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Specifically regarding changing how the program works. I meant it in the sense of using hashes in place of arrays, and maybe even using while instead of for loo
by noahc 14y ago
Specifically regarding changing how the program works. I meant it in the sense of using hashes in place of arrays, and maybe even using while instead of for loops, etc. So fundamentally, it's the same input and output, but how the program stores and computes that is the same.
The variable thing makes sense though. I would use the 'changing the program' tactic to stop computers and the variables to stop teachers from detecting it. However, from another poster, using the same variables between assignments maybe unnecessary.
- anonymouz 14y agoIf the program is non-trivial (e.g. contains some classes, many functions), then usually the program structure alone will give it away (1), unless you invest a lot of time into changing things. From my experience (as a student), the people that copy programs don't even work that hard to obfuscate their plagiarism. Usually they just rename a couple of variables and reformat things a bit. A former professor of mine wrote a program to "fuzzily" compare two source codes and show how close they are, which quite nicely showed of clusters of programs where a bunch of students had copied-and-slightly-modified from one student. (1) i.e., give the instructor a feeling of "Hm, I've seen that before...".