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Comment by dskloet | Hacker News Reader

I used something similar when I was a TA 20 years ago and while your assumption seems reasonable, there are actually a lot of different ways to solve even quite simple tasks and most cheating is very obvious on manual inspection.

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Yep... If you're going to go through the effort of completely rewriting a piece of code to try and dodge an AST analysis algorithm, you've effectively just done 70% of the work and put your grade/position at the institution on the line. It's not worth it, and so people don't tend to do that. It's the same thing with plagiarism—students could very well resynthesize a stolen work in their own words. It would still be plagiarism, sure, but it's also putting in a large amount of effort while still being risky.

If you rewrite everything you steal (e.g. never copy/paste), it’s no different from using an especially well written source.

Well, no. It's still plagiarized if you fail to communicate that it isn't your original work. You can't just steal ideas from someone else's paper, even if you rewrite everything. If you rely on another paper for inspiration, you have to cite it. If a student submitted a paper that was just another paper entirely rephrased, that would not be acceptable in the least even if they cited their source because the expectation of writing a paper is that you contribute something novel and not just regurgitate someone else's argument

If the problem is large enough, I do submit that there are multiple (even many) ways of solving it.

I will also say that there’s problems where that is not the case. For example, we were told to write simulators for scheduling schemes (RR, MLFQ). Other than using different data structures (even that’s a bit of a stretch) not sure how much variance there will be.

Using the right tool for the right job is important.

Just above your post another author posted/cited results of a system that “never produced false positives”.

I think that cited number another author shared is probably correct but presumably, the tool is used in cases where problems are big enough to warrant it.

The problems we had were way way simpler than anything deserving an acronym. You'd think there was only one way to do it and yet it was not hard to distinguish plagiarism.

Do you happen to have a few examples? I’m super curious! How many students were taking the course?

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