begin quoting Lan Barnes as of Wed, Dec 05, 2007 at 12:11:43PM -0800: > > On Wed, December 5, 2007 11:50 am, Andrew Lentvorski wrote: > > Gus Wirth wrote: > >> I saw this on the Lazarus developers list and thought it was an > >> interesting tool. > >> > >> Similarity Testing <http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dick/sim.html> > >> > >> In case you need need to know who is copying from whom. > > > > I find that the best plagiarism detector is a source code repository. > > > > And, as I tell my students, check in early and often. Nothing is better > > for defending *against* charges of plagiarism than a nice rich revision > > history.
Yup. Next best thing is an idiosyncratic style. Nobody every tried to plagiarize my work, so far as I know, as it's purportedly distinctive. > > I actually had an accusation of plagiarism against two of the students > > in one of my classes. It was very nice to be able to pull the code and > > the revision history and refute it quickly. Cool. It's nice to refute rather than accuse. > > Besides--plagiarism is stupid. You can probably buy someone in India to > > actually write the code for you for about 100 dollars or so. > > > > My only defense against that is to make sure that the midterm and final > > are worth enough to penalize that kind of behavior. Ask 'em to explain their work. "Why did you name this variable 'xxi'? And this other one 'lpcn'?" > Good poets borrow. Great Poets steal. > - T. S. Eliot > > It amuses me that borrowing is plagerism in college and a best practice in > later life. Plagiarism in college gets you in trouble; later in life, it gets you sued. Unless you're a manager and you're plagiarizing your employees. -- Failed 10% of the last class I taught. For blatant plagiarism. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
