students editing output

[rob robertson]

In article <1051 at hou2h.UUCP> mr at hou2h.UUCP (M.RINDSBERG) writes:
>> {A professor wants a way of verifying the student's program output is
>>  not doctored by a text editor}

>Sort of a flame.
>If the assignment is simple enough to be calculated by hand, then it
>is nonsensical to assign a person to perform this on a computer. One of
>the duties of a professor of computer science is also to teach when,
>and when not to use a computer for a given task.
>end of flame.

Think.  To test my assembler, I hand assemble something, then run it through
the assembler and then compare the two results.  What your saying is that my 
assembler is then useless because I can do it by hand, untrue.  

>>   The only way I know of to check a student's work is go through a demo.  But
>> this is terribly time consuming, and it is hard to set a precise due date
>> (unless you check file modification times).
>
>File modification times can be changed easily with a standard unix
>utility.

Not if they are owned by the professor.

>>   What do other people do?  Thanks.
>
>They don't worry about this.
>
>					Mark

As a computer engineering student, I see rampant cheating in lower computer
classes, I've worked in a computer lab and have had people come up to me and
ask me how to doctor results.  It doesn't go up to the higher classes, 
because if you can get 99% of an assembler working the last 1% isn't 
terribly hard.

In my opinion: (a) the problem needs to be recognized.  (b) solutions to
the problem need to be found.

BTW, lets move this discussion away from net.unix.





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