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From: hartley@uvm-cs.UUCP (Steve)
Newsgroups: net.unix,net.cse
Subject: Re:  students editing output
Message-ID: <452@uvm-cs.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 15-Oct-85 16:03:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: uvm-cs.452
Posted: Tue Oct 15 16:03:55 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 17-Oct-85 06:58:45 EDT
Organization: UVM
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Xref: linus net.unix:5316 net.cse:478


  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@stc.UUCP) pointed out that their batch system
posted last April (226,227@stc) could be modified to send the output to lpr,
the line-printer spooler.
-- 
							Stephen J. Hartley
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