• Mikkel (unregistered) in reply to CRNewsom

    Exactly.

    The original WTF is of course extreme cases, but during my time as a CS student, I've contacted lots of professors outside the university to get input or more information from their field since our university is too small to have experts on every single field on earth.

  • rob bateman (unregistered)

    The story posted here is slightly incorrect here. I used to teach graphics and tools programming at the NCCA, bournemouth, UK (on the 3D animation courses there). My notes are (mostly) all still online at robthebloke.org, which is mainly the reason why i get all sorts of interesting e-mail queries... (got another similar one this morning)

    The assignment posted there is not one of mine, but one that i was offered money to complete for a student.....

  • rob bateman (unregistered) in reply to pitchingchris
    pitchingchris:
    No kidding, the first one actually offered to pay the professor to do his project, how stupid is that!

    none of them were my students. It's been about 3 years since i left lecturing.... still idiotic of them to ask though - Who knows they might end up getting named and shamed on the dailywtf ;)

  • rob bateman (unregistered) in reply to Kenny
    Kenny:
    Why doesn't he just password protect all of his material online like my professors do?

    Because the information is useful for everyone, so why try to prevent people seeing it? Ok, so exam answers, things like that shouldn't be publicly available, but i see no problem with class material being available.

  • rob bateman (unregistered) in reply to xjoaniex
    xjoaniex:
    Two of the three emails that were noted had the name of the University where the person was studying. He should go on to their websites ... find an email address for the head of the department and forward the emails that he received to the head of the department.

    I did :p

  • rob bateman (unregistered) in reply to TroelsL
    TroelsL:
    What makes matters even worse, is that the idiots would pay for this.. It's not like it's impossible to find the source code for a queue or a stack somewhere online.

    What makes matters worse is that there is a code sample on my website that would have answered that assignment.

    TroelsL:
    Also, how the .... do you get a CS degree without knowing how to implement a stack?

    By offering cash to someone to do the assignment for you?

  • rob bateman (unregistered) in reply to burnside
    burnside:
    the real WTF is that bournemouth have a cs dept at all. I thought it was just one of those seaside colleges for language students who want to make it big in the catering world ;-)

    It does have a CS course, however i taught on the Ba & Msc Computer Animation courses (C,C++,OpenGL,plug-in writing,scripting languages, 3D maths etc). None of those students are bournemouth students.....

  • Billy Booble (unregistered) in reply to Stewie
    Stewie:
    That's really BS. Why is the stereotype that it's always CS students that don't know how to use proper programing techniques, or write their own assignments? Why are the Engineers to glorified that they never screw up or cheat? In my current position, I've seen way more Engineers that didn't know the basics about programing than the CS grads.

    Flustered

    And I've known so many CS students who know nothing about XOR gates, or how a capacitor works, but they don't have to take classes about them on top of their programming classes. Leave the engineers alone, its hard enough for us not having time to date and all.

  • (cs) in reply to zip
    zip:
    I did a project for my ex-gf one time for $50. I rationalized that it was ok because she was in a different country, and if she wanted to pay her way through Comp Sci 100, that's her own bad decision.

    I did one for a kid on comp.lang.java.misc the summer after I gradauted. An easy $50. I wish I got paid that much for all my homework in school as well :)

  • A K (unregistered) in reply to guy smiley
    We once had two Indian students apply to the grad program at my university. They both had great grades and their recommendation letters were positively glowing. The problem was, even though those letters were written by two different professors at two different universities in two different cities for two different people, three of the paragraphs were word-for-word identical. The crazy thing is, we ended up accepting them both, and they're both brilliant. They're doing some amazing work, and they both lived up to their recommendations. I don't even know what to think about that anymore.

    For Indian students applying to a university, often the recommendation letters are written by the students themselves :) Get the requisite 2-3 professors to agree that they will give recommendations, rarely will a professor take the effort to write and send sealed recommendations himself. Instead, the student is expected to draft a reco letter, which is then signed by the prof and (if the univ. requires a sealed recommendation) then the student puts it in the envelope and gets someone in the college office to stamp the official seal. If you think about the number of students who apply for graduate studies and how much time the professor would have to spend actually writing the letters, then this is somewhat understandable - who has the time to write recommendations for 100+ students, each of whom is applying to 4+ universities on average?

    Of course, this also means that honest students will only list actual achievements while the unscrupulous majority either embellish or outright lie about their work. The overworked professors usually don't even have time to read the student-drafted letter, and imho just don't care - most of them are not exactly the highly paid professors who take pride in their teachings that you may be accustomed to.

    As for two students with similar letters - from school through college, I participated in several programming and quiz contests, often in a team with one of my friends who also studied Comp Engg. (equivalent of CompSci in U.S.) When he was applying to several universities, I helped him compose some of the paragraphs describing how he'd won several prizes and was eager to further drink from the fountain of knowledge etc. Later on, when writing my own recommendation letters (of course on behalf of professors who had agreed to give them), I recycled a lot of those paragraphs since there was substantial overlap. In fact, the main difference between our profiles (re. info described in recos) was that he did far better in academics (I was and am a lazy ass) while I had won a few more general knowledge quizzes (with another friend who didn't go for C.S.)

    To summarize, imho you can handily ignore any recommendation letters for Indian students even if the university requires sealed recos. Their general contents will just be a list of the student's achievements and how he will certainly be a great asset to your school etc. - you can just go through the CV and spare yourself from reading how the student is highly motivated and will surely shine in future etc. (dunno about others, but I personally thought inability/dislike of lying was a handicap while drafting my own recos).

  • MM (unregistered) in reply to fluffy
    fluffy:
    ... an example which was written in the stupidest way I could think of ... probably thousands of people have copied "his" code for the purpose of finishing some assignment.
    And I wonder how many people have copied it in the workplace, and how many production systems it's on. Could you ever know whether or not you rely on those systems?
  • MM (unregistered) in reply to Travis
    Travis:
    why they let these people pass even though they knew they are cheating
    When students cheat by copying something they found on the internet, then if you can spot the plagarism, you know they've cheated. When students copy from each other, however, all you can readily tell is that somebody cheated. Determining who can be tricky. Maybe one student let the other one copy, in which case they're both guilty, but there are enough ways to steal someone's work that that's at least as likely. In that case, you've got one cheater and one victim, with no clear way of telling them apart. I think a lot of professors are too woried about punishing the victims to be able to punish the cheaters.
  • MM (unregistered) in reply to Greg
    Greg:
    I can't image actually asking someone in an entirely different school for help, let alone to do my homework for me.
    If they were asking for legitimate help, they could have asked within their own school, but when they're asking someone to help them cheat, they're less likely to be caught by going farther afield.
  • incoherent (unregistered)

    When I was in my second semester of CS, we had a take-home exam for the second exam. "Someone" (and the professors never said who, and I don't think they ever determined it to enough precision to actually out the guy) posted the exam on RentACoder. One of the professors noticed, and for awhile they told us the final exam would be in-class (in other words, a royal pain), but eventually they made it take-home as well.

    Sure enough, the final exam appears on RentACoder again, from the same seller (with a lower price, oddly). At this point the professors excitedly start posting updates on the course webpage so we can all see the drama unfold: The exam was 5 hours long and due on a Wednesday at 5pm. Someone accepted the bid a few days before the exam was due, then at around 12:30pm on that Wednesday bailed out.

    I have to imagine that this method works for some people, but not in this case.

  • Duncan Bayne (unregistered)

    I am still very proud of my response to someone hoping a comp.lang.c regular would do his homework for him.

  • ajk (unregistered) in reply to pitchingchris
    pitchingchris:
    Oxyd:
    Well, the real WTF here is: You can get a job without any actual knowledge, as seen from many articles here. You can pass college without having to put much effort into it, besides “obtaining” your homework assignments. So why do we actually study all this? Clearly, studying is a sub-optimal solution to getting a job.

    You're absolutely right, it is the sub-optimal solution to GETTING a job, but maybe not keeping a job. Or better yet, if we learn the material, we will enjoy our jobs more because we are applying things we have learned. If we never learn the material, we might as well be a doorstop. The challenge is there for our benefit, not for us to just sidestep it or try to cheat.

    I have this theory that once you land a job you are home free, the only thing you need to do is to do "job surfing", after a couple of months you move on to the next job before they figure out how crappy you are. Most employers give you a few months to get into the job. So you change job as often as you can and eventually, after some years of surfing, you end up in management. Then you are really home free and can blame other people for your incompetence. ;-)

  • VISUALIZER (unregistered) in reply to Outlaw Programmer

    You don't. But OpenGL can be useful for generating a visual representation of stacks and queues...

  • (cs) in reply to MM
    MM:
    I think a lot of professors are too worried about punishing the victims to be able to punish the cheaters.
    Interestingly enough, one of my CS academic friends has spent a substantial proportion of his last two years in chasing down cheats: with considerable success.

    Part of academia is getting it right yourself. Part of academia is helping your students getting it right.

    But most of academia consists of controlling standards. If they can't do that, then they're worthless.

    (He claims to have more fun chasing down cheats than he's had in the last ten years, BTW. Probably because they tend to be imbeciles, and easily caught).

  • Martian (unregistered) in reply to Duncan Bayne

    Nicely done!

  • SomeOneSomeWhere (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi

    Well.. all are not alike.. I have toiled and worked up to where I am .. and yes.. I am from India.

    36% of ppl in NASA are of Indian Origin.. How would you explain that ?

  • SpamBot (unregistered)

    This happens in other subjects too. Reminds me spookily of:

    a) Indian student on my MSc who insisted I did her work for her (I tried to help, not do, but it was HARD). Found out too late she was going from one person to another to another - basically did NONE of it herself. I am very angry with this girl. I managed to get rid of her in the end, but not before my grades had suffered - similar to the guy who got a C when the pretty girl got an A.

    b) a friend who has spent the past 4 years looking for boyfriends based on their potential ability to do her economics assignments for her. Nope, she dosn't have her degree yet. Or a steady relationship. She might - MIGHT- finish in another 2 or 3 years ...

    Some people just don't know what learning is all about IMO.

    Didn't really connect person (a)'s behaviour with their nationality - didn't seem to be the case at all with another Indian girl in the class (who got equally annoyed). But we DID wonder how she got her references. Person (b) essentially lied on her application forms by omitting the FIVE previous degrees she had flunked out of.

  • SomeOneElse (unregistered) in reply to SomeOneSomeWhere
    SomeOneSomeWhere:
    Well.. all are not alike.. I have toiled and worked up to where I am .. and yes.. I am from India.

    36% of ppl in NASA are of Indian Origin.. How would you explain that ?

    Since you brought it up: Challenger, Columbia, etc.

    http://wonkette.com/politics/dept'-of-accidents-will-happen/nasa-also-cant-spell-the-shuttles-name-278262.php

    Also, it's commonly known that NASA actually does not have the best engineers. Or even the second best. They're kind of low on the ladder.

    Just saying...

  • Yuvi (unregistered)

    Totally off topic, but it has to be said...

    The 36% figure is a complete, total myth. People still fall for it sigh

    I'm Indian too, btw.

  • ivan altarriba (unregistered)

    I have a degree from UPC, and I feel 'Mario Parra' is a disgrace for his teachers, his classmates, and maybe his country.

    (But maybe he does not deserves his private message be made public and indexed by Google for the shame of his sons, and the sons of his sons, ...)

    Despite this, UPC is a fairy good university, clearly above the country mean; for example, its computer department can show big scores in programming contests to back up this.

    http://concurs.lsi.upc.edu/

    captcha: jumentum

  • hana (unregistered)
  • (nodebb)

    so dope

  • (nodebb)

    thanks for info

    Addendum 2023-02-09 20:59: When a person likes what they do and has fun doing it, that is good. For instance, as a student who dislikes writing, I resort to https://ibwritingservice.com/ for assistance with written assignments when I don't have the time to do it myself.

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