Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science

Heh. I wanted to store my old university coursework somewhere, and GitHub seemed as good a place as any. Because I'm cheap and don't want to pay for a private repo, there it sits in all its public glory. Few years back I got an irate email from a professor that students were copying a program I wrote for a SPARC assembly course which has remained unchanged for, like, two decades. So, to some degree the whole plagiarism thing is due to professorial laziness.

I was teaching the lab portion of CS 101 (don't remember the actual course number off-hand) when I discovered that two students had the same remarkable code that shouldn't have worked but did.

We were using C, and instead of using globals or parameters, each function declared the same local variables in the same order. The stack, then, remained sufficiently consistent that each function had access to the values it needed.

When I confronted the two of them about plagiarism (and explaining what they had done wrong) their defense was that they were working on the problem together, and thus had made the same mistake out of ignorance.

And frankly, it made perfect sense. I could easily see myself doing something like that.

I guess my point is that, for at least some small portion of the problem space, plagiarism isn't really plagiarism.

Maybe I'm being small-minded, but I strongly dislike using the word 'plagiarism' to refer to cheating on your homework by copying someone else.

To me, plagiarism is taking credit for someone else's ideas at their expense; it's a "sin" against the person being copied.

Copying someone else with their connivance, or paying some essay-mill writer to do your work for you, should be in the same category as taking a calculator into a mental-arithmetic test, not the same category as « My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed, when he finds out I publish first ».

They are paying for the piece of paper not for the content.

Standardized homeworks as a simple check on learning with an individual or group project at the end has been my favorite way of learning.