.
"For those students for whom it's been discovered have uploaded similar or duplicate solutions, cases will be handled on an individual basis. Though beware, that cheating in any capacity not be tolerated."
I have to wonder if those posting solutions on github are actually doing it in an effort to cheat. I made a similar mistake recently with a project I completed in my computer architecture course. When the professor contacted me about it, it seemed obvious. But at the time, all I was thinking about was "yay, public code!" Obviously, I took it down right away. I wonder how many people are doing the same thing. Cheating a Coursera course just doesn't make much sense.
It would be cool if we could upload our private Git repo on Github once the course is finished. But I guess they might want to re-use the assignments next year...
Sure, but if it's against school policy, the school has the right to expel you. Coursera is not taking the public code down, the owner is, at the coercion of the school. The student is making a value decision: continue the course or take my code down. If you can't play by the rules, you can't be in the game.
I think there's a unique opportunity for GitHub here. They could give an educational license to verified students in college/high-school/on-line schools. For the duration of their class, they can have as many private repos as they like. When the semester ends, you've got a week to grab your code before it goes public, like a free account. First, it would get students used to GitHub and they would clammer for it in the workplace because they love it so much; Second, it would position GH as a great supporter of education.
When the semester ends, you've got a week to grab your code before it goes public, like a free account.
I suspect this would catch on better if the repos were destroyed or stayed private. Professors reuse assignments year after year and wouldn't be too happy about public solutions to all their past assignments.
At least in my university solutions to all past problems are posted anyway, we even have our own wiki for it. I imagine it's similar in other universities.
(fwiw, I use Github exactly in this way, only with public repos)
it seems so on this site like to argue just for the sake of argue. who is saying anything about rights? sure, it's his work, it's his right do anything he wishes, and he will be expelled. the course doesn't mind you sharing your code, just wait till the class is over. share and risk getting expelled.
Not that this is very relevant to begin with or anyhing. But as a side note, in this course the solutions tend to be mostly code written by Coursera course people, with some small parts written by the students.
I (unknowingly) posted my code for the class on Github. As you point out, I did it with the "yay public code" mindset, not thinking about cheating at all. I'm taking it down right now and apologizing to the Coursera staff.
You have to expect that they kinds of programmers this course would attract will want stick the code they've put hours outside of work into in some kind of source repository.
With the ubiquity of free (public only) github accounts, I'm not entirely sure what else they expected might happen.
When discussing online courses, a recurring theme is that of the "value" of online certifications, versus "real life" certifications. By taking action against cheaters, Coursera is trying to preserve the value of their certification. I wonder how it will affect it.
Do people really care about online certifications anyway?
For me, the main advantage of the weekly assignments, is that it stops me from procrastinating, like I might if I were to learn by myself with a book... I don't really care about the certification itself. I guess I can add it to my resume, like the SCJP, but I don't think employers will care much.
I'm entirely self taught at Scala and never did Java, so I'm doing it just to test myself to see how much I missed and how much I understand already. Certification is almost entirely worthless as a CV aid... it gives an indicator that you are willing to put in effort out of hours for self improvement, but it's value vs a well tended github account / a programming test is negligible.
In my eyes, the only benefit of the certificates is that you have something to show for your time and effort; something that proves you're willing to take the time to better yourself. That being said, it's not much.
The certificates, IMHO, are meaningless in the context of these online courses. Considering this, I find the measure exaggerated.
I use github as a central place to store almost everything I write outside work, so it comes pretty natural for me to version code for problems I've been working on there.
Disclaimer: I'm not involved in the Scala course, so I don't know how the actual assigments were structured.
The certificates will have value as long as they remain evidence of honest completion of the course. To say they are worthless is kind of short-sighted. Considering the number of tech resumes in the typical hiring manager's inbox that contain a laundry-list of programming languages in the skills section and not even a single project or course to prove the knowledge of the candidate, I'd say there is a fairly large domain for these certificates.
Given two resumes, one with a big bullet list of unverified skills, and one with a bullet list of some completed coursera courses, which would you choose?
Obviously coursera will not be replacing real college any time soon, but it can definitely serve a role in verifying at least cursory knowledge of basic skills.
> Given two resumes, one with a big bullet list of unverified skills, and one with a bullet list of some completed coursera courses, which would you choose?
I would accept neither as evidence of anything other than the skills a candidate advertises.
IOW, I trust "I know Scala" on a resume exactly as much as "I know Scala and completed a Coursera course on it".
Well if nothing else it gives a portable measure of ability.
Like instead of having to saying I'm an expert in Scala and the meaning of that being largely arbitrary; you've got a syllabus of stuff they claim to know (which you still need to verify it it matters).
>Given two resumes, one with a big bullet list of unverified skills, and one with a bullet list of some completed coursera courses, which would you choose?
The big problem with your logic is assuming that one of these two options must be meaningful. Those two resumes are either both good enough to bring in for an interview, or both not good enough to bring in for an interview. "I have a worthless piece of paper" changes nothing.
It does to me. It shows that someone at least took the time to work through a course. It also shows they are cool enough to know what coursera is and open minded enough to use it.
Ok, but you asked "which would you choose?". That is not the same as saying "I would choose X". You are assuming your opinion on the matter is common, I am suggesting it is not as common as you believe.
Certificates and other records from this and Robert Sedgewick's algorithms course (maybe others) can be shared with employers through Coursera's placement service. Not entirely meaningless.
Coursera will ultimately try and leverage their courses as a hiring mechanism. I'm participating in the course, and have taken a prior course as well. After sigining up you will receive an email from coursera asking your permission to share course results with employers.
If they can't use the course certificate as a signal mechanism then there will be no incentive for employers to partner with them
It's to be expected there will be cheating. Even in normal brick and mortar school s there were always cheaters. Hell, even the tour de france got turned into a dopers ball. So yes, this is a bummer and all the naysayers of these free opensource online classes now just have more ammo. But as someone who's life has not allowed them the path to Stanford/Upenn/University of Toronto, etc, I am putting in the work and bothering to actually learn and extremely grateful for the opportunity. So bummer, sure, but shame on the cheaters.
Searching Github for assignments is pretty easy, but I wonder how they'd be able to detect duplicates other then when every source is 100% equal to another student's.
I wonder how much work it is to monitor the students, it must be hard to tell if there's cheating, assuming the published solution is well written and tought. If they have to look at past submissions to detect sudden peaks in grades it's got to be a burden.
I'm not sure I agree 100% with your police work there.
I am enrolled in the class, and when I got the e-mail, my first thought was "Great. Now I have to worry about whether or not my work will look too similar to someone else's, or to the solutions that have been posted."
Granted, my first submission for assignment #2 was a third of a point short of 10/10, so maybe I don't have anything to worry about.
If it's this easy to "cheat" on these assignments, then maybe the professors should sit down and think about how to properly craft assignments. It's clear to me that traditional assignment grading will not work in an online/anonymous environment - appealing to a code of honor will not help if they want the certificate of completion to actually hold meaning.
I don't have any actual suggestions other then when I was in school the assignments were worth about 10-15% of our final grade because of this very reason (shared solutions). Actual knowledge was tested in other ways: presentations, quizzes, exams, etc.
Revoking the completion certificate for everyone else is NOT a way to build trust with the community at large - use those large academic brains and come up with a better solution.
actually, when I took the first "not-quite-coursera" classes (ML and DB) they did quizzes in a smarter way[0], using a larger set of questions per quiz than the stuff you'd get in a single attempt.
So each attempt, even from the same student, would get a slightly different set of questions, and the dumbest attempts at cheating were discouraged[1].
I don't see why this couldn't be done for the programming assingments.
For example, the first assignment in this functional programming was "functional sets": empty set, singleton, contains, union, intersect, filter. It would have been trivial to add a few more (unionAll, containsAll, difference etc) and select a subset for each student, or something like that.
[0] alas, they don't seem to do this anymore.
[1] also, a "random answer + replay with proper solution" approach wouldn't work.
I know there is one class on Coursera doing exactly that. The reason was to allow students multiple attempts at quizzes - have a bank for 20 questions where only 10 get asked.
Another solution would be to employ an alogrithm that checks your solution against past solutions. It would work much like what professors employ when they submit Reports to an online repository.
If someone it stupid enough not to even change variable names then they'd be caught easily. While with Millions of solutions it would be easy to get some replication, most of the time there wouldn't be any and this is when manual intervention by a person could be triggered.
This in conjuntion with your solution would work pretty well especially if someone submitted a wrong answer for another question that they haven't seen.
So far, majority of the functions in the Scala course homework have been one-liners. Mostly without any new variables that one could name. This kind of problems, a lot of people write the exactly same answer, down to every single character.
Use an algorithm to cross-check homework submissions, checking for structural copying. If a high correlation is found, as with human intervention, you suspect cheating but cannot prove it.
So, only for the potential cheating students, issue an extra quiz at some scheduled time, and discard the homework score. These quizzes should be all issued in parallel batches and last an hour or so, so solutions can't possibly be copied among cheaters. Make sure the quiz is actually harder than the homework, conceptually.
In other words, rather than trying to punish potential cheaters, just keep testing them until you're sure they're not cheating. This is better IMO than producing a 10x size problem set and selecting random subsets, because the number of suspected cheaters will probably be a small-ish percentage. Therefore, rather than having to write a ton of etra test material for everyone, you only have to write a few extra quizzes for a subset of the class.
I'm of the opinion that the value of Coursera's courses comes from the learning opportunity, not the certification. I think they should simply allow cheating and not issue certificates. Alternatively, allow cheating and continue to issue certificates while letting employers decide the true value of the certificates.
The point of Coursera (to me) isn't to pad my resume, it's to learn from courses not always offered at my university.
I completely agree, which is why I find the cheating so interesting. I strongly doubt that any employers are going to lend much value to the certification so early in Coursera's lifespan, but I don't doubt that cheating is going to continue even though the only thing you 'truly' gain from a Coursera course is knowledge.
I agree with you, but that is mostly because I already have a 4 year degree in Engineering and I'm assuming you do too. There is a problem in the fact that many people cannot afford that degree because their parents can't afford it (or the loans that they'd need).
Cheating degrades the quality of education at any level. Cheaters are trying to get accreditation when they shouldn't. While Cheating is all over in education (we had a couple of cases at my school), it is obviously going to be more prominent in a place like Coursera, where cheating is easier and looking for cheaters is harder.
One thing they could do is create an algorithm that checks answers much like what they do for journals, but again that's an extra load they "shouldn't" have on their employees.
People shouldn't let cheating degrade the quality of education. You either possess the skills or you don't, and if you don't you shouldn't act like you do. It'll probably be obvious. Here's the scenario in my mind...
A: "Oh hey I know how to program Scala"
B: "Ok program Scala..."
A: "Well I only got the cert, I don't actually know."
B: "Sorry I guess you're not qualified then. Why don't you learn?"
Yeah that sounds like a great interview. How long do you let them go, half an hour, a day? Do you think you can adequately judge someones abilities like this?
Your format implies more formality than a normal conversation - I assumed you meant it in terms of an interview too, and if not that, I'm not sure what you were aiming for. I don't see conversations like that outside technical interviews.
I think it was more of a broad sketch of a series of interactions, not a formula for an interview. Someone represents themselves as having some skills because they are certified as having those skills; they are asked to apply those skills; etc...
There is a big crediblity difference between taking random classes and completing a program in a university.
The university has the onus to hire credible teachers, and to maintain a high reputation. You're paying for the standards they apply. Some universities aren't worth their weight and some are. The information that they have is out there. This has not changed. Textbooks have been arround for a while. Additionally professional teachers have the ability to communicate the material affectively.
Online classes can't guarantee a level of understanding of the material. Additionally online classes will never be able to guarantee that the person who signed up for the class is the actual one that gets the credit.
The algorithm for checking answers in journals is to send it to a panel of other people in the field, ask them if it checks out (obvious errors, overlooked things, etc.), and publish if it does. This model has already broken down when people outright fabricate results, it has missed blatant plagarism, and overall is largely dependent on all the parties being honest.
It wouldn't work at Coursera's scale and for a price point they can afford.
Coursera has a huge amount of data and could create their own algorithms that check for similar code in the database. It wouldn't be perfect but it could do simple string comparison against other work.
I would argue it hurts after the cheating, though possibly not precisely when it occurs. Later courses, things that build on what was cheated, that kind of thing. Time (and money, and happiness) must be spent to deal with people who aren't prepared, degrading the quality of what the legitimate ones receive, and the educator's time.
From a practical standpoint, while it's disappointing, I don't understand why they are so surprised that solutions were posted online.
I mean, if there are 5000 students in the course, for even odds of it happening, 0.5 = (1 - n) ^ 5000 -> n = 0.0139% chance per student, which seems like an awfully saintly ratio to assume.
>I think they should simply allow cheating and not issue certificates.
This kind of thinking really bothers me. They've gone to some pains to ensure their certification has some level of meaning, and now they want to chuck it all out the window based on the actions of a tiny minority.
Collective punishment is usually the product of lazy thinking.
Fair enough. Perhaps, the second option I proposed might work. The value of a Coursera certificate will not be reduced if it continues to be only a tiny minority who cheats.
I suppose I've always been of the opinion that they should offer the courses in a fashion similar to that of Khan Academy. I don't expect a certificate when I complete a section there as I'm there for the purpose of educating myself, not for accrediting myself. I think it's hard for Coursera to fulfill accreditation, but wish them the best if it's what they want to try for.
Also - cases will be handled on an individual basis - I guess it's not a standard sized class. There is a few hundred people signed up at least. Putting up a free course in functional programming seems like a lot of work. On top of that, trying to find people who are cheating and handling them more or less individually is a bit of a time waste in my opinion.
I would not list it under "Education" alongside a formal degree. However, I might mention it in a cover letter to demonstrate passion and internal motivation for a given subject.
While I'm quick to condemn certification, I can see the other side of this argument as well. To a lot of people, Coursera represents the opportunity to overhaul a broken education system. In order for true change, Coursera must not only demonstrate that it can educate people, but that it can do so credibly and consistently.
As an employer, I take continuing education of any sort as a positive sign when looking at resumes. Software development is a Red Queen field; one has to keep up.
However, I do take most certifications as mild negative signs. E.g., SCJP, CSM, PMP. A lot of for-profit certifications are worthless. A notable exception are some of the Cisco certs, which really put people through their paces. Which makes sense, as Cisco benefits more from having expensive Cisco products work well than from certification revenue.
It'll be interesting to see what bucket Coursera certs fall into. They need to jump on the cheating thing right quick, though.
Considering that the Coursera certificates require you to take a class (usually taught by experts in the respective field) as opposed to cramming for a certification exam, I'd say it's a good bit more valuable.
I took the first AI class last Fall, and if you've never been exposed to the material, it was a very good survey of Artificial Intelligence.
I agree, just as long as the certificate actually means you've taken the course and done the work. If one can cheat one's way through the homework and then just cram for the final, the Coursera certs would end up being of low value. I hope not, though. I'd love to have a good way to tell the continuous learners from the people who get stuck.
> Which makes sense, as Cisco benefits more from having expensive Cisco products work well than from certification revenue.
I'm not sure about the actual comparative amounts, but Cisco makes a lot of money off of certifications. Of course, in the long run making them actually represent something is best for both sides of the business.
> I'm not sure about the actual comparative amounts, but Cisco makes a lot of money off of certifications.
80% of Cisco's revenue is hardware. And even the service side is something close to $2 billion. I suspect the amount of money they make off of certifications is a tiny slice of that. Even if there are 10k CCIEs each paying $1500 for a yearly test, that's only $15 million, which is nothing to Cisco.
> Of course, in the long run making them actually represent something is best for both sides of the business.
That's not true for many certifiers. Take a look at the CSM certificate. It is meaningless, but popular and therefore profitable.
Some would argue that the point of Coursera is to offer education to those who cannot afford it or access it through traditional means. If I come from a poor community anywhere in the world, but have internet access, this certificate means quite a bit to me in terms of employment and opportunities (not just as a resume pad). I think for this reason alone your second alternative is more fair. Obviously, Coursera also helps to augment someone's existing knowledge, or as an educational source for a hobbyist.
I think that's how I instantly analyzed the title: "how can someone cheat at coursera??". I get it that some people put the certifications on their resumes, but there are also a subset of people who take the courses just to learn, and therefore may not be able to spend the time doing the work.
At this moment: very few but I imagine this will change in the near future and that Coursera is betting on this. That, off course, requires strict enforcement of the rules.
Well, things change. Some years ago, nobody took MMORPG experience seriously (even thought it to be a bad thing), but these days, people get management positions because of it.
Indeed, the possibility to learn quickly, without wasting time on filtering and validating publicly available information (mostly long, self-praising blog posts by narcissists) is such a rare opportunity.
Certification is second after ability, as it is in most arts and activities, except scams, such as SAP, Oracle, Cisco or other pay-walled artificial hierarchies.
To put it differently - certification is for those, who are unable to prove/show his abilities second time.)
For many of us, the value is in the learning opportunity. Some people, I imagine, are out of work and need a way to pick up skills and job credentials cheaply. For them I think huge value could be found in a certification. Having a certificate on your resume can start an interesting conversation in an interview, show personal initiative, and so forth.
So, what exactly is the point in cheating on these assignments? IIRC there is no academic credit available and all you receive is a non accredited certificate.
Surely the only point in doing the assignments in the first place is to satisfy yourself that you have understood and can apply the material?
"I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke" people to enroll in a free online course that (presumably) nobody forced them to take and then submit homework done by someone else.
Rather than trying to fight cheating (which is impossible), Coursera should emphasize the point that these courses are not resume busters but for learning.
Well, it seems that Coursera business model is either issuing meaningful certificates, or offering other companies potential hires (the latter being what I've understood of Udacity business model). In both cases, the certificate is supposed to mean something.
I've taken several Coursera classes, but I don't mention them in my resume and I only care about the certificates as an incentive to complete the course, but from the very nature on how these classes are graded, it would be very difficult to prevent cheating (or sharing), barring having the exams taken in real-life locations (something that Udacity optionaly provides for some of its courses if I recall correctly).
As a potential employer, I care more about the candidate's ethics (or lack thereof) than their ability. I could always teach them, but I could never trust them.
Coursera should just publicly identify cheaters so I can cross check against resumes or certifications. Problem solved.
Forget the certificate. If you enroll in a coursera course to learn, and you need some help getting started on the code or checking your work, why not take a look at the code? Not submitting it as your own, of course, but taking ownership of your education, which is all that matters.
Sure, I think that's perfectly fine. Coursera needs to provide some ability (if they don't already) to allow a student to say "not taking this for credit or certificate".
But I don't think that should allow you to go and post code / answers in a public forum of sorts.
I disagree with your assertion. Cheating is not necessarily an act of malice. As an example, a friend of mine (who is from India) helped another student (also Indian) with a programming project in an intro to CS class at my alma mater. My friend was trying to help a friend out, not intentionally trying to break the rules. This took place during the first few weeks of school, mind you, and neither student had any significant experience with the ethical standards of American institutions. Both students readily admitted to what had happened- neither was trying to hide anything. Nonetheless, the professor gave my friend a two letter grade demotion and the person whom he helped an F. Arguments about the fairness of their punishments aside, I don't think it's fair to assert that either had a lapse in ethical judgement more than a cultural misunderstanding, but nonetheless both students did cheat.
I am taking this course - it's impossible to not notice these rules, there are annoying confirmations at every single submission or multiple choice test that you are submitting your own individual work only. I.e., submitting a program copied off web is 100% intentional fraud.
To me it is unclear whether it is allowed to talk about solution after the hard dead line.
Is that ok?
Not publicizing them just talking about them in a closed study group.
There's a difference between cheating and helping. If the professor believed that there were cheating, that meant that the work didn't appear to be original. Helping someone else means that you're helping them with the concepts related to the problem. If you want to be hands on with helping them through the problem you create a similar problem [that doesn't have the same requirements and help get them over what got them stuck]
It's "cheating" though in the sense that it's against a TOS on a website, but tons of things are against a TOS and almost no one reads them. They're pretending to be one, but Coursera is not a college, is not accredited and does not hand out degrees. This is a free online self-study course being taken by hundreds of thousands of people with varying degrees of seriousness. Some people may treat it like a college course and want the certificate (for what I am not sure), but I bet most people just want the knowledge. I signed up for a similar course once and never logged in because my schedule changed, should I get an F and have that publicized?
I have also worked through some iOS courses from Standford on iTunes U and I would not think twice about helping someone with one of the problems. Is that cheating?
If people sign up for a course like this and then turn in work they copied from the Internet, I definitely don't want to hire them. Even if they weren't after the certificate. That's like cheating at solitaire. It's just sad.
Also, do you have any evidence that the no-cheating, no-publishing-homework policy is buried in a TOS? If Coursera hasn't made it obvious enough, then sure, people could have made a mistake. But Odersky's a smart guy so his reaction makes me imagine he made the requirement obvious.
As someone taking the course - yes, it was pretty obvious. And even if he had said nothing, it's common sense that uploading other's solutions as your own is frowned upon.
Nobody smart hires purely based on the certificate, but the question is what value one assigns to it. Anybody with a degree from a strong CS program is much more likely to get an interview from me. Ditto for anybody with a good online portfolio. I'd like to assign some value to Coursera courses, but we'll see.
Right know there are actual students at EPFL who are taking the Functional Programming Principles in Scala course, using the same web site that random joes like me are using at the same time. So for me it's not an actual college, but it is for those students at EPFL. They have no choice but to enforce academic honestly rules, given that real students at a real institution are involved.
It makes sense for EPFL to use the course lectures and quizzes to help the students, but it makes absolutely no sense to use it for the grading part. It is trivially easy to make a second account, take a quiz, and just answer randomly to be able to see all the correct answers. It's absolutely absurd to not have a totally independent grading system.
It's possible students (ignorantly) made their work public because they were proud of their accomplishments. I've done that once or twice under the assumption the course would change for other classes, if only slightly.
That being said, the onus is on the student to make sure they aren't submitting someone's work as their own. I'm not really sure if they understood what they were doing was serious (as in if Coursera was just a bunch of robot drones and they didn't give it much credibility). I know this incident legitimizes Coursera (and it's certificates of completion) in my eyes.
Really I believe all they need to say is, "Look, we really put a lot of work into this to make a good experience for people. We'd appreciate it if you took your answers offline and help make Coursera a respectable name in learning by submitting original work". The whole "We'll start expelling!" doesn't really strike a chord with me. I've been expelled before [not from coursera] for really dumb reasons.
# ALSO, they should take their Honor code out of the ToS. Put it somewhere that people READ!
I remember being presented with the Honor Code directly when I started the course. I don't remember if it was a popup or during the introduction video, but it was definitely highlighted.
Oh okay, I took a course and have no memory of being presented with the Honor Code. The one they linked to is in their ToS, it still deserves it's own page.
They definitely showed the honor code the first time I went into this class as well as a different class I took on modeling.
I think the expelling is totally fine. Martin and his team put a lot of time into this, developing the course and the tools to automate grading and if someone is going to put this up publicly and not take it down they should just boot them from the course.
I don't understand why anyone would actually turn in the same work, though. It's not like a completion certificate from this class will get you closer to a degree or anything. I'm sure there must be some reason and I hope it's more than just "I wanted a 10/10 for me to see!". I suppose that an employer might tell someone "learn Scala and get that certificate and get a 10/10 on every assignment" but I somehow doubt it.
unless it turns out (in physical reality, this is not an ethical statement) that the social creatures who would selflessly upload whatever they worked on for the benefit of their peers, without giving a shit about the ethics program of their schools, turn out to be better employees than those who would never do such a thing.
is such a thing possible? I am not saying one way or another. I am saying it's not the be-all, end-all signal, and you should prove that it even goes in the direction you suggest. :)
>Coursera should just publicly identify cheaters so I can cross check against resumes or certifications. Problem solved.
This introduces a lot of problems, all of which are difficult to solve and not directly related to the fundamental vision of Coursera. If I cheat under the full name of my sworn enemy, I can have them publicly blacklisted from any employer who uses this list. Identification seems like the logical next step, but it's no easy task especially when your students come from hundreds of different countries with varying forms of ID.
If you're serious in your suggestion, you're going to have to explain how these kinds of problems can be solved. You're then going to have the same problem Google+ had with online identities. Why should one be forced to give their real identity if they're simply trying to learn, not to be recognized for it?
Continue to award the certificate even to cheaters but then allow employers who are presented that certificate to verify whether the person has been cheating. :)
I wonder how many potential employees should consider working for potential employers like edw519 who make such short-sighted decisions. What they care for maybe relevant, but how they care is questionable.
I found it annoying when people were submitting answers to Stripe's CTF before the end date - just seemed to cheapen the experience - and would imagine for someone not cheating in the class that they might feel the same way.
(on a side note - did anyone get their CTF tshirt yet?)
The fact that people publicly posting their work would get expelled disappoints me. During the Machine Learning class on Coursera, I did all of the programming exercises myself. After submitting the assignments and getting 100% scores, I would browse other people's GitHub repositories to see how they completed the assignment, which taught me more about both Octave syntax and machine learning and helped me to vectorize some of the more tricky algorithms (use Octave's native matrix operations rather than slower for loops).
The people who submit exact copies of assignments they find online should absolutely be penalized. To expel those who publish their work seems overly harsh.
" For those students for whom it's been discovered have uploaded similar or duplicate solutions, cases will be handled on an individual basis. Though beware, that cheating in any capacity not be tolerated. "
This seems like pretty clear language. I doubt people who accidently used a public repo will be punished for it.
I was referring to the section that stated, "We have identified several individual students with solutions publicly posted (github included) who will be expelled from the course in the coming days if these solutions remain public." People who use a public repo to share their work will be expelled.
I would think it would be better to let the course go on, and mail the certificates and give each one a unique identifier. Then make an annotation at cousera of which students were caught cheating. Then give employers the ability to check if a certificate is from an honest student or one who was caught cheating. Everyone wins.
I would have went the other way and forced everyone to develop in public via github (or similar, in fact it wouldn't need to be private if Coursera had access to the git repository). I'd guess it would be more work to try and painstakingly recreate a unique and authentic looking sequence of commits than it would to just do it yourself, probably teach some good habits too.
Are your downvotes coming because of you specifically suggesting github or are they because of the underlying idea? I think the idea's good. I had a group projects in a coding-intensive course (not distance) this summer and one of our members procrastinated endlessly. He kept insisting he'd done work and we hadn't but he was new to version control and didn't realize that you can pull up commit logs. He quit the team when he saw them.
At the least, if someone contributes a ton of code for an assignment in one shot that's identical to somebody else, the professor could compare commit logs there too. Tons of code is out there on the internet and plagiarism is something that'll be tempting on the job under a deadline, too, with potentially more serious legal consequences.
I keep my code private until the class is over, then open-source it. I consider this stuff to be my resume.
If they're going to issue certificates that people respect, they should do it like EdX is planning: paid formal testing at exam centers.
For connecting top students with recruiters, they're already looking at contributions to forums as well as homework/test scores. It shouldn't be too hard to see who's really engaged with the material.
Getting uptight about people sharing work seems counterproductive and hopeless.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadEarly questions are things like: if membership of a set is a function mapping between an integer and a boolean, how would you define the membership of a singleton set? Modulo the spaces and variable names, every student's answer was probably the same!
So detecting who has copied their solution is probably difficult.
that's kinda amusing. [edit: thanks for the reply (have an upvote); missed that. that's more reassuring.]
"For those students for whom it's been discovered have uploaded similar or duplicate solutions, cases will be handled on an individual basis. Though beware, that cheating in any capacity not be tolerated."
So, whilst you cannot be prevented from posting it somewhere public, you can (theoretically) be thrown off the course for doing so.
I think there's a unique opportunity for GitHub here. They could give an educational license to verified students in college/high-school/on-line schools. For the duration of their class, they can have as many private repos as they like. When the semester ends, you've got a week to grab your code before it goes public, like a free account. First, it would get students used to GitHub and they would clammer for it in the workplace because they love it so much; Second, it would position GH as a great supporter of education.
I suspect this would catch on better if the repos were destroyed or stayed private. Professors reuse assignments year after year and wouldn't be too happy about public solutions to all their past assignments.
(fwiw, I use Github exactly in this way, only with public repos)
edit for link: https://github.com/edu
Maybe Coursera should host private repos?
https://bitbucket.org/plans
Edit- Apparently BitBucket launched a new version of their site only moments after sharing this link. Looks great!
That's like using free speech as a motivation to tell your boss to "Go fuck himself"
With the ubiquity of free (public only) github accounts, I'm not entirely sure what else they expected might happen.
Do people really care about online certifications anyway?
For me, the main advantage of the weekly assignments, is that it stops me from procrastinating, like I might if I were to learn by myself with a book... I don't really care about the certification itself. I guess I can add it to my resume, like the SCJP, but I don't think employers will care much.
I use github as a central place to store almost everything I write outside work, so it comes pretty natural for me to version code for problems I've been working on there.
Disclaimer: I'm not involved in the Scala course, so I don't know how the actual assigments were structured.
Given two resumes, one with a big bullet list of unverified skills, and one with a bullet list of some completed coursera courses, which would you choose?
Obviously coursera will not be replacing real college any time soon, but it can definitely serve a role in verifying at least cursory knowledge of basic skills.
I would accept neither as evidence of anything other than the skills a candidate advertises.
IOW, I trust "I know Scala" on a resume exactly as much as "I know Scala and completed a Coursera course on it".
The big problem with your logic is assuming that one of these two options must be meaningful. Those two resumes are either both good enough to bring in for an interview, or both not good enough to bring in for an interview. "I have a worthless piece of paper" changes nothing.
If they can't use the course certificate as a signal mechanism then there will be no incentive for employers to partner with them
In the spirit of the Platonic ideal of the Academy it seems beneficial to freely share and exchange ideas.
I am enrolled in the class, and when I got the e-mail, my first thought was "Great. Now I have to worry about whether or not my work will look too similar to someone else's, or to the solutions that have been posted."
Granted, my first submission for assignment #2 was a third of a point short of 10/10, so maybe I don't have anything to worry about.
I don't have any actual suggestions other then when I was in school the assignments were worth about 10-15% of our final grade because of this very reason (shared solutions). Actual knowledge was tested in other ways: presentations, quizzes, exams, etc.
Revoking the completion certificate for everyone else is NOT a way to build trust with the community at large - use those large academic brains and come up with a better solution.
So each attempt, even from the same student, would get a slightly different set of questions, and the dumbest attempts at cheating were discouraged[1].
I don't see why this couldn't be done for the programming assingments.
For example, the first assignment in this functional programming was "functional sets": empty set, singleton, contains, union, intersect, filter. It would have been trivial to add a few more (unionAll, containsAll, difference etc) and select a subset for each student, or something like that.
[0] alas, they don't seem to do this anymore.
[1] also, a "random answer + replay with proper solution" approach wouldn't work.
If someone it stupid enough not to even change variable names then they'd be caught easily. While with Millions of solutions it would be easy to get some replication, most of the time there wouldn't be any and this is when manual intervention by a person could be triggered.
This in conjuntion with your solution would work pretty well especially if someone submitted a wrong answer for another question that they haven't seen.
Use an algorithm to cross-check homework submissions, checking for structural copying. If a high correlation is found, as with human intervention, you suspect cheating but cannot prove it.
So, only for the potential cheating students, issue an extra quiz at some scheduled time, and discard the homework score. These quizzes should be all issued in parallel batches and last an hour or so, so solutions can't possibly be copied among cheaters. Make sure the quiz is actually harder than the homework, conceptually.
In other words, rather than trying to punish potential cheaters, just keep testing them until you're sure they're not cheating. This is better IMO than producing a 10x size problem set and selecting random subsets, because the number of suspected cheaters will probably be a small-ish percentage. Therefore, rather than having to write a ton of etra test material for everyone, you only have to write a few extra quizzes for a subset of the class.
The point of Coursera (to me) isn't to pad my resume, it's to learn from courses not always offered at my university.
Cheating degrades the quality of education at any level. Cheaters are trying to get accreditation when they shouldn't. While Cheating is all over in education (we had a couple of cases at my school), it is obviously going to be more prominent in a place like Coursera, where cheating is easier and looking for cheaters is harder.
One thing they could do is create an algorithm that checks answers much like what they do for journals, but again that's an extra load they "shouldn't" have on their employees.
A: "Oh hey I know how to program Scala"
B: "Ok program Scala..."
A: "Well I only got the cert, I don't actually know."
B: "Sorry I guess you're not qualified then. Why don't you learn?"
Yeah that sounds like a great interview. How long do you let them go, half an hour, a day? Do you think you can adequately judge someones abilities like this?
The university has the onus to hire credible teachers, and to maintain a high reputation. You're paying for the standards they apply. Some universities aren't worth their weight and some are. The information that they have is out there. This has not changed. Textbooks have been arround for a while. Additionally professional teachers have the ability to communicate the material affectively.
Online classes can't guarantee a level of understanding of the material. Additionally online classes will never be able to guarantee that the person who signed up for the class is the actual one that gets the credit.
It wouldn't work at Coursera's scale and for a price point they can afford.
Not in the least! You can argue that it degrades the prestige or something like that, but the education remains the same.
I mean, if there are 5000 students in the course, for even odds of it happening, 0.5 = (1 - n) ^ 5000 -> n = 0.0139% chance per student, which seems like an awfully saintly ratio to assume.
Won't they be making the problem worse by drawing borderline cheaters' attention to it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect)?
This kind of thinking really bothers me. They've gone to some pains to ensure their certification has some level of meaning, and now they want to chuck it all out the window based on the actions of a tiny minority.
Collective punishment is usually the product of lazy thinking.
I suppose I've always been of the opinion that they should offer the courses in a fashion similar to that of Khan Academy. I don't expect a certificate when I complete a section there as I'm there for the purpose of educating myself, not for accrediting myself. I think it's hard for Coursera to fulfill accreditation, but wish them the best if it's what they want to try for.
If learning is truly your motive and you are unable to do the assignments, well just don't do them. Why even go as far as cheating.
Also - cases will be handled on an individual basis - I guess it's not a standard sized class. There is a few hundred people signed up at least. Putting up a free course in functional programming seems like a lot of work. On top of that, trying to find people who are cheating and handling them more or less individually is a bit of a time waste in my opinion.
While I'm quick to condemn certification, I can see the other side of this argument as well. To a lot of people, Coursera represents the opportunity to overhaul a broken education system. In order for true change, Coursera must not only demonstrate that it can educate people, but that it can do so credibly and consistently.
However, I do take most certifications as mild negative signs. E.g., SCJP, CSM, PMP. A lot of for-profit certifications are worthless. A notable exception are some of the Cisco certs, which really put people through their paces. Which makes sense, as Cisco benefits more from having expensive Cisco products work well than from certification revenue.
It'll be interesting to see what bucket Coursera certs fall into. They need to jump on the cheating thing right quick, though.
I took the first AI class last Fall, and if you've never been exposed to the material, it was a very good survey of Artificial Intelligence.
I'm not sure about the actual comparative amounts, but Cisco makes a lot of money off of certifications. Of course, in the long run making them actually represent something is best for both sides of the business.
80% of Cisco's revenue is hardware. And even the service side is something close to $2 billion. I suspect the amount of money they make off of certifications is a tiny slice of that. Even if there are 10k CCIEs each paying $1500 for a yearly test, that's only $15 million, which is nothing to Cisco.
> Of course, in the long run making them actually represent something is best for both sides of the business.
That's not true for many certifiers. Take a look at the CSM certificate. It is meaningless, but popular and therefore profitable.
Present market value of a common certification - ~$100k.
Which aspect would you attempt to build a business around?
Certification is second after ability, as it is in most arts and activities, except scams, such as SAP, Oracle, Cisco or other pay-walled artificial hierarchies.
To put it differently - certification is for those, who are unable to prove/show his abilities second time.)
Surely the only point in doing the assignments in the first place is to satisfy yourself that you have understood and can apply the material?
Rather than trying to fight cheating (which is impossible), Coursera should emphasize the point that these courses are not resume busters but for learning.
I've taken several Coursera classes, but I don't mention them in my resume and I only care about the certificates as an incentive to complete the course, but from the very nature on how these classes are graded, it would be very difficult to prevent cheating (or sharing), barring having the exams taken in real-life locations (something that Udacity optionaly provides for some of its courses if I recall correctly).
As a potential employer, I care more about the candidate's ethics (or lack thereof) than their ability. I could always teach them, but I could never trust them.
Coursera should just publicly identify cheaters so I can cross check against resumes or certifications. Problem solved.
But I don't think that should allow you to go and post code / answers in a public forum of sorts.
I have also worked through some iOS courses from Standford on iTunes U and I would not think twice about helping someone with one of the problems. Is that cheating?
Also, do you have any evidence that the no-cheating, no-publishing-homework policy is buried in a TOS? If Coursera hasn't made it obvious enough, then sure, people could have made a mistake. But Odersky's a smart guy so his reaction makes me imagine he made the requirement obvious.
A website that is providing you with completely free content from some of the top universities. I think it's fair for them to dictate the terms.
That being said, the onus is on the student to make sure they aren't submitting someone's work as their own. I'm not really sure if they understood what they were doing was serious (as in if Coursera was just a bunch of robot drones and they didn't give it much credibility). I know this incident legitimizes Coursera (and it's certificates of completion) in my eyes.
Really I believe all they need to say is, "Look, we really put a lot of work into this to make a good experience for people. We'd appreciate it if you took your answers offline and help make Coursera a respectable name in learning by submitting original work". The whole "We'll start expelling!" doesn't really strike a chord with me. I've been expelled before [not from coursera] for really dumb reasons.
# ALSO, they should take their Honor code out of the ToS. Put it somewhere that people READ!
Heck, my thesis latex files are still in my public Google code repository.
The punishment should be on people that copy not who have content publicly available.
I think the expelling is totally fine. Martin and his team put a lot of time into this, developing the course and the tools to automate grading and if someone is going to put this up publicly and not take it down they should just boot them from the course.
I don't understand why anyone would actually turn in the same work, though. It's not like a completion certificate from this class will get you closer to a degree or anything. I'm sure there must be some reason and I hope it's more than just "I wanted a 10/10 for me to see!". I suppose that an employer might tell someone "learn Scala and get that certificate and get a 10/10 on every assignment" but I somehow doubt it.
There it is, really obvious too.
https://twitter.com/blaines/status/255762571704020992/photo/...
is such a thing possible? I am not saying one way or another. I am saying it's not the be-all, end-all signal, and you should prove that it even goes in the direction you suggest. :)
This introduces a lot of problems, all of which are difficult to solve and not directly related to the fundamental vision of Coursera. If I cheat under the full name of my sworn enemy, I can have them publicly blacklisted from any employer who uses this list. Identification seems like the logical next step, but it's no easy task especially when your students come from hundreds of different countries with varying forms of ID.
If you're serious in your suggestion, you're going to have to explain how these kinds of problems can be solved. You're then going to have the same problem Google+ had with online identities. Why should one be forced to give their real identity if they're simply trying to learn, not to be recognized for it?
(on a side note - did anyone get their CTF tshirt yet?)
Wait, so they didn't know this was going to happen?
The people who submit exact copies of assignments they find online should absolutely be penalized. To expel those who publish their work seems overly harsh.
This seems like pretty clear language. I doubt people who accidently used a public repo will be punished for it.
At the least, if someone contributes a ton of code for an assignment in one shot that's identical to somebody else, the professor could compare commit logs there too. Tons of code is out there on the internet and plagiarism is something that'll be tempting on the job under a deadline, too, with potentially more serious legal consequences.
I keep my code private until the class is over, then open-source it. I consider this stuff to be my resume.
For connecting top students with recruiters, they're already looking at contributions to forums as well as homework/test scores. It shouldn't be too hard to see who's really engaged with the material.
Getting uptight about people sharing work seems counterproductive and hopeless.