I TA'd for Gatech in 94-96, and the cheatfinder program was in use, although not heavily advertised.
Basically, all these posts about groupthink skills being a necessary component of the CS curriculum are uninformed. As we went from through the curriculum, eventually almost every class at Georgia Tech (at that time) became group oriented.
The classes where "cheatfinder" was used were frosh classes DESIGNED to measure individual capacity. Anyhow, I was the TA assigned to run the stupid thing week after week on hordes of Pascal programs, and later Java programs. So I want to clear up a thing or two:
The cheatfinder program only flagged similar programs so that they could be visually inspected by a person (me). Nobody ever got nailed b/c the cheatfinder ratio was 100.00% correlation.
What I would do was set a ratio (like 99% correlation), run the thing, and if there were no flags, lower the ratio (to 95%), until I got about 15 or so pairs or triplets of programs. Then I dumped those to the printer and looked them over. VERY OFTEN it was just two or three very good programmers who had the same (best) way of solving the problem.
Then there were the ones who got busted. You know what killed them? The comments! It was hilarious how these guys would go to all kinds of lengths to make the program "look" different: change variable names, move functions around, and so on, (and cheatfinder was never fooled by such tactics), but they would leave the original owner's comments (often with the same spelling errors). To me, it showed that they thought the cheatfinder only cared about code (TRUE) but they forgot that there would be a human being looking at the code.
There was some sad scenes. One guy was an Industrial Engineering major fulfilling his CS requirement. He had a job with Anderson Consulting lined up, was set to graduate that semester, the whole family including grandma had bought plane tickets to Atlanta to see him graduate, etc. I believed him, but I still nailed him.
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Basically, all these posts about groupthink skills being a necessary component of the CS curriculum are uninformed. As we went from through the curriculum, eventually almost every class at Georgia Tech (at that time) became group oriented.
The classes where "cheatfinder" was used were frosh classes DESIGNED to measure individual capacity. Anyhow, I was the TA assigned to run the stupid thing week after week on hordes of Pascal programs, and later Java programs. So I want to clear up a thing or two:
The cheatfinder program only flagged similar programs so that they could be visually inspected by a person (me). Nobody ever got nailed b/c the cheatfinder ratio was 100.00% correlation.
What I would do was set a ratio (like 99% correlation), run the thing, and if there were no flags, lower the ratio (to 95%), until I got about 15 or so pairs or triplets of programs. Then I dumped those to the printer and looked them over. VERY OFTEN it was just two or three very good programmers who had the same (best) way of solving the problem.
Then there were the ones who got busted. You know what killed them? The comments! It was hilarious how these guys would go to all kinds of lengths to make the program "look" different: change variable names, move functions around, and so on, (and cheatfinder was never fooled by such tactics), but they would leave the original owner's comments (often with the same spelling errors). To me, it showed that they thought the cheatfinder only cared about code (TRUE) but they forgot that there would be a human being looking at the code.
There was some sad scenes. One guy was an Industrial Engineering major fulfilling his CS requirement. He had a job with Anderson Consulting lined up, was set to graduate that semester, the whole family including grandma had bought plane tickets to Atlanta to see him graduate, etc. I believed him, but I still nailed him.
M.