How I Dealt with Student Plagiarism

However, I think that a Bachelor's degree is supposed to be about something other than job training. Sure, there is some overlapping material between "prepare for a job" and "get a Bachelor's degree," but not very much. People who have a Bachelor's are expected to have knowledge that is both broad and deep. That is, they are expected to know far more than they need to know, and have skills outside of their area of expertise.

Not that there is anything wrong with your approach, I just think that it disagrees with the overall goals of a standard university degree program, which is not terribly concerned about job preparation.

If you can just copy and paste answers, with source, then you haven't actually learned anything (technically, you might have, but there is nothing in your work to support this conclusion - unknowledgeable until proven knowledgeable). The grade you receive should be a measure of the skills you have obtained, and the things that you have learned, rather than the results you produce. Sure, you can do this in the real world, but in the real world you are not trying to show what skills you have obtained, you are only asked to produce results - this is the major difference between the education environment and the work environment.

In the real world, you do get punished if you need to program something, but don't know how to. College CS classes aren't meant to teach you how to get stuff done using software, they're meant to teach you how to program. Handing in someone else's code is not going to accomplish that.

  >> In the real world you don't get punished for using Google or surrounding yourself with people who are smarter than you.

To emulate the real world, each student or team has to have its own problem. This is possible (as discussed in the post), but raises the level of effort for the instructor considerably.

Do you allow books or computers? I'd think the internet would make it too easy as it'd allow people to communicate.

Some more pet peeves:

* Expected to write perfect code on paper despite students using the IDEs and documentation throughout coursework and tutorials. Professor's response "Practice writing on paper before exam/quiz"

* Timed exam/quizs and it's on paper. I write far more slowly on paper than computers. In fact, I can type for many hours but after one or two hours on paper, I'm exhausted. Professor's response "Too bad / Not enough computers for everyone"

This is why I think grading on work is more important than the right answer, though of course the right answer and right work should be taken into account. If problems are such that little to no work needs to be shown, they aren't worth assignment as homework.

The key is that every student writes software as uniquely as they write prose or have fingerprints. I can't get a class to type in HelloWorld.c exactly as presented on a projector without odd spacings, typos, errors, etc. I watch for submissions which feature the same impossibly identical nuances, usually bizarre solutions (works, but nobody else would do it quite that way) or odd mis-formattings or other things which raise red flags. Find the previously seen instance, and - here is the key - overlay the windows to position the text exactly the same, then Alt-Tab flip between them. The copying is plain, exact when the paltry few guilty tweaks are accounted for. Showing this to the parties involved usually reveals the original author vs plagiarist pronto.

The contention that "it's the same assignment so submissions will be similar" doesn't work when bad formatting is duplicated right down to every extraneous space.

The other way is just watching for submissions well beyond the capacity of the student. For my classes, legit passing students will find it easier to just do the work than to attempt stealing it. In-class participation, quiz results, short answer questions, and lab work will soon show what the student is really capable of. When submissions far exceed what is demonstrated elsewhere, suspicion is warranted and dead giveaways will usually occur.

In the end, a talented cheater cheats himself, not the system. For programming classes at least, there will come a point where you have to perform, at which point the error of cheating one's way to a degree becomes it's own very costly punishment.

But since we could see what parts were considered to be plagiarized, we could easily change our program and resubmit to avoid the filter. It would only deter the students who were too lazy to change their variable names to something else.