

UWA students accused of plagiarism - callumjones
https://secure.csse.uwa.edu.au/run/help2140?p=np&a=197&all=y

======
ctdonath
I teach. There is a huge difference between "some students worked together and
submitted similar labs" vs "some students handed in exactly the same thing
featuring the same obscure errors and same random whitespace inconsistencies,
save for some lame cut-and-paste and search/replace differences obviously
intended to conceal blatant plagiarism". It's not that the answers are
similar, it's that all the mistakes are identical right down to each sporadic
extra space.

Think: several students handing in the same "what did you do last weekend"
essay - even if they spent the entire weekend together, their submissiions
should not be the same text right down to dotting a particular 'i' with a tiny
heart.

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eli
I've seen first hand how someone can be falsely accused of plagiarism because
they had a solution that just happened to be similar to another student's
solution. Two high school friends in my CS program had learned programming
together and had a very similar coding style. They were put in the difficult
position of having to prove a negative -- that they didn't cheat -- before an
ethics commmittee.

Anyway, seems a bit unfair to post these usernames publicly.

(That said, the people defending their actions with phrases like "working
together" and "helping each other" probably need to reread their department
ethics policy)

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georgecmu
_This unit is horrible, I failed it last year. I got 49%.

When I asked Arcady Dyskin about the blatant plagiarism that I should have
taken a part of to pass he simply told me "Cheating has been part of student
culture for thousands of years".

So the unit co-ordinators have been releasing the same assignments for 600
students each year._

Here's the professor at UWA that's mentioned above:
[https://www.socrates.uwa.edu.au/Staff/StaffProfile.aspx?Pers...](https://www.socrates.uwa.edu.au/Staff/StaffProfile.aspx?Person=arcadydyskin)

Sorry to say, but there is an attitude in Russia that cheating is OK, but
getting caught is not. It's even more unfortunate that this attitude persisted
throughout this guy's academic career.

~~~
callumjones
To be fair we don't know if this claim is true or not, I certainly doubt any
lecturer at UWA condones plagiarism.

(Also thanks HN for changing the thread title, though it does sound a little
harsh towards UWA)

~~~
callumjones
Condone as in overlook

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jordanmessina
Direct link to the graph porn some commenters have mentioned:
<https://files.me.com/jonathan.wan/uxhv4p>

That's really the only thing I find interesting about this thread.

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rick888
I find it hilarious that people have to resort to personal attacks to defend
the fact that they were obviously cheating.

------
eqdw
In reality it is so difficult to identify honest-to-goodness plagarism in comp
sci. For instance, in my algorithms courses, wikipedia was super useful. Most
significant algorithms (e.g. quicksort) have a pseudo-code implementation, and
when you look them up, it's really hard work to NOT make yours look identical.
How do you deal with that situation?

Answer: you deal with it in the way my algo prof did. We implemented
algorithms so we could compare performance. So he'd say, for instance, "write
libraries in C to implement a binary, ternary, and quaternary heap. Then,
write code to track how many data accesses there are, run all three on test
input, and compare results". It doesn't matter if you're copying the algorithm
from online; if you don't understand the algorithm then you won't know exactly
what you're tracking.

------
kaptain
I like the pdf; they should run this program at the Chinese university I'm at.
It'd be a complete graph. :)

~~~
orta
I find infrographics like this fascinating, anyone know what app this was made
in?

~~~
gregable
This looks very much like output from neato - <http://www.graphviz.org/>. I'd
be pretty surprised if it wasn't.

------
kjuhygtfrde
I always loved the way every engineering degree teaches you that the most
important thing is that you must never work with another student, copy
existing work or collaborate in any way.

Thats what industry demands - engineers that must work totally in isolation.

Of course it's not as bad as my PhD where I had to sign a disclaimer that it
was entirely my own work and not the result of any collaboration or group
effort. This as for an experiment at CERN that had about 10,000 people working
on it!

~~~
JoeAltmaier
They aren't being paid to come to an engineering solution. They are paying to
learn and get a degree. Which problem has an entirely different solution
space. And probably doesn't include "steal/borrow/buy problem solutions and
learn nothing, graduating in 4 years to design crap that kills people"

~~~
kjuhygtfrde
Then design courses and exams/projects so that team work is the way to do it
right. They are paying to learn how to be engineers - the most important part
of any engineering project is collaboration, teamwork and project management -
not memorising Von-Whatsits formula for strength of a beam

I don't want a new engineer who thinks it's cheating to look up the strength
of a beam in a handbook!

~~~
JoeAltmaier
One step at a time. Learning to do each skill is confounded using "teamwork"
when that simply means one guy does all the work.

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eqdw
The questions in my first (And even some second year) comp sci classes were so
trivial, and java so verbose, that it would be impossible NOT to have the same
code as someone else.

Granted, if those percentages are obtained by, say, diffing the files, I'd be
more inclined to take this seriously. I'm so anal about my spacing and brace
placement that when I google for a code snippet to do X or Y (at my job, not
my school of course), I change the spacing and braces to suit my OCD.

~~~
_jameshales
They are obtained by simple diffing. 100% means a character-for-character
match for all of the code. This means that the student didn't even bother
changing their name and student ID written at the top of the code in the
comments.

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julius_geezer
One thinks of Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture, "Reflections on Trusting
Trust", paragraph three:

"That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of
beauty. In the ten years that we have worked together, I can recall only one
case of miscoordination of work. On that occasion, I discovered that we both
had written the same 20-line assembly language program. I compared the sources
and was astounded to find that they matched character-for-character."

------
JoeAltmaier
Sounds like a "warning shot", issued to scare lazy students into giving a crap
and actually learning the stuff.

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twymer
Anyone know if there's a copy of the mentioned graph elsewhere? The original
link is down.

~~~
_jameshales
<http://cassa.org.au/junk/diamonds.png> \-- Low-res version unfortunately.

------
pavel_lishin
It would be helpful to know what the assignment was.

If it was something like, "Given a list of integers, sort them alphabetically
by their full names in English", of course most everyone's programs are going
to look similar.

~~~
_jameshales
[http://undergraduate.csse.uwa.edu.au/units/GENG2140/unit-
mat...](http://undergraduate.csse.uwa.edu.au/units/GENG2140/unit-
material.html#assignments)

------
kenjackson
The visualization is pretty nice. I'd be inclined to give a pass to the
2-person clusters -- unless similarity was 100%. But look at some of those
clusters.. that's not coincidence or even just "helping someone out".

~~~
sesqu
Ah, but a cluster doesn't mean they all collaborated with each other. For
example, take a look at the big one in the middle: 3 identical ones and one
pretty close, for a 4-person clique. Chances are that there are actually 3
connections instead of 6 - two collaborated, one shared with a friend, the
other helped a friend by spelling out the pseudocode.

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nickz
I don't know if publishing such a graph is a good idea. Imagine a jealous
girlfriend going through some of those 2-person clusters and finding you there
with some other girl. Besides, sometimes students just steal each other's
work. I once caught a pair of students with two identical homework reports (me
being a TA). It turned our the guy has stolen the homework solution from his
classmate/girlfriend. She was not guilty. He was. In such a case, openly
accusing both parties of cheating on the homework is just not fair.

