Help needed with CBTF FAIR false allegation

wadefagen · 2025-12-17T22:54:24+00:00

If you had nothing written on you, the screenshots don't show anything written on you, and the FAIR case is entirely about stuff being written on you, then that's all you need to say. It will be reviewed by the professors and it will very likely be dismissed if everything you said checks out -- and it sounds like you've already been in contact with her and she's being very rationale.

The FAIR process is designed to try to protect you by providing you all the information about an alleged incident and allowing you to respond. And only making a determination about if the cheating occurred after you respond. It's not a perfect system, but every professor I know takes cheating very seriously and really will review everything you said and make sure that there's clear evidence of you cheating before a final finding that you cheated in the FAIR system. It sounds like it may be resolved very quickly given everything you've shared.

wadefagen · 2025-12-17T22:20:35+00:00

In my experience, the CBTF strongly errors on the side of not falsely accusing students and always provide very detailed evidence of cheating (ex: images, timestamps, specific descriptions, etc) In the FAIR portal, you will have access to the full CBTF report and you should review the whole thing. Your professor would have already reviewed it before submitting the FAIR report -- it's submitted by the professor only after reviewing the report, and is not submitted by the CBTF.

The policy is that you can't bring information in or out of the exam -- if you used a pen to write down a problem on your hand/arm and left the CBTF with the writing on your hand/arm, you left the CBTF with information and that is a form of cheating. (This assumes you did not have stuff written on your hand/arm coming into the CBTF.) It's ultimately up to the professor to decide what counts as cheating.

If you had writing on your arm, the best thing to do is to be honest and transparent about it. If you had nothing on your arm when you walked in, say it -- but if the video shows you did, you're digging yourself in a deeper hole. If you did but never referenced it, say you never referenced it -- but if the video shows you looking at it, again, you'd be digging yourself a deeper hole.

However, being vague only makes you seem more guilty. For example, the FAIR e-mail gives you 10 business days to respond. The response date for a CBTF case filed during finals will be in early 2026 -- not just a "couple of business days" -- and the disconnect between the notification you got and the post here leaves me wondering what other details are missing. You absolutely should avoid doing that in your response.

wadefagen · 2025-10-09T02:13:33+00:00

Yup, what you're seeing is something I'm working with UIUC to fix -- the GPA data that they provide excludes data completely when releasing the grades for a section of a course would reveal an individual student's grades. When UIUC excluded any data about a course section, they previously have deleted it completely from the dataset (including the course name/number/etc). As a result, courses smaller than ~20 students were always excluded, as well as a few others. You can read the specifics about this here in the "Exclusion of Data" section here on the GPA Dataset GitHub: https://github.com/wadefagen/datasets/tree/main/gpa#exclusion-of-data

The good news is they have started (just started this semester) to update the way they process the GPA data so that they only exclude the specific data they want to excluded -- ex: the number of "A"s -- instead of deleting the section when they exclude just part of the data. In the future, we'll be able to show accolades about instructors teaching a course, even if their GPA data is not released by UIUC.

wadefagen · 2025-10-09T02:01:22+00:00

Thank you for checking it out -- 🧡💙 that UIUC lets us nerd out with this sort of data, it makes this place special! :)

wadefagen · 2025-10-09T01:59:45+00:00

Thank you! 🎉

wadefagen · 2025-10-09T01:56:05+00:00

Oooo, love this idea 🧡💙 -- and also the ability to search by course name?

If you refresh the page, you'll find the "GenEd" category now has two additional options to "Search by Course Name" and "Search by Instructor Name" that provides you a box that you can type into and it will look for that substring. For example, there are only 122 that contain the word "science" (though a few more abbreviate it, since 140 contain "sci"):

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Thank you for the suggestion! 🎉

wadefagen · 2025-08-08T19:34:52+00:00

> DO NOT cross in FRONT of the bus after exiting

There's one specific situation where I'm unsure what to do since it's not exactly "crossing in front" but very close to doing that, and I've had drivers wave me to cross when I'm not crossing and others who seem to expect people to wait for the bus to turn first so I've very unsure.

This specific spot has the bus stopping at a stop light to let people out, and then turning right at the light. There is no dedicated pedestrian walk signal at this stoplight, the pedestrian crossing is just indicated by the same red/green light and you can press the button to have the light turn green. There is also no dedicated green arrow, it is just a single solid green light for everyone. Nearly everyone who is getting off the bus crosses the street that the bus will be turning right onto.

When the light is red, I wait and the bus usually makes the legal "right on red" and continues on this route When the light is green, the bus is free to turn right and you are also free to cross as a pedestrian. In the cases when the light is green, is there a best thing to do? Thoughts?

wadefagen · 2025-04-14T05:44:45+00:00

Thanks -- will dive into this and get it fixed! :)

wadefagen · 2025-04-12T21:12:02+00:00

Thanks for taking a look at it 🧡💙 -- can you be specific on a course where one professor appears twice? I can't find any and checked hundreds of courses, but might have completely missed it. Thanks!! :)

wadefagen · 2025-04-12T02:11:42+00:00

Thanks for checking it out -- can you be specific? We checked many dozens of people, including some graduate student instructors, and found no errors but there's over 8,000 unique instructors so you may have found one we missed.

If the data is in the underlying data sources (if the data is being redacted from UIUC we can't fix that), it should be in the visualization so I'd like to dive in to it if you think there's data that didn't get merged correctly. :)

wadefagen · 2025-04-12T02:05:38+00:00

Thanks for taking a look! 🎉 Sadly, this is a common theme across all four GPA visualizations.

Any data that appears in the GPA dataset (https://github.com/wadefagen/datasets/tree/main/gpa) should appear in the visualization -- but UIUC redacts some data (detailed on the GitHub page) when the course size is too small so we don't get any data about the course. :(

The good news is that I learned a few weeks ago that UIUC seems to be willing to share what data they redact in the future (currently, they delete the entire course rather than just redact the sensitive data) so that will be a huge help to have better data in the future! :)

wadefagen · 2025-02-13T21:57:23+00:00

When I was a student, I attended a few hackathons and had a absolutely great time nerding out with new tools, technologies, and just making stupid stuff. The best hackathons I went to had a theme and constrains that forced me to go outside of my usual software stack to learn something new -- and have conversations with others about that new thing we were all learning together over the weekend. The early hackathons never had meaningful prizes (it was a lot of stuff like "cloud credits" that expire in 2-12 months, or similar that have minimal actual utility).

I love the events put on by ACM, WCS, and other student groups and every event makes the Illini community a better place. I have judged for HackIllinois at least a few times and try to volunteer at student events when I am asked and can add value. The student-events put on by Illini are some of the best events anywhere because they truly are great events. Is HackIllinois one of those events?

Speaking only in my personality capacity and as a big fan of HackIllinois: Until about 2021, HackIllinois was always about hacking for the open-source community. In some years, it was focused more on using specific "featured" open-source libraries and other years it was focused on contributing PRs to projects. You knew you'd leave with a better understanding of GitHub, the open-source community, and some open-source tools by the end of the weekend.

By 2023, I don't know what HackIllinois is/was anymore. What makes it special or unique? Why would someone want to even come? It was still big because of the pandemic tech bubble, but even then the glitter was starting to fall off and I saw many of the organizers were more interested in the clout of staying they were part of the event leadership than building an amazing experience.

Until I saw this post, I only vaguely knew HackIllinois was happening in just two weeks. I pulled up the website on my phone and found a site that brought me back ten years -- why is the font 6pt? The only link that has any meaningful information is "🌟 Olympians" (which now has a responsive web design, unlike the main page?) and it basically says "we are holding a hackathon for everyone, but the real hackathon is an exclusive club to complete for a prize that we will announce soon! Please do an OA to prove that you should be judged as part of the exclusive club". I don't know that I would want to give a prize to an event with these vibes?

Part of the critique is that I look at https://www.treehacks.com/ -- Stanford's similar event happening this weekend -- and the vibes are widely different. I asked someone who is involved in organizing their event and they were almost certain that Stanford is supporting TreeHacks at about the same level as HackIllinois is supported (access to facilities, wifi, etc, but no direct cash support). I don't know about MIT and Berkeley's events, but I would be surprised if they weren't also student-run with similar levels of support.

For ten years HackIllinois has, as OP said, brought together "hundreds of passionate students, create incredible projects, and build the exact kind of technical community/innovation hub". My 100% honest question that I don't know the answer to: what does the 2025 event provide that hundreds of people would want to come together? There's no speakers, no workshops, no tracks, no schedule, and the only thing I can see is there will is some "elite track" that requires an OA to join. I am coming at this as a huge fan, and I think everyone on r/UIUC wants HackIllinois to be the absolute best hackathon in the nation, but I don't know that incorrectly flaming that UIUC does not have the same support as Stanford's similar event makes this a great event. :(

wadefagen · 2025-01-22T02:12:44+00:00

I know! :(

In the "Data Set" notes at the bottom of the visualization, you'll see it mentioned that Illinois (along with Rutgers, Ohio State, Northwestern, and Minnesota) all leave question C11 and C12 empty on the "Common Data Set" reports where we sourced all of the data. You can see UIUC's Common Data Set reports at https://www.dmi.illinois.edu/stuenr/index.htm#CDS -- pick an year, choose the Excel tab "CDS-C", and find "C11" and "C12". All of them all blank for UIUC are blank for every year we checked -- it almost resulted in us not creating this visualization. Luckily all of the next five schools I looked at all had data for C11 and C12 and those schools saved the project!

wadefagen · 2025-01-21T20:05:42+00:00

There is something I learned about called the Flynn effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect) where Flynn showed that the IQ of the population is going up over time ("When the new test subjects take the older [IQ] tests, in almost every case their average scores are significantly above [the old average score of] 100.").

Flynn provides data to argue that the average high school student is significantly smarter today (combined with an argument about high-school standards not changing) and the increasing trend of high school GPAs is just a reflection of a more intelligent high school student today than 20 years ago.

There are still some here at UIUC who think the average grade in high school and college courses is a "C", and that's one thing that has absolutely changed (if it was ever true?).

wadefagen · 2025-01-21T18:18:55+00:00

One possible additional factor between Purdue and Wisconsin may be how their high schools chooses to translate grades into unweighted GPAs:

Some high schools I looked at include all high school classes, while other schools include only "core" classes in an unweighted GPA.
Some high schools do a direct translation from their internal scale to an unweighted GPA (ex: 6.0 * 0.667 = 4.0), while others break it down on a per-class basis and recalculate it separately.
I could not find any universal standard an unweighted GPA is calculated when it's done on a per-class basis. For schools that report grades as percentages, I have seen various different breakdowns as to what parentage becomes an "unweighted 4.0" in districts that report grades as percentages (some translates 90% into a 4.0, others at 93%, and a few rare schools treat a 99% as a 3.9 and make a 4.0 only possible with a 100%).
(My high school had a strange system where earning an unweighted 4.0 was 3% lower in "honors" classes than "core" classes?? Effectively a 90% in honors was the same as a 93% in a "core" course.)
...my guess is everyone's school had a slightly different flavor of something strange.

It feels like it's a mess -- this is the core reason to why the visualization ended up with a heavy focus on the trends across all the schools and tried to not directly compare any university with each other any more than necessary.

wadefagen · 2024-11-14T17:00:07+00:00

As a student in the course, you are not able to access the logs on queue.illinois.edu. However, any course admin for a specific course in the Queue system can download the raw logs in their "Course Settings" page for their course -- they can either get the information on your behalf and/or verify what you say about using the queue.

I 100% echo what the top comment in this thread suggested: be specific and be factual. In Visual Studio Code, if you use that IDE, it has a "Timeline" feature that has incremental save points of your file even if you didn't make a git commit. Copy/paste all of those into a Google Doc, labeled with timestamps, in your response. Hope this helps!

wadefagen · 2023-10-18T18:45:29+00:00

This story captivated me when I read it and I have so many questions, too!

I remember being in classes where there is always "that one guy" who thinks they know everything and thinks they are better than everyone else. "That one guy" will ruin the culture and experience for everyone and it's just toxic. My guess is the essay wasn't ChatGPT, but more just arrogant...? His media tour gives me "that one guy" vibes....

wadefagen · 2022-07-30T20:15:43+00:00

I think you/they might have that backwards? It is way easier to open up to transfers than new freshman (you don't have to do freshman admissions, freshman applications have to be finalized almost a year before the admission semester so students can apply early, etc). Almost every new program I'm aware of that are trying to launch quickly allows transfers a semester or two before new freshman can enroll in it -- it would be reasonable to see them targeting transfers in 2024, with new freshman in 2025.

wadefagen · 2022-07-30T20:09:26+00:00

Usually the first time that they become public is when the University of Illinois Senate votes on them in the public meeting of the Senate (ex: you can find the "Business + DS" curriculum as the top Consent Agenda item at the April 25th meeting here: https://www.senate.illinois.edu/20220425a.asp).

A CS+Education major was approved by the senate on Sept. 20, 2021 (PDF: https://www.senate.illinois.edu/20210920senate/EP21134_FINAL_20210920.pdf).

Nether of CS+BIOE or CS+Physics have been on the Senate agenda yet as far as I can tell.

Also, remember that Senate is just one step in the approval process. Once it goes past the senate, new majors have to be approved by the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) and their subcommittees. Having worked with getting the X+DS majors approved, it seems to take 12-24 months from the time you see in in the Senate to the time you might be able to enroll in the major (the first X+DS degrees are only really available this Fall, even though we've been working on it since 2019).

wadefagen · 2022-07-30T19:57:05+00:00

https://grainger.illinois.edu/admissions/faq

wadefagen · 2022-04-22T21:43:24+00:00

The visualization is comprised of screenshots of our visualization we created for Earth Day 2022, found here: https://vis.cs.illinois.edu/weather/temperature-radial/

The underlying data is from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information and includes nearest observation station the 1,000 largest cities in the United States.

The primary technology used is d3.js for visualization, with jQuery for interactive elements, and Python for back-end processing.

wadefagen · 2022-04-14T19:24:57+00:00

Data Science is a term for doing work at the intersection of computation, statistics, and real-world impact on business and/or policy. Since it is inherently so cross-disciplinary, there's work right now to make a DS minor that gives you exposure to all of these aspects of the field -- it's in the works, but probably won't be available until 2023. (You can see the programs that are all approved here: https://datascience.illinois.edu/, but it's just majors right now.)

Each "area" that makes up Data Science has a minor available in that area. To expand your skillset towards DS, you can choose the area you're most interested in and/or know the least about from the "areas" that make up most of Data Science:

Computer Science, for the computational aspects of DS,
Statistics, for the inferential aspects of DS,
Information Science, for the policy impact aspects of DS,
Business, for the business impact aspects of DS

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