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The funny thing is, at least at Stanford, the students are warned at the beginning of the course that their assignments are automatically compared against all o
by basugasubaku 17y ago
The funny thing is, at least at Stanford, the students are warned at the beginning of the course that their assignments are automatically compared against all other submissions including those of previous years, and that the the comparison tool is quite smart; simple modifications like changing variable names will not fool it. It's a bit surprising the number of students who get caught anyway. Perhaps they think it is a bluff, or perhaps they get so caught up in meeting the deadline they forget all about it.
- bad_user 17y agoIt's because they don't know how those tools work, and assume that the academic staff is incompetent enough to let slip a homework with variables/methods/classes names changed. Unfortunately for such students, since we are talking about source-code which has a parsable grammar, such a tool usually does pattern matching directly on the syntax-tree, and it's not the names of the nodes that are relevant, but the tree's structure, and a single routine copied from somewhere can give you away. But even if some of them realize it, they still try (since the effort of changing everything to pass the screening can be greater than the effort of doing it yourself) with a wishful thinking ... I don't know about Stanford, but it really depends on the teacher that's reviewing the homework, since many of them don't use such tools. I imagine that in the future we'll also have such tools for essays / natural language, making it easier to detect plagiarism ... I'm suspecting PhD awards will drop :)
- barrkel 17y agoFor simple exercises, though, I can easily imagine spurious collisions if the comparison routine looks too deeply.