Please remove all answers to 'how to solve Kepler's equation' Students are using the answers to cheat.

Hello MATLAB Central, I am a Professor at ASU, and I have assigned a homework on solving Kepler's equation for E (E - e*sin[E] = M) Unfortunately, I see many answers on MATLAB Central. Can those answers be removed or modified so that students have less opportunity to cheat? Thank you, Dr. Anna Haywood

[Adam]

This is a general problem of the internet age I would think. There are probably people asking about Kepler equations (and many other topics that happen also to come up in student questions) for totally different reasons, either for work or just personal interest.

Having all posts related to such topics deleted sets a dangerous precedent and would not really be feasible I wouldn't think.

I am in favour of people ignoring or deleting the questions of those who are blatantly just asking people to do their homework, but that isn't my choice and it's still not always easy to tell. People who are asking how to do things "without using builtin functions" are quite obvious since no real-life problem would require that unless it is a toolbox function they don't have.

It's hard to know what a solution would be. In the modern world the internet is a huge source of information and learning which will always now give students a chance to cheat.

[Guillaume]

As an academic myself, I sympathetise with Anna's plight and this is why when students come here asking for help with homework I never give a complete solution.

I would be completely opposed to any of us with delete privileges to remove such posts tough, even if they contain a complete answer.

Maybe the solution is to ask the students to heavily comment each line of code, forcing them to explain the reason behind the usage of each function. It's more complicated to mark but cheaters would be fairly obvious.

Alternatively, somebody needs to come up with a turnitin for code.

[John D'Errico]

While I agree that comments would help, but then you will just start to see commented answers. Cheaters will find a way to cheat. And if you did manage to shut down the answers that apply, then you will still find other solutions on a forum like stackexchange.

Sadly, I think the burden is on the teacher, comparing solutions to those online, and changing the problem subtly enough that the student is forced to think.

[Steven Lord]

I'd also like to suggest to Professor Haywood that students who cheat by copying MATLAB code from one of the major discussion forum for MATLAB programming are probably going to be pretty easy to catch. I suspect many of them will fail to change variable names, function names, etc. in the code they copy. [Or they'll Find/Replace and make a clbuttic mistake.]

[Jan]

Beginners in cheating copy homework solutions. But copied solutions have been recognized by teachers for thousands of years. Today there are more sophisticated approaches to cheat, because we live in a digital world.

Teachers run codes delivered by students on the private computers, where they collect the grading in Excel files. It is easy to hide a urlread command in your code, which loads code dynamically from the net to attack the teachers computer, e.g. to modify the file, which contains your grade.

In the next step these Excel files are stored in the network of the university. But teachers and office assistants are not necessarily experienced in the security management of networks. I've seen cases of lists of the complete year of students containing personal data like names, addresses and date of birth together with all grades for the complete year of students - and not only readable, but writable. The IT admin commented this: "I did not know that this disk is shared without restrictions for all members of the university network."

My conclusion: The problem of copy&paste solutions can be handled with traditional methods without a big effort. Data security on connected computers is severe and most teachers and professors are not even aware of this.

There has been an interesting phase, where Cody was cheated. E.g. the evaluation system was tricked by shadowing built-in functions. But more evil things can be done with a virtual Linux machine which runs in public.

[Jan]

I'm astonished that this question got one vote only yet. Homework questions are an important problem the forum has to solve every day.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

The Answers facility gets a lot of questions from students, and so acts as an educational resource. The major volunteers do not hesitate to push students to put in efforts. But we also explain; and by the time a student has worked everything through, a substantially complete answer might be present.

The MATLAB Answers volunteers in effect act like tutors. The answers are worked out in public to act as future educational material for other people. If a student brings a problem to us and we assist the student in working it out, and another student reads it and learns from it, then we have done something useful and educational, just the same way that people who publish hardcopy textbooks and tutorials are engaging in useful educational activities.

MATLAB Answers "competes" with thousands of other sites, (absolutely definitely including Facebook), in which students get together and share techniques and solutions. It also "competes" with the services that offer to write any program for $5. But here, the people who stick around as volunteers are conscientious about pushing students to learn, not copy. And by being public, educators can check to see what is going on here. For us to delete types of questions would not prevent the questions from being asked and answered elsewhere. You could perhaps think of us in the "harm reduction model" sense ;-)

The ability of students to spread questions around quickly and seek answers from diverse sources would not go away if MATLAB Answers were to close today. Unfortunately that implies that educators must adapt when assigning homework. By, for example, incorporating student identity information into the question, so that if a student just blatantly copies someone else's answer, it will not work for them.

When I was getting started in programming, students sometimes copied assignments by duplicating someone's card deck, or by having a student copy their program to paper tape and then read in the tape. The better-off students photocopied notes in their parent's office. It was just after the era that students would mimeograph notes for their study circles. The problems are not new.

Answer 2

[Jan]

No, unfortunately removing all answers concerning the Kepler equations is not a feasible option. You have found a better solution already: identify the potential sources for cheating. This is a reliable step to control this problem.

You can tell your students, that there are some useful Matlab forums and that they can get assistance there, but that you know them also and recognize copied solutions. Mention that you let a student explain his code if you are in doubt. And explain that plagiarism is a serios problem in science, even dissertations of famous politicians and articles in important journals are concerned.

Motivate the students to ask you in case of problems. When I studied my professor mentioned, that he offers positions for a diploma thesis or a PhD not to those, who deliver all homework solutions correctly, but to those, whose face he can remember from the lessons. So asking more questions and showing more interest was more important and cheating of homework had less impact.

[John D'Errico]

I saw this recently.

http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2014/02/you-can-cheat-but-dont-be-a-cheater/

The gist is that students who were told not to cheat, still did. However, students who were told not to be cheaters were less likely to cheat.