Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Cheaters, Spammers, Chessmen
GA Tech TAs not given credit for program exposing those who don't give credit. zorba1 writes: "Chalk another one to the 'TAs get no credit' department. CNN is running an article on how on how Georgia Tech's College of Computing professors wrote a cheat-finder program that discovered 186 Intro to Computing cheaters. As a former CS TA at GaTech, some clarification points:
- The app was developed by TAs, not by professors.
- It doesn't detect 'exact duplications of computer code.' It removes variable names and examines duplication in code structure.
- The only reason it's in the news is that GaTech recently required nearly all students to take one or two introductory CS courses."
The stench whiffed 'round the world ... Kelsevinal writes "A look at this article on the Chicago Tribune website reveals that our good friend Bernie Shifman is getting a little publicity... Think what you want about the situation, but I think it's funny as hell. I bet Shifman likes it too ... think of all the human resources depts. who might see this!"
After all, not everything is Free. xueexueg writes: "I just noticed that the Free Software Foundation has finally gotten around to setting up secure servers for orders and donations. For ages you actually had to print out and mail an order form to them, but now, at last, you can give them money for goods or charity, in your proverbial underwear."
And let's face it, there aren't that many places in the world where you can order T-shirts adorned with a levitating gnu.
Does this remind you of Gorman Seedling's electric collars? koganuts writes: "Updating a story posted by Slashdot on January 9th, according to The Los Angeles Times, "Gov. Gray Davis' proposal to let state and local police obtain roving wiretaps on suspected criminals was dropped from the legislation containing it Tuesday after the legislative counsel's office concluded that it was illegal." There were also provisions in the proposed bill which extended wiretapping to e-mail and the Internet. One thing I never knew was that "...wiretaps cost an average of $56,767.""
Have you learned your lesson? Eblis writes: "The Learning Machine Challenged hosted by AI has finally ground to a halt, with results available at lmw.a-i.com. Congratulations to the winners and to AI for hosting such a successful contest!"
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign had similar cheating catching software running on all the programming assignment since before 94. This is nothing new. I remember in 96 they caught 2/3 of the intro CS class (those silly non-CS/CompE majors) copying code from each other.
Cool, the Chicago Trib has a poll, just like slashdot and cNet.
Is Bernard Shifman a "moron spammer?"
Yes. Hundreds of complaints can't be wrong.
No. Give the guy a break. He's looking for a job.
Please stop and vote for this moron spammer.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Punkbuster stopped supporting HL/CS several months ago. Paladin is a joke and was hacked within minutes of it being released.
What I run on my server is a combination of CSGuard And Cheating Death. Cheating Death is interesting in that it doesn't attempt to detect cheats, but just to hide the extra information used by the cheats to wallhack/aimbot, etc. It seems to work really well, and is going to be very much harder for the cheat coders to work around.
Result? My server is mostly cheater free. I can go on there and have a good game and not worry about cheating. I bust something like 10-20 people a day which makes me happy..
(this was for an assembly language course)
We had no false positives.
I know that at least one university (the one I am still enrolled at, hence the anonymous coward...) intentionally looks the other way when students send in copies. Why? Two reasons.
1. It makes the university money.Alot of the computer science freshmen turn in 'very similar' coding assignments. They pass a class or two in this manner, but later fail a couple project oriented classes that they can't fake. Then they change majors once or twice, taking that many more classes at the university. More classes = more money for the university. (note: a professor told me this- if this reason is BS then it his his BS, not mine.)
2. If you punish one cheater, you have to punish them all. Look at the stats they are giving - 2/3 of the students cought? The school is chucking it's reputation. It also takes extra work punish these students, the professors have to attend boards of inquiry and such. (This explanation also came from the same professor, but seems like a more sane responce than number 1.)
Heh, you ever /read/ the message's claims though?
/really/ short movie, but besides that. . . . enjoy your pixalated blurry mess! ^_^ )
It says that their software allows for you to burn DVD-Rs with your CDR burner! LOL!!
One of the newer varations appears to be selling instructions on how to copy from DVD to VHS.
(This isn't all that hard really, if you have a CDR drive and a DVD-ROM drive on your computer and a standalone DVD player, it will just end up looking like dog shit. Rip the DVD, decrypte, reencode into SVCD or VCD [eew] and then play said S/VCD on your DVD player, which most now days support doing. Plug your DVD players out into your VCRs in and set the VCR to record, you will have to pause the recording while swapping S/VCD disks unless it is a
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Check out this page. It links to the image in several different formats, including a lossless PNG, and a high-quality JPEG ("No gifs due to patent problems"). Both of those are ~580k, but the crappy JPEG is only 36k - it's probably better if Slashdot doesn't link to huge images.
Disclaimer: I too am an ex-TA from Georgia Tech. I am posting this anonymously due to possible privileged information.
The CheatFinder is really a suite of programs, sort of kludged together. Some are writting in various shell scripts, other parts are in C and Perl. In a nutshell, CheatFinder examines all permutations of students' submissions and calculates a score from 0.00 to 1.00, where 1.00 indicates a perfect match. The one in charge of running CheatFinder determines a relevancy level, typically 0.95 or so. All results above that threshold are then hand-examined for matches -- things like same indentation, same errors, etc. For students whose works were flagged by it, all of their other submissions were then critically examined. The idea was to build a case to demonstrate that this particular set of students were cheating, much like Jack McCoy builds a case for the prosecution. The true test to see if a person was cheating was by asking him/her, "Tell me how your program works."
As you correctly pointed out, simple programs will cause multiple false positives. CheatFinder was not run on those trivial assignments; it was reserved for the longer ones occuring later in the term.
To be honest, CheatFinder was just one of many ways to detect academic dishonesty. Experience has shown that cheaters are stupid. Examples include: forgetting to remove their friend's name from their submission, braggingg about their exploits within earshot of a professor, and so forth. Almost of our cheaters were found through means other than the CheatFinder.
Sadly, that doesn't always work. I say this as one of the fellows who makes some extra cash (and gets some kicks) "tutoring" computer science students at a local university... which is to say, doing their homework for a fee much higher than real tutoring pays (roughly on par per hour with my "real" programming job).
Doing it right is real work -- it involves coming up with multiple versions of each involved algorithm, structuring the implementations differently (OO vs procedural; for loops vs while loops; storing data in fixed-length arrays vs linked lists vs stacks, &c), being sure that any subtle bugs found in one revision don't show up in all the others (and occasionally inserting bugs not serious enough to result in a grade reduction in one revision or another), &c. My clients comment the code themselves, so that's unique (and they come out with enough understanding to explain how it works to the prof), and the whole thing gets run through indent/beautify before being turned in.
Not one of my clients has been accused of cheating yet.
Now, they still have to study for the tests (and any help I give them studying is genuine, honest tutoring). I have no problem with selling such services -- if these folks fail to learn the skills they need, 'twill bite them in the end no matter how much they're willing to spend on such as me, and every one of them knows it.
Incidentally, one pair of folks I sold my services to during their freshman year ended up winning the local ACM programming contest the next year -- so taking the easy way out once doesn't necessarily mean that one can't learn.
The AGC is a feature on your TV set. Older sets have a switch to turn it off. Macrovision generates signals that trip up the AGC on the TV if the signal has been recored. The device doesn't regnerate the AGC but takes the signals and removes the parts that mess up AGC.
The total cost is always going to be higher, due to the fact that
;)
a) You'll need a team of people to do it to ensure that they don't get caught doing it... (People watching the house for a while, to work out when the suspect tends to be out... lookouts etc. All of this costs money)
b) The cost of getting the warrant in the first place (Judge's time is hardly cheap - there's also the cost of the other court personnel who are involved)
c) The cost of the detectives preparing the case to get the warrant
etcetera...
All of this is a good thing. You wouldn't want wiretaps to be cheap, or they'd use them a lot more...