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- So as such, realize that those are points
that are relatively easy to grasp.
And now a word on this.
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DOUG LLOYD: So we're sort of in the middle of week two now.
We've had a couple of lectures and now we're
going to deliberately take a couple of minutes to talk about academic honesty.
What motivates this sort of conversation, this sort of depth
right now?
DAVID MALAN: Yeah.
You know, I mean this is something we, and I think a lot of CS courses
if not courses more generally, experience which
is some degree of academic dishonesty.
In the class, which in our case typically
takes the form of students in the class collaborating unduly,
going beyond the scope of what's allowed by CS50's syllabus.
Or worse, Googling around and finding some online solution or GitHub
repo that has solutions in it and proactively seeking out
answers to problems.
I mean per the syllabus, the course is pretty generous
I think in terms of the allowances, because we
want students to be adopting practices now
that they're going to use in the real world, which is,
looking at Stack Overflow and using Google more generally
to find little tidbits, little ingredients
that they can weave into their own solution.
DOUG LLOYD: Right.
DAVID MALAN: But that's the distinction, their own solutions.
And Googling CS50 Mario pyramid, Enter, and looking for outright solutions,
that's clearly crossing a line.
And so what we're trying to do in this, week two of the class,
is send a message of clarity as to where those lines are.
And remind students to not just skim but to actually read the academic honesty
policy in the syllabus and appreciate where those lines are
and be comfortable with them.
But then honestly, we also share some statistics and some data
and behind the curtains of what we do.
And we use over the years, a number of tools MOSS from Stanford,
Etector from Princeton, which are web-based tools that
allow us to analyze and cross-compare all submissions from this year,
as well as against the past nine years of submissions, which we certainly
archive.
So as to look for statistically unlikely similarities among students work,
at which point we don't just summarily then
discipline students if we see matches, whether outright
or pretty close matches.
Then human eyes come in.
Like you and I and some of the course's senior staff
will iteratively go through it, trying to get to a place of emotional comfort
that, yeah--
DOUG LLOYD: This feels like it's kind of
DAVID MALAN: --a line has been crossed and it's time for us to act.
DOUG LLOYD: Now are tools like MOSS and Etector things
that are available for others to use as well?
DAVID MALAN: Yeah they are.
In both of those cases, they can email the faculty who created the software
and ask for accounts with which to use it.
But I think it's the right thing to do.
Right?
You want to be fair to so many of the other students who are staying well
within those constraints and make clear, I think reputationally,
that the course takes this seriously and that we do look for it
and we do pursue it if there's an issue, so that everyone can feel comfortable
that everyone is being treated the same.
DOUG LLOYD: It's a particularly fine line
to have to toe though, especially in a CS class where collaboration
is encouraged and collaboration is what you're going to see in the real world.
And--
DAVID MALAN: It's hard to have this conversation now
with an eight-foot duck on the stage.
Note to self next year, take the duck off the stage first.
DOUG LLOYD: But I think it's a really important one to have.
And I think it's good to normalize students' expectations
and then this of course, this regret clause,
was something we introduced a couple of years ago.
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, and this was pretty contentious early on,
because we're the only course that does something like this or at least
certainly quite so visibly.
But this was deliberate.
I mean, we have years worth of data and we
know that for many of the cases of academic dishonesty that come forward,
it really is late night poor decisions.
Students are super stressed.
Pset, whether ours or someone else's, is due the next day.
They're under a time crunch.
They've got lots going on.
There might be issues of physical health, mental health,
or personal issues or whatever the case may be.
And they make a bad decision.
And up until just a couple of years ago when
we rolled out this regret clause, which is really
just one extra sentence in the course's syllabus,
that encourages students within 72 hours to come forward
to me, or the course's heads, and just own up to a poor decision.
And tell us what they did.
And how it came to pass.
At which point, we commit to handling the case internally.
So I'll handle it with the student directly.
We will take some punitive action, typically zeroing the problem
or the problem set in question.
But then we literally and quite verbally make
clear that we'll consider the matter now behind us,
assuming this is the first such instance there of.
And we don't escalate it to the university itself
where it would be handled typically much more harshly and much more distantly
from the class.
And this has been huge, because I think for our case, and I think in general,
you wake up after having gone to sleep at 4 AM, 5 AM.
And you realize, oh my god, what did I do?
And you've never before in CS50 had an outlet with which to solve that.
I mean, I think it's too much to ask and unlikely to expect a student to,
on their own, knowing how severe the outcomes could be to just proactively
own up to it, unless you create a relatively safe space
in which they can come forward, that doesn't excuse the behavior.
It still handles it and handles it pretty firmly internally.
But doesn't mean the end of their academic year in the class itself.
And I think it's actually really a teachable moment.
And indeed, we've done-- this is the third year in which we've
had the so-called regret clause.
And the first two years, we had some 20 or so students come forward
and had 20 heart to heart conversations with me and in a few cases,
it led to a revelation of some personal issues that were then,
with the student's blessing, involved their resident advisors and so forth.
So they got the right help.
And so it was kind of a nice--
DOUG LLOYD: It's a nice side effect of doing something
like this to being able to surface these kinds of issues
and help students in other ways than just being an educator.
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, and I think by far the healthier and more appropriate
outcome than three months later, some verdict being handed down,
that certainly I think is sensitive to some of those issues
but it's far too distant, I think, from the act in question.
So I think the fact that we've given students a window.
And it's somewhat arbitrary, but 72 hours feels like enough time for them
to catch up on some sleep, to do some reflection,
without being rushed into it, but still to own up
within a reasonable amount of time for us to come forward and deal with it.
So overall, hands down, I wish every course everywhere
had something like this.