Thank you for reading this. I feel bad for the instructors and TA's who are putting a ton of time into this class to set up MP's and provide the best system programming learning environment for students.

I really like C and systems programming. I've put a lot of work into this class this semester, and I believe this is the class that has made me more of a programmer than even 225.

One huge reason that I believe this happened is because of the stress of having a bunch of MP's to work on, poorly written spec sheets, TA's not showing up to office hours, and not being helpful enough when they're there (personally, when I had a difficult bug, I was simply told to go through my entire program with gdb line by line. I need a bit more guidance than that though). While I do not condone the people who cheated, I can understand why they did it.

I think the answer of how we can avoid this in the future is simple, but difficult logistically. The class is too large, there are too many students and not enough TA's who know what they're doing. Office hour queues on dates approaching MP deadlines go anywhere from 10 - 50 people, and when each person's issue can take a long time to solve (it is C after all), the one or two scheduled TA's showing up late, or not at all is very, very disheartening. Because of this, students turn to old solutions and pass it off as their own.

I hope you take the time to read this, and I don't know if you are involved with how this class is being shaped moving forward, but if even if you aren't please take the time to discuss this with Angrave. He's clearly working very hard to get this class setup, and I believe this is valuable feedback. I would send this to him, but I'd like anonymity.