Comment by unionpivo
2 years ago
> Wow this is such an awful excuse.
yes for whomever organized such a curse and didn't give such guidance.
And besides curse asked for project to do something. It did. It printed lines. We can call the email gimmick, the marketeering strategy, making a turd look good.
Don't blame students for failure of whomever designed the curse.
So did they disclose that all the Pi did was printed lines?
The problem with the email isn’t it’s a gimmick etc. it’s that it appears quite clear that the students created the impression that it was the Pi doing it.
Your excuse that it’s difficult for first year college students with no coding experience to do something useful with the Rapberry Pi is disproven by the fact that there exist many extremely useful projects that kids with no coding experience can do, so college students almost certainly should be able to do without needing to resort to gimmicks.
So I don’t understand your complaints about the course. It’s clearly not too hard which is what you’re implying. And if you’re suggesting that the wording for the project wasn’t clear enough then that’s a huge claim to make considering you don’t know what the wording was.
Also, college (at least in the U.S.) was never about playing funny word games with the professor. There’s a level of maturity, reasonableness, and respect that is expected of the students. None of which is indicated in the response here.
> There’s a level of maturity, reasonableness, and respect that is expected of the students.
Given that the general teaching style of colleges isn't unique to the US, and based on my experience throughout my degree at a similar institution, I somehow doubt that statement.
> It’s clearly not too hard which is what you’re implying.
It sounded like the students received literally no guidance, in the way the course is described. These types of assignments usually result in those with previous programming experience showing off their skills, while the actual rookie students are left in the mud. I.e. an assignment that targets the top 20% of the class.
Regardless, to my knowledge I never cheated during my college degree, but I can't hold it against people that do. Criticism such as yours disregards the reality that students face, pressure to graduate with good marks and whatnot. Not cheating will put you at an disadvantage, because your competition is actively doing so and they are already skewing the marks that way. If the intention of the assignment was to identify honest work, it was certainly structured wrong (as a required submission would have eliminated the cheaters).
That's another issue going on: you using your cheating to belittle Google scan which again plays against any ethical ground you might still had