Recognizing copied code...

[jthompsonjr]

I'm a high school teacher teaching an eCommerce class. All work in this course is supposed to be done just using straight xhtml with notepad-- no Dreamweaver, Frontpage etc.

It's an online course so I have students from about 7 different high schools and many of them work from school and home.

I need some ways to tell the difference between straight code and those that are fudging (cheating) by using the other software.

For most of them it's pretty easy-- they have fairly little knowledge right now (of xhtml) so if they're throwing a bunch of tables and div tags around I'm pretty sure they're using one of those programs. Some of the kids are pretty talented though and I need to figure out a way to easily check for those.

I was just wondering if there were some other red flags to look for.

Thanks!

 

[nasaboy007]

there's no straightforward way to determine if the user used a WYSIWYG editor (dreamweaver, frontpage, etc) other than the fact that it makes the code completely superfluous. frontpage adds all these random javascript things. dreamweaver is a little better at looking "handcoded" but there are no specifics. I'm afraid you'll just have to look at it and see whether it looks like somebody typed it up or if it was generated by a program. one thing might be using <font> tags rather than css, but that could just as well be an inexperienced user.

 

[shockie]

red flags? i would just say bulky nonsense code, code that serves no purpose, etc. anything that isn't validated xhtml is also a big red flag.

<font><font color="red"> </font></font>

 

[weblord]

like they've said you can't distinguish there's no clear path, the way to do it, is have an actual on the spot exam and have each one of them create (can also be done all of them at same time) and see that only notepad is opened up and they directly typing the code themselves.

 

[dezinerite]

I agree with Weblord, it's not easy to tell. One possible (but not 100%) way of knowing whether they've used such softwares is if they've used indent in their coding. Many new coders will start from the extreme left, e.g.:

Hand coded:

<d i v></ d i v>

Software coded:

<d i v></d i v>​