Plagiarizing code
 

I need your help on this one. I just don't know what to do or if I should even do anything about it.

At my high school class we were given a final assignment about a week ago. It's worth 30% of our total mark and here's how it goes: You pick something that you would like to do and you do it. I'm making tetris, another person is making BlackJack and a few others are making Role Playing Games.

Here's my situation, we are given 3 weeks to do this assignment and out of the entire class (12 people) they're are only 3 people trully working on the assignment. The rest are just playing games in class (helicopter game), (tetris) and (ball shooter) not that it matters. However, there's a time to play and there's a time to work. These people are lazzy, and are just going to game websites and printing off the code as their own.

Knowing all the effort / hard work that I put into my assignment that they missed, would you let the teacher know? I think that it's their problem and it's all going to come back to them later in life "So I'd say no.". On the other hand, they did no work and therefore, deserve a mark of "0".

It's a really hard to make a call here. Does anyone have a system that will make it harder for my classmates to rip code off the internet that's worked in the past for you?

How smart is the teacher? Will they be able to figure out its copied code on there own? Most of the time, if the student is an idiot, and has no clue what they are doing, then when they hand in there code, the teacher will realise that the student isn't capable of writing something of the same complexity that they handed in. the student won't figure this out because they are stupid. Don't bother ratting them out, they are doing it themselves :p

Dont say anything becouse sooner or later they will need to code somthing and everything cant be ripped of the net and they will be sorry that they didn't take the time to learn the language and code there own things... and here is the :banana:

In my experience, those types of students are in that class to play games and fool around on the computer, not do work. I know because that used to be me, except for the plagiarism part. In the high schools I've been to, from what I've seen, the programming teachers rarely do a damn thing when they see someone fooling around. They might tell them to get off the websites or something a few times then just give up. From what I've seen, roughly %75 of the people in the computer classes are there to get an easy credit. It's natural for high school students to try to find the easy way out. Don't tell the teacher about anything, but if you decide you really want to tell, perhaps you should go to the principal and tell him/her how your teacher isn't doing his job either.

EDIT: Also, they're only in high school so by plagiarising they will only be told not to do it again. Now tell me, do you seriously think a high school student who would plagiarize in the first place would NOT do it again if they had the chance? It is probably different over there though.

That is good advice jayme

It just drives me nuts. I'll tell you something which happened earlier today.

The guy next to me plays games all day and everyday. So obviously not having any work done up to date, he decides to rip code for his card game (Texas hold em) off the internet. Which is in fact 2000 lines of code. He tells the teacher
He's been working on it all… weekend (yea right) and I'm sure he's going to get 95 - 100% on the project. Then he changes a few variables around compiles his code and shouts out loud "yes it finally works!!!" LOL wow it's such a joke.

This is a hard situation but I would say just leave it. Im in the same situation where people cheat because they can. The Internet is huge and its pratically impossible to check if the code has been ripped from somewhere else.

Just think though, by cheating where does it get you? absolutly nowhere. These people who cheat and get good grades will struggle in real life because they supposedly know what they are doing but they actually don't. Main part is cheating gets you nowhere. It will do for this year but in the real world people will pick up on the lack of thier skills very fast.

Another way our college system works in the UK is that when we hand code in, we the students have to sit down with our lecturer and show what each line of code does. A tedious process but it picks out the cheats straight away. I think we have to get 90% correct in order to pass the assignments.

I'm going to propose that to him. Brilliant!!!

Notify some of the real authors of the code.

Or if the teacher doesn't already, just require the source.

If your teacher is any good at all he will know that they did not write the code.

my teachers always required the student to comment every line of code in the entire program, most code you find on the net isn't completely commented like that. if a student is able to do that, even if they did copy it, at least they can prove they know what it does. my teachers never minded that a student took snippets or ideas from some other source, just as long as you knew what it was doing and how.