It's for CS majors and is mostly done online. Students can go to this domain and solve these "challenges" to get points, think of them as "mini" assignments on Canvas.
It is fairly new yeah, I took it last year and it was great. I don't know what would be an equivalent 300 class during your time, but we learn some basic cybersecurity stuff with an assembly chapter.
Yeah required cybersec class. The class has been fairly unstandardized up until the past year or two. If you’ve heard of pwn.college which started I want to say 2018ish, they’ve expanded and pushed the lower modules to be this class
The pwn.college site was only started in like 2018 or so. I was in one of the first classes to actually use it. It's made for cybersecurity focused classes.
I’m in this class, it seems there were pdfs going around in different discords with the answers. There even seem to be cases where people had the exact same comments and spelling errors.
Well that’s just dumb. When I had to do coding with people, I’d still format it differently or use different variables and that’s when all we did was work together
I graded for some CS classes and there was one assignment In particular where a LOT of submissions had the same weirdly spaced period after the answer. Turns out a bunch of people were just copying from a PDF and that period was getting pulled in with it.
They are not smart. Lol.
In the real world, engineers are adapting pre-existing working code into every aspect of their careers… but for real, how dumb are you if you have to copy and paste with comments, without even reading it. At least make it look like it’s your own.
Idk why ppl are downvoting you, but this will not work because a few smiley emojis won’t throw off plagiarism software. These systems work by seeing if your code is semantically similar to a database of other pieces of code. Even if you change the names of the variables, it still won’t work. The best way to pass a check is doing the work yourself 😃😀😁
Ah ok thanks for explaining. Another question, in one given language, how many ways are there to get a certain desired result? Are the possibilities basically infinite, even at maximum efficiency?
Spacing, typing, variable names, indentation, function names, general organization of the code.
There's so many different things that it's very obvious when code is derived from the same source.
Also there are code checkers that will detect a simple rename of all variables.
There’s a concept in CS theory where there are several ways to solve a problem like how 2+1 is the same as 1+2 to get 3. However, there is an uncountable number of problems that even our computers can’t solve. But going back to the point, yes there are quite a lot of ways to solve our typical CS problems. It’s just a matter of which solution should you take in order not to get flagged by the checker
What's stupid about this is a lot of design patterns and algorithms exist to solve these common problems. Most academic exercises are for the very same common problems.
The only people this helps are the bad programmers who are going to write bad code, but at least that code is unique so it won't get flagged.
If you've done what you're supposed to, your code is going to look similar to what already exists.
I don't like cheating, but at the same time some of these "detection" methods end up false flagging well written assignments, defeating the point of learning how to be an engineer in the first place.
Maybe it's a stupid question because I'd guess the programs they run can detect code anywhere, whether it's between other random code added on or not. But I haven't coded since I was 11 or 12 so im just curious. And my brain is fried rn from strep too so that doesn't help.
No because plagiarism softwares, usually MOSS, are tokenizers. If you add a smiley face as a comment it ignores it as a comment. It also ignores the variable name, it just registers the fact that it’s a variable and its type. Think about it like that
I know a TA in the CS department, and the way he describes it, cheating is an absolute shitshow over there. It's gotten so bad that he's had to report other TAs that are sending code to their friends. Sounds like this is only the tip of the iceberg.
It’s always been that way. I’ve been out for over 10 years, and it was typical for half of the students in any given CSE class to cheat. Often times blatantly, like copying off of each other during exams.
Funny enough, a lot of those people ended up not getting jobs. So the way I see it is the problem takes care of itself eventually.
The issue with this class is that at least when I took it the professors didn't teach anything related to the modules so there was nearly no instruction that would help actually do the homework. Luckily when I took it the TAs were really helpful in office hours and also did a lot of the problems that we had on the modules in the recorded office hours and thats how I struggled through the class.
True the baseline for class is not something a lot of student know. But honestly you just need to know a few commands before you can keep up with the twitch classes. And I'm pretty sure those are covered in the first module.
I’ve taken him twice, his videos maybe cover 15% of what’s needed to know to complete his assignments. I was taught by my peers and myself not by this dipshit
Honestly that's the point of this class. This class teaches you just the basic bash commands and switches to mostly theory. After that you are supposed to read manual pages and use any online or offline resources (not answers) to try finding an answer.
I am begging you to understand that this is something that the class itself needs to teach. I had to directly ask the professor what he meant by “man page” because in his discord and lecture material a would be referenced and not explained(when I took it during COVID this may have changed but I think it speaks to his ability to put himself in the students’ shoes) Most people in this class don’t know that Linux has a manual.
You can’t take an adversarial approach ESPECIALLY not be dropping that this happened THE WEEK OF FINALS ON A REQUIRED COURSE. I understand that cheating is bad and did not tolerate it at all when I used to teach, I would give automatic zeroes on assignments that I noticed this in, but this approach is adversarial at best and cruel at worst. When I gave students zeroes I talked to them to understand why they cheated, tried to see what aspects of the material they were struggling with, and even if it was “teacher I was lazy as fuck and didn’t do it” I set up soft deadlines for them to try and meet. How did I accomplish this? I googled “techniques to stop my students from cheating and succeed in my class. Man paged it as every insufferable student and TA loves to spam in the class discord
It would be extremely easy to say, hey guys I understand you grew up during the pandemic where this was the norm, I understand that with AI it’s a tool you need to understand isn’t the end all be all, and I understand this class is easy to cheat in. This also isn’t the first time this has happened in this class.
Once the however many students were flagged he should’ve corrected the students and told them they would be watched. If he really cares about learning as he says, this is not the right way to go about this. A college should be a place to learn and still be able to make mistakes and recover. Jeopardizing a major, potentially scholarships, is extremely fucked up.
Have some sympathy, and if you don’t that’s fine just never apply for a teaching position
I'm trying to say that your approach to understanding this class with the help of your friends was not a bad approach. It was the intended approach. You asking the professor or even the discord about what a man page is is also the intended approach. This course won't spoon feed you direct answers but will require you to investigate and ask questions.
A lot of my friends in freshman and sophomore year don't use discord and aren't very familiar with it. I often tell them to please use discord so that they are comfortable talking and asking questions in the channel. Again this sort of communication is something that should be taught in 101 classes but it isn't really.
I wish you had a better experience with pwn college though.
Courses should not require you to use material outside of the class. That’s what a course is for an exemplar explanation through an enclosed system that has the information and the answers contained within. There should not be a need for a discord or links found outside of the course material list.
My point is doupe does not understand that a student might need help navigating a man page, might need help understanding what flags on a Linux argument are, might need help on how to set up a VM to run this in if that’s the approach they want to take. And to be frank, as an older person in these courses, the TA and student behavior even from the professor when it comes to sarcasm and shoulder shrugging of “I don’t know what do YOU think the answer is” is appalling for the amount of money and effort and time I paid to be at ASU.
The course is not laid out efficiently and honestly I’m glad that he made the is open letter because the amount of attention this gets maybe the CS department will finally actually review this course and its materials
This is more of a question to fufill my curiousity, but do you expect jobs + resourses to just be provided to you in the future outside of university?
As for 'I don't know what do YOU think the answer is', I can say that I have said this myself because I wanted to use it as a reflecting point to try to help building up the understanding to get to a point. It usually was because I noticed something doesn't add up in the understanding, and I wanted to see where the issue could be.
The course does, however, feed into my tendencies of seeing 'one more thing, I can do it' with how much it builds onto it, so it may not be for you. It is, imo, the best CSE course I have taken.
Highly agree, this is not a class to be spoon-fed.
Hell, when I took it a few years back(along with the 466 variety which is substantially harder than 365), they told you that you needed a solid understanding of bash+python(I mean 466 even told you to drop the class if you didn't have that as a prereq and come back when you did).
Blame ASU and blame yourself for not learning the required material, don't blame pwn.college. As you say, the real world isn't all-encompassing and doesn't spoon-feed you, especially the cyber security world.
If you're interested try 469. Not related to pwn college or anything but one of the best hands on classes and you learn a lot! It's Forensics! For me that's my fav asu class of all time!
"Many students had the foresight to delete their solution code after the fact. This was the case for 80% of the identified files. Unfortunately, however, for those students, we have recovered those deleted files."
The internet is forever.
CS is dying. Half of the people in CS are only in it for the money. Tried to collaborate with some group members using a GitHub repo for CSE 330 group projects and no one used it because “GitHub is too confusing.” Even had a group member in CSE 445 not know what an absolute path address is.
That being said, CSE365 was one of my least favorite classes. You can’t really get genuine help, people in the Discord are past students telling you to just “read the documentation”. I think that problem comes from people with the different colors of belts, they stick around in the server and torment current students. The whole belt system gives these geeky “hackers” an overinflated ego, makes current students feel bad for struggling.
Sad thing is pwn.college was Doupe’s PhD project to try and teach cybersecurity better. Hope he is doing alright with how this is all going.
Pwn.college is a great way for people to learn who are actually interested in cybersecurity. Unfortunately, you can’t put that expectation on 500 college juniors. I feel like he def expected some degree of academic dishonesty.
And I agree that ASU persay doesn't teach collaboration on GitHub which I think is pretty important. But there are GitHub workshops on campus and 1-2 hours of video. Spend 3-4 hours in your first year learning GitHub/git and 1 hours learning why IDEs aren't important. And you're set for the 4 years here.
Nah trust me when I took that class, a LOT of my friends had no idea what Linux even was let alone bash. Even till date a bunch of my "friends" can't execute their code without a Run button. 😭😭😭😭
I also took it, there were definitely hard challenges, but not enough to cheat over it lol. The TAs were the GOATs in that class tbh, I went into an office hour and the dude just guided me to get to the correct answer.
>than knowing if you know how to program
I almost feel bad for you. You went through the entire course and never figured out that it has basically nothing to do with programming. Not everything in compsci is centered writing code (I bet you also complained about the digital design and computer architecture classes). If all you want to do is write code then maybe you'd be better off doing a coding bootcamp than a 4-year degree. Of course cybersecurity will still be relevant even in basic coding jobs, it's just that someone who took the time to learn those things will have to come in behind you to clean up your mess.
Sounds like someone didn't do so well and is projecting...blame ASU(although you should also blame yourself) for not teaching you well enough to go through the pwn.college series. The class is so good, it's well regarded in the hacking community OUTSIDE OF ASU(It's a FOSS class after all).
If anything, the pwn.college classes are the few worth taking at ASU and the few that actually teach you anything, everyone in the SEFCOM group is highly regarded as being some of the best. ASU ranks top 3 in cybersecurity along with UCSB and CMU, not to mention the ASU/UCSB group (Order of the Overflow) ran DEFCON(CTF) for 4 years, they definitely are teaching you the good stuff you'll need to be successful in a (mostly offensive) cyber security career.
Yeah because no fucking class at asu ever even gives you the resources to learn what any of that is. Snarky cs students will say that you’re supposed to know it already or know how to google but the cs department severely lacks the resources in the classes themselves for students to succeed. I can count on one hand the amount of times an IDE debugger or a debugging tutorial was even mentioned let alone discussed in depth. And when it was discussed in depth it was for the continuation of cyber security that basically required you to understand assembly code and registers intimately after a single semester of learning them.
Oh my god it’s the pwncollege dipshit. You know how I passed that class? Having the TAs teach me and me reading up on the class material completely outside of class. That man has zero fucking idea how to teach
Honestly I agree. There should be a 101 class or a HW 0 type of thing to get them used to this. And starting a CS Student's journey with Java which more often than not requires a specific IDE is a questionable decision.
C + VScode wins
Yeah it was ranked 36 when I went there, looks like it’s slid a little but still a top 50 so not awful.
It suffered from a lot of tenure in MAE (in my opinion) if you didn’t get the “good professors” you got the ones that didn’t care or enjoyed failing students I only had one of those but man he was an ass.
Not sure how rankings work, maybe it’s based on curriculum, but I can attest about a decade ago the professor pool was the epitome of “good not great”
Couple interstellar teachers though, my thermofluids/thermodynamics teacher literally did a cartwheel out of excitement when explaining the laws of thermodynamics
Maybe it’s dependent on the engineering program but when I did chemE the program was bad. The counselors normalized it would take 6 yrs or so, and that the failure rate for specific professors were high. I found out in my final year how badly people were cheating. The teachers and TAs were definitely not teaching to the standard they were making their tests, labs, and assignments like. Heard some students who were also struggling in other engineering programs for the terrible teaching.
I wouldn't say really hard. As long as you're half paying attention you can breeze through most classes. There isn't any reason to cheat, though. I graduated Summa Cum Laude from ASU with an undergrad in CS. I am now a level IV engineer.
What I will say is on the whole the material is not taught well at ASU, or in some cases not even taught at all. For example SOLID is pretty fundamental to programming/software engineering. ASU doesn't teach it. Even the S, Single Responsibility, the most important one isn't emphasized.
From what I can remember from CSE365 is simple subjects like RBAC were overly complicated to the point of obscurity and almost all assignments aside from 'hacking a website' had no practical real world applications. Stuff that should have been mentioned like Oauth, JSON Web Tokens/Bearer Tokens, OIDC, SAML, all of the authentication schemes that are in actual use aren't even mentioned. It's good you get some exposure to things like XSS attacks, SQL injection, etc cetera, but these things are solved for you in the real world. Web Frameworks like Blazor, ASP.NET, Angular, and so on sanitize input for you.
I liked Adam Doupe, but CS as a whole at ASU is just... not good. It needs serious attention.
However, if there's one thing to take away from Intro to Information Assurance... NEVER implement your own security or cryptography. I repeat, NEVER implement your own security or cryptography.
Simply put, most of what's taught at ASU simply isn't useful and the important stuff is absent.
But as someone who was accused of cheating a few times when I never actually did, I find a lot of these detection methods horribly suspect. Some are clear cut, like including the same comments with the same spelling mistakes, but others are just mere coincidence. In the real world, having identical code is actually preferable. Conventions exist TO be followed. It makes pull requests easier to read, results in cleaner, better to understand code. The better you get, the more you find your code isn't really that unique, nor should it be.
First, learn what SOLID is. You will be interviewed on this ad nauseum. Not a single employer has failed to quiz me on SOLID during a technical interview.
* Single Responsibility
* Open/Closed
* Liskov Substitution
* Interface Segregation
* Dependency Inversion
These 5 principles will drive any design you do. They are absolutely fundamental to know. It's infuriating ASU doesn't teach and reinforce it.
Second, if you're not comfortable with Git/SVN or any other source control, learn it. This will be the bread and butter of everything you do. EVERYONE will be using version control. ASU does somewhat well here.
Third, learn as many design patterns as you can. You will get exposure to some like Publisher/Subscriber and MVC at ASU, but there's other super common ones like Factory, Singleton, State, Observer, Decorator, and so on. Learn as many as you can.
Also, it may seem pointless now, but pay attention to SCRUM/AGILE. You will likely be in a SCRUM meeting every day for the rest of your career.
Beyond that, it really depends on what you're going to do. Know Java, C++, C#, and Python like the back of your hand. These will be used everywhere. Not all at once, but they're going to make up most of the market.
If you don't take databases as your elective, learn relational databases and SQL anyway. Even things like Cosmos will still be accessed via SQL commands. Guaranteed no matter what you do you're going to have to deal with a database of some kind.
Get comfortable with JSON, it's going to be the most common type of payload in like 99% of the APIs you'll touch. I don't remember ASU ever teaching JSON or XML. On a positive note, these are brain dead easy to learn.
Understand what makes a good REST API. I guarantee you'll be using an API of some sort. Even game design will make API calls to servers.
Just expose yourself to as much as you can.
ASU just leaves a lot of gaps. Commit to being a life long learner and realize that most of what you did at ASU you're never going to do again. Remember that you're not going to know anything when you graduate and you will learn on the job. You will have access to references, you will spend most of your time Googling answers, and you will find most of your answers on Stack Overflow.
99% of being a good engineer is just learning how to use Google.
But above all else, if you cheat your way through ASU, even though most of these assignments are useless in the real world, you are setting yourself up for failure. Put in the work now, so you can just get all of your answers on Stack Overflow later and learn to spot problems and code smells.
Computer Science should also teach these things. These concepts are also core to Computer Science. While yes, CS is more generalized and theoretical, everyone who does any sort of programming needs to know these things. CS majors still wear the programmer hat.
For all intents and purposes, CS should have these core concepts as well. That's a failing on ASU as these concepts ARE taught in the Maricopa College Curriculum for CS majors.
CS != SWE, this is a fact. Hell it's not even programming. CS programs began as applied math programs. They are not intended to teach an industry tech stack or engineering methodology. People don't study physics and then complain, "oh they didn't teach me how to fix my car, that's a lack in the curriculum."
That is a massive false equivalency with physics and being a mechanic. The two are unrelated disciplines. Computer Science and Software Engineering are interdisciplinary.
Computer Science is an applied science.
CSE 360 is a required class. As is CSE 110, CSE 310, CSE 240, all concerned with being a programmer.
CS students must PROGRAM their assignments.
CS majors must complete a capstone to demonstrate proficiency as a Software Engineer.
For all intents and purposes, as a CS major you ARE a Software Engineer, one who also must apply theory in practice. It is an interdisciplinary study, which is why CS majors ALSO must take several EEE courses.
I'm not saying a CS major needs to study every aspect of being a Software Engineer, but core Software Engineering concepts like SOLID, Design Patterns, etc need to be taught in the curriculum. These things are included in the curriculum at the Maricopa Colleges which is how I was exposed to them, but I never heard anything about them once I transferred to ASU.
>It's good you get some exposure to things like XSS attacks, SQL injection, etc cetera, but these things are solved for you in the real world. Web Frameworks like Blazor, ASP.NET, Angular, and so on sanitize input for you.
And yet I've still had to spend _so much time_ arguing with colleagues that they should actually use query parameterization.
ykw i learned more from this comment than i did in 365, so that's something at least to say abt the 365 rn in todays day. It's an insanely interesting subject but the way they are teaching now is completely cheating students from learning and not really doing much for anyone. I don't think people realize how automated and hands-off the asu cs degree has become in just 2 years, majority of the lower level is becoming completely "online" even though its for in person asu and an in person class, sure it might be easy but it really doesn't prepare you for much especially higher level classes (which might also slowly get automated i mean look at 365) Teachers are also somewhat out of touch with reality of the cs students that are joining the degree. I did fine in 365 but all im saying is nothing I learned in it really stuck, fr emptied it all out the very next day. All in all: asu's cs degree is just sad in it's current state.
i see. I've worked a lot of places that use the roman numeral system where at one place at the time i wouldve been an engineer III and another it was engineer VI lol
I get you, it's not really standardized. The organization I work for stops at level IV for their titles. If I'm being honest my title doesn't even match what I do. I hold the title of Dev Ops, but I do full stack development, Dev Ops / Sec Ops work, architectural work, as well as lately act like a Site Reliability Engineer.
Yeah i get it, i do a little bit of everything and have for a few years now just had weird titles like Senior Platform Security Engineer while doing everything under the sun
it's a useful tool, but i won't say its the best thing lmfao it's like saying zybooks is the best thing to grace the cs department. i don't think pwn should be used as a full on class period
Hmmm let me rephrase
Pwn college is one of the best thing ASU has done for people serious about CybSec
It has great challenges for CybSec enthusiasts and those interested can learn from it. Plus almost anyone can access the challenges, classes and YouTube videos.
It is a useful tool but has its shortcomings in the teaching area mainly bcuz basics aren't being taught.
I do agree with it being a good resource for CyberSec, it's better than nothing, and yes the basics aren't being covered at all leaving ppl stranded in the intro. Side note: if you are interested in Cyber and want things like pwn there are incredible side resources out there such as THM, HTB....I guess I'll add pwn to the list too.
My only peeve with pwn is how it's being implemented at ASU and also its lack of being intro friendly which is what CSE365 is. The CS department at ASU is being absolutely crazy with self learninifying their courses, it's like milking their students more than before and packing them all together like sardines and overall lowering the quality of the degree that is being given. It feels more like a "here play with this you'll figure it out, while we go do our other important researches at ASU" That's my only hate for 365 , the way this class is formatted doesn't help people to actually enjoy the subject matter either which is what you also said. Also for this class, I thought they took down the videos that help solve the challenges? Also when I say "it's not the best thing" I mean it's not enough nor the best thing to completely replace a class with which is what the professors are trying to do with pwn. And to add on, professors are kinda outta touch with who is taking this class and only basically receive feedback from people that already are super good at cyber or have been entirely involved in it for a while it's something i've noticed. I think the feed back from those students is semi flawed, they don't represent the avg cs student, who is unaware of these topics. Overall pwn good resource, current pwn for teaching 365 entirely bad.
Don't want to defend cheaters, but tbh this class is structured in a way you have to cheat if you are not proficient in a topic before you start taking the class. It is too demanding for where it's placed on a major map. Lectures are of little to no help, the discord server is far from being friendly, so it's obvious people started spreading completed solutions.
Idk about you but Discord was fun for me. Helping and receiving help was actually a good learning process for me. However you're right it has a huge curve for people that have no idea what bash commands are.
If only it was Linux commands. The course requires some knowledge of computer networks, databases, some level of discrete math (which most of cs students are not good with), javascript basics, a bit about html, and a good understanding of assembly (which is taught by Indela). It is kind of strange that one is expected to be proficient in arp/ip layers functionality when they still didn't take 434.
In the video lectures they explain those topics. They don't spoonfeed us the commands but that's mostly it. And they have enough resources that you wouldn't need to cheat.
You really think it's reasonable to make people write js scripts for xss right after 3 short videos on the topic?
Let's be honest, cybersecurity as a field requires knowledge and experience far beyond what people have when they take the course.
Again the lectures are meant to be more on the informative side. Talk to TAs, Discord, YouTube, GPT, Manual Pages. It's definitely not easy but completely doable.
You talk about knowledge but completely forget about the experience. I'm not saying it's not doable, I'm saying people should have a basic introduction to the tools they are using before getting committed to their exploitation. At the very least they should be somewhat comfortable with the code they are writing.
Iirc there's a whole module on assembly practice. It wouldn't hurt if they continued a practice and added some tasks on SQL/js/theory of cryptography/network communication BEFORE asking you to implement arp poisoning/database leaking/other stuff the professor came up with.
Oh yeah there should be demo classes if that's what you mean. Where the professor solves "similar" challenges.
In 545 we have that and it's honestly a life saver
If this is pwn.college they would give you half the modules themselves when I took it. If they haven’t changed their challenges I wouldn’t be surprised every answer is online.
Idk it seems like they’re doing the same twitch stuff as they did with me. They deleted all old office hours during my year because students weren’t showing up. It seems like you have twitch vods for every class all year though still. Also deleted it because of academic integrity issues
ASU is one of the cheapest colleges out there unfortunately. It's telling that even then it's considered unaffordable. We're in a crisis of education from multiple POVs right now.
College is a time where college kids are approaching closer to adult hood. There are tons of lessons to be learned in college that can impact their development.
If one of those students just gets a 0 on a module, its probably not the end of the world nor the end of their scholarships.
Plagiarizing is a big deal in college and a college can kick someone out for such an action. I hate those who cheat since I was a CC transfer into the CS program and barely made the requirements to transfer in. My heart broke when I learned how much cheating happens at ASU, I was in an undergrad/grad CS class and I learned of so many graduate students cheating in the same assignments as me. I barely got in and yet there are spots taken by people who are cheating.
If someone is gonna cheat, I do think they should be kicked out and let someone in who actually deserves a spot in the class. But mistakes can happen and just getting a 0 is just a lesson.
so an issue is the professor didn’t catch them all after the first module for cheating, they waited until the end of the course so they failed the course. The letter they wrote comes off self aggrandizing. Some of these kids might harm themselves. If it was about learning a lesson they should have been informed after their first offense so they could change.
It is a huge class and the instructors may had not been aware of cheating til now. There are hundreds of students and the instructors will also have other duties other then teaching this one class.
i’m sorry but the tuition dollars in such a large class dictate the faculty should make it a top priority.
Also faculty should be checking online just like their students can if solutions are online as pdfs. if your students can find it so can you. This is on the faculty for being lazy about catching this sooner and letting it get to this point.
I’ll also add i was once a physics ta at asu and I caught one of my students cheating. Instead of reporting him I pointed out why he was wrong and he learned and is now a doctor. He didn’t have his life ruined and grew and could become a positive force for society.
Thats a good point. Its just a lesson and now the student is now a doctor and you really helped them learn and grow. I just find it frustrating that I almost wasn't able to do the major I wanted for past reasons.
making things harder for others because it was hard for you is not how we make a better society. Cheating should be discouraged but in a way which promotes growth and minimizes incentives to cheat. In medicine for example there is a principle that name shame and punish doesn’t work to prevent future medical mistakes after lots of research in the space. This should be considered by the faculty and AIP. This gross cheating at this scale is demonstrative of the fact the faculty dropped the bar either in instruction or in course design or in quickly calling out the cheating before it became widespread.
I don't agree with that. The cybersecurity professors at ASU are really really good. They are really engaged. I took a look at the modules for pwn.college and they don't look rather difficult. I do not have any actual experience in cybersecurity.
Again like I said, the faculty may not had been aware of cheating until now. This class has hundreds of students along with thousands of submissions of assignments.
Actions have consequences and everyone is aware that cheating can get you kicked out of school. If a student gets a 0 in a module, that's fine. I spoke to one of the professors, Doupe when I was failing the class. He told me, getting a F is not the end of the world. He was right. I retook CSE 365 and got an A in it.
Maybe not end of the world for cs, but for scholarships some kids rely on to even attend and keep learning it is. Maybe if asu was affordable I would agree.
Better reason not to cheat tbh if you only got one shot financially(and 2 AI wise).
Considering the rampant cheating that profs did nothing about throughout all of ASU CS(even when reported directly - which you bet it was when most classes are graded on a curve), this is a well deserved lesson and I'm glad a professor stood up.
Not to say I disagree with college being way overpriced these days, that's 100% true, but cheating is still very very bad and deserves punishment. No one wants unethical, cheating graduates in the workplace, either fix the behavior or get rid of them completely.
the professor should have offered a remediation pathway for the students caught cheating, taken some ownership for allowing it to happen so long and so systemically, and not allowed it to get to this point to begin with.
This doesn't apply here.
1) if you fail a class you can retake it. It's not a core class so you won't get off tracked immediately after failing once.
2) failing classes won't take away your scholarship. Getting AI violation will most certainly will. If they want to save money, it's best for them to approach the class.
3) Cheating is easier. If you have a PDF with the answers it's incredibly hard to control yourself.
I think a key point to reiterate is if there are PDFs of the answers found on google faculty should be checking every semester for them since they have the solution. These are cs faculty for pete sake, how haven’t they written a code to automatically look for their solutions online.
This PDF (might be online) is mostly being spread by a network of student groups and friends. Passed and modified from previous semesters. These challenges cannot be found online. The PDF might be on shit like Coursera or something tho but it's mostly being handed person to person.
For the record I also don’t think students should cheat but I think the goal as an educator (I being a former asu physics ta and future faculty in another field entirely) should be to call out the student and help them grow from it. I think having a single Academic integrity complaint filed for the entire course for every student was right, filing the same complaint for each infraction in the course when the instructor could and should have remedied it mid way through the semester and not all at the end is on the instructor.
Yes same. I'm a TA for a senior level class too. I won't put in an AI violation on a student that plagiarized a single section of a report.
However it's different in this class. They have multiple challenges. Each challenge records the time taken to complete it. Students that are cheating will copy paste the code from the PDF, run it and complete the challenge in under 1 minute where as it would take the professor himself around 10-20 minutes to figure out.
I agree that it should have been released sooner tho but I'm assuming that since the scale was this big and acc to document they have a good foundation and proofs, I assume it took them this long bcuz they were scraping all the proofs for all the students.
Also it's not like other classes where they can switch up assignments in 2-3 days. But even then I think an announcement should have been made. Something like "Hey we have noticed a PDF going around and a bunch of Academic Integrity Violations. We are investigating that"
But then again, someone who cheated in a challenge before was bound to cheat on the challenge after so idk if that would have made a difference. Still sucks what happened to them
Teachers using the exact same assignments and questions for a decade being flabbergasted when people cheat. Like what did you expect to happen? And I'm happy they're busted but have some initiative as an instructor.
it’s on faculty in my mind to keep assignments fresh otherwise those who cheat have a leg up over those who do it right until the once in a blue moon sweep to catch cheaters happens. Too little too late by the faculty.
Maybe a hot take: but honestly If any student (epsially on that caliber) are driven to cheat maybe you should look at what your giving in the class. Every class I've had to urge to cheat on has been the worst of the worst. And I never did actually cheat because of the academic consequences at ASU, I just don't think that anything would be worth it to lose my entire collage. So the fact that SO many students felt like they needed to but also to risk there entire university shows how AWFUL this class might be. Because there are some students who are just lazy AF and don't wanna study. Or computer science is dying lol
Honestly so true, like computer science is so saturated by people who just want a good pay check and not actually a love for computers. Thats why I choose data analytics, it screatches my coding brain, but also if one day I hate it, I still have a bussiness degree technically
Thats fair lol, I will admit some of the worst classes with me studying the professors TERRRRIBLLLEEEE!! But im a WP cary student thats technically stem.
If a person that makes 6 figures a year finds a 100$ on the street, that person is keeping that 100$. It's not because he is poor but because that's easy money.
I took a class last semester where I, and one other student, were the only students who weren’t Indian internationals in a class.
About two weeks into the semester, I walked into the classroom to see a bunch of the students crowded around a laptop, then disperse upon my entry - like they were up to something. I could clearly see a Canvas quiz opened then minimized. Minding my business, I went to my table. The other student who wasn’t international was coming in behind me, saw, and later told me they had a massive group chat where they cheated off each other and shared answers. I was repulsed by the broad-brushing comment and asked “How do you even know that?”. He just told me a friend of his knew of it, and I was like, “That’s crazy.”, just to end the conversation.
Lo and behold, one month later my instructor read the class the riot act over the rampant cheating he was witnessing from the homework being turned in.
*(This isn’t to say that all international students participate in this conduct, but more-so to share an experience that aligns with what may be a pattern the roots of which should be explored so we can figure out why this is happening and how we can fix it.)*
I'm going to have to directly say otherwise. There was no race information tied to this, but from what I have seen of the student body in this particular course, it's majority white people. Yes there are indian internationals, but this blanket statement is misleading at best.
Is this a bad thing? Or a sign asu wants better education and is cracking down? Id argue its a net positive. Im sure cheating is nearly even across education
I have not taken CSE 365 before, but I really thought the pwn.college{xx} should be the same for each challenge...
And more, not really understand why so many conspire with each other, despite the fact that they offer you many help, not to mention that knowing how to ask for help (instead of copy-paste) is the MOST vital soft skill in your future career. ( I learned this skill a lot from CSE466, before that, I was super introverted for any assignment)
I'd appreciate it if ya'll stop cheating so goddamn much. It devalues my degree (and all of yours) when news like this gets out to the rest of the world. Not too mention the ethical concerns, did your parents not teach you to be better?
How does the teacher even know they cheated? I’m genuinely curious like how can he prove that they cheated because this is a lot of students like how hard is this class?
Yeah ok makes sense most cheating I have seen is with students using ChatGPT which unfortunately for teachers they can’t do anything to prove a student used that and I know people that have here.
This is literally what they SHOULD have done. It’s 10x easier than straight writing, but you actually have to learn the topic.
I took CS classes for fun as an IE major and you just really have to WANT to learn, the kids copying full code files don’t give a crap about CS
The funny part here is that this course not only allows generative AI like ChatGPT, it also has it's own GPT4 interface called Sensai. The unfunny part is that the cheating is not that.
Wait? They have full permission to use AI and these stupid kids still just copied and pasted? This has got to be the weirdest group of kids in college I have ever seen.
Doupe’s classes are some of the single worst ways to teach the subjects he’s trying to get people to learn. It’s all capture the flag, the course materials barely cover 20% of what you need in the class to actually execute the code. His prereqs need to include an upper division course on assembly level code, basics of databases, and many more resources on what he’s actually talking about
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This popped up in my feed even though I attend university of Minnesota. In one of our intro comp sci courses (csci 1133, intro to python) they had about 35% of students caught last semester with academic dishonesty events. Being caught also constituted cheating on multiple assignments so that the professor could build a “case” on you with enough evidence across multiple assignments to submit to the academic dishonesty department. This semester it was slightly lower, but still 20-25%.
Edit: Just wanted to add, the professor that teaches most sections of this class is absolutely incredible. If you are willing to put time into the class, you will get an A. There are also office hours, both online and in person, running about 16hr/day, every day (except Sunday). So there is really no excuse for NEEDING to cheat in this class.
If this many people cheated I think it’s more of a reflection on how stupid the course is or the lack of teaching ability from the professor of anything. 300+ is a crazy number
allegedly my friend cheated his way through comp sci at ASU, had an internship and now works full time with a good job as a SWE. cheating doesn't mean you aren't smart enough for your major, sometimes you have too much stuff going on outside of school and need to get things done by any means. doesn't make it ethical but it's definitely understandable. does every kid who cheat deserve to graduate? absolutely not, but it's unfair to compare kids whose parents are paying for them to go through school so they can focus 100% of their time and effort to learning, rather than people who need to work full time to support themselves outside of school (like my friend).
normally if agree with you but i was in the class (not among the cheating majority) and… yeah the class is so ass they literally teach u nothing. most people likely cheated as a last resort so they can keep their GPA up. i didn’t cheat and worked my ASS off more than the rest of my classes combined and still only got a B- after a large curve.
nothing wrong with a B-, its stem after all. Depending on what you do in the workforce you may not even need the info taught in the class. Hands on experience, projects, and industry knowledge is way more important than a shitty class.
I’ve had my share of shitty classes but there’s absolutely no need to cheat in them. Just gotta lock in and hope for the best
Nonsense. This is clearly due to the recent availability of chat gpt. Not surprised half the class was so easily tempted. Cheating used to require some level of actual work.
You're right. I should've read the letter. Apparently people were sharing solutions and blatantly plagiarizing from course heroes and such. Looks like the temptation was the fact that he wasn't testing them.
either way, I wouldn't jump to blame his teaching ability.
did you take the class?
My thought was similar to yours with the driving factor being no tests. If these students have no real NEED to learn the subject, some of them who are busy with other stuff, etc. have no incentive to try and learn it in the first place outside of future use for an employer.
I haven't taken this class yet, barely knew anything about it. So I checked the website - anyone can start any module at any time.
The only thing you have to do as an ASU student is enter your ASU ID to get your grades and follow the deadlines. Late work is half of the total grade you get until the last day of class. 5% extra credit (completely possible to earn the full 5% by posting nothing but memes). Multiple instructors, the main one holds office hours on *twitch*. Class discord has nearly 12,000 members. There's no exams or quizzes, just assignments.
Someone please explain to me why there would be any need to cheat in this class? I thought maybe if almost half the class feels the need to cheat on more than one module it must be an extremely challenging and strict class with tons of strict deadlines, no curve exams, random pop quizzes, etc. But no, this looks like this is one of the most lenient courses in the major probably ever. Of course people thought they could get away with cheating but why even do that? At that point it doesn't matter how difficult the content is, if you have that many resources and second chances you could pass any class. You're more likely to pass a class like this half-asleep than you are by copy-pasting off a 100-page PDF document verbatim that is widely circulated online.
Now the curve is 60% for a C. And I've still seen some students get mad at these instructors. This entire situation is wild to me.
the content is not taught properly. period. there’s no book, no way to google such specific topics without coming upon what people used to cheat. they rarely do example problems or have example code. the lectures are useless.
The only possible reason is the factor of having no tests or quizzes. Therefore, to some of these busy students or ones who just don’t care enough, there is no real need or incentive to genuinely learn the class material. Now I’m not a comp sci major, but from what I hear ChatGPT was allowed for this class, which makes me think, why didn’t they just use that to get the assignments done?
It's not the best when it comes to cybersecurity concepts, partially due to limitations added by AI chatbots, and even with full knowledge of the enviroment you're working in with the class's own Sensai (GPT 4 with full command line context, and most recently edited file too). It's good, but not good enough.
Teachers are discouraged from giving out large amounts of A's so they don't teach to give A's the fact that so many students felt the need to cheat says less about the students and more about a failure to teach them.
pwn.college is the domain name attached the document’s link. This domain is THE class where students do modules. So we can affirm that this document is legit. For when this was created, it was on 26 APR 2024 as shown in the doc’s metadata. For the teacher, I cannot figure out.
lol big rip. That's a massive class. Who's typically taking cse365?
required course for all CS majors
It's for CS majors and is mostly done online. Students can go to this domain and solve these "challenges" to get points, think of them as "mini" assignments on Canvas.
Gotcha. Must be relatively new. But I've also been outta there for..... Nearly a decade. Sadge
It is fairly new yeah, I took it last year and it was great. I don't know what would be an equivalent 300 class during your time, but we learn some basic cybersecurity stuff with an assembly chapter.
Yeah required cybersec class. The class has been fairly unstandardized up until the past year or two. If you’ve heard of pwn.college which started I want to say 2018ish, they’ve expanded and pushed the lower modules to be this class
The pwn.college site was only started in like 2018 or so. I was in one of the first classes to actually use it. It's made for cybersecurity focused classes.
I’m in this class, it seems there were pdfs going around in different discords with the answers. There even seem to be cases where people had the exact same comments and spelling errors.
Well that’s just dumb. When I had to do coding with people, I’d still format it differently or use different variables and that’s when all we did was work together
I graded for some CS classes and there was one assignment In particular where a LOT of submissions had the same weirdly spaced period after the answer. Turns out a bunch of people were just copying from a PDF and that period was getting pulled in with it. They are not smart. Lol.
htpp moment
Oof. All of my discords have strict rules on sharing answers. We can discuss questions, but no answers will be shared.
In the real world, engineers are adapting pre-existing working code into every aspect of their careers… but for real, how dumb are you if you have to copy and paste with comments, without even reading it. At least make it look like it’s your own.
LMFAO no way 😭😭😭
This is why you have to add smiley faces to the end of your code.
I'm not a comp sci guy but does this actually work?
Idk why ppl are downvoting you, but this will not work because a few smiley emojis won’t throw off plagiarism software. These systems work by seeing if your code is semantically similar to a database of other pieces of code. Even if you change the names of the variables, it still won’t work. The best way to pass a check is doing the work yourself 😃😀😁
Ah ok thanks for explaining. Another question, in one given language, how many ways are there to get a certain desired result? Are the possibilities basically infinite, even at maximum efficiency?
Spacing, typing, variable names, indentation, function names, general organization of the code. There's so many different things that it's very obvious when code is derived from the same source. Also there are code checkers that will detect a simple rename of all variables.
There’s a concept in CS theory where there are several ways to solve a problem like how 2+1 is the same as 1+2 to get 3. However, there is an uncountable number of problems that even our computers can’t solve. But going back to the point, yes there are quite a lot of ways to solve our typical CS problems. It’s just a matter of which solution should you take in order not to get flagged by the checker
What's stupid about this is a lot of design patterns and algorithms exist to solve these common problems. Most academic exercises are for the very same common problems. The only people this helps are the bad programmers who are going to write bad code, but at least that code is unique so it won't get flagged. If you've done what you're supposed to, your code is going to look similar to what already exists. I don't like cheating, but at the same time some of these "detection" methods end up false flagging well written assignments, defeating the point of learning how to be an engineer in the first place.
Stop downvoting they’re asking an honest question
fr why we flaming this guy 😭
Maybe it's a stupid question because I'd guess the programs they run can detect code anywhere, whether it's between other random code added on or not. But I haven't coded since I was 11 or 12 so im just curious. And my brain is fried rn from strep too so that doesn't help.
No because plagiarism softwares, usually MOSS, are tokenizers. If you add a smiley face as a comment it ignores it as a comment. It also ignores the variable name, it just registers the fact that it’s a variable and its type. Think about it like that
Oof 😬😬. Might as well be a world record.
So what you're saying is, ASU is #1 ^^^^in ^^^^innovation.
Yes! Number #1 in INNOVATION!!
Yes! Number #1 in DUPLICATION!!
The hotlines at the end are wild.
They understand it's going to fuck over a lot of ppl, considerate kings.
I know a TA in the CS department, and the way he describes it, cheating is an absolute shitshow over there. It's gotten so bad that he's had to report other TAs that are sending code to their friends. Sounds like this is only the tip of the iceberg.
It’s always been that way. I’ve been out for over 10 years, and it was typical for half of the students in any given CSE class to cheat. Often times blatantly, like copying off of each other during exams. Funny enough, a lot of those people ended up not getting jobs. So the way I see it is the problem takes care of itself eventually.
The issue with this class is that at least when I took it the professors didn't teach anything related to the modules so there was nearly no instruction that would help actually do the homework. Luckily when I took it the TAs were really helpful in office hours and also did a lot of the problems that we had on the modules in the recorded office hours and thats how I struggled through the class.
True the baseline for class is not something a lot of student know. But honestly you just need to know a few commands before you can keep up with the twitch classes. And I'm pretty sure those are covered in the first module.
I’ve taken him twice, his videos maybe cover 15% of what’s needed to know to complete his assignments. I was taught by my peers and myself not by this dipshit
Honestly that's the point of this class. This class teaches you just the basic bash commands and switches to mostly theory. After that you are supposed to read manual pages and use any online or offline resources (not answers) to try finding an answer.
I am begging you to understand that this is something that the class itself needs to teach. I had to directly ask the professor what he meant by “man page” because in his discord and lecture material a would be referenced and not explained(when I took it during COVID this may have changed but I think it speaks to his ability to put himself in the students’ shoes) Most people in this class don’t know that Linux has a manual. You can’t take an adversarial approach ESPECIALLY not be dropping that this happened THE WEEK OF FINALS ON A REQUIRED COURSE. I understand that cheating is bad and did not tolerate it at all when I used to teach, I would give automatic zeroes on assignments that I noticed this in, but this approach is adversarial at best and cruel at worst. When I gave students zeroes I talked to them to understand why they cheated, tried to see what aspects of the material they were struggling with, and even if it was “teacher I was lazy as fuck and didn’t do it” I set up soft deadlines for them to try and meet. How did I accomplish this? I googled “techniques to stop my students from cheating and succeed in my class. Man paged it as every insufferable student and TA loves to spam in the class discord It would be extremely easy to say, hey guys I understand you grew up during the pandemic where this was the norm, I understand that with AI it’s a tool you need to understand isn’t the end all be all, and I understand this class is easy to cheat in. This also isn’t the first time this has happened in this class. Once the however many students were flagged he should’ve corrected the students and told them they would be watched. If he really cares about learning as he says, this is not the right way to go about this. A college should be a place to learn and still be able to make mistakes and recover. Jeopardizing a major, potentially scholarships, is extremely fucked up. Have some sympathy, and if you don’t that’s fine just never apply for a teaching position
I'm trying to say that your approach to understanding this class with the help of your friends was not a bad approach. It was the intended approach. You asking the professor or even the discord about what a man page is is also the intended approach. This course won't spoon feed you direct answers but will require you to investigate and ask questions. A lot of my friends in freshman and sophomore year don't use discord and aren't very familiar with it. I often tell them to please use discord so that they are comfortable talking and asking questions in the channel. Again this sort of communication is something that should be taught in 101 classes but it isn't really. I wish you had a better experience with pwn college though.
Courses should not require you to use material outside of the class. That’s what a course is for an exemplar explanation through an enclosed system that has the information and the answers contained within. There should not be a need for a discord or links found outside of the course material list. My point is doupe does not understand that a student might need help navigating a man page, might need help understanding what flags on a Linux argument are, might need help on how to set up a VM to run this in if that’s the approach they want to take. And to be frank, as an older person in these courses, the TA and student behavior even from the professor when it comes to sarcasm and shoulder shrugging of “I don’t know what do YOU think the answer is” is appalling for the amount of money and effort and time I paid to be at ASU. The course is not laid out efficiently and honestly I’m glad that he made the is open letter because the amount of attention this gets maybe the CS department will finally actually review this course and its materials
This is more of a question to fufill my curiousity, but do you expect jobs + resourses to just be provided to you in the future outside of university? As for 'I don't know what do YOU think the answer is', I can say that I have said this myself because I wanted to use it as a reflecting point to try to help building up the understanding to get to a point. It usually was because I noticed something doesn't add up in the understanding, and I wanted to see where the issue could be. The course does, however, feed into my tendencies of seeing 'one more thing, I can do it' with how much it builds onto it, so it may not be for you. It is, imo, the best CSE course I have taken.
Highly agree, this is not a class to be spoon-fed. Hell, when I took it a few years back(along with the 466 variety which is substantially harder than 365), they told you that you needed a solid understanding of bash+python(I mean 466 even told you to drop the class if you didn't have that as a prereq and come back when you did). Blame ASU and blame yourself for not learning the required material, don't blame pwn.college. As you say, the real world isn't all-encompassing and doesn't spoon-feed you, especially the cyber security world.
If you're interested try 469. Not related to pwn college or anything but one of the best hands on classes and you learn a lot! It's Forensics! For me that's my fav asu class of all time!
CSE 469? If there's spots, I may consider it!
"Many students had the foresight to delete their solution code after the fact. This was the case for 80% of the identified files. Unfortunately, however, for those students, we have recovered those deleted files." The internet is forever.
Idk why but that sounds scary. It's almost like this https://youtu.be/tHza_jWceDk?si=_cbHpvn5u2QFDiLX
CS is dying. Half of the people in CS are only in it for the money. Tried to collaborate with some group members using a GitHub repo for CSE 330 group projects and no one used it because “GitHub is too confusing.” Even had a group member in CSE 445 not know what an absolute path address is. That being said, CSE365 was one of my least favorite classes. You can’t really get genuine help, people in the Discord are past students telling you to just “read the documentation”. I think that problem comes from people with the different colors of belts, they stick around in the server and torment current students. The whole belt system gives these geeky “hackers” an overinflated ego, makes current students feel bad for struggling. Sad thing is pwn.college was Doupe’s PhD project to try and teach cybersecurity better. Hope he is doing alright with how this is all going.
Pwn.college is a great way for people to learn who are actually interested in cybersecurity. Unfortunately, you can’t put that expectation on 500 college juniors. I feel like he def expected some degree of academic dishonesty.
And I agree that ASU persay doesn't teach collaboration on GitHub which I think is pretty important. But there are GitHub workshops on campus and 1-2 hours of video. Spend 3-4 hours in your first year learning GitHub/git and 1 hours learning why IDEs aren't important. And you're set for the 4 years here.
Hi, are you able to provide some resources to be able to find these GitHub workshops?
Look at Sundevil Sync. ASU Clubs often host workshops that at times involve GitHub and many other tools !
It was Doupe's project? I'm pretty sure Shoshitaishvili invented it.
Yan and Connor started this project like 2018 I believe.
cse365 is not even that hard lol, even if you're tanking you could still get a C. Be better you lazy ass mfs
Nah trust me when I took that class, a LOT of my friends had no idea what Linux even was let alone bash. Even till date a bunch of my "friends" can't execute their code without a Run button. 😭😭😭😭
I also took it, there were definitely hard challenges, but not enough to cheat over it lol. The TAs were the GOATs in that class tbh, I went into an office hour and the dude just guided me to get to the correct answer.
[удалено]
>than knowing if you know how to program I almost feel bad for you. You went through the entire course and never figured out that it has basically nothing to do with programming. Not everything in compsci is centered writing code (I bet you also complained about the digital design and computer architecture classes). If all you want to do is write code then maybe you'd be better off doing a coding bootcamp than a 4-year degree. Of course cybersecurity will still be relevant even in basic coding jobs, it's just that someone who took the time to learn those things will have to come in behind you to clean up your mess.
Sounds like someone didn't do so well and is projecting...blame ASU(although you should also blame yourself) for not teaching you well enough to go through the pwn.college series. The class is so good, it's well regarded in the hacking community OUTSIDE OF ASU(It's a FOSS class after all). If anything, the pwn.college classes are the few worth taking at ASU and the few that actually teach you anything, everyone in the SEFCOM group is highly regarded as being some of the best. ASU ranks top 3 in cybersecurity along with UCSB and CMU, not to mention the ASU/UCSB group (Order of the Overflow) ran DEFCON(CTF) for 4 years, they definitely are teaching you the good stuff you'll need to be successful in a (mostly offensive) cyber security career.
Skill issue
Yeah thats exactly my point. It’s an issue of skill, which a class is supposed to cover.
Yeah because no fucking class at asu ever even gives you the resources to learn what any of that is. Snarky cs students will say that you’re supposed to know it already or know how to google but the cs department severely lacks the resources in the classes themselves for students to succeed. I can count on one hand the amount of times an IDE debugger or a debugging tutorial was even mentioned let alone discussed in depth. And when it was discussed in depth it was for the continuation of cyber security that basically required you to understand assembly code and registers intimately after a single semester of learning them. Oh my god it’s the pwncollege dipshit. You know how I passed that class? Having the TAs teach me and me reading up on the class material completely outside of class. That man has zero fucking idea how to teach
Honestly I agree. There should be a 101 class or a HW 0 type of thing to get them used to this. And starting a CS Student's journey with Java which more often than not requires a specific IDE is a questionable decision. C + VScode wins
It’s no secret that ASU engineering programs are really hard, and the teaching there doesn’t make up for it. Not the least surprised they did this lol
Are they known for being difficult?
They weren’t when I graduated in 2015
I hear its a good/mediocre engineering college. Better than most at some engineering disciplines but mediocre at others.
Yeah it was ranked 36 when I went there, looks like it’s slid a little but still a top 50 so not awful. It suffered from a lot of tenure in MAE (in my opinion) if you didn’t get the “good professors” you got the ones that didn’t care or enjoyed failing students I only had one of those but man he was an ass. Not sure how rankings work, maybe it’s based on curriculum, but I can attest about a decade ago the professor pool was the epitome of “good not great” Couple interstellar teachers though, my thermofluids/thermodynamics teacher literally did a cartwheel out of excitement when explaining the laws of thermodynamics
That's awesome. Do you remember who he was
Kangping Chen
Maybe it’s dependent on the engineering program but when I did chemE the program was bad. The counselors normalized it would take 6 yrs or so, and that the failure rate for specific professors were high. I found out in my final year how badly people were cheating. The teachers and TAs were definitely not teaching to the standard they were making their tests, labs, and assignments like. Heard some students who were also struggling in other engineering programs for the terrible teaching.
But security faculty actually have already provided the best teaching (in the whole country?
I found the security faculty to be really really good at teaching. Baek, Doupe, Bao and Crandall are really really good professors.
I wouldn't say really hard. As long as you're half paying attention you can breeze through most classes. There isn't any reason to cheat, though. I graduated Summa Cum Laude from ASU with an undergrad in CS. I am now a level IV engineer. What I will say is on the whole the material is not taught well at ASU, or in some cases not even taught at all. For example SOLID is pretty fundamental to programming/software engineering. ASU doesn't teach it. Even the S, Single Responsibility, the most important one isn't emphasized. From what I can remember from CSE365 is simple subjects like RBAC were overly complicated to the point of obscurity and almost all assignments aside from 'hacking a website' had no practical real world applications. Stuff that should have been mentioned like Oauth, JSON Web Tokens/Bearer Tokens, OIDC, SAML, all of the authentication schemes that are in actual use aren't even mentioned. It's good you get some exposure to things like XSS attacks, SQL injection, etc cetera, but these things are solved for you in the real world. Web Frameworks like Blazor, ASP.NET, Angular, and so on sanitize input for you. I liked Adam Doupe, but CS as a whole at ASU is just... not good. It needs serious attention. However, if there's one thing to take away from Intro to Information Assurance... NEVER implement your own security or cryptography. I repeat, NEVER implement your own security or cryptography. Simply put, most of what's taught at ASU simply isn't useful and the important stuff is absent. But as someone who was accused of cheating a few times when I never actually did, I find a lot of these detection methods horribly suspect. Some are clear cut, like including the same comments with the same spelling mistakes, but others are just mere coincidence. In the real world, having identical code is actually preferable. Conventions exist TO be followed. It makes pull requests easier to read, results in cleaner, better to understand code. The better you get, the more you find your code isn't really that unique, nor should it be.
Got any advice for someone heading into their senior year for CS? I’ll have to look up those topics you mentioned!
First, learn what SOLID is. You will be interviewed on this ad nauseum. Not a single employer has failed to quiz me on SOLID during a technical interview. * Single Responsibility * Open/Closed * Liskov Substitution * Interface Segregation * Dependency Inversion These 5 principles will drive any design you do. They are absolutely fundamental to know. It's infuriating ASU doesn't teach and reinforce it. Second, if you're not comfortable with Git/SVN or any other source control, learn it. This will be the bread and butter of everything you do. EVERYONE will be using version control. ASU does somewhat well here. Third, learn as many design patterns as you can. You will get exposure to some like Publisher/Subscriber and MVC at ASU, but there's other super common ones like Factory, Singleton, State, Observer, Decorator, and so on. Learn as many as you can. Also, it may seem pointless now, but pay attention to SCRUM/AGILE. You will likely be in a SCRUM meeting every day for the rest of your career. Beyond that, it really depends on what you're going to do. Know Java, C++, C#, and Python like the back of your hand. These will be used everywhere. Not all at once, but they're going to make up most of the market. If you don't take databases as your elective, learn relational databases and SQL anyway. Even things like Cosmos will still be accessed via SQL commands. Guaranteed no matter what you do you're going to have to deal with a database of some kind. Get comfortable with JSON, it's going to be the most common type of payload in like 99% of the APIs you'll touch. I don't remember ASU ever teaching JSON or XML. On a positive note, these are brain dead easy to learn. Understand what makes a good REST API. I guarantee you'll be using an API of some sort. Even game design will make API calls to servers. Just expose yourself to as much as you can. ASU just leaves a lot of gaps. Commit to being a life long learner and realize that most of what you did at ASU you're never going to do again. Remember that you're not going to know anything when you graduate and you will learn on the job. You will have access to references, you will spend most of your time Googling answers, and you will find most of your answers on Stack Overflow. 99% of being a good engineer is just learning how to use Google. But above all else, if you cheat your way through ASU, even though most of these assignments are useless in the real world, you are setting yourself up for failure. Put in the work now, so you can just get all of your answers on Stack Overflow later and learn to spot problems and code smells.
Random , but I’m not a CS major and just thought this post was interesting. Have zero clue on what everything you just said means. Respect
Everything you mentioned here is taught in ASU's software engineering core btw. It's not gaps, you just chose the wrong degree.
Computer Science should also teach these things. These concepts are also core to Computer Science. While yes, CS is more generalized and theoretical, everyone who does any sort of programming needs to know these things. CS majors still wear the programmer hat. For all intents and purposes, CS should have these core concepts as well. That's a failing on ASU as these concepts ARE taught in the Maricopa College Curriculum for CS majors.
CS != SWE, this is a fact. Hell it's not even programming. CS programs began as applied math programs. They are not intended to teach an industry tech stack or engineering methodology. People don't study physics and then complain, "oh they didn't teach me how to fix my car, that's a lack in the curriculum."
That is a massive false equivalency with physics and being a mechanic. The two are unrelated disciplines. Computer Science and Software Engineering are interdisciplinary. Computer Science is an applied science. CSE 360 is a required class. As is CSE 110, CSE 310, CSE 240, all concerned with being a programmer. CS students must PROGRAM their assignments. CS majors must complete a capstone to demonstrate proficiency as a Software Engineer. For all intents and purposes, as a CS major you ARE a Software Engineer, one who also must apply theory in practice. It is an interdisciplinary study, which is why CS majors ALSO must take several EEE courses. I'm not saying a CS major needs to study every aspect of being a Software Engineer, but core Software Engineering concepts like SOLID, Design Patterns, etc need to be taught in the curriculum. These things are included in the curriculum at the Maricopa Colleges which is how I was exposed to them, but I never heard anything about them once I transferred to ASU.
Thank you for the response!! You gave me so much go on from here!
>It's good you get some exposure to things like XSS attacks, SQL injection, etc cetera, but these things are solved for you in the real world. Web Frameworks like Blazor, ASP.NET, Angular, and so on sanitize input for you. And yet I've still had to spend _so much time_ arguing with colleagues that they should actually use query parameterization.
In this case I think the proofs are pretty solid
ykw i learned more from this comment than i did in 365, so that's something at least to say abt the 365 rn in todays day. It's an insanely interesting subject but the way they are teaching now is completely cheating students from learning and not really doing much for anyone. I don't think people realize how automated and hands-off the asu cs degree has become in just 2 years, majority of the lower level is becoming completely "online" even though its for in person asu and an in person class, sure it might be easy but it really doesn't prepare you for much especially higher level classes (which might also slowly get automated i mean look at 365) Teachers are also somewhat out of touch with reality of the cs students that are joining the degree. I did fine in 365 but all im saying is nothing I learned in it really stuck, fr emptied it all out the very next day. All in all: asu's cs degree is just sad in it's current state.
as a Staff Security Engineer, what is a level 4 engineer? is that like senior engineer at your company?
Level 4 would generally be considered Senior level, yes.
i see. I've worked a lot of places that use the roman numeral system where at one place at the time i wouldve been an engineer III and another it was engineer VI lol
I get you, it's not really standardized. The organization I work for stops at level IV for their titles. If I'm being honest my title doesn't even match what I do. I hold the title of Dev Ops, but I do full stack development, Dev Ops / Sec Ops work, architectural work, as well as lately act like a Site Reliability Engineer.
Yeah i get it, i do a little bit of everything and have for a few years now just had weird titles like Senior Platform Security Engineer while doing everything under the sun
pwn.college is probably the best thing in ASU 😭😭
i hope that is sarcasm or adams/fishes/conners alt account
The teaching structure is a mess but pwn.college by itself is a very useful tool
it's a useful tool, but i won't say its the best thing lmfao it's like saying zybooks is the best thing to grace the cs department. i don't think pwn should be used as a full on class period
Hmmm let me rephrase Pwn college is one of the best thing ASU has done for people serious about CybSec It has great challenges for CybSec enthusiasts and those interested can learn from it. Plus almost anyone can access the challenges, classes and YouTube videos. It is a useful tool but has its shortcomings in the teaching area mainly bcuz basics aren't being taught.
I do agree with it being a good resource for CyberSec, it's better than nothing, and yes the basics aren't being covered at all leaving ppl stranded in the intro. Side note: if you are interested in Cyber and want things like pwn there are incredible side resources out there such as THM, HTB....I guess I'll add pwn to the list too. My only peeve with pwn is how it's being implemented at ASU and also its lack of being intro friendly which is what CSE365 is. The CS department at ASU is being absolutely crazy with self learninifying their courses, it's like milking their students more than before and packing them all together like sardines and overall lowering the quality of the degree that is being given. It feels more like a "here play with this you'll figure it out, while we go do our other important researches at ASU" That's my only hate for 365 , the way this class is formatted doesn't help people to actually enjoy the subject matter either which is what you also said. Also for this class, I thought they took down the videos that help solve the challenges? Also when I say "it's not the best thing" I mean it's not enough nor the best thing to completely replace a class with which is what the professors are trying to do with pwn. And to add on, professors are kinda outta touch with who is taking this class and only basically receive feedback from people that already are super good at cyber or have been entirely involved in it for a while it's something i've noticed. I think the feed back from those students is semi flawed, they don't represent the avg cs student, who is unaware of these topics. Overall pwn good resource, current pwn for teaching 365 entirely bad.
Innovation!
For those that haven't looked it up, pwn.college is owned by the instructor.
Why does that matter
Don't want to defend cheaters, but tbh this class is structured in a way you have to cheat if you are not proficient in a topic before you start taking the class. It is too demanding for where it's placed on a major map. Lectures are of little to no help, the discord server is far from being friendly, so it's obvious people started spreading completed solutions.
Idk about you but Discord was fun for me. Helping and receiving help was actually a good learning process for me. However you're right it has a huge curve for people that have no idea what bash commands are.
If only it was Linux commands. The course requires some knowledge of computer networks, databases, some level of discrete math (which most of cs students are not good with), javascript basics, a bit about html, and a good understanding of assembly (which is taught by Indela). It is kind of strange that one is expected to be proficient in arp/ip layers functionality when they still didn't take 434.
In the video lectures they explain those topics. They don't spoonfeed us the commands but that's mostly it. And they have enough resources that you wouldn't need to cheat.
You really think it's reasonable to make people write js scripts for xss right after 3 short videos on the topic? Let's be honest, cybersecurity as a field requires knowledge and experience far beyond what people have when they take the course.
Again the lectures are meant to be more on the informative side. Talk to TAs, Discord, YouTube, GPT, Manual Pages. It's definitely not easy but completely doable.
You talk about knowledge but completely forget about the experience. I'm not saying it's not doable, I'm saying people should have a basic introduction to the tools they are using before getting committed to their exploitation. At the very least they should be somewhat comfortable with the code they are writing. Iirc there's a whole module on assembly practice. It wouldn't hurt if they continued a practice and added some tasks on SQL/js/theory of cryptography/network communication BEFORE asking you to implement arp poisoning/database leaking/other stuff the professor came up with.
Oh yeah there should be demo classes if that's what you mean. Where the professor solves "similar" challenges. In 545 we have that and it's honestly a life saver
Weren't these directly provided by slides and videos above the challenges, because they didn't expect that?
Imho providing 20 page presentation and 3 20mins videos isn't enough to ask people of database exploitation and js script injection
If this is pwn.college they would give you half the modules themselves when I took it. If they haven’t changed their challenges I wouldn’t be surprised every answer is online.
It’s gotten much tougher recently to combat all those answers online
Yeah they took away/deleted all of those old office hour videos that helped and dialed it back significantly this semester so it did get pretty hard
Idk it seems like they’re doing the same twitch stuff as they did with me. They deleted all old office hours during my year because students weren’t showing up. It seems like you have twitch vods for every class all year though still. Also deleted it because of academic integrity issues
That's awful, I hope this a good lesson to those who cheated. Just getting a 0 and a learning experience is not the end of the world.
just the loss of scholarships which means a cycle of debt for some poor kids because asu is unaffordable
ASU is one of the cheapest colleges out there unfortunately. It's telling that even then it's considered unaffordable. We're in a crisis of education from multiple POVs right now.
yup
Actions have consequences. Choosing to plagiarize and losing your scholarship is a dumb action with a severe consequence.
maybe don’t make college unaffordable and kids won’t be scared they have to cheat to keep up their gpa
College is a time where college kids are approaching closer to adult hood. There are tons of lessons to be learned in college that can impact their development. If one of those students just gets a 0 on a module, its probably not the end of the world nor the end of their scholarships. Plagiarizing is a big deal in college and a college can kick someone out for such an action. I hate those who cheat since I was a CC transfer into the CS program and barely made the requirements to transfer in. My heart broke when I learned how much cheating happens at ASU, I was in an undergrad/grad CS class and I learned of so many graduate students cheating in the same assignments as me. I barely got in and yet there are spots taken by people who are cheating. If someone is gonna cheat, I do think they should be kicked out and let someone in who actually deserves a spot in the class. But mistakes can happen and just getting a 0 is just a lesson.
so an issue is the professor didn’t catch them all after the first module for cheating, they waited until the end of the course so they failed the course. The letter they wrote comes off self aggrandizing. Some of these kids might harm themselves. If it was about learning a lesson they should have been informed after their first offense so they could change.
It is a huge class and the instructors may had not been aware of cheating til now. There are hundreds of students and the instructors will also have other duties other then teaching this one class.
i’m sorry but the tuition dollars in such a large class dictate the faculty should make it a top priority. Also faculty should be checking online just like their students can if solutions are online as pdfs. if your students can find it so can you. This is on the faculty for being lazy about catching this sooner and letting it get to this point.
I’ll also add i was once a physics ta at asu and I caught one of my students cheating. Instead of reporting him I pointed out why he was wrong and he learned and is now a doctor. He didn’t have his life ruined and grew and could become a positive force for society.
Thats a good point. Its just a lesson and now the student is now a doctor and you really helped them learn and grow. I just find it frustrating that I almost wasn't able to do the major I wanted for past reasons.
making things harder for others because it was hard for you is not how we make a better society. Cheating should be discouraged but in a way which promotes growth and minimizes incentives to cheat. In medicine for example there is a principle that name shame and punish doesn’t work to prevent future medical mistakes after lots of research in the space. This should be considered by the faculty and AIP. This gross cheating at this scale is demonstrative of the fact the faculty dropped the bar either in instruction or in course design or in quickly calling out the cheating before it became widespread.
I don't agree with that. The cybersecurity professors at ASU are really really good. They are really engaged. I took a look at the modules for pwn.college and they don't look rather difficult. I do not have any actual experience in cybersecurity. Again like I said, the faculty may not had been aware of cheating until now. This class has hundreds of students along with thousands of submissions of assignments. Actions have consequences and everyone is aware that cheating can get you kicked out of school. If a student gets a 0 in a module, that's fine. I spoke to one of the professors, Doupe when I was failing the class. He told me, getting a F is not the end of the world. He was right. I retook CSE 365 and got an A in it.
Maybe not end of the world for cs, but for scholarships some kids rely on to even attend and keep learning it is. Maybe if asu was affordable I would agree.
Better reason not to cheat tbh if you only got one shot financially(and 2 AI wise). Considering the rampant cheating that profs did nothing about throughout all of ASU CS(even when reported directly - which you bet it was when most classes are graded on a curve), this is a well deserved lesson and I'm glad a professor stood up. Not to say I disagree with college being way overpriced these days, that's 100% true, but cheating is still very very bad and deserves punishment. No one wants unethical, cheating graduates in the workplace, either fix the behavior or get rid of them completely.
the professor should have offered a remediation pathway for the students caught cheating, taken some ownership for allowing it to happen so long and so systemically, and not allowed it to get to this point to begin with.
This doesn't apply here. 1) if you fail a class you can retake it. It's not a core class so you won't get off tracked immediately after failing once. 2) failing classes won't take away your scholarship. Getting AI violation will most certainly will. If they want to save money, it's best for them to approach the class. 3) Cheating is easier. If you have a PDF with the answers it's incredibly hard to control yourself.
I think a key point to reiterate is if there are PDFs of the answers found on google faculty should be checking every semester for them since they have the solution. These are cs faculty for pete sake, how haven’t they written a code to automatically look for their solutions online.
This PDF (might be online) is mostly being spread by a network of student groups and friends. Passed and modified from previous semesters. These challenges cannot be found online. The PDF might be on shit like Coursera or something tho but it's mostly being handed person to person.
based off all the comments it’s common knowledge this is an issue in this department
For the record I also don’t think students should cheat but I think the goal as an educator (I being a former asu physics ta and future faculty in another field entirely) should be to call out the student and help them grow from it. I think having a single Academic integrity complaint filed for the entire course for every student was right, filing the same complaint for each infraction in the course when the instructor could and should have remedied it mid way through the semester and not all at the end is on the instructor.
Yes same. I'm a TA for a senior level class too. I won't put in an AI violation on a student that plagiarized a single section of a report. However it's different in this class. They have multiple challenges. Each challenge records the time taken to complete it. Students that are cheating will copy paste the code from the PDF, run it and complete the challenge in under 1 minute where as it would take the professor himself around 10-20 minutes to figure out. I agree that it should have been released sooner tho but I'm assuming that since the scale was this big and acc to document they have a good foundation and proofs, I assume it took them this long bcuz they were scraping all the proofs for all the students. Also it's not like other classes where they can switch up assignments in 2-3 days. But even then I think an announcement should have been made. Something like "Hey we have noticed a PDF going around and a bunch of Academic Integrity Violations. We are investigating that" But then again, someone who cheated in a challenge before was bound to cheat on the challenge after so idk if that would have made a difference. Still sucks what happened to them
Holy shit 💀 Took this in S23. It was a cheating cesspool back then. How did it take an entire year for those guys to catch on?
Teachers using the exact same assignments and questions for a decade being flabbergasted when people cheat. Like what did you expect to happen? And I'm happy they're busted but have some initiative as an instructor.
This is not the case for this class. The structure and content of the course has completely changed since I took it in 2020
it’s on faculty in my mind to keep assignments fresh otherwise those who cheat have a leg up over those who do it right until the once in a blue moon sweep to catch cheaters happens. Too little too late by the faculty.
I remember doing the modules, and you could get 70% of all the answers just by watching the office hours and the ta videos.
They removed all of those videos this semester. Probably what influenced this a bit.
It was to see where students were struggling, with the expectation of it being asked more in the discord, recitations and class. Ya.....
🗣️NUMBER ONE IN INNOVATION 🔥🔥
Maybe a hot take: but honestly If any student (epsially on that caliber) are driven to cheat maybe you should look at what your giving in the class. Every class I've had to urge to cheat on has been the worst of the worst. And I never did actually cheat because of the academic consequences at ASU, I just don't think that anything would be worth it to lose my entire collage. So the fact that SO many students felt like they needed to but also to risk there entire university shows how AWFUL this class might be. Because there are some students who are just lazy AF and don't wanna study. Or computer science is dying lol
Computer science IS dying. No passion and all money bags chasers
Honestly so true, like computer science is so saturated by people who just want a good pay check and not actually a love for computers. Thats why I choose data analytics, it screatches my coding brain, but also if one day I hate it, I still have a bussiness degree technically
this class has some of the best professors. the students are just lazy.
Thats fair lol, I will admit some of the worst classes with me studying the professors TERRRRIBLLLEEEE!! But im a WP cary student thats technically stem.
If a person that makes 6 figures a year finds a 100$ on the street, that person is keeping that 100$. It's not because he is poor but because that's easy money.
Most of these people were indian internationals. That's what a professor told me. It's sad that they're so desperate they have to cheat
I took a class last semester where I, and one other student, were the only students who weren’t Indian internationals in a class. About two weeks into the semester, I walked into the classroom to see a bunch of the students crowded around a laptop, then disperse upon my entry - like they were up to something. I could clearly see a Canvas quiz opened then minimized. Minding my business, I went to my table. The other student who wasn’t international was coming in behind me, saw, and later told me they had a massive group chat where they cheated off each other and shared answers. I was repulsed by the broad-brushing comment and asked “How do you even know that?”. He just told me a friend of his knew of it, and I was like, “That’s crazy.”, just to end the conversation. Lo and behold, one month later my instructor read the class the riot act over the rampant cheating he was witnessing from the homework being turned in. *(This isn’t to say that all international students participate in this conduct, but more-so to share an experience that aligns with what may be a pattern the roots of which should be explored so we can figure out why this is happening and how we can fix it.)*
I'm going to have to directly say otherwise. There was no race information tied to this, but from what I have seen of the student body in this particular course, it's majority white people. Yes there are indian internationals, but this blanket statement is misleading at best.
#1 in innovation 🥴🥴🥴
Is this a bad thing? Or a sign asu wants better education and is cracking down? Id argue its a net positive. Im sure cheating is nearly even across education
I have not taken CSE 365 before, but I really thought the pwn.college{xx} should be the same for each challenge... And more, not really understand why so many conspire with each other, despite the fact that they offer you many help, not to mention that knowing how to ask for help (instead of copy-paste) is the MOST vital soft skill in your future career. ( I learned this skill a lot from CSE466, before that, I was super introverted for any assignment)
Also, don't play tricks with 'masters of tricking', and in fact, the way they used to decide if someone is doing plagiarism is lenient enough.
You can't trick they goddang magicians 😭😭😭
Sucks to suck lmao
I'd appreciate it if ya'll stop cheating so goddamn much. It devalues my degree (and all of yours) when news like this gets out to the rest of the world. Not too mention the ethical concerns, did your parents not teach you to be better?
How does the teacher even know they cheated? I’m genuinely curious like how can he prove that they cheated because this is a lot of students like how hard is this class?
read the url they explain everything
Yeah ok makes sense most cheating I have seen is with students using ChatGPT which unfortunately for teachers they can’t do anything to prove a student used that and I know people that have here.
This is literally what they SHOULD have done. It’s 10x easier than straight writing, but you actually have to learn the topic. I took CS classes for fun as an IE major and you just really have to WANT to learn, the kids copying full code files don’t give a crap about CS
The funny part here is that this course not only allows generative AI like ChatGPT, it also has it's own GPT4 interface called Sensai. The unfunny part is that the cheating is not that.
Wait? They have full permission to use AI and these stupid kids still just copied and pasted? This has got to be the weirdest group of kids in college I have ever seen.
Bet you it was larger during COVID
Doupe’s classes are some of the single worst ways to teach the subjects he’s trying to get people to learn. It’s all capture the flag, the course materials barely cover 20% of what you need in the class to actually execute the code. His prereqs need to include an upper division course on assembly level code, basics of databases, and many more resources on what he’s actually talking about
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Good for them. Cheat more
This popped up in my feed even though I attend university of Minnesota. In one of our intro comp sci courses (csci 1133, intro to python) they had about 35% of students caught last semester with academic dishonesty events. Being caught also constituted cheating on multiple assignments so that the professor could build a “case” on you with enough evidence across multiple assignments to submit to the academic dishonesty department. This semester it was slightly lower, but still 20-25%. Edit: Just wanted to add, the professor that teaches most sections of this class is absolutely incredible. If you are willing to put time into the class, you will get an A. There are also office hours, both online and in person, running about 16hr/day, every day (except Sunday). So there is really no excuse for NEEDING to cheat in this class.
If this many people cheated I think it’s more of a reflection on how stupid the course is or the lack of teaching ability from the professor of anything. 300+ is a crazy number
That is just the number of people caught cheating. Honestly in the real world it is more about knowing where to get the information that you need.
Kids cheat in every class on campus… Should be addressed on a larger scale, but then all the money goes away, so we proceed with the facade
Professor should step down for teaching so shittily that 60% of class feels the need to cheat lol
hot take but those students shouldn’t be in the major if they have to resort to cheating 🤷
allegedly my friend cheated his way through comp sci at ASU, had an internship and now works full time with a good job as a SWE. cheating doesn't mean you aren't smart enough for your major, sometimes you have too much stuff going on outside of school and need to get things done by any means. doesn't make it ethical but it's definitely understandable. does every kid who cheat deserve to graduate? absolutely not, but it's unfair to compare kids whose parents are paying for them to go through school so they can focus 100% of their time and effort to learning, rather than people who need to work full time to support themselves outside of school (like my friend).
normally if agree with you but i was in the class (not among the cheating majority) and… yeah the class is so ass they literally teach u nothing. most people likely cheated as a last resort so they can keep their GPA up. i didn’t cheat and worked my ASS off more than the rest of my classes combined and still only got a B- after a large curve.
nothing wrong with a B-, its stem after all. Depending on what you do in the workforce you may not even need the info taught in the class. Hands on experience, projects, and industry knowledge is way more important than a shitty class. I’ve had my share of shitty classes but there’s absolutely no need to cheat in them. Just gotta lock in and hope for the best
Nonsense. This is clearly due to the recent availability of chat gpt. Not surprised half the class was so easily tempted. Cheating used to require some level of actual work.
The professor does allow the use of ChatGPT for this course iirc
You're right. I should've read the letter. Apparently people were sharing solutions and blatantly plagiarizing from course heroes and such. Looks like the temptation was the fact that he wasn't testing them. either way, I wouldn't jump to blame his teaching ability. did you take the class?
My thought was similar to yours with the driving factor being no tests. If these students have no real NEED to learn the subject, some of them who are busy with other stuff, etc. have no incentive to try and learn it in the first place outside of future use for an employer.
I haven't taken this class yet, barely knew anything about it. So I checked the website - anyone can start any module at any time. The only thing you have to do as an ASU student is enter your ASU ID to get your grades and follow the deadlines. Late work is half of the total grade you get until the last day of class. 5% extra credit (completely possible to earn the full 5% by posting nothing but memes). Multiple instructors, the main one holds office hours on *twitch*. Class discord has nearly 12,000 members. There's no exams or quizzes, just assignments. Someone please explain to me why there would be any need to cheat in this class? I thought maybe if almost half the class feels the need to cheat on more than one module it must be an extremely challenging and strict class with tons of strict deadlines, no curve exams, random pop quizzes, etc. But no, this looks like this is one of the most lenient courses in the major probably ever. Of course people thought they could get away with cheating but why even do that? At that point it doesn't matter how difficult the content is, if you have that many resources and second chances you could pass any class. You're more likely to pass a class like this half-asleep than you are by copy-pasting off a 100-page PDF document verbatim that is widely circulated online. Now the curve is 60% for a C. And I've still seen some students get mad at these instructors. This entire situation is wild to me.
the content is not taught properly. period. there’s no book, no way to google such specific topics without coming upon what people used to cheat. they rarely do example problems or have example code. the lectures are useless.
The only possible reason is the factor of having no tests or quizzes. Therefore, to some of these busy students or ones who just don’t care enough, there is no real need or incentive to genuinely learn the class material. Now I’m not a comp sci major, but from what I hear ChatGPT was allowed for this class, which makes me think, why didn’t they just use that to get the assignments done?
It's not the best when it comes to cybersecurity concepts, partially due to limitations added by AI chatbots, and even with full knowledge of the enviroment you're working in with the class's own Sensai (GPT 4 with full command line context, and most recently edited file too). It's good, but not good enough.
Everyone cheats. Just got to be slick enough to not get caught.
It’s only cheating if you’re caught
Teachers are discouraged from giving out large amounts of A's so they don't teach to give A's the fact that so many students felt the need to cheat says less about the students and more about a failure to teach them.
lmao this course has some of the best teachers. if you're lazy, don't study one of the hardest majors.
[удалено]
pwn.college is the domain name attached the document’s link. This domain is THE class where students do modules. So we can affirm that this document is legit. For when this was created, it was on 26 APR 2024 as shown in the doc’s metadata. For the teacher, I cannot figure out.
I’m in this class right now. It’s real.
Well don’t leave us hanging, did ya cheat?
If a comment could wear a wire 😂
We need to know
It is 100% real. Lmao