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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 ;)
Remember, folks -- you may not get fired for consulting with a fellow programmer, but if you never learn how to do anything but copy & paste other people's code, you've lost out on a LOT of problem solving skills.
:).
There's a difference, a huge difference, between collaborating and cheating.
In the real world, you _would_ get fired for taking credit for someone else's work, trying to pass it off on your own. Heck, you'd probably also violate a bunch of licenses, too
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
In the real world, you are fired if you steal code from someone else without their permission, pretend it's your own, and incorporate it into the app you're writing for your company. In the real world, people give credit where credit is due.
A lot of the stories I hear about students plagiarizing each other's code is done without the other student's permission. Many systems have files readable by other students by default, and students don't bother to read-protect their files. Students will take printouts out of the trash. And of course, it's always convenient for students to claim they didn't know the other person copied their work.
It's better for students if professors have an accurate way of detecting cheating. The worst thing is if the method is inaccurate, and innocent students get accused. This method sounds accurate.
Find free books.
So how exactly does consulting with a fellow student (or co-worker) result in both parties having identical code? I have to say that this is the most ignorant comment I've seen attached to a slashdot story ever.
At my University they have the same code policy but they encourage you to work with others! Under no circumstances are you to copy their code line by line but you can certainly ask for their help or use a module or two. The only condition to all of this is that you credit them on the cover sheet of your assignment.
Sorry for the flame but I saw that comment and it made me quite irate.
--
Todd's Law: All things being equal, you lose!
CS programs at schools are not out to end colaboration with students. They are aiming to produce students who know how to program. In the real world YES, you can just copy the code directly from someone else, but what does that teach you? Nothing. Well how to copy/paste.
I mean, we talked about this today in class, if a guy gets a degree and makes it out of school riding the coattails of others his degree is worthless. Once he is out in the real world, he also drags down everyone else who has the same degree from the same school because employeers will think - Guys from school x don't know jack.
CS departements are not evil, but they are trying to uphold the principles of school. Don't misinterpret actions such as these as some sort of action to "keep people down".
-RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
Good point. There's another reason why CmdrTaco's comment represents flawed thinking: I've been in several group projects in school in which we had to collaberate, and it certainly did not consist of copying answers off one another. I don't think that cheating can ever be construed as "consulting with a co-worker." In most of my CS classes at ohio-state, my professors encourage us to work together toward understanding the problems, but to actually turn in our own solutions.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
You all laugh at that joke, but in my friend's Operating Systems class this fall, the "cheat script" flagged half the students, very few of whom were actually cheating. My friend's group didn't hand in one part of the assignment, and the script detected similarities between the nonexistent file and the whitespace in other groups' code. Duh. And of course, instead of first LOOKING at the similarities, the professors went ahead and accused my friend of cheating, and told him he had to come to an "appeal session" THAT SAME DAY.
Students shouldn't cheat, but professors shouldn't toss around those accusations lightly either.
grep -ri 'should work'
"Today I am going to give you two examinations, one in trigonometry and one in honesty. I hope you will pass them both, but if you must fail one, let it be trigonometry, for there are many good [people] in this world today who cannot pass an examination in trigonometry, but there are no good [people] in the world who cannot pass an examination in honesty."
- Madison Sarratt (1891-1978), dean, Vanderbilt University.
Actually, the white space is what tends to get the cheaters caught.
If there's 6 extra spaces at the end of a few lines and there are exactly the same extra spaces on the same lines (variable names aside), then there's an extremely good chance it's the same code, or a cut and paste of that section at the very least.
In addition, you'd want to strip comments in your above example.
As a former TA for one of these classes who nearly ended up working on the cheat finder software for a quarter, let me add some additional fuel for the fire.
1. These are not just "programmers" in the traditional Computer Science major sense. The first class is required for almost all students at Georgia Tech. It started off just for Computer Science and Computer Engineering, then expanded to all engineering majors (civil, mechanical, etc). Now, even management majors (Georgia Tech's version of Communications, Basketweaving, or whatever the weak major that many athletes did at your school) have to take the class. The language used to be a locally developed pseudocode language (affectionately known as Russcal). Right or wrong, many of these students consider the class to be an unnecessary hurdle on their way to a degree, and to a technologically illiterate management major, programming does not come easy, nor are they inclined to learn their ethical obligations as a "programmer" - they just want out of the class.
2. Contrary to many snide remarks, the algorithm is, in fact, quite sophisticated. It is not fooled by extra white space, variable name changes, or simple rearranging. As a TA, I saw even simple algorithms done a slightly different way by every single student. Chances are that a student who will resort to cheating doesn't know enough to rearrange the code beyond the recognition of the cheat-finder and still have it be correct, and a student who does know enough would probably spend as much time dressing it up as it would take them to write the thing in the first place.
3. Once two submissions are flagged as possible copies, they are first reviewed by a student TA. If the TA believes that they are in fact copied, it is escalated to the class manager (GT staff), and then to the dean if need be.
It's not a perfect system, but the cheat-finder does a good job of crunching the role of a human down to a minimum, and leaves room for people to make a subjective judgement. It's pretty good, so cut the sarcasm back a bit - it's unwarranted.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
Pardon me for posting anonymously, but I've got to let a little venom loose.
I was a TA at an prestigious, well known computer science program. The professors there always unfurled elaborate anti-cheating policies. Cheating of any kind whatsoever would be brought before the Dean, where you are going to be subject to a wide range of punishments, including possible expulsion from the University. They purported to be using a script very similar to the one being described here. Yet many of my classmates cut and pasted their way through all the entry level classes while i labored away at every assignment. How did they get away with it?
That one issue -- that people who did no original work whatsoever got scores at least as high as mine -- has been dismissed as "a fact of life" by friends and family, and I tend to not think about it too much. Why? Because I'm the one getting the education, not them, and in 5 years when college GPAs don't matter a fraction as much as intelligence, experience, and work ability, I'll get sweet (or is it l33t?) revenge.
But in the meantime, I thought, let's become a TA and be on the other side of the fence for a change. Let me do my part to bring all these cheaters to justice.
And you know what? The reason they all got away with it was not because the previous TAs slacked off, but because the professors, when push came to shove, just didn't care. They lied about using the script.
When I brought identical assignments to their attention, they didn't pounce, but gave me options such as taking off some points or letting it go.
As it turns out, we have a very forgiving Dean, and any cheaters brought to his attention will get no more than a slap on the wrist. For that, professors get to do a lot of paperwork, cast themselves as the bad cop in making the case, and get a poor repuatation with students who are used to the status-quo of a cheat friendly environment. They don't want to do any of that , so they put on the pretense of being tough on cheating and hope it all goes away.
Slashdot is mostly a young crowd, and young are naive like I was, so let me break some bubbles: maybe at GA Tech profs let ethics take precedence over apathy, but not everywhere.
And to all your cheaters out there: yes, you're off the hook for now, but wait until we're co-workers.
Can someone please mod this out of the anonymous doldrums? Thanks.
I personally have had experience being accused of cheating in a computer science class. At the uni that I attended, the prof for the Programming Languages class was in his tenure and had already (mentally) retired. His concern for the class was minimal at best. An example of this was the time that myself and another student went into his office to talk to him because he was late to class and we had some questions on an assignmnet that was due the following class. When we poked our heads in his office he was in his chair - asleep. If that isn't enough - he completely forgot to show up for the final exam.
I don't claim to be a model student by any means, but in this class of 16 I had the highest grade in the class and had done every assignment to the best of my abilities. It came as quite a shock to me when I got my grades and noticed that there was an F for my Programming Languages class.
I promptly called the professor and he said that this was an issue that was best dealt with in a face to face manner - so I went to his office and he claimed that myself and 3 other students in the class had cheated. He pulled up the source code and showed the very striking similarities. When I explained him that some of the problems that were assigned were out of the scope of this class and that he offered no help, I informed him that I had worked with these students to get a solution to the problem. We did not copy any prior works, and all worked together to complete a tough assignment. I admitted that we shared code, only because we had shared ideas and had all come to the solution together.
To make an already long story short (Im forcing myself to leave out details), it ended up getting appealed and overturned, and the professor is now on probation and only teaching 100 level courses
The moral - cheating and sharing of ideas are different concepts and should be handled seperately. I don't agree with programs that flag cheating based on similarities in code because sharing of ideas is typically encouraged in a university setting as long as they are obtained legitimately - a program as such cannot sufficiently distinguish the two.
Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more