Introductory computing students' conceptions of illegal student-student collaboration

Abstract

Academic integrity and cheating are issues of specific importance in computing courses due to the restricted nature of much of our assigned work. Additionally, use of valued pedagogical and professional practices such as pair programming can muddy the waters when it comes to students' understandings and experiences with collaboration. In this study we report on 112 students at the beginning of a second programming course being asked to describe a scenario of student-to-student collaboration that "crosses the line" in terms of what should be allowed in the course. We find that students describe inappropriate acts involving sharing of code and sharing of information, with the former being more prevalent. Additionally, about half of the scenarios include mitigating circumstances that should not affect the propriety of those acts. Finally, when presented with other students' (often vague) scenarios, students have little consensus on whether those reflect appropriate or inappropriate collaborations.

Student perceptions of cheating in online and traditional classes

“…Other means of improving culture are studied by Broeckelman-Post in [11], in which it is reported that effective engagement with students, as well as more in-depth discussion of cheating behaviors and expectations, can have a significant effect on deterring cheating. An approach to defining cheating that also uses cultural/attitudinal factors is presented by Stepp and Simon in [12]. The authors asked students to define the act of cheating as it related to their own course assignments.…”

Student perceptions of the acceptability of various code-writing practices

“…Similarly, Stepp and Simon found that students frequently cited mitigating circumstances as a reason for unauthorised collaboration [14], and the mitigating circumstances included situations where students had exhausted their own resources to solve the problem.…”

“…Regardless of this distinction, it does appear to be considered the most prevalent form of academic misconduct among computing students [5,14], and a number of projects have focused on this aspect of misconduct. Dennis [5] conducted two surveys, one on collusion in programming and another on plagiarism in essays.…”

“…Like other researchers [8,12], she found that many students did not see a problem with working together on large parts of a program, so long as they then added their own individual contributions. Stepp and Simon [14] asked students to describe scenarios that entailed crossing the boundary of legitimate collaboration, and then found that there was very little student agreement on whether each of those scenarios was in fact misconduct.…”

Victorian Aboriginal life and customs through early European eyes

“…Fraser (2014) points out that, owing to the nature of computer science, the best answers will be highly similar, the compiler being 'a relentlessly unforgiving arbiter of correctness' (Roberts, 2002). And it is not just the answers that are confined; Stepp and Simon (2011) have described the constraints on the types of tasks arising in introductory programming assignments.…”