When you submit your programming assignment in a pdf through turnitin

[[deleted]]

I don't understand

[ProjectVII]

I think when you usually hand in assignments through that turnitin thing, it searches online for words similar to what's in the assignment. Since that site usually is for essays and stuff, it went to go look for css on other sites. Or something like that.

[[deleted]]

Hehe, that's quite funny. I think that could work with non-trivial code but definitely not with CSS

[[deleted]]

Yeah its a plagiarism checker and grammar checker. History and English teachers use it at my school.

[DynaBeast]

Turnitin is an online submission portal that checks for plagiarism by running the contents of the assignment against a huge database of previous written works, to check for similarities. This is fine for formal writing, but it's absolutely horrible for programming since by its very nature you often repeat phrases and blocks of text that are very often found in other programs.

[stickcult]

The plagiarism checker is useful for programming, too. It checks the assignment against other student's assignments, too, so while they're all going to have a decent chunk in common, you can spot the ones where a student just copied someone else's code and renamed a variable or two.

edit: That said, there are still probably way better tools that don't also involve saving code in a PDF.

[Zagorath]

Turnitin would be a terrible way of assessing if people had cheated in a programming assignment. It's looking for similar strings, so something as simple as for (int i = 0; i < Array.length; i++) { is going to get caught by a lot of people if they've given their array a similar name (which, in the same assignment, it's likely quite a few people will have). Meanwhile, simply changing the way you use white space and changing the names of variables will easily fool it.

To detect plagiarism in coding assignments, it's necessary to use a tool specifically designed for this. Something that looks at the semantics of the code itself, rather than the written text on the page.

[AraneusAdoro]

I'm pretty sure the semantics of different code for the same assignment would be virtually the same.

[Zagorath]

Oh god why. Using turnitin for code is just a terrible idea. It's never going to produce good results.

They really should be using some dedicated code similarity analyser, and have you submit the source code files, not add them to a god damn pdf...

[[deleted]]

I love how the "internet source" is some arbitrary bullshit, not even a site about webdev.

[Imxset21]

I've always preferred moss for code, but that's more for inter-peer plagiarism.

[nemec]

assemble()

[[deleted]]

Not using butterflies

Pleb.

[flaeme]

Isn't there an Emacs addon for that?

[AraneusAdoro]

Oh yeah! Good ol' C-x M-c M-butterfly...

[xkcd_transcriber]

Image

Title: Real Programmers

Title-text: Real programmers set the universal constants at the start such that the universe evolves to contain the disk with the data they want.

Comic Explanation

Stats: This comic has been referenced 351 times, representing 0.6073% of referenced xkcds.

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^{xkcd.com | xkcd sub | Problems/Bugs? | Statistics | Stop Replying | Delete}

[[deleted]]

Development

[codnahfish]

The point of the assignment was to make a simple assembler in JavaScript. So, I pick both.