So that's why

[dtm]

Occasionally, my boss will interview people for a somewhat technical job. Often, these people will claim to be able to program, and she has a standard "bare minimum programming competency" question:

In the language of your choice, write a function that accepts a two-dimensional array of floating-point numbers and returns the smallest value in the array.

This should be something that can be done without any thought by anyone claiming to be a programmer, right? I'd never understood how people could come to an interview for a programming position, degree in hand, and fail this test. Now I understand. It's a bit reassuring to know that math departments aren't the only ones who have to deal with flagrantly unethical undergrads.

Update: it appears that this auction has been made private. Basically, it was a request for a full worked-out, ready-to-turn-in homework assignment. (Google even supplied me with the name of the course book the assignment was taken from and a little hunting with the exact page number)

Comments

[joxn.livejournal.com]

Of course, choice of language is everything. How about Octave?

function res = floatmin(a)
res = min(min(a));

[joxn.livejournal.com]

You'd probably believe how many undergrads in a numerical analysis class couldn't do that.

Yes, yes I would

[dtm]

And really, I don't have any problem with people entering a class incompetent of the class's subject - nor do I really have a problem with people who, even after taking a class in X, still find themselves unable to grasp the basic nature of X, or reason about X in any substantial way. Some people just don't get it, and there's little you can do about it. This doesn't make them bad people, necessarily, just people you wouldn't want to hire for your critical X work.

Ignorance is no sin, neither is incompetence. Deliberately choosing to remain ignorant, (by not trying to complete the simplest of assignments, many solutions to which are already posted all over the web) or actively pretending to competence one does not have is another thing. And presenting grades (or degrees) as "completed by me" when one did not in fact complete said degrees is fraud.

Students buying answers irks me. Help is one thing - everyone needs the occasional help on some syntax quirk. Direct "please do this for me" requests are something else entirely. I can certainly sympathize with professors who require all work to be run through anti-plagiarism sites, even if I think that forcing students to contribute work to a for-profit company's proprietary database is ethically questionable.

An aside:
My father has reported that his experience in teaching night classes at the local community college has been that there are three classes of students: those who would learn the material naturally even if he were replaced by a text-to-speech engine run on the course text, those who won't be able to grasp the basics no matter who teaches, and those for whom he can actually make a difference as a teacher. In his classes, the three groups are usually about the same size.