Plagiarism: Codes

We permit and encourage healthy discussion among students. However, students must draw the line between discussion and plagiarism (copying of other’s work or taking credit for a piece of work that is not original).

The university does not condone plagiarism. If detected, both the party who copied and the party who had permitted the copying will be penalised equally.

For first-time offenders, they will be given zero mark for that assignment/assessment. In addition, their final grade will be reduced by one grade point (for example, from a B+ grade to a B- grade, from C grade to D grade). The plagiarism record will be kept in the undergraduate office of the school.

For repeat offenders, their final grade will be F

Since the prof told us (during lecture) that a group has been found copying and had been award 0 marks for their labs. This sets me thinking, for small codes. The similarity will certainly be there, especially if the CourseMarker restricts you to using certain stuffs. For example, no arrays, no loops or sort. Everybody will fall back to using individual variables and control structures like if-then-else.

How do they determine you plagiarised? If I wanted to I would change variables to another name add in unnecessary spaces and line breaks, change method names and such.

Headache. Thinking of which, somebody used my code before in poly days. I was dozing off in lecture theatre then I noticed the person was holding on to his printed out codes. I had a quick browse of the codes then I realised the coding style is similar to mine. Methods declared as similar but of different name. Have the liking of using arrays and controlled loops to create User Interface rather than typing out one by one for each objects.

I approached the person and asked where he got the code from but he insisted that he did it himself. Then I pointed to one line that left him dumbfounded.

public static void main(String[] shadowandy)
..

Then I told him, I didn’t know that your screenname is also shadowandy. Well, he lifted the whole code of mine, use search and replace option to replace strings. And yet he failed to notice at the very start of the whole program, my screenname is there. Only then he started to say the truth. Baaa…

So to people who intends to copy codes, do take note that some programmers like to leave their footprint / signature in their works; and I am one of them. Instead of hiding them, I made them so obvious in JAVA that people overlooked it.