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 ;)

Comments

You're caught

[alen]

Your Hello World program is exactly the same as Johnny's. You fail. You're kicked out of school. Good bye.

Repost Detector

[Unknown Bovine Group]

Maybe Slashdot could use this technology to stop reposts.

Cheating Is Harder Than Actually Doing The Work

[KingAdrock]

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.

so if another university uses the same code

[Infonaut]

to stop cheating, will GT bust them for plagiarism? ;-)

Re:Flame-bait in comment aside:

[StaticEngine]

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.

Re:Flame-bait in comment aside:

[Spectre]

if you never learn how to do anything but copy & paste other people's code

Then you are known as a JavaScript coder ...

Yeah, but.

[Pope Slackman]

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

Experience of an former TA

[BWS]

I was TA/Maker for 2 classes at my Univ and my experience with cheating suggests that programs like these are necessary...... here are some of the better exampls.

1. for an intro to java course... I had a student that photocopied another's assignment and then used white-out to remove the other's name and write his own down
2. for an intro to java course... they had to implement a doubbly linked list structure... I had 4 students copy off another student... they changed all the variables by adding an extra to the end ... so like next became nextS... (they used Z, S, and B FYI respectively)
3. for an data strcutres course... I had the two students who's code was the same expect that they replaced the numbers in the varibles by the written version... so like counter1 became counterOne and counter2 became counterTwo
4. my 2nd funniest example (well, the first one is really good) is an student who tried to pass in another's assignmetn and changed the comments type... he replaced all the /* */ comments by // comments..
5. my best example was once when I was TAing a course and during my tutorial one of the students acutally offered me $40 to do an assignment for them... (they didn't know I was the TA)...

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"

Re:More Info

[statusbar]

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

I remember a guy....

[mikera]

....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.

Re:Flame-bait in comment aside:

[bareman]

Oh my God. I have to get some underlings. I'd love to go golfing.