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by al_borland 216 days ago
I wouldn’t worry about students. They won’t be hurting you, only themselves. If the goal is to learn, they aren’t learning. This will either mean programming is a random class they’re taking, not their career, so who cares… or they’ll have a really hard time later in life when they will need to sink or swim in a real job, having not first developed the skills. That’s not a problem for you.

It’s also much more likely they will go to AI these days; the odds of them searching and landing on your repo to use are almost 0. If they do, I imagine most schools would scan for direct copies of existing code.
1 comments
jjmarr 215 days ago
It's considered my responsibility to protect my labwork at my school, and I could get in trouble if someone else plagiarized it from GitHub.
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al_borland 215 days ago
If that’s the school policy, then there is no fear to get over. Keep the repos private to comply with policy. That makes it easy.
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evilduck 215 days ago
Your school lab work is only valuable to yourself and other students who wish to plagiarize, there's not really a compelling reason to share that code.

If you're writing other software beyond classwork that you wish to share, the school has no say over it, no more than they would if you chose to write a book while in school.

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jjmarr 215 days ago
This incentivizes me to minimum effort school projects so I can focus on personal projects.

But most professors want students to be creative and inventive on classwork.

I get that this isn't a problem if I treat my schoolwork as having no utility beyond the course I made it for, but that isn't the ideal.

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al_borland 215 days ago
I always found I learned a lot more when I expanded upon the coding assignments and added my own features. Not only did I learn more, I found it much more enjoyable. In some cases it took something that would have just been an assignment and turned it into something useful for me. I’m not sure why not being able to share the code with the world would change the value proposition of doing that stuff?

I also have to assume there is some limit on how long you’re expected to hide your work away? After you graduate, if you make the repo public, what are they going to do?

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jjmarr 215 days ago
Well, I've enjoyed it too, but I'd rather spend that time contributing to OSS if it's potentially the difference between getting a job.
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