🚀 go-pugleaf

As an undergraduate during the late '70's, I had three experiences with
people cheating based on my work.  Interestingly, they all have different
characteristics wrt blame and motivation (in my opinion).

The first example occurred in my first programming class, Fortran taught
on an IBM 370 using punched cards.  Our first assignment was to write
a simple quadratic equation solver that would check for imaginary solutions
and print something appropriate.  I imagine that I could write this program
now in about 10 lines of C code in 30 seconds, but being my first program
I came up with about 75 cards of Fortran riddled with GOTOs and junk, and
spent about a day on it (including time figuring out how to use the $%^$&^%
keypunch).  A neighbor of mine who was in the class was really struggling,
and asked (the night before it was due) to see my listing.  Being a nice
(and naive) guy, I let him borrow it.  Well, he simply typed in the program
verbatim (variable names, labels, spacing, everything), so we wound up each
getting half-credit for it.  I managed to convince the teacher that I was
essentially blameless and deserved the credit, but I learned an important
lesson from it about caution.  I think the motivation for the cheating in
this case was desparation, not actual malice.

The second case occurred in a systems analysis class.  I took this class
as a junior, and did quite well on the final exam (98, I think).  It was 
an open-book, open-notes exam.  The following year, a friend was taking 
the class and asked to borrow my exam to study from.  I let him have it,
since I didn't really see any harm.  He then proceeded to distribute
photocopies of it to most of the other 20+ people in the class (the CS
majors at my school (Bradley) were a fairly small and tight-knit group).
I discovered later (to my horror) that the professor had given an essentially
identical test (right down to the essay questions).  Since it was open-notes,
almost the entire class had a copy of the "key" (my test) with them, and
thus gave the identical correct answers (including the essay questions!).
Well, the professor apparently didn't believe in the hundredth monkey
effect (see sci.skeptic for details), so he investigated and found that
my name was in everyone's notes (and probably near the top, given the
outcome), so he called my and we talked about it.  He decided that it
wasn't really my fault, and also decided to vary his tests a bit more in
the future.  I think that he might have also just disregarded the final grades
of the few unfortunates (two or three of them) who didn't have a copy
of the "key".  This instance was more of a teaching error than an instance
of actual cheating - I don't think anyone involved had any malice in their
intentions at all.

The final case was by far the worst, and the one that still galls me ten
years later by its blatant nature and the weak response of the professor.
I had, by the end of my senior year, a reputation as a good source of
advice on programming problems (partly because I worked as a consultant
for the Computer Center helping students out).  One day, I was working
in the terminal room when a guy came up to me with a problem on his
third-semester COBOL program.  It was one of those gory 1000-line multi-level
report things that COBOL does so well at, complete with sorts and searches
and such.  The guy didn't have a clue as to what was wrong, so he asked me
to help debug it.  Well, as I read the program, I started to get the feeling
that it looked familiar.  Soon, I had convinced myself that this was a program
that I had written the previous year (for the same class), with the variables
and paragraph labels changed!  At this point I told the guy that I didn't
know what was wrong to get rid of him, then got a listing of my  old program
and headed for the professor's office to turn him in (I was pretty p.o.'ed
about this, and amazed at the stupidity of someone who would ask the author
of his ripped-off program for help).  I convinced the professor that the
guy was a blatant cheater.  She said that he was taking the class for the
third time, needed it to graduate at the end of the semester, and was
doing pretty poorly this time and might fail again, but that she would take
appropriate action.  Anyway, the guy showed up at graduation a few weeks
later (and got a diploma), so I assume that she wimped out and didn't do
anything about it.  This was pretty hard for me to take - I had caught the
guy red-handed, he was a mediocre student, but the professor let him pass
anyway.  I think that this one will bother me for a long, long time.  I
hope that I never cross paths with this guy again.  (I later determined
that he had gotten a listing of my program off of the table in the prof's
office in which she would leave the graded homework for people to pick up.)
Lesson learned from this one:  don't leave homework out in public (whether
you are a teacher or a student).