Flutterby™! : No learning from peers 2002-04-17 16:16:52+00

No learning from peers

2002-04-17 16:16:52+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Also via /. (discussion here), one of the reasons for going to college is to surround yourself with peers interested in learning, to share ideas with them. Nope. At Georgia Tech it's an honor code violation to discuss some classwork with fellow students.

And in the real world, we integrate other peoples code into our works all the time. I understand the point in school, but if the students get together to solve tough problems, and solve them well and can use the solution, then I think this is evident of teamwork and proper collaboration. It'd have to be evaluated on a case by case basis, as it is possible to get carried away. But Dan is right, one of the reasons to want to go to a good school is to learn from those around you as well as the 'teachers'. I'd have loved to go to school with Dan, Eric, Andrew and Rick instead of the sub-human high school and college I did go to.

When I was in college, we used to get assigned to teams to do our CS projects, mostly because we didn't have enough resources for everyone to be able to do their own. The problem was that we'd always end up with someone in the group who was a complete waste of space, and we'd have to carry them through the semester because they'd been assigned to our group, and we got a grade for the group as a whole.

My preferred way to handle the situation would be for everyone to have to turn in their own project. If the prof grades on a curve, there's incentive for other students to help you out only if you're helping them out, too. If your project looks like other people's, fine--you've managed to convince them to help you. If you're just trying to skate through on other people's work, there's no motivation for anyone to help you out.

The only issue would be that you'd have to change the projects from semester to semester to keep people from getting work handed to them by previous takers of that course, but that should be the standard, anyway.

End result: top grades for those with good skills in either technical or social engineering. That works for me.

And complete leaches get shunned soon by everyone. You are right, technically competent enough to get by well with a little social engineering is much more like the real world.