I'm appalled that the author puts most of the blame on the faculty. I would hope that CS students had some personal integrity.
Dartmouth College addressed this in a number of ways:
1. Collaboration was routinely encouraged, so long as all work was properly credited. You weren't expected to be able to ace some of the theory classes by yourself, for example.
2. Many courses included large team projects.
3. Each course began with a clear, unambiguous description of what behavior constituted cheating, and which types of collaboration were allowed.
4. When caught, cheating was treated as a major offense: a 9-month suspension and a permanent annotation on your transcript for a first offense, and an irrevocable expulsion for a second offense. I was friends with a CS TA who _always_ took the time to ram through these penalties.
Even with those precautions, we had a cheating scandal in a non-major course. Unfortunately, it was hard to identify the cheaters, and the usual penalties couldn't be enforced.
Still, I do admire Dartmouth both for encouraging collaboration and for ruthlessly ending the academic careers of students who lacked personal integrity.
The reason these articles focus on the faculty is because students will only be in a particular class once in their whole lives (everything going according to plan), whereas the professor teaching that class will do so many times. This is why articles like this put the blame on the faculty: it's pointless trying to reform student behaviour because the next batch of students in 6 months' time won't have learnt anything at all from any punishments you dished out to the last group.
> it was hard to identify the cheaters, and the usual penalties couldn't be enforced.
This might be a common problem. My university had similar draconian penalties for cheating, but the seriousness of the penalty requires an appropriately-serious proof of culpability, and it's surprisingly hard to get one.
Dartmouth College addressed this in a number of ways:
1. Collaboration was routinely encouraged, so long as all work was properly credited. You weren't expected to be able to ace some of the theory classes by yourself, for example.
2. Many courses included large team projects.
3. Each course began with a clear, unambiguous description of what behavior constituted cheating, and which types of collaboration were allowed.
4. When caught, cheating was treated as a major offense: a 9-month suspension and a permanent annotation on your transcript for a first offense, and an irrevocable expulsion for a second offense. I was friends with a CS TA who _always_ took the time to ram through these penalties.
Even with those precautions, we had a cheating scandal in a non-major course. Unfortunately, it was hard to identify the cheaters, and the usual penalties couldn't be enforced.
Still, I do admire Dartmouth both for encouraging collaboration and for ruthlessly ending the academic careers of students who lacked personal integrity.