We still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science (2018)

Summary

Imagine that you’re hired to work at your local public library. As an eagle-eyed checkout clerk, you soon realize that half the patrons leave without actually checking out their books! This leaves everyone else scratching their heads when the catalog doesn’t match the shelves. But conveniently, the library has an unused anti-theft alarm sitting in the back room. There’s just one problem: your supervisor, though sympathetic to your cause, doesn’t want you using the alarm. You see, people take books for many reasons, and not all of them are malicious. Besides, who cares if the shelves are in disarray? They’ve been like that for years, but everyone who works at the library still gets their paychecks the all the same. If you want to set up the alarm, you’ll have to do so on your own time, in addition to your other responsibilities. In many undergraduate computer science programs, this is the absurd reality we face when trying to combat plagiarism. Everyone agrees plagiarism is wrong. Everyone wishes they could stop it. Everyone has access to the tools that find it. But no one seems willing to take any action. Why bother? The most important goal is to keep the course fair for students who do honest work. Instructors must assign grades that accurately reflect performance. A student who grapples with a problem — becoming a stronger programmer in the process — should never receive a lower grade than one who copies and pastes. Finally, as educators, we also hope that the accused student can learn difficult lessons about ethical behavior in the classroom rather than the workplace. Understanding the scope of plagiarism I’ve been a teaching assistant in a lower-division computer science course for the past two years. Each semester, in a class of 200 to 300 students, we typically discover 20 to 40 blatant cases of plagiarism on homework. And because of the nature of our process, even more cases go undetected. Here’s how it works: We begin by uploading our students’ code to an on...