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

Re:Real-world vs. school

[SJS]

Would you want to work with (or supervise) a slacker who couldn't code his way out of a paper bag, but who graduated anyway because hecut-and-pasted the work of his (harder-working) classmates?

Seen that.

A lot of college students -- especially the ones in CS -- use the argument that copying work is equivalent to "consulting with a co-worker"; apparently, this is to disguise the fact that they don't actually know what they're doing.

Many of these students appear to be pursuing a CS degree because "that is where the money is". Which is a damn poor reason, I think, but that's just my opinion. They also tend to be the ones who complain about having to learn more than one language... "You should teach us $LANGUAGE_OF_THE_MONTH, to better prepare us for the work force!" they cry.

Bah. A university degree is supposed to certify that you know how to think and how to learn, not that you're basically a trained monkey. I think that undergrad courses should only teach the so-called "dead" languages -- and when one of 'em becomes popular again, drop it, and move to something else. An undergraduate should come out of school with a solid grasp of Pascal, Forth, Scheme, and MIX or SICTOY.