[Edu-sig] assigning homework

[David C. Ullrich]

On Mon, 10 Sep 2001 19:55:12 GMT, Garry Hodgson <garry at sage.att.com>
wrote:

>Danyel Fisher wrote:
>> 
>> I've had good experiences with MOSS
>> (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html), although it takes a (gasp!)
>> Perl script to submit requests. In general, it seems to do a pretty good job
>> of picking out duplicate code. The times I used it, as a TA for a class of
>> several hundred, I was able to pull out a few unamiguous cases of
>> plagiarism.
>> 
>> (Cheaters don't seem to be terribly subtle about it).
>
>snicker...i remember one night working at the help desk a few millennia
>ago, 
>a member of our football team presented me with a listing and asked "if
>i
>wanted to make this look like i wrote it, what would i have to change?"
>he had zero clue what any of of the symbols on the page meant.  it may
>as
>well have been written in klingon.
>
>i mumbled something unhelpful about different variable names, and he
>wandered off, no doubt wondering what a variable was.

Actually changing variable names but leaving valid code wouldn't help!
If you really wanted to help him make it look like he wrote it you
should have suggested a few syntax errors...

>-- 
>Garry Hodgson                   sometimes we ride on your horses
>Senior Hacker                   sometimes we walk alone
>Software Innovation Services    sometimes the songs that we hear
>AT&T Labs                       are just songs of our own
>garry at sage.att.com


David C. Ullrich