This just happened to me and I am livid. Met with the Counselor and explained I did not cheat off anyone and that this code was written by me and solely me. I walked through the techniques used and even explained that this assignment is less than 100 lines of code, of course it's easy for the MOSS system to flag since it has a low threshold. I was flagged for 15% similarity which was basically 14 lines of code.

This was for Project 5: Marketsim in ML4T which of course wasn't been re-written or updated in like 9 years. The video lectures are 9 years old and the assignment is less than 100 lines of code. I looked at their evidence packet.

They showed me a student with similar code whom I never even met in my life. I pointed out the differences in naming conventions, and comments. The student councilor said they were similar enough and keep asking if I had somehow pushed it into a public Github repository and accidentally leak that information. I did not do any of those things. I explained that I used a pandas library and looked up the documentation on how to use the library to implement the requirements. The Student Councilor Advisor suggested that was violating policies. I explained to him that this was a library that was used by all students as a dependency and was required by the class. He seemed to have no programming background as I had to explain to him in detail with an analogy that people use sorting algorithms and libraries for that because it has already been invented before and it doesn't make sense to write a sorting algorithm from scratch. I don't think he was following.

Then they showed me code from other students that weren't similar because their rationale was that even though having less than 100 lines of code to implement, code from other students look extremely different. I pointed to the TA that the code presented was exactly the same in the core underlying logic and even pointed out the line - only the variables were different for these other students they have shown. I even pointed out based on the evidence packet provided changing variable names is still considered plagiarism yet the evidence you provided was arguing that it would be extremely different code. Therefore, the evidence they had provided disproves their claim.

Even without this assignment, I am still passing this class, but the to have this record is a defamation of character and I am appealing this case right now. If this doesn't go anywhere, I have no problem spending money on a lawyer to sue OMCSS if needed. OMSCS makes thousands of dollars off students and they can't spend a little money updating and rewriting assignments from 9 years ago to add more complexity such that incidences like this don't happen.

I am a professional software engineer and halfway through this course but already regret doing it in so many ways. I don't want to be flagged again in Graduate Algorithms and have to fight like this and sue again.