Hacker News Reader

Comment by javanix | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I get the same way.

My CS courses were basically all dependent on exam scores - I would estimate that on average 75% of the course grades came from exams.

In some of the courses, even as late as my 3rd and 4th years, people weren't able to complete projects that had even moderate amounts of coding, even in Java. I would much rather have seen a more 50/50 grading scale (at least in courses that it made sense for - I don't see much of a way to get around exams in theory courses) so that a good grade would require strength in both application and theory.

View on HN

At my university, the CS department requires students to pass both the homework/project portions of the class and the exam portion. If you get a 95 on the final and don't do any of the projects, you fail. It's not exactly a 50/50 grading scale, but the idea is similar.

It's worth noting that the CS department is the only department at this university that applies this grading requirement- I'm a little surprised the other engineering programs haven't picked it up.

They haven't, because putting a large amount of weight on assignments leads to endemic cheating. Exams are highly weighted because they take place in a controlled environment where students can't easily copy answers or crib off the Internet.

I suspect if they ran source-level comparisons on the programming projects at your university, they would find a huge amount of copying between students.

Not huge... I was with a friend who was a marker of assignments in my university... He says that there are always cheaters when he marks the assignments, but its only 1 or two out of a hundred. He marks only one part of the assignment... so if we suppose there are 5 parts to each assignment and each assignment is copied similarly... the rate of copying is only ~5%, which isn't a "huge amount" IMO.

The most worrying is not copying but students outsourcing their assignments. I've googled coding questions before just to find them on rentacoder.com.

Just last week a student offered me money to do their assignment for them. (but of course I flatly declined.) I've heard from some first years the market price for completing that assignment was $75.

I can certainly see that concern, but actually we do source-level comparisons, and we make it very clear up front that this takes place. It happens, but not at the rate you're suggesting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com