Posting work I did for a uni course online
December 5, 2011 10:09 PM   Subscribe

I'd like to make a programming project I did for a university course available as open source. I finished the course, but not my degree yet. The code could be helpful to people outside of just an assignment problem, and it's actually a well known project from a book, with answers in other languages already available online. My question is, are there any academic integrity issues with doing this, also considering I am still working on my degree?
posted by nlap to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)
 
The best person to direct this question to is the professor for whom you did the project. The main concern is aiding plagiarism, and if you have the professor's blessing, there's hardly any reason they could withhold a degree. If you really want to help them, a few deliberate misspellings in comments, or just longish comments that have few or no exact hits in google might make it easy to detect. Another mitigating factor might be to make the code available, but direct search engines to not index it via robots.txt.
posted by pwnguin at 10:16 PM on December 5, 2011


Best answer: I generally agree with pwnguin -- if the professor who assigns this project gives you his or her blessing, it probably won't be a problem. I think that changing comments is pointless, though, as college professors have much more sophisticated tools available to them for defeating plagiarism, and changing comments can be defeated with a simple regex (%s/\/\/.*//). And trying to hide the code from google sort of defeats the point of open sourcing it in the first place. Besides, the same anti-plagiarism tools already mentioned will catch anyone using your code -- your professor already has a copy of it.

So, if it was me, I'd feel no qualms about putting it up with the professor's blessing. If the professor says no, I wouldn't do it, even though I think it is morally OK, because the amount of trouble an angry professor could cause for me in your situation would not be worth it.
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 10:24 PM on December 5, 2011


Yeah, definitely ask your professor. I understand the sentiment behind this, and it's to your credit, but your professor may still take it the wrong way. I definitely had professors in undergrad who assigned the same obscure variations on heaps as implementation problems year after year and would have been furious to find the code online.
posted by troublesome at 10:51 PM on December 5, 2011


It will probably depend on the university, but there's a decent chance they own rights to anything you do as a student.
posted by curious_yellow at 5:57 AM on December 6, 2011


chasing: "How do programming classes work in the age of StackOverflow and such? Are the answers not already mostly out there? Aren't students already on their honor to not go and grab existing solutions?"

CS plagiarism happens, but I think it's believed that most cheating is between students in a given class; rarely does the web already have a completely implemented version of your assignment, in the language you require. And AskMefi has been around for ages, and long ago instituted a no-homework policy. On Q&A sites, the easily spotted cheats are discovered quickly and given a flood of joke answers. Obviously there's a confirmation bias, so maybe a proper study on homework-question detection is in order.

At least one professor I know of sets up traps for plagiarists. Luis von Ahn constructs his assignments in tandem with a honeypot website containing terms found only in it. If you Google key terms in the assignment, you get his website, and he gets your IP from the server logs. At which point he does the detective work so that when the assignment is turned in, it's ready to be handed over to a disciplinary committee. He mentions this at the start of every semester, and he's now built a reputation for this behavior, which should keep most people in line. Or incentivize people to learn onion routing.

The deeper AST analysis tools that tylerkaraszewski mentions are useful, but less so when your project builds on top of NachOS or Minix or other large existing code bases. Hence the misspelling watermark as a secondary countermeasure. Generally people who cheat don't invest a lot of time in the act, so watermarks have a higher chance of remaining intact, and are easier to explain to the non-technical people who adjudicate these disputes.

On the other hand, professors bringing plagiarism cases before committees / honor boards is rare. There's no consideration in tenure decisions for "number of cheaters caught", so from the prospective of their career and publication record, this only detracts. As a bonus, if you actually turn in the cheaters you get a Dean on your case for harming accreditation numbers, losing tuition dollars, and earning your department's students a reputation as cheaters just for the mere act of exposing the truth.

To bring this long post back on topic, just ask the professor and they'll probably be fine with it. And then write a log parser to watch for IP addresses from your institution for the lolz.
posted by pwnguin at 9:49 AM on December 6, 2011


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