> Some of the numbers that you saw from the number of students who receive failing grades were because we caught them (cheating) and prosecuted them and are sending their cases to the center for student conduct,” Garcia said. According to Garcia, nearly 30 students in CS 10 were caught cheating on take-home exams in spring 2026.

▲

Manuel_D 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

In my uni, rates of honor code violations in introductory CS classes were high even before AI. I was a section-leader for the CS106 series at Stanford, and the honor code violations were common. In 2015, ~20% of one intro class was suspected of an honor code violation [1]. Often, the CS department comprised the majority of honor code violations in a given quarter.

There are several reasons for this:

1. Cheating in CS is easier to detect. MOSS [2] (authored by CS professor Alex Aiken) is a very effective tool at detecting plagiarism in coding assignments. Personally I witnessed more honor-code violations in math problem sets, but there was no feasible way for professors to detect this.

2. Problems in programming assignments are (usually) very tangibly wrong. I can bullshit my way through an essay with shoddy research, I can hand-wave a proof that is definitely wrong but will probably garner at least some points. But when your program is crashing or not compiling, and the due date is approaching, it produces a very immediate and undeniable sense of failure and pressure to cheat. The thing is, many students would get a decent chunk of credit even for failing code, but this is not immediately obvious.

3. The ability to cheat is more available. Math problem sets tend to change quarter by quarter. It's basically impossible to cheat on a prose essay short of straight up paying someone to write it for you, or fabricating sources. But for CS classes, especially at prominent universities, there are plenty of solutions online. Much of it is people who aren't event at Stanford implementing the assignments for fun or self-learning, and sharing it with their peers. Which, to be clear, isn't unethical or bad - it's the responsibility of Stanford students to refrain from looking at those solutions. But nonetheless, it's a contributing factor.

1. https://stanforddaily.com/2015/03/29/increase-in-cs-106-hono...

2. https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/

	▲	morpheuskafka 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> MOSS [2] (authored by CS professor Alex Aiken) is a very effective tool at detecting plagiarism He apparently also makes (I would assume a satisfying amount of) money selling the same technology to law firms for copyright/patent analysis: https://www.similix.com (I love these ultra minimal HTML sites, ex. https://www.hwaci.com (SQLite commercial licensing) for another example. It just has this subtle smugness, like you either don't need any new clients or virtually all of the market is your client.)

▲

aidenn0 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Anybody know how many students take CS 10 in a typical spring semester?

▲

mdorazio an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I believe it’s still a single section, so probably around 250 (at least that’s about what it was when I was there a long time ago). Compared to the 1000+ who take 61A.

▲

snarky-comments 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Or how many are normally caught cheating?

Did they use AI to detect AI using cheaters?

▲

Manuel_D 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

When I was a section leader (not at Berkeley, though) we used MOSS: https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/

It's not AI, its a deterministic program that analyzes compiled code for similarity.

▲

jmalicki 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And if cheating was triggered using AI detectors, was it real?

AI detectors are pretty mid in practice - they tend to have a lot of false positives for "B" students who are okay, but can still be struggled to be more coherent than AIs are. There are some specific triggers that AIs are way more likely to do than students, but a lot of AI detectors will trigger on this "almost there, but you're still struggling" level of essay writing that might get a B, B-.

I could expect the same might be true for CS students even though I haven't seen how AI detectors work for CS/math homework.

	▲	acbart 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You'd be amazed at how many students we know are obviously cheating because the logs reveal that they copy pasted a long, complete answer within seconds of opening a problem for the first time, full of sophisticated code constructs that we didn't teach them, and lot's of nicely formatted comments. Sometimes they even copy/paste the entire GPT output and then format it down.