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Cheating Detector from Georgia Tech
brightboy writes "According to this Yahoo! News article, Georgia Tech has developed and implemented a "cheating detector"; that is, a program which compares students' coding assignments to each other and detects exact matches. This was used for two undergraduate classes: "Introduction to Computing" (required for any student in the College of Computing) and "Object Oriented Programming" (required for Computer Science majors)." Cuz
remember programmers: in the real world you are fired if you consult
with a co-worker ;)
Your Hello World program is exactly the same as Johnny's. You fail. You're kicked out of school. Good bye.
1993? Think it was written in COBOL? Have they tested it for Y2K compliance?
Kind thoughts do not change the world
How the hell are all those lonely CS majors supposed to get in good with the Education majors now?
It hurts when I pee.
m00.
I always found that it wasn't easy to cheat. If I copy and pasted somebodies code, I had to go back through and change it all around so that I couldn't be caught cheating. This often proved to be more difficult than actually doing the project myself would have been.
to stop cheating, will GT bust them for plagiarism? ;-)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I wonder if they will start using this on the resumes of their coaches from now on?
In the real world, you _would_ get fired for taking credit for someone else's work, trying to pass it off on your own.
Actually, from what I've seen, in the real world you get promoted for taking credit for someone else's work, especially when it's one of your underlings who slaved away while you were out on the golf course.
Actually, in the real-real world it just means that you are a manager.
Then you are known as a JavaScript coder
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
No two programmers are working on the exact same bug/feature. You can't expect to just copy someone else's code or get them to do most of the work for you. At best, you can ask for help, but that's not what the article is talking about. It's talking about straight copying of code (with minor changes to fool a cursory examination).
...you would have roommates that wouldn't talk to you anymore :(
Knowing slashdot, they'd prolly implement it by comparing how well they compress.
You know they're dying to use this revolutionary compression filter technology in other places!
C-X C-S
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/09/198259 &mode=thread
"Perhaps most amazingly, votaries of 'diversity' insist on absolute conformity." -- Tony Snow
in general... they are the extreme... there is a lot of general cheating going on and I think something like this is a good idea... to catch "the smarter cheaters"
-- Note: These Comments are Generated by ME! Not You! ME!
Hmmm...
Makes me think of the possibility of a new product! anti-cheatfinder!
Parse the original code and then re-organize the parse tree to be different yet functionally equivalent. Output the new code based on the modified parse tree. No need to change the variable names since cheatfinder ignores them anyways.
Then, sell the product to cheaters around the world! Hopefully they will go get jobs at microsoft!
Jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
My first programming course 20 odd years ago led to a pretty funny cheating story. For a final exam we were given a fairly simple coding assignment to do on the last day of class. We were instructed to write our code down on sheet of paper, put our name on it, xerox a copy of it and hand it in right then and there. And then we had until the last day of Finals week to get the code to compile and work, and we would be graded on the delta between the first draft and the working code.
:).
The funny thing was that the course was taught in two sessions, a 10:00AM and 11:000AM session and the two sessions were given completely different coding assignments.
And yet there were a number of people that somehow managed to hand in working code for the other session's assignment instead of their own
Nah, you just have to be really clever about it, such that the original programmer gets fired, and then the code makes the company billions in the video game industry, and you become a senior executive vice president of the company, and the original programmer is reduced to an arcade manager, and then he tries to hack into your systems, and then your mainframe decides to digitize him, and he helps a small group of rebels free the system.
Ok, maybe I've watched Tron a few too many times...
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
I acutally had the problem of a co-worker taking a bunch of work I had done to the boss and claiming he did the work.
The funny thing is the guy was so stupid he didn't understand that there would be backups that would show who created the files and when.
Here's the flip side of Cmd Taco's comment:
Manager: Hi Sally, this is Bill, our new hire. He graduated without writing a line of original code and is totally clueless, despite successfully litigating against Georgia Tech's use of a cheat detector. You'll be doing all his work as well as your own.
Sally (pulling hair out in clumps): Arrrrgh! Damn you Cmd Taco and your smug comments!
Bill (puzzled): I thought it was okay to consult with co-workers?
Curtain closes.
This mini-software-drama has been brought to you by Beatrice.
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as Anonymous Coward since 1997
and quite the third thing to advertise in a public forum that you completely failed to get a simple joke.
....who thought he would cheat by copying someone else's code.
But he was pretty paranoid about getting caught, and realised that a verbatim copy wasn't enough, you'd have to change the variable names, comments etc.
So he did some research, wrote himself a little parser that read in the source code and built a parse tree of the program. He then wrote another function that spat out all the code again but with different spacing, block ordering and some simple variable renaming (e.g. x,y,x->a,b,c)
To make sure the structure of the code didn't give him away, he wrote a few code transformations, e.g. if a then b else c became if !a then c else b. The order of non-conflicting assignments were swapped, and mathematic expressions were re-arranged (sometimes actually optimising the original code in the process!).
Still wasn't good enough, the comments needed changing and the structure of the code looked the same. So he linked in a thesaurus and NLP/AUG engine to change the words in a meaning-preserving manner. Same principle could be applied to the more complex variable and function names, so buildTree became makeStructure etc.
Finally, to put the icing on the cake he modified the program so it could output the code in a couple of different functional languages. Made the plagiarism almost impossible to spot.
Best programmer I ever met.
Oh my God. I have to get some underlings. I'd love to go golfing.
So it's OK to plagiarize on an exam, as long as you get permission and attribute the original author!
A student came up and said "I've written all of the assignment, but the compiler is broken." My friend looked at the error output from the toy teaching language compiler.
"Unknown keyword 'From:' in line 1 'From: student2@cs.university.edu'"
"Unknown keyword 'Subject:' in line 2 'Subject: Assignment 2 answers'"
The student tried to insist that it was all his own work.
Eh? How could they tell? Everything written in Scheme looks exactly the same.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I honed my programming skills in college by writing a 10,000 line perl script which tranforms other students' work in ways not identifieable by automatic cheat detectors.
-mjjm
---
Nothing is more depressing than the sight of people who believe they are following collective manias of thier own free will.
--Czeslaw Milosz
Nothing's more depressing than the sight of people who believe they're following collective manias of thier own free wil
Was in a class where the instructor asked us to write a program to perform an ascii sort of a file (kind of like 'sort' actually). I specifically asked if we could use libraries, and he said yes. Of course most of the students were using Pascal...
You can probably guess what I did. My program featured the prominant use of "qsort()" out of the C library. Even though I had learned about callbacks with the thing, he really didn't like it. Made me go back and reimplement it so that there was an actual "sort" being performed in my code. Ug.
Now I'm a Principal Engineer.
Back in school I was so poor I would write other people's coding assignments for money. I made what's equivalent to a few thousand dollars doing this. The trick, of course, was to do things differently for every single person. This meant coding it in different ways which couldn't be caught.
Needless to say I was in "high demand" by several groups. Advertising was purely through word of mouth, and I never got caught.
Do I regret it? Absolutely not. Those same students now can't code their way out of a paperbag, and I got to put myself through school.