Comments on: Kyle Brady wins a copyfight

By: Natanael L

Natanael L — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:16:28 +0000

âThanks to some perseverance and asking the right questions, SJSU Professors are now prohibited from barring students from posting their code solutions online, as well as penalizing their students for doing so.

âA win for students, programmers, and copyfighters nationwide!â

+1 pWn4g3z! xD yay!
Awesome! What license is the code under? GPL? BSD? Got to check… (or haven’t you picked one yet?)
It is truly awesome that they have locked down the possibility to prevent people from sharing code!

By: Jakykong

Jakykong — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:32:33 +0000

If a student decided to use the code he posted in the next class, who is at fault?

A) The student who posted the code
B) The student who used the code for their answer, or
C) The professor, who continued to use the same questions repeatedly.

a) No. The student was not at fault — he wasn’t posting for students to cheat, and any reasonable teacher would have changed the questions the next time around so that the code wouldn’t help much. In any event, similar code could doubtless be found elsewhere strewn about coincidentally similar. A lot of introductory classes use nearly-identical sorts of exercises, so that online tutorials often have the same examples. Why would this be any different for the next class?

b) Yes. The student used someone else’s code as their answer instead of writing their own. Using the first student’s code as a guide is no problem. But plagiarism has always been forbidden — and open source code can still be plagiarized.

c) Yes. If the professor is too lazy to come up with exercises that don’t repeat every semester, then he’s absolutely at fault for the code already being available for the questions. Being a professor is something you earn for academic success. If you’re too lazy to teach the students (and instead expect them to learn on their own and then regurgitate the same stupid crap semester after semester) then you should probably find an easier career.

The student isn’t at fault if any cheating took place. No way. This is just insane; a fine example of oldy moldy teachers who can’t bring themselves up to date and instead expect everyone else to stay in the 20th century.

By: Monkey D. Luffy

Monkey D. Luffy — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:31:08 +0000

I had an instructor who wouldn’t even let you keep your tests, he would pass them out so you could see the results, then take them back again. The reason was he was too lazy to switch up the questions from year to year. This sucked, as no one was able to use the returned tests as a study aid. My suspicion is this Professor probably does the same thing. He doesn’t like answers posted because unlike students discussing the test results and then going their own way, the posted results stay online so the next batch of students can get the code online if they know where to look. Maybe if he had explained that instead of getting high handed something could have been worked out.