Stanford finds cheating increasing, especially among CS students

Boy, do I know this story!  The increase in cheating cases at Georgia Tech directly led to our three approaches to CS1.

“My feeling is that the most important factor is the high frustration levels that typically go along with trying to get a program to run,” said computer science professor Eric Roberts, who has studied the problem of academic cheating. He noted that most violations involve homework assignments rather than exams.

“The computer is an unforgiving arbiter of correctness,” he said. “Imagine what would happen if every time you submitted a paper for an English course, it came back with a red circle around the first syntactic error, along with a notation saying: ‘No credit — resubmit.’ After a dozen attempts all meeting the same fate, the temptation to copy a paper you knew would pass might get pretty high. That situation is analogous to what happens in computing courses.”

via Stanford finds cheating — especially among computer science students — on the rise – San Jose Mercury News.

In 1999, Georgia Tech instituted the requirement that all students had to take an introductory computing course, and until 2003, only one course met that requirement.  Just as Eric describes, cheating was rampant in that course.  One semester, we turned in something like 140 cheating cases in the class.  That wasn’t a high for us, but it was the first time that we had a student who told his story to reporters, who got it on the AP wire.  Interesting observation: FERPA laws in this country don’t allow a University to defend itself when a student complains about how the university treated his academic misconduct case — we simply can’t say anything about the case.  The ensuing uproar led to a University committee about the ills of our one-size-fits-all model of computing-for-everyone.  That’s when we created our Computing for Engineers (in MATLAB), and our Media Computation course for liberal arts, architecture, and management majors.

So while I don’t wish rampant cheating on anyone — not the instructors or the students (there are no winners here) — we used the lemons of bad publicity to create the lemonade of a new approach to introducing computing, especially for non-majors.

Beginning to Rethink CS Education at NSF

Cameron Wilson just wrote a Blog@CACM post that helps to clarify how NSF CISE is re-thinking CS Education.  Yes, CPATH and BPC are going away, but they’re being combined into something new that goes across the whole pipeline (like BPC) and goes beyond just computing majors, which is an entirely new space for CISE:

The described intent is to evolve CPATH’s work into something broader. That is the new program would look at the entire pipeline but with special focus in two areas:

1) moving earlier into the pipeline with specific engagements in middle/high school to bring computational thinking/computer science concepts into this space

2) widening the program to be inclusive for all populations, built around a theme that “computing is for everyone”

via Beginning to Rethink CS Education at NSF | blog@CACM | Communications of the ACM.

Cameron also mentions that Cyber-Learning to Transform Education (CTE) is a different program than the combo program that he’s describing.  I heard that CTE was described at last week’s Computational Thinking Workshop at the National Academies.   CTE has strands like “Personalized Instruction” and “Anytime Anywhere Education,” which is the direction of where I’m trying to take my own research. That means that there will be two new education-related programs in CISE, both of which are pretty exciting.

I’m most excited to see the message that “computing is for everyone.”  CPATH and BPC were about creating more computing majors.  The idea that computing is for everyone is the key motivator in our work at Georgia Tech. Our notion of “contextualized computing education” has a goal that every student in every major succeeds at a computing that makes sense to them.  The notion of “contexts” was a driving force in our ”Threads” curriculum, and in how we help teachers across Georgia improve the retention and diversity of their courses in our  “Georgia Computes!“ BPC alliance.

While the devil is still in the details, the signals about where things are going are promising.  We should get more information over the next couple months.

Failure rate for AP tests climbing

That the average AP score would decline while more students take the AP is really not surprising.  It’s a pretty common phenomenon: as more new, initially-underprepared students flood in, the average is drawn down.  We’re seeing this in Georgia with the schools that are just starting AP CS (many at minority-majority high schools).  It’s going to take some time for the teachers to get better, for the school to figure out how to best prepare the students.

What I found more interesting is that Physics scores are rising, while English Literature scores are declining.  Why would that be?

The newspaper’s analysis finds that more than two in five students (41.5%) earned a failing score of 1 or 2, up from 36.5% in 1999. In the South, a Census-defined region that spans from Texas to Delaware, nearly half of all tests — 48.4% — earned a 1 or 2, a failure rate up 7 percentage points from a decade prior and a statistically significant difference from the rest of the country.

College Board officials say it’s misleading to lump all scores together, because some tests have vastly different historical pass rates. Scores on AP Physics tests, for example, are consistently up; those for AP English Literature are dropping.

via Failure rate for AP tests climbing – USATODAY.com.

Minority Male Plight Demands Broad U.S. Action, College Board Says

Speaks to the issue of how important education is as a tool for addressing inequality and of having good teachers:

A College Board report highlighting the “overwhelming barriers” U.S. minority males confront in becoming educated and productive citizens recommends national strategies aimed at erasing “the disparities in educational attainment” and demonstrating “new ways of reaching the increasingly diverse U.S. student population.”

via Minority Male Plight Demands Broad U.S. Action, College Board Says.

Role for Universities: Supporting training in down economic times

Last year’s economic downturn had a significant impact on the technology sector: not only did many long-time software engineers find themselves out of work, but they also found themselves out of the upskilling loop, while those still in employment found that funding for training courses had dried up in many organisations.

Following a successful series of courses teaching the foundations of the Java programming language last year, University College Dublin’s (UCD) School of Computer Science and Informatics is embarking on a second round, and this time the low-cost course is aimed both at job seekers and those finding themselves on short time.

“The idea is to offer training to companies that have no training budgets because of economic woes,” explains Prof John Murphy, a senior lecturer at the school.

via SiliconRepublic.com: Brewing up Java skills for the knowledge economy – R&D.

I find this idea so interesting for several reasons.

• Here’s a University teaching non-degree courses for the direct economic impact on its community.
• Here’s the economy (industry, job-seekers) relying on the shared resource of the University to do things that they can’t do themselves under economic conditions.
• Here’s a University-as-economic-entity offering a loss-leader.  The article goes on to say that several people who took the courses last year are in Masters programs this year.  Offering courses free or at a discount to gain market share is so Internet-age!

What CS teachers know: PCK for CS Ed

I’m teaching educational technology again this semester (along with a senior design class — it’s a two-fer semester).  We always read chapters from How People Learn which is an amazing book for providing a gentle introduction to a wide swath of learning theory.  We just read a section introducing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK):

Shulman (1986, 1987) argues that pedagogical content knowledge is not equivalent to knowledge of a content domain plus a generic set of teaching strategies; instead, teaching strategies differ across disciplines. Expert teachers know the kinds of difficulties that students are likely to face; they know how to tap into students’ existing knowledge in order to make new information meaningful; and they know how to assess their students’ progress.

via How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School.

This section is always a hotbed for discussion among my students.  There are two main strands of discussion that come out of this section.

First, it’s pretty clear that higher education explicitly disbelieves in the existence of PCK.  Instead, we act upon the belief that knowing a lot about your domain (e.g., getting a Ph.D. in a topic, having an on-going research program) makes you qualified to teach in post-secondary education — arguably the most important level of education for addressing social inequality.  It’s an important job, and colleges and universities don’t do much to make sure that the job is done well.  When we get to this part of the chapter, the students launch into tirades (that I try to moderate) about the poor teaching quality that they find in college, and worse, the lack of interest in making it better. That’s not a computing-only issue, of course.

The second theme, which I emphasize more than the students, is the challenge of identifying PCK for computing education.  I’ve spoken to people at several places that are trying to put together degree programs or certification/endorsement programs around computing education.  In all of these efforts, they need “methods courses” — the courses where teachers are taught PCK.  It’s not obvious what the content is for those methods courses.

So, what would you teach a new teacher about teaching PCK for computing education?  Sure, you’d teach that you can use the spring-loaded cafeteria tray/plate holders as a model for a stack — that’s clearly part of our methods, part of the PCK for computing education.  Everybody uses that example.  What else?  I think there is a lot to include in such a class, from pair programming as a learning method, to the work in Commonsense Computing to define baseline understanding, to contextualized computing education as an organizing principle, to tools and IDEs and interactions between them (like Barb’s Alice-integration-with-Java approach).  There is a lot of teaching lore associated with a particular method, such as the procedures and processes of TeachScheme, and Logo teaching methods like “Ask-two-before me” (which is how I learned it in the 1980’s, which I know see as “Ask 3 before me.”)  The challenge is drawing together these disparate pieces into a cohesive whole.

Letter from Harriet Taylor on NSF CPATH

Just sent to all CPATH Project Investigators:

Dear CPATH PIs

By now many of you have seen the announcement on the CISE web site (www.cise.nsf.gov) about the CPATH program. As it says, we are cancelling the competition for this year and developing a new program.

We am sure that this change impacts many of your plans. We hope that you can continue with the projects that you were planning to submit in April and tailor them to suit many of the other NSF programs.

We want to assure you that CPATH remains an important activity to CISE and NSF. We still have almost 70 active projects that will continue on into 2012.  We will continue to have meetings and develop communities as we make inroads into revitalizing undergraduate computing education.

It is more important than ever that we continue our evaluation efforts and document the impact of the projects and CPATH as a whole. SRI will continue to lead the programmatic efforts. They will be contacting you about submitting data to their data monitoring instrument and about site visits to some of your sites.

CPATH is clearly having an impact – there are many concrete indicators of this. We have been given an opportunity to evolve CPATH as it should have and create mechanisms that can sustain and advance computing education in the future. Please bear with us as we work on developing this new initiative. At this time, there are few details that we can share.

Continue your good work. Plan on an attending an exciting and energetic PI meeting in March.  Tell us about your successes and concerns as well as any ideas about what the needs of the community are for the future.  This is a big change – but there will be new and exciting opportunities on the horizon for which you are well prepared through your CPATH successes.

Thanks from all of us at NSF for your efforts.

Harriet Taylor

For the CPATH Team

Harriet Taylor, Sylvia Spengler, Joan Peckham, Tracy Kimbrel, Kera Johnson

Cyberellas?

A group in the UK is promoting a competition to draw more women into IT.  I think that’s great, and is in keeping with the goals of BPC and NCWIT.  Their term for women who do IT could be improved:

“IT is a great place to work but we need more ‘Cyberellas’, women with strong IT skills and qualifications who will be a great asset to the industry as well as being role models to encourage more women to join the profession in the future,” she said.

via Competition seeks to attract more women into IT – V3.co.uk – formerly vnunet.com.

Given that overwork is a negative stereotype of IT, it may not be sending the right message to play off the fairytale character who’s name referenced working among the cinders, Cinderella.

NSF BPC and CPATH end

The NSF CISE (CS-stuff) Division is cancelling the CPATH (CISE Pathways to Reinvigorate Undergraduate Education) and BPC (Broadening Participation in Computing) programs. The April CPATH call for proposals has been cancelled. Right now, the May BPC call is still going forward. We’re told that CISE is creating a new program to fund work in computing education, from middle school level up. All currently funded proposals will be honored. This does raise questions about the efforts started that will require additional funding, like the creation of the new APCS exam, the CS 10K effort (to create 10K high school CS teachers in 10K schools by the time the new AP CS starts in 2015), and the renewals for the BPC Alliances, like Georgia Computes!

What if “CS1″ is just a really bad idea?

At the AP CS Commission meeting this last weekend, we addressed the question, “How would we know if we’ve done our job right?  How would we know if  this is a good class?”  It’s an important question to ask about anything, but I realized from the discussion that it’s a particularly hard question to ask about a class or a class definition.

We talked about the five pilots of this class which are going to take place in Fall 2010. (Yes, the teachers have been picked, and no, I’m not allowed to say yet who they are — they’ll be announced at SIGCSE 2010, I understand.)  These are all excellent teachers.  What could go wrong?  I started listing the problems that could occur.  Sure, those things could go wrong — but what would you attribute a failure to?  What evidence would you need to convince you that the idea of the class is bad, e.g., that the learning objectives are too big and too broad and can’t be covered in a one-College-semester or one-High-School-year course?

In any given offering of the class, outcomes might suggest that something went wrong — a high withdrawal or failure rate, students do not perform well on a post-test, or the loss of more women and minorities than white or Asian males.  Would you say that that was just bad luck? Maybe it was students in the class?  Maybe they were under-prepared, or unmotivated, or had a bad mix of personalities so that they were always annoyed with each other or with the teacher?  Maybe it was a bad teacher?  Maybe the approach to teaching the learning objectives was bad — a lousy book, an inappropriate use of project-based or inquiry-based learning, boring lectures, or bad homework?  Maybe the room was at fault — uncomfortable, poor HVAC, faulty A/V? Maybe the school didn’t support  the class well, or the graders were bad, or there were rumors about the class going around the school creating a set of weird expectations?

But at what point would you decide, “You know, I don’t think that this class works?”  What would convince you?

Now, let’s consider Jens Bennedsen and Michael Caspersen’s paper surveying CS1 failure rates across North American and Europe.  These failure rates range between 30-50% in the US, and even higher (on average) in Europe.  If you have a class that hundreds of schools can’t teach without flunking out half the students, maybe the whole class is a bad idea?  Maybe the set of learning objectives for CS1 are just too big and it’s actually the rare case (a correct combination of teacher, book, approach, room, school, etc.) where the class actually results in learning gains for most if not all students.

I’m not making the argument here that CS1 is a really bad idea.  I am raising the question of “How would you know?”