When does helping someone with homework equal cheating?

[Egotistical EvilN]

At Wallace State, our courses come with discussion boards. I logged in 2 days ago, and saw a post asking for help in understanding the problem. This is the problem:

"4. You require an algorithm that will read in a discount rate (as a percentage) and the prices of three items. The program is to calculate the total dollar amount of discounts received and the price for the customer. The amount of discounts received is calculated by multiplying the discount rate percentage times the total price. The final price to the customer is the original price minus the total discount amount. Print the original total price, the total dollar amount of discounts received and the final price for the customer as output."

I replied like this (omitting equations and a good chunk of the information in the prescribed homework):
Get the Three Prices
Get the Discountrate
Math to find Subtotal
Math To Find Discount Total
Math to Find Final Total
Print Subtotal,Discount Total, Final Total.

And I received this email yesterday:
"Andrew,
What you did in the posting in response to that other students question is UNACCEPTABLE. If you post any more potential solutions, even partial code, I will be forced to take administrative action against you and any other violators. Helping someone understand concepts is one thing, providing pseudocode, even partial pseudocode, is an entirely different thing. Do not make this mistake again..... Terry"

So, what exactly is crossing the line between helping, and cheating?

[MulletMan13]

That's BS on what the teacher did.... you told him the steps to get where he needed to be, not solutions.

Then again if you are in your second week and the code is SUPER simple (i.e. y=x+2;) where you write 'Math to get____' then I could see his argument. Quite honestly that problem could be solved in like... 10 lines of C code, so I guess walking him through it that early is considered 'pseudocode'. My advice would be to talk to the Professor and see xactly what he felt you did wrong.

[Strapping Scherzo]

Yes that truly is some BS. You basically said exactly what the problem said but not in sentence form. Your post was definitely not pseudo code. Pseudo code would actually say what math was taking place. In that sense, the text to the problem offered more in terms of pseudo code. What else is the message board good for if you can't discuss the problem and possible solutions?

[APE]

I'd rip him a new one.

[Covar]

about the only thing i would have probably done, was instead of saying "Math to find x" just said "find x" or "figure out x"

honestly what you wrote is barely psuedocode. I would definitely ask the teacher about this, and find out from him what the proper response, because as a TA I probably would have given the exact same response.

[BlackAura]

All you did was restate the question. Personally, I don't see how that would be considered an answer, or even a partial answer.

Sounds like they're still at the stage where the main thing is practicing explaining to the computer exactly what you want it to do. Typically, the main issue people have is getting a working program, or even parts of a working program.

Exactly what the program needs to do is clearly stated in the question, so the point of the question seems to be to find out how to input four numbers, how to add three of them together, how to multiply two numbers together, how to subtract one number from another, and how to print numbers back out.

Sounds like either the teacher is expecting everybody to be a complete moron, or they're being paranoid.

[Egotistical EvilN]

Oh, and this would be the pseudocode for it.

CLS
Print "Please enter the prices of three items"
input item1
input item2
input item3
subtotal=item1+item2+item3
Print "Please enter the discount as a decimal."
input discountrate
subtotal*discountrate=discount
subtotal-discount=total
Print subtotal "is the price before discount"
Print discount "is the discount"
Print total "is the total after the discount"

[Ex-Cyber]

So, what exactly is crossing the line between helping, and cheating?

I think it depends on the purpose and complexity of the assignment. I don't know the full context, but it sounds like extracting the algorithmic structure from an English description may be a key component of the assignment. If so and you've diluted the thinking involved in that, I can understand why a teacher would object. One factor weighing against you is that you've posted a fairly complete overview rather than answering a more focused question. However, I do agree that the response was an overreaction and should have more clearly explained what you did wrong. You have every right to ask for clarification.

[MulletMan13]

This assignment was WAY too easy to even need any sort of overview... how is this person even capable of college level thinking? It's as basic as basic can get, and although you were just guiding him through, saying it in English was basically telling him the code. Now if there were actually other steps involved, it would be one thing but every sentence of yours essentially corresponded to one line of code.

Honestly the person who initially posted that question should get a kick to the face, and really think of why they are in a CompSci class.

[Quzar]

So, what exactly is crossing the line between helping, and cheating?

I think it depends on the purpose and complexity of the assignment. I don't know the full context, but it sounds like extracting the algorithmic structure from an English description may be a key component of the assignment. If so and you've diluted the thinking involved in that, I can understand why a teacher would object. One factor weighing against you is that you've posted a fairly complete overview rather than answering a more focused question. However, I do agree that the response was an overreaction and should have more clearly explained what you did wrong. You have every right to ask for clarification.

That's exactly what I think about it. Here we are told that the message boards are 99% for the professors and TAs to use to answer, and that we should only really comment when either we have the same problem, we have a different but related problem, or to give extremely technical advice. An example (from one of my classes) would be:

Q:how could i save the objdump -D output to a file? It does not all fit on the screen so i can't see most of it. A: objdump -D bomb > blah.txt

or anything like that. In general appending > and a filename at the end of any
command will "pipe" the output of it to the other thing.

Technical help.

[Egotistical EvilN]

I received I reply. It was pseudo-pseudo code, according to him. Everything is fine now.

"And I did. Please don't provide code like that. Helping someone understand general concepts and general assistance is ok, but what you provided was WAY too close to a solution, even though you left out the mathematical part, that is not all there is to generating solutions.... terry"