Is Pyra expensive outdated hardware?


Oh, the amounts of bad code I've had to read and grade! And the surprise on students faces when I ask them "Well, if you have written this code, how come the hardcoded path names in it point to another students home directory" or "Well, it might be that you wrote this, but since you only got the assignment last week, how come all the files have a last changed-date over two years ago", or...

If you're gonna cheat, at least put som decent effort into the cheating, mmkay? And thats even without me mentioning people answering written assignments with internet cut-and-paste run through google translate...
I can relate :)

Some people thought they got away scot-free if their code was accepted by the automatic grading system. Little did they know. Knowing how our plagiarism-finding algorithms worked it would be less work to actually come up with another solution than dodge detection. Running the detection program for all instances of hte same exercises ever submitted takes a few hours to run, but pretty much finds all clear offenders. Of course the algorithm gives false positives, but that's why there's a manual inspection after that.

There was a big temptation to act all smug while showing how easy it is to match "their" work to another submission beyond reasonable doubt, but copying coursework is a serious matter so acting stern was a better way to get the message through.

Don't cheat! You're only cheating yourself if you do!
 
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Well we allowed them to work together so it was okay if they handed in the same code, however they were suppossed to explain what the code did.. some failed miserably. They thought it would be an easy course. In the end the only thing that matters if they've learned to code I guess its more a skill than a testable knowledge (at least at the level Im teaching it)
 
In this country (well, union of countries), if you can't be bothered to cheat, complain that the test is too hard, and they'll lower the passing grade requirements... :(

I looked at the two Scottish Higher Maths tests which they claimed were impossible. I could see why the Crocodile one would be difficult - though more time consuming that complicated - but the toad/frog one was piss easy
 
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If you're gonna cheat, at least put som decent effort into the cheating, mmkay?
I wish it could say it got better. I've been interviewing for a few weeks and as part of the interview they get a very simple take-home assignment, just enough to make sure you actually understand some basic principles, should take about 30 minutes to 2 hours depending on how involved the person wants to make it.Easily half the candidates straight up plagiarize it off the internet, from the exact same website. Sometimes they rename things but the code flow is always the same. This website has a very obvious marker, a half dozen lines which are... not wrong but not exactly right either. I just look for those lines first thing now and if they're there it's dead.

The very first time I caught it was only because the person had copied it and then modified it, mixing tab characters where he'd modified it with spaces from where it was copied, and I only caught it because I guess his editor used 8 character tabs whereas I prefer 4 so nothing lined up. The only reason for there to be mixed tabs and spaces is when working on someone else's code, so a few quick googles and I'd found the culprit. I then checked the other current candidates and went back on the old rejected ones and found that over half of them had effectively copied the solution from the exact same source. No idea how we didn't catch on that so many solutions were looking the same; like, they all had different comments (if any comment at all), and mostly different function names, sometimes in different orders, but all the real code was almost identical. Fortunately no one had been accepted, I think one came for an interview but most of them bombed out in other ways. This was such an easy thing to do we didn't even think of checking for plagiarism. What were they expecting, that they'd answer the question and we'd just give them an offer without following up? Some people...
 
The only reason for there to be mixed tabs and spaces is when working on someone else's code
Can I interject this isn't 100% true. I frequently have a mix in my code projects; mostly because I work across several computers with several editors. I do try and keep all the settings consistant, but sometimes I forget. Then when I start a new project, I copy/paste a load of code, and then there's more.
Maybe that says more about my chaotic way of working though :)

At work, we were looking for a new dev, they had a small coding test, but it was done on-site and observed.
 
The very first time I caught it was only because the person had copied it and then modified it, mixing tab characters where he'd modified it with spaces from where it was copied, and I only caught it because I guess his editor used 8 character tabs whereas I prefer 4 so nothing lined up. The only reason for there to be mixed tabs and spaces is when working on someone else's code, so a few quick googles and I'd found the culprit.
Yeah, be careful of that one - my IDE has an option for "optimal tab" which will insert both tabs and spaces depending on where your caret is. Makes a right mess when you load it up in a different editor or change your tab sizes.

D.
 
Yeah, be careful of that one - my IDE has an option for "optimal tab" which will insert both tabs and spaces depending on where your caret is. Makes a right mess when you load it up in a different editor or change your tab sizes.
Well your IDE is wrong and you're a terrible human being for using it. :p
 
Don't cheat! You're only cheating yourself if you do!
Even in video games?
Well... yes. I mean, winning by cheating under any circumstances is not winning at all. If you just want to play around and not "win" the game, sure cheat all you want. But it's not really an accomplishment. Same way if you want to just mess around with code copypaste all you want. But if you're trying to prove you've learned something cheating can't be any part of it.

You are all evil teachers/bosses/managers/directors!!! Who cares how the problem gets solved as long as it gets solved :D
We don't care that the problem gets solved. There's enough "hello worlds" in the world already. What there isn't is people who demonstratably can solve stuff using the tools they're given. It's about the student, not the exercise.
 
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This website has a very obvious marker, a half dozen lines which are... not wrong but not exactly right either.

Oh, yes. I know this. And when you want to nick your solution from a mate, of course you aren't competent enough to realize that your mates solution, whilst it might just have been accepted, is idiosyncronatic enough that I'll immediately recognize it as "another one of those"...

B-zar said:
We don't care that the problem gets solved. There's enough "hello worlds" in the world already. What there isn't is people who demonstratably can solve stuff using the tools they're given. It's about the student, not the exercise.
Yes! Yes, yes, yes!
 
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You are all evil teachers/bosses/managers/directors!!! Who cares how the problem gets solved as long as it gets solved :D

Good teaching is not about knowledge (all knowledge is just a Google search away), nor is it about shallow skills.

It's like that saying, "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime".

Good teaching is not about collecting fishes -- i.e. solving the problem, but you don't know how you got there.

Good teaching isn't even about teaching how to fish -- i.e. solving the problem, and you know how the solution works, but what if the problem changes? e.g. what do you do when there are no more fish in the sea?

Good teaching is about learning to use your own brain, so you can develop the methodology for solving arbitrary problems yourself -- this is what really makes you future-proof.
 
Heh!  You all see my smiley face at the end.  Anyway, for the sake of this argument, I can live a comfortable life by keeping on borrowing by working minimally and just pay the minimum until I die, or I can also live comfortably by working really hard and pay off my credit card in full every month until I die.  I still die at the end :)   Does it matter if my credit score is high when I die? :)
 
.vimrc:

syntax enable

set tabstop=4

set shiftwidth=4

set smarttab

set expandtab

set softtabstop=4

set autoindent

set listchars=tab:▸\

set list

 

 

no confusion between tabs and spaces, thanks to the listchars.  i do work on some other people's code who use tabs, but at least I can see that, and then do a set noet.
 
I would guess that one factor - besides being crusaders on a mission of course :) - is the repetitiveness of it. As Klumpen alludes to above, more or less this exact thread tends to pop up every 3 months or so, and in the end some of the more temporally advanced board dwellers tend to lose their temper a bit.

Which is a bit unfair to every new person asking the same question, but still. I do get the same urge, sometimes, when I'm grading exams. By the 35th identical error I tend to want to write "I've already told you that is wrong!!! Why do you keep making the same error!!!" It takes great effort to remember that it is actually different students behind every exam :D
The major difference is that the people asking these questions here did not sit in class and get told all of this already.  I am pretty sure the official internet rules say you should look on your own before asking, though.  The problem is "expensive" and "outdated" depend on how you are measuring them.  Sometimes $50 is expensive and sometimes $1000 is cheap; it just depends on how much money you have and what you want.  If you only want a device that is bleeding edge everything is outdated nearly as soon as it is available, yet if you are only trying to do very simple things, or play games on the go for a handheld console that came out 25 years ago the Pyra will blow you away and give you so much more (with far better controls than touchscreen devices if you are used to physical buttons).  The best solution is a FAQ section that discusses why it has the specs it does and why it will still cost what it does despite the lack of a 3GHz octa-core x86-64 processor and 32GB of RAM, then point at that and lock the thread.

If you extend that example into an analogy though,  here the students take the exam one by one, and each student has the opportunity to review all the already marked exams before taking the same exam themselves, yet they still make all the same mistakes...

-Neelix
I didn't study for my exam.   You guys can stop rubbing it in now. :p

As I understand it, there weren't too many computers that were present in large numbers on both sides of the Atlantic between the late 70s and early 90s.  I only personally know of one or two people that had British computers in the US back then (ZX80, I think), and everyone else was using something from an American company.  I think Commodore was one of the exceptions to this, having products that were fairly popular in Europe and North America.  Feel free to correct me and fill in any gaps in my knowledge.
Yeah, the Commodore machines and to a certain extent, Atari machines were successful in Europe (well, Britain at least). We also had the Spectrum, Amstrad machines, and BBC micros (plus various also-rans, from Dragon on down). Makes me wonder sometimes what else the Americans had for 8-bit machines; little old blightey had five major makes, America must've had more than those two and the TRS-80/Co-co (though I guess America was also into consoles in a bigger way than we seemed to be back then).
I thought I had seen people over there mention Atari.  The funny thing is for a while back then I didn't think Atari computers were that popular even though I knew 2 families that owned one, and I knew none that owned Commodore machines.  We had an IBM compatible (not really for young hands to touch, though...actually, that is a lie, there was one at each of my parent's houses and I don't think I was restricted from using the one my father had, but I didn't mess with it as much as I wish I had when younger since I was busy doing other stuff), and most schools and libraries had things from Apple (but in my experience it was a rare treat to use them, and that was often restricted to educational games...if you wanted to learn more you had to find another way to get time with them, which I did but it was still not enough to be of much value).  Over here almost every family with children I knew had some sort of video game console, so I do think that played a part.  I guess our NES was supposed to be fore the kids, and the computer was supposed to be for adults (even if the kids knew better how to use it).  Based on conversations I have had as an adult, some people that were a little older than me seemed more likely to have computers when they were younger.  That would be people who were able to put them to use in the late 70s up to the mid 80s.  It really seems to me that NES and the next generation of consoles took a big chunk of the market.  One of my schools even had a subscription to Nintendo Power, and my friends always tried to be the first ones there when a new issue was released.  People younger than me were also more likely to have a computer in their home after the WWW became popular, and by that point computers were widely used in school and were present in many of my classrooms, with plenty available in libraries, both in schools and not, but we are talking early to mid 90s here.  Since I was already spending all my free time at libraries I just shifted most of my time from books to computers, often helping out the librarians.

 


Some people thought they got away scot-free if their code was accepted by the automatic grading system. 

...

Don't cheat! You're only cheating yourself if you do!
A couple years ago when I started on my education again I had a class where the assignments were automatically graded.  The instructor didn't care about that.  He would go in and look at everything you had done, and even if everything was set up properly and fully functional if you did things that were not on the instructions he would take points away.  He also added points if you did things in a different way than what was being automatically checked and your method worked.  It seemed a lot of people didn't like that he did this or how he taught, and he is one of my favorite instructors.  I don't know if I expressed to him how much I appreciated how he did things before he retired.  The person who took over that department from him seemed to spend a lot more time focusing on question and answer tests rather than the practical stuff, and is much more tolerant of errors (and not as suspicious of cheating, which I know happens).  Grades are higher, and they have a higher retention rate in that program now, but I strongly feel that they don't know as much.  Sneaky people using their smartphones may be able to get around that the practical exams are a huge portion of your grade, but as you said, they are cheating themselves (and their future employers, and those that have actually worked hard to learn and didn't get the job...they don't care, they are getting paid for now, screw those that put in effort.  I also have a problem with those that use brain dumps for certification exams.).

In some more recent classes we had a grading script that didn't work so well sometimes, so other students that didn't understand what was being looked for would get frustrated and spend hours working on assignments and still getting major errors in their grading results even though they had done nearly everything correctly.  I spoke with the instructor and got permission to help them, so I went through all of the assignments and identified errors (there were many, one telling you over and over to create and work with specific files, then in the final step to execute one that had never been mentioned, and which was not needed for grading, and was actually because someone didn't verify what they submitted to the course material, as you were supposed to use what you had been working on the whole time), then found places where I thought people would be confused.  The deliverables were usually listed so I stopped reading scenarios and just took the list of deliverables and my notes and talked to two other students who had a good grasp of what they were doing and they made sure what I was saying was clear, so if someone said "I missed #3 on the chapter 6 lab" we could respond with exactly what was different between what they did and what was being looked for, or with a quick view of the history (or by scrolling up) we could point out syntax errors.  This helped others get caught up and allowed the instructor to focus on more severe issues.  I eventually started helping tutor later classes, and assisting in one with a different instructos where I did the same thing on their lab days.  I used this to show people that they did know what they were doing, since most were intimidated by the CLI, and if they truly didn't know I could direct them to where the answer was.  At first I was concerned the instructors might consider it cheating (which is why I approached the first with what I wanted to do) however when the instructions for assignments coming from a corporation are full of errors it is a waste of everyone's time if it is not addressed, and requires some help from others when everyone is working independently and at their own pace so that even if the instructor says "do this other command for #5 on this assignment in this chapter" since some people will not hear it, or will forget.  It is still funny that one error was over 7 years old, and some Q&A tests had all blank answers or were missing half the question.





You are all evil teachers/bosses/managers/directors!!! Who cares how the problem gets solved as long as it gets solved  :D
Is it better to have somebody that knows what they are doing, can identify why something isn't working, and think through the problem, fixing it themselves quickly, and then move on to the next thing, or a warm body that knows how to search using Google but doesn't understand the basics so they keep searching and never bother reading to understand (search, copy, paste, "nope, not that") and spends 12 hours, which they are getting paid well for while others have to deal with what they are neglecting, working on a problem, and probably causing more problems along the way, when the other person would spend 5 minutes on it?  Unlike others here, I do care that the problem gets solved, quickly, because what I have had to deal with prevents others from being able to do what they need to.  Downtime is expensive, and I don't just mean money.
 
Yeah, be careful of that one - my IDE has an option for "optimal tab" which will insert both tabs and spaces depending on where your caret is. Makes a right mess when you load it up in a different editor or change your tab sizes.
Well your IDE is wrong and you're a terrible human being for using it. :p
But that's not really the point though, is it? The fact that these tools exist means that your assertion is shaky at best :p

D.
 
You are all evil teachers/bosses/managers/directors!!! Who cares how the problem gets solved as long as it gets solved :D

Good teaching is not about knowledge (all knowledge is just a Google search away), nor is it about shallow skills.

It's like that saying, "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime".

Good teaching is not about collecting fishes -- i.e. solving the problem, but you don't know how you got there.

Good teaching isn't even about teaching how to fish -- i.e. solving the problem, and you know how the solution works, but what if the problem changes? e.g. what do you do when there are no more fish in the sea?

Good teaching is about learning to use your own brain, so you can develop the methodology for solving arbitrary problems yourself -- this is what really makes you future-proof.
I wish more people felt this way.  Even in some of my more technical classes memorization (or should I say "search skills", as the tests are online) are weighted more than the hands-on stuff.  It is easy to search for some key words, but it is not so easy to search for symptoms that are difficult to describe.  Comprehension and troubleshooting are far more important, imo, than memorization, and the more you do something the more you remember it.  It is more than just "you said you want this and this, so I should say this".  You have to understand why, and this is why it pisses me off that people who are using their smartphone on an exam worth 25% of a their final grade don't get kicked out of the class, their degree program and the school, or why many people feel that brain dumps are an acceptable way to prepare for cert exams.  I had to have a serious discussion with someone several months ago because I was having some trouble and was considering using brain dumps, but I feel it is wrong.  In my area the main criteria for employment doing what I enjoy is that they can check off the boxes, which includes certs.  Anyway, I don't want to dig too much more into my personal life.

I particularly like the example you gave in the second to last paragraph.  It seems like the problem always changes (of course if you actually fixed it you shouldn't be dealing with it again too soon).

Heh!  You all see my smiley face at the end.  Anyway, for the sake of this argument, I can live a comfortable life by keeping on borrowing by working minimally and just pay the minimum until I die, or I can also live comfortably by working really hard and pay off my credit card in full every month until I die.  I still die at the end :)   Does it matter if my credit score is high when I die? :)
It depends on if would you rather not have financial issues while still alive?  I feel it is better to work hard and have less stress related to finances than to rely on others by borrowing.  Eventually you might not be able to get someone else to help you out, and if you have enough to make it on your own you will still be comfortable.  Die happy at 85, or die from a stress induced heart attack at 50, either way you die. :D

I don't use credit cards and things of that sort, and most likely my credit score is terrible.
 
OK moving on, I mean since the problem has already been solved by someone on the internet, why would I reinvent the wheel and try to do it again?  The teacher shouldn't blame me for using someone else's solution to solve his unoriginal problem. If he wants me to solve the problem on my own, he should give me a problem that no one has solved before.  Well, I should blame the teacher too since he himself copy that problem from someone else and give it to me to solve :p
 
OK moving on, I mean since the problem has already been solved by someone on the internet, why would I reinvent the wheel and try to do it again?  The teacher shouldn't blame me for using someone else's solution to solve his unoriginal problem. If he wants me to solve the problem on my own, he should give me a problem that no one has solved before.  Well, I should blame the teacher too since he himself copy that problem from someone else and give it to me to solve :p
Are you sure you want problems that no one has solved before as homework? Really?

When you learned to read, did you also insist on starting with an alphabet and a language nobody has read before?
 
I seem to remember that the Knuth has a bunch of unsolved problems as exercises in TAoP. Maybe I should start giving those out :D :D :D
 
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