[jessaustin]

TFA seems a bit at odds with itself. One reason academic boards don't care too much about CS plagiarism complaints is that CS generates so very many of them, compared to other fields. The reason isn't that CS students are degenerates (although they may be anyway), instead it's because it is so much easier to check for plagiarism in CS. So, sure closed-source is bad and definitely we can always use more TAs, but the problem is clearly not "we're only punishing 10% of our students while we should be punishing 40%!"

The problem isn't with CS at all, but rather with USA colleges in general. Indeed the only professor I've read who seems to even notice the problem is Harry Lewis. Most subjects should be taught very differently than they are taught. USA university education makes a great deal of unnecessary and counterproductive work for students and professors. The busywork threatens to drive out real academic work.

The reason for this is so that more such work might be created for administrators, who must multiply inexorably to absorb the ridiculous amounts of money that our ridiculous system of student debt generates. In fact it will be no surprise if some schools eventually do hire enough administrators to suspend 40% of every CS course every semester. One hopes that the professors who could restore some of the quality that universities used to possess, will realize by then that they can restore that and should restore that.