🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Feb5.2...@axion.bt.co.uk> PK...@axion.bt.co.uk writes:
>
>	We had a really suspicious lecturer in college who used to take the printouts
>which we had handed in as assignments and hold them up to the light in batches,
>looking for programs which were the same.
>
>	He obviously didn't realize that the Pascal (well it was designed as a
>teaching language!) `prettier' which we had available allowed you to customize
>the indentation etc., though we cottoned on pretty quickly. A global replace on
>a few variable names also defeated his system.

Oh, God.  Now it's going to be *impossible* to separate the lowlife scum from 
the real students...

FORTRAN was great.  Any indentation at all by the students would show up cases
of cheating in an instant.  Line labels were even better, since you have to be
psychic to make your labels sequential and evenly-spaced on the first try, and
students never make a second try :-).  Global replaces on variable names often
led to integer/floating point type mismatches, which the students failed to
catch, and there were so many ways to construct a "test-and-branch" statement
that it was practically an admission of guilt to use one.  Cheating was harder
than doing the assignment.

Now, of course, we live in an age of software tools, which allow reasonably
clever scum to sabotage the grading without even thinking hard...  I guess
output formatting is the last place that's still a dead giveaway.


-- 
        David M. Tate       | "The logarithms of 1,2,...,10 to base 10^(1/40)
  dt...@unix.cis.pitt.edu   |  are conveniently close to whole numbers, which 
                            |  when you think about it, is why there are 12
 "A Man for all Seasonings" |  semitones in an octave." -- I. J. Good.