Re: database systems and organizational intelligence

>
> Lament -- I'm teaching Java in the Fall and the last time I taught a
college
> language course was over 20 years ago --COBOL, Fortran, and BASIC. Where
we
> were once able to teach a language and in short order a student could take
> in data, validate it, use it, modify it, store it, and retrieve it (i.e.
> data processing), we might now need to teach Java, SQL, XML (including
many
> xml-based "languages" such as ant), jsp, html (along with taglibs etc) to
> write one little example of taking in data, storing it and retrieving it
> again the way a production system might work. (and then to get the
software
> run-time environment set up...!!)
>

Just a "watch out". I stopped teaching last year as I became very disillusioned with the quality of the students. In every class I taught (undergrad seniors and graduate level), I discovered instances of cheating and/or plagiarism. I don't know what I would have found if I was actively looking for it. This was at a leading (according to U.S News & World Report listing) university for I.S. I hope your experience is different, but my dean indicated that this is a nationwide problem.

I don't give "repeat the facts back to me" questions, I give "you have to think about this and synthesize what you've learned" questions. I almost never give syntax questions. In case you are interested, here are some examples of the cheating:

• Take home final in what was essentially an "Intro to being a DBA class". (Yes cheating on a take-home final). How I caught them: They were given a business situation and asked to set up an Oracle database to support the given requirements. Specifically, in one question they were asked to explain what tablespaces they would need, and what they would name them (there are recommended naming conventions). As I am grading the papers, one student supplied syntax fior creating tables (which I did not ask for, and contained numerous glaring errors anyway). A few papers later, I find myself thinking, "Didn't I just read this?" It was word-for-word, though slightly rearranged. They even used the same names for attributes! The ironic part of this is (aside that it was a take-home final, and therfore they had the world's resources available to get it right), even if they had both gotten 100s on the exam (not likely), one _still_ would have gotten an F in the class, and the other would have just barely passed with the lowes possible passing grade. So-they both would have gotten an F anyway. Now, they also have cheating on their university record.
• Another class, this time three students. Assignment- create an ERD that models given business requirements. How they got caught: No two people will ever come up with the exact same ERD, much less laying it out on the page in exactly the same manner. I thought I came upon photocopies. Turns out there were very slight modifications to some names, but that's all. When confronted, they deny it. I say, fine, all of you get an F for the course. Then stories start to surface. They conflict, but there is some overlap. I was able to determine who did the original work, and who just "stole" it. The original worker got downgraded, the other two got an F for the assignment.

What is really galling, is that in addition to the university cheating policy, I explicitly layed out in the syllabus what kind of collaboration was allowed and what wasn't, what was plagiarism and what wasn't. No one ever claimed to be confused by the policy- they just cheated.

Now here's the really sad part of the story- as I mentioned, these were seniors and grad students. Could it be that they never cheated before? Of course not, so it means that faculty members either were not paying attention, just didn't care, or, more chillingly, were afraid to confront the students because it would affect the faculty member's student evaluation. Received on Fri May 28 2004 - 17:04:07 CEST