Back when I was marking assignments in university that was by far the most reliable way to catch cheating: two assignments with the same quirky error in the sam

Back when I was marking assignments in university that was by far the most reliable way to catch cheating: two assignments with the same quirky error in the same spot. It didn’t even have to be a shared code/logic error; a misspelled comment or variable name was enough to mentally pop up a red flag and go back to find the other assignment with the same error in it. On some of the assignments we gave out we would provide a set of, say, 10 initial test cases that the students could use to verify their work with the expectation that they would write more of their own. As a marking team we would also generate our own more detailed test suite; partly to make our job easier, partly to try to identify trends of places where students might not be understanding the course material. That ended up being another interesting way to identify plagiarism: if only 2 or 3 assignments failed a given unit test we would go and look to see if the implementations on those assignments was identical…