On Fri, Feb 07, 2003 at 01:34:31PM -0500, David Z Maze wrote: > So, having had some experience doing this: your class has TA's, right? > And they review the things students turn in? When I've been a TA, > this has caught the more gratuitous cases of cheating; having a class > policy that code sharing is absolutely verboten esssentially forbids > students from working together at all, which is counterproductive. A > sufficiently aggressive tool will result in lots of false positives, > too, which isn't helpful. Finally, if you do decide to go after > students, please apply some discretion, and don't assume your tool > infallibly detects the students' intentions...
I know one person who used to teach Compiler Construction. He had a program that parsed the student's compiler, built a syntax tree, and used an algorithm to compare trees. Anything over a certain level would trigger an alarm, *and then he'd check it himself*. Such a tool wouldn't ring the bell if a student had shared a few pieces of code with another -- but it'll certainly catch the guy whose work is mostly copied from someone else (no matter how much he changes in variable names or comments!) J. -- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
