students editing output

[Steve]

  Here is the summary I promised of the mail I received on "Students Editing
Output":
  A common comment was that some professors rely more on exams, papers, and
oral presentations (or defenses of programs) than on programming assignments
in determining a students grade.  There should be no tremendous gap between
test results and programming assignment results.  Also the pilfering of programs
from trash cans seems to be a fairly widespread problem.
  The comment was made never to trust file modification times.
  Suggestions for various methods for dealing with programming assignments:
    (1) a script would be run by the instructor at program due time which would
        collect copies of all the programs, compile them, and test them against
        the instructor's thoroughly-exercising input data;
    (2) the students would run a script when ready to turn in a program that
        would copy the program into the instructor's directory;
    (3) the students would mail copies of their programs to the instructor,
        and the TA's would break out the programs, compile them, and test them;
    (4) a modified version of script (4.2 BSD) could be used that sends its
        output to the instructor;
    (5) checking of programs can be automated with scripts that compile, run,
        and "diff" against the correct out, and mail results back to the
        student;
    (6) having the student write only a subroutine which is called by the
        instructor's main program makes it harder to forge output.
  Andrew Macpherson (andrew at stc.UUCP) pointed out that their batch system
posted last April (226,227 at stc) could be modified to send the output to lpr,
the line-printer spooler.
-- 
							Stephen J. Hartley
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