This feels like a narrative in need of hard evidence. I was there at what I assume was the tail end of this in 1997. My gut was cheating was no worse then it had been, but they had automated systems for the first time.
Some of it was so silly that I was accused of cheating in the C course for using and citing the hashtable implementation from the assigned textbook. On just talking to the graders and professor, they dropped it and were amused that anyone used the book.
For the other sciences, they would shake up the rules on how to capitalize figures. Idea being that cheaters would use last year's rules. Or, lazy people would just not pay attention..
The cheating came out in the Scheme class, specifically. It was something like 150 students caught. It was not a general cheating scandal in the first CS course over the years. My comment was very clear about this, I did not imply cheating was a problem elsewhere (may have been, I wasn't aware of any issues though).
It wasn't really overblown, it was a problem with that course. The instructors and TAs were grossly unprepared to teach hundreds of freshman a semester in a language they (the instructors and TAs) weren't familiar with that was fundamentally harder (especially for an arbitrary student rather than those actually interested in the topic) than what was done before.
The rest of my comment was about appropriateness of the first course to the students and their objectives. MATLAB being a much better first language for the engineering majors than the general CS requirement provided.
My point was that a lot of that was the definition of cheating. It got so bad that just working together in electrical engineering would get you threatened with cheating.
So, yes. They had evidence of massive cheating on a level they had never seen. They also had evidence of near incompetence in teaching at a rate never seen before. Not shockingly, they focused on the cheating.
My assertion is that the behavior in the cs students was no different from any other students. They just had more mechanical grading schemes and were less prepared to teach such a variety of students.
Edit: and apologies for skipping the Matlab assertion. As an EE at the time, that was my intro. I don't recall it being particularly good. Or bad. It just was. They shifted to java soon for many folks. As someone that was a TA for the Java classes. Then the VHDL classes. Then the C classes. I can't really see any benefit of any one over the others.
From [1], 2002 187 students investigated for cheating at GT. 77 students had their final letter grade dropped by at least one letter grade, 26 received an F, 32 received a zero for the assignment, one student was suspended for two semesters.
Though I couldn’t read the full article, but that’s what it seemed to say in the first two paragraphs.
There seems to be two slashdot threads discussing the issue from 2002. Perhaps it was worse after you left?
I should have been clear on my call for hard evidence. I am not claiming point blank that there was no cheating. I caught some folks myself that left someone else's name on the submission.
Rather, a lot of what they classify as cheating in that time was stupid close to standard practice for sorority and fraternity members. Having banks of previous years tests and assignments, for example. (I say this as someone that was not in one, so mayhap I am misrepresenting.)
So, my request for hard evidence is mainly to get to a root cause and to establish norms and base rates of behaviors. Yes, it could have gotten worse or had some bad years. It feels highly suspicious that it just happened to correspond with the rust of automated graders. Yes, coincidences happen. Feels really shaky, though.
Some of it was so silly that I was accused of cheating in the C course for using and citing the hashtable implementation from the assigned textbook. On just talking to the graders and professor, they dropped it and were amused that anyone used the book.
For the other sciences, they would shake up the rules on how to capitalize figures. Idea being that cheaters would use last year's rules. Or, lazy people would just not pay attention..