On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 6:39 PM, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > But sometimes different skills are being examined, and the student > should be exercising skills on their own without basing it directly on > the work of others. In these cases, penalties for plagiarism are > appropriate, would you agree?
If Fred writes something and Bill copies it without acknowledging Fred's work, then Bill should be penalized. That much is clear. That aligns well with the requirement to see what each student can accomplish, and with standard copyright law (including open source, where requirement-to-acknowledge is a common part of both licensing and courtesy). But why should Fred be punished? What has he done wrong? If it can be proven that Fred wrote the code (granted, that's hard to prove, but providing each student with a git/hg repo to push code to every day would make it easier), he should be graded on that code and not on the fact that someone else ripped it off. When it's less clear who copied from whom, I can understand issuing across-the-board penalties in the interests of fairness (and because the effort of figuring out who wrote what isn't worth it), but I'd say it's a compromise for simplicity rather than justifiable punishment on someone who published code. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
