Funny students.

[Zeroth]

So, I was marking an assigment for the intro to computers class. 48 students, javascript. I ended up discovering that about 8 of the students had submitted identical files, differing only on the comment line with their name and student numbers.(Yay diff!)

So, umm, that plagiarism was pretty easy to catch.

Even better, one student decided to take the requirement of a program literally, and be pedantic, and say that since javascript is "interpreted script" it doesn't count as a program... so he submits a java file. Ironic. Even better, is the fact that it actually is an assignment the same student had turned in, in a different class. He tried to hide his laziness with a very badly done pedantic tone, while still exposing he does not know what he is talking about by submitting a java file, which itself is interpreted.

Anyone got any other stories of... interesting students?

[md]

Java is compiled (JIT compilets ftw!) on many systems these days and there is hardware that directly runs java bytecode. Technically he's got you there. And in most cases there is nothing that doesn't say you can't submit an assignment to two classes... not that I commend it.

diff is indeed a handy tool

[Zeroth]

well, his point was that a 'program' is different from an interpreted script. Its not, not according to the von neumann model. Of course, he's forgetting that nearly /all/ languages nowadays are technically interpreted. Modern x86 chips transform x86 instructions into per-processor model unique 'primitives'. So, technically, its interpreted.

[delparnel]

md @ Sun Nov 09, 2008 9:18 pm wrote:

Technically he's got you there. And in most cases there is nothing that doesn't say you can't submit an assignment to two classes... not that I commend it.

Actually, at a lot of schools, this is considered academic misconduct, unless you have permission from both professors (of the previously submitted class, and the current one) to do so.

[Dan]

delparnel @ 9th November 2008, 9:58 pm wrote:

Actually, at a lot of schools, this is considered academic misconduct, unless you have permission from both professors (of the previously submitted class, and the current one) to do so.

This is consderied misconduct and palgariusm at lakehead too (with out permission).


@Zeroth About how many students palagrized there work from some where? It sounds like there is a big problem with this sort of thing with computer science courses.

[Insectoid]

Apparently, my CS teacher has caught some plagiarism. Perhaps it's because many students are only there for an 'easy' credit or to play video games.

[Clayton]

I think one of the biggest things that can happen is students can end up working together, and end up with the exact same program. Of course it's great that they are working together (hell, I just finished an assignment with a couple of friends of mine), but you have to know that you can't do exactly the same thing. My friends and I all accomplished the task in 3 distinctly different ways. It's this little snag that can catch a lot of students IMO.

[Dan]

Well the prof/teacher/instudcter should have a clear policy about doing assigments in groups or not. It is noramly prity clear if this is acpectable.

Also there is a big diffrence between simlaur code that uses the same logic and code that has the same variable names, method names, style and formating, etc with just the comments changed.

[Zeroth]

well, the students I caught, the only differences was in one comment, where they had to put their name and student number. Everything else was identical according to diff. So, yeah, they're all busted. Its not that these students worked together but that they all copied one file and submitted it. I'm always suspicious when I find exactly identical mistakes in two assignments.

Apparently resubmitting the same assignment is considered academic misconduct as well. Its very surprising that in total, about 10 students were caught and have been charged for this one assignment. Its an extremely large amount of plagiarism going on.

Plus, its very tempting to just copy someone else's work, and I find lots of files that are very similar, but I never found any files that were identical down to the hidden characters. I had an encounter last year where someone had copied one of my assignments(I didn't know this happened), and so I got in trouble for it, and received a zero for the assignment.

I remember back in high school that a kid got caught with plagiarism for an anthropology essay. The teacher only had to go online, check wikipedia, and found 70% of the essay right there. And it was a pretty smart student too.

I'm going to make sure my students understand clearly the policies on cheating and misconduct.

How do you guys feel about swear words and derogatory terms in source code? IE, a variable named slut for no reason?

[Tony]

Zeroth @ Mon Nov 10, 2008 2:14 pm wrote:

How do you guys feel about swear words and derogatory terms in source code?

Questionable... It's hard to judge without context.

Though that reminds me of a friend of mine, who named one of his variables "kill_me". It was some temporary local variable, something about clearing pointers... the variable was indeed "killed" during each iteration of the function. Though according to UW's policies, that warranted a counseling session for suspected "suicide thoughts". I think he got it all cleared up though.

[OneOffDriveByPoster]

Tony @ Mon Nov 10, 2008 2:35 pm wrote:

Though according to UW's policies, that warranted a counseling session for suspected "suicide thoughts". I think he got it all cleared up though.

Fun, and what happens when you have to kill child processes?

[jbking]

Zeroth @ Mon Nov 10, 2008 12:14 pm wrote:

How do you guys feel about swear words and derogatory terms in source code? IE, a variable named slut for no reason?

Generally I find them annoying and sad more so than anything else. Usually they pop up in a comment or some moronic function name that makes me go, "Sigh," as really, why would you want to say the swear words for crap and butt in code?

There can be the odd case where someone makes a bad acronym like a FromUniversallyCoveringKicks which I find a little cute or that song from the Bloodhound Gang, "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo".

[Zeroth]

Personally, I feel that when you write code, you should take it as serious as you would an essay or report for your job. Yes, many of us find it fun. If you are writing code for submission, you should especially be professional. Second of all, consider error reports that may end up being visible to users. I know that there have been several cases of people being fired for sexual harassment because they had stuff like, def I_Want_To_Fuck_Janet(blah). Adopting a professional attitude to the code you produce helps establish good habits, and makes you a much more valuable programmer to have around and to work with.

My personal two-bits.

[Unforgiven]

Zeroth @ Mon Nov 10, 2008 3:13 pm wrote:

Personally, I feel that when you write code, you should take it as serious as you would an essay or report for your job. Yes, many of us find it fun. If you are writing code for submission, you should especially be professional. Second of all, consider error reports that may end up being visible to users. I know that there have been several cases of people being fired for sexual harassment because they had stuff like, def I_Want_To_Fuck_Janet(blah). Adopting a professional attitude to the code you produce helps establish good habits, and makes you a much more valuable programmer to have around and to work with.

My personal two-bits.

This is dead on. Additionally though, it's just a bad sign when you have a function that shouldn't have a more descriptive name. Variables too - if you're just using it as a quick iterator, call it i,x, or things like that. While the name may not matter, having it something of that kind makes it much more obvious that it's an iterator of some kind to begin with.

I did not do any of that, however, in high school. My teacher there told us that variable names were limited to 256 characters. I decided to test that. >: - )

[Insectoid]

I suggest you tell the students to keep copies of previous versions of their code saved, so that if they are accused of plagiarism, they can show all the WIP code. I assume it is easy to tell the difference between actual WIP code and code stripped down to imitate WIP code. (as variable names change, things get moved around, and whatnot. My finished projects are nothing like the original WIPes.