The "Pile"

[gremcint]

That what I'm calling it. Stack of 10 assignments that I've marked, out of 60. This is the second assignment for this course but the first I've marked for this course. 10 assignments, there shouldn't even be 1 in this pile I've separated but I'm pretty sure these 10 people cheated.

10, 1/6 of the class.

I'm just a teaching assistant not the professor. Basically it's a case of I'm looking at the same flowcharts (programming) or the same computer code, all of them have the same multiple choice answers too. There's even the same bad grammar.

I felt like crap looking at these, let alone marking them.

The teacher said to mark them but hold back the marks for now and he'd investigate, I had a secretary pass them on to him. To actually accuse these people feels like crap but it's a case of I've gotta do it. It's my responsibility.

It's not 10 identical assignments but a group of 4 and 3 pairs.

[houdini]

Having the same bad grammar does tend to argue for copying - usually you get a little variation in the stupidity.

[Racket_Man]

I too was a TA in an entry level computer programming class and got the same thing for several programming assignments.

different student names
Same bad grammer in the comments
same variable names
same misspellings
same spacing

You get the picture

[Jetfire]

Variable names (beyond the simple/standard "for i = 0 to 10" type), commenting (where bad grammar comes into play) and spacing are the big things to watch out for as far as cheating goes. The overall flow of the assignment is usually too simple to ding them as cheaters, but the rest will get most of them. Unless they are smart enough to rename variables and rewrite comments, but if they do that they've at least looked at the code and done something so it isn't pure cheating.

Chances are they aren't cheating off eachother, but they found some site to get their solution and copied that.

[wolfie]

I wonder if the only lesson the cheaters will learn from this is "make sure you use proper grammar" - after all, if you have 100,000 people using proper grammar, you won't find them making the same mistakes because there are NO mistakes.

Ideosynchrasies in variable names are a classic "trip-up". In one piece of production code, I used a variable name that started with "TPIR". Why would I use that combination of letters? Because at the end of a check against various possibilities, it needed to hold the one that was closest to, but not over, a value from another table - and a certain game show came to mind.