students editing output

[Vince Manis]

In article <1627 at ihuxl.UUCP> veach at ihuxl.UUCP (Michael T. Veach) writes:
>> I make a point to tell my classes that the faking of results is a serious
>> breach of trust and will be dealt with severely. I emphasize that the programs
>> I ask them to write I have seen in many versions, both correct and incorrect
>> that they should not expect an error to slip by. [The truth of this depends
>> on exactly what language and what programs they're doing, but they don't 
>> know that.]
>
>
>I think the only reasonable thing would be to give the student
>an A+ for the course as he obviously has the same values
>for 'truth' as the instructor. 

Not at all. As an instructor, I often tell students things that could be
true, but aren't. The fact is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, it
*is* obvious that a student has cheated. (This summer, there was a case
of a simple text-processing program which miraculously rephrased its input
along with counting words). Generally, if a student knows enough to do a
good job of cheating, s/he knows enough (and is motivated enough) to write
the program properly. 

This fall, we switched to Macs, and I am somewhat concerned about the
possibilities for fraud in an environment where everyone does his or 
her work on micros, and where it's very easy to edit an output file.
I have no answer to this, other than to threaten the students (I explain
that it's exactly like handing in a falsified physics experiment), and
to lower the dependence of the final grade on assignment marks.