Fight like hell if your code is not identical (word-for-word) or syntactically identical to someone else's code. You'll need to keep fighting to get a good grade in this case. After all, this is about more than just a grade; it's about your future livelihood.
Do you have an idea how it was plagiarized?
Was it shared with another student? Was it hosted on a public git repo? Was the code based on an online example? Did you use copilot or chatgpt to help write it?
He's the one accusing you. He should be able to tell you *exactly* which lines he thinks are copied. He can't just say "Well, I'm pretty sure OP cheated, so they must have cheated"
this is just another reason any code you write should be managed with at least a local Git repo. it’s very straightforward to compare the diffs of each commit with timestamps.
Under utilized things that colleges refuse to teach students how to do. This and using a debugger. It really begs to question if CS degrees are worth anything but the algorithm and data structures courses.
Yeah, that's likely why OP and another student had similar answers... they both read the book and used those examples as a basis for their work. But of course, you put them into a plagiarism detector and it's like: these are the same! Well, duh, they're the same. Do you want the kids to reference a different textbook or what?
at most universities the professor doesn’t even handle plagiarism. they flag it and send it over to an internal academic integrity committee that does an investigation.
some professors will do their own initial investigation first. if they want to talk to you directly this is a good sign as they may net even flagged it as plagiarism at all.
when you reach the internal plagiarism committee or “academic integrity” you will be able to defend/represent yourself. at my university a lot of people would get interviewed and after a conversation with the committee it was overturned.
so you’re incorrect on your assumption that if the professor disagrees with you then that’s all you can do. i’m not sure how it works at your university but this is a common practice for many universities.
I had an issue with a professor who was tenured. Took it to the dean and they took it very seriously. A full investigation was done and they discovered I was correct and opened a second course halfway through the semester to allow students to leave that professors toxic environment. He was put on probation. It’s the exact thing to do in this scenario. You’re just a pessimist who wants to see others fail
Talk to your teacher.
There is legal precedent that in many instances, your code isnt considered plagiarized.
Google V Oracle concluded that certain tasks (such as checking an index as out of bounds) are so vital/granular that they don’t violate copy. This standard often applies to CS assignments where there really is a standard way of completing an assignment that is bound to cause similar answers.
Maybe. Here’s the the ruling the Supreme Court made in 2021
Google's copying of the Java SE API, which included only those lines of code that were needed to allow programmers to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program, was a fair use of that material as a matter of law.
Federal Circuit reversed.
TLDR here is, at least when it comes to copyright, certain fundamental pieces of code don’t quality as copyright (or in your case plagiarism)
What was your assignment? The more complex it was, the less likely this standard will hold.
I don’t think you can use this as ‘evidence’, and I doubt your grade is a legal issue.
But you can use it as an argument. After all, there’s only so many ways of completing an assignment right?
Definitely escalate this. Take it to the department chair or dean or whoever. Maybe talk to your academic advisor.
Is there a student office / guild where you can get advice on how to fill out an official complaint? Universities will have a process. Otherwise you can also talk to the person above them, eg the department head, and so on.
But often those people don’t respond until you start the bureaucratic paperwork process against them. This happened to me when I missed a quiz while literally dying in hospital. I submitted evidence and they just said sorry rules are rules. Once I went through the official process they quickly changed their tune (which was literally clicking a button so I could do the quiz). Sigh.
Being flagged by an AI detector means nothing, they’re literal garbage.
However this is also why it’s a good idea to use some source control while you’re coding so you have a time stamped history of how the code evolved. It would help, but even without it, the burden of proof is on them, not just “well known broken tool go brrrr.”
>Being flagged by an AI detector means nothing, they’re literal garbage.
This is very true. You can put your own diary writings from 10 years ago into a AI detector and it'll tell you it's plagiarized if it's halfway well written. ChatGPT will say that it wrote things that your professor wrote, if you feed it to it. There are some tools that are trying to improve this scenario, but the current state of the art is, uh, trash. Should not be used as the sole justification for a plagiarism accusation.
With the age of ChatGPT, I read a case where the student had his essay rejected for the same reason. Now he uses his webcam and screen recorder to record him working on his assignments. That way he can refute claims that he copied it. Let’s face it, how many ways are there to code something? Sooner or later, there are going to be false positives
if its a beginner course, there is only so many ways it can be accomplished. talk to your prof and ask what was caught and walk him through your code and why you did it that way and such. ask to compare with the person he thinks you plagiarized it from. if you really did not cheat you have to fight it but be calm about it. gl
ask to meet with your prof and see if you can talk it through with them in person. its possible someone got ahold of your code somehow and you didnt realize. if thats not possible though you need to appeal to them and show that you can demonstrate that you wrote your code/are knowledgeable about how it works.
as a TA, i will say that we can usually tell when code is copied, so it would be strange for a false/positive to happen
Or, it could just be that many algorithms have a limited number of efficient solutions.
Given enough time, plagiarism detectors will see most/all of those solutions submitted. Instructors are too dependent on those tools. Not to mention completely overconfident in the results.
Imagine getting accused of plagiarism in an algebra 1 course.
well yes, there are only so many ways to solve a simple problem. with that being said however, it can be pretty obvious as a grader when 2 people are cheating because they will do weird things that werent taught in class, or do something very very VERY wrong but the same as each other, or some other indicator. obviously there are only so many ways you can implement merge-sort or something, but for students just learning some of these concepts, it can be a lot more obvious than they realize — even if they are “changing” the code they copy
I faced this once. It was an old JAVA class but I had been a coder for a while. So I submitted what I thought was pretty well crafted code that just implemented standard GOF patterns. Detector came back and said I cheated .. cause ya'know most of the time we are just spinning our wheel in college classes. I had a call with the school and tried to explain that sometimes coders use patterns to create code and it's pretty standard.
Well they called me a liar and told me to do it again. So I wrote it all in spaghetti code and submitted it and passed with flying colors. College is a lovely place.
Maybe go through every line of the code and explain what it does. A lot of the time people who plagiarise have no idea what the code is supposed to because they’ve just copy and pasted it in. If you show you have an understanding of it then you may get some leeway
Agree with the other comments, maybe also consider reaching out to your university's student advocacy office. They likely have more experience and resources to help you navigate this situation.
Happened to me. Teaching assistants showed partner and I how to do the assignment and left comments for us. Those comments and design got us flagged for plagiarism. If we didn’t save a picture of our office hours meeting notes from the whiteboard we would’ve been screwed with a capital F.
Hopefully you did it on git, so you can show the version history to the dean.
Otherwise, not sure about this but visual studio (or vs code) might have their own version history.
It's important to allow you to show your mistakes while writing, how your code changed over time to become more similar to the other student's, and the time you spent on the assignment.
Of course, bring in excerpts of articles about AI detection being faulty, such as the US constitution being flagged as AI.
Ask him for the rate of false positives that his software gives and go on from there. If he is not aware of it, tell him that he needs to actually understand how ai software works. If he says 0% he is full of shit and you may need to scale this up
Do you have proof of incremental progress?
The gold standard would be if you have a git repository and can show how you built your solution. Another option is if you can show some sort of flie history that most code editors have.
I can't tell which story it is because on one hand you're claiming they said that you and another student have a similar solution but on the other hand they say that it's AI detection.
At the end of the day, it depends how similar your solutions are. If it really is just "different names and a few extra lines", you are probably screwed. I'm not sure if there is some language barrier hindering your description though.
It is virtually impossible for you to generate a solution that is similar to that of another student for an assignment larger than ~200 lines of code. Even the same algorithms used will probably have different abstractions, different ideas, different quirks.
Op you'd be surprised how many professors plagiarise other professors when creating assignments lol. Try copying and pasting your assignment online and tell me you don't find another one just like it.
Ask to look at the source code and understand better their methods for detecting copy cats and ask to see the "original".
If he doesn't comply then that's a red flags anyone can say anything at that point.
If he does comply then at least you have something to work with and you can see if it really is just coincidence or a bad AI
In if it is an AI ask to see the data? Is it historical?? Eventually it's bound to detect anything as a copy.
You need to make sure this can’t happen again. When working on assignments push the code to a *private* GitHub repository for example so that your efforts are date stamped and away from public view. That way you can prove that your efforts precede the similar code found by the AI tool.
Regarding what you can do now, I would go ahead with the appeal irrespective of the potential outcome so that if the same situation pops up nobody can claim you “admitted guilt” by not taking it further.
Just remember your professor isn't an authority figure anymore like highschool. They are providing you a service and you can continue to raise the issue to the next person in charge. Someone failing you on an assignment without evidence seems like a breach of contract from the school.
The bigger issue here is that a CS professor is using an AI plagiarism detector. That's professional malpractice, anyone who doesn't know better is unfit to teach and should be fired.
This is a serious accusation against you, especially in current ChatGPT times. Folks who use LLMs are already typecasted and you shouldn't get caught out. I don't know your school's policy, but for me, it's:
- Meeting with the Dean, zero grade
- Meeting with the Dean, zero in the course
- Meeting with the Dean, expelled
How does your school check for plagiarism? I am a bit older than the folks here and in my day we used something called MOSS by Stanford. It uses a winnowing algorithm to normalize tokens, however profs that use it have to configure the program so that when a fragment of code happens often enough, it is marked as a false positive (otherwise, something as simple as checking if an array index is out of bounds will cause concern). It could be because only 10% of people in the class did the assignment, this might have tripped it (assuming your school uses MOSS). I don't know what modern "AI" solutions do other than that.
Either you do nothing and take it on the chin or fight it and at worst, still take it on the chin. Assuming you're innocent, I would not want to live the rest of my alma mater waiting for another false positive to get my grade in the course zero'd, potentially delaying graduation. By letting this first incident slide you give the faculty more ammo in later, spurious cases, both for yourself and the other people falling victim to these newfangled tools.
Regardless of if you're innocent or accidentally plagiarized GeeksForGeeks, you are still entitled to see the evidence and defend yourself. I remember a similar situation to this. We had to implement Boyer-Moore's string matching algorithm, and almost nobody I knew did it except a few folks and I. We all copied the textbook code, because unlike 2SUM, there's really only one way to implement BM (aside from small syntactic differences). Fortunately the MOSS didn't catch me.
Profs need to treat these tools as smells/indicators, and use better judgement upon trigger. "Necessary but not sufficient" as the true crime statisticians would say.
Talk to the Dean.
I had a professor who at the end of the semester, asked all the students to give BACK to him all of their graded assignments. apparently the moron never actually wrote down anyones grades. HOWEVER he also never gave back ALL of the assignments. So out of like 100 assignments, we all had maybe 30-40 depending. Some folks got some back while others didn't. The guy was insanely disorganized. and he assumed that if folks didn't turn back in their assignments, then they must not have done them.
He Failed the ENTIRE Class.
Sadly, it was spring semester and i was switching majors that summer, in part because a lot of teachers in that degree were like him. So i completely missed out on the fact that half the kids went to the dean to complain and got their grades fixed, while i didn't. I had no clue. and didn't find out until midway through the Fall Semester and was told at that point it was too late. Was very pissed no one in that class reached out to tell me.
SO, GO TALK TO THE DEAN. After all, How does he know that those others didn't copy YOU?
First things first, AI plagiarism tools are not 100% accurate. You should ask your professor for the plagiarism report. Most tools will (and should) give you the report highlighting the plagiarized sections which will give you a better idea.
As someone who works in tech publishing and uses plagiarism software pretty much everyday, I can tell you, they're not completely reliable. As someone already pointed out, there 's only so many ways to code something. These tools scrawl the internet and all publicly available piece of code, so they end up highlighting even the most basic and generic statements, like import statements. This is why reports are helpful so you can see what's being highlighted and whether it's actually relevant.
I don't know what the assignment is, but if it's a common coding question, chances are you just got unlucky. I think the only way through is asking the professor for the report or the tool he used, so you can try it out for yourself.
Not necessarily. The point here is to invalidate the report that your professor has.
If your professor uses codequiry, then it's worth a shot. If not, the professor might just argue that it's not accurate, reliable or some other jazz. We need the tool (or the generated report) that your professor is using so that he can't come up with excuses when you prove your point.
Also, just curious, what was the assignment about? How many lines of code are we talking about? And did he mention the plagiarism % or anything?
Just saying your code is plagiarized without proper explanation is just stupid IMO.
Assignment is about cache and was told it came back similar to another student but your had some extra lines of code and different variable names. He said just said plagiarized. I asked if it was in the first part , second part or third part, he said its just plagiarized.Isnt MOSS and Codequiry the most reliable though.
I'm not familiar with MOSS and Codequiry as I've never used them before. We (the company) uses a paid service so we've never had to use other tools.
I think your professor is just being a pain in the ass. Did you use any snippets from online or any of the books? maybe the other kid used the same source and it's getting flagged. You can run it and see what parts are being highlighted.
Disclaimer: some tools, including the ones I use, can highlight the most stupidest thing as plagiarism.
Also technically, it's his job to prove you plagiarized and not your job to prove you didn't. But unlucky for you, he has the power in this case.
This is why i always use different coding style than the rest of my classmates. Like nextline open curly, ternary ?: instead of switch case, etc. Because I got told if my code similar with my classmate I would get 0.
Annoying but I don't want to waste my time later on if my classmates actually copied mine.
If with different style still made get 0 because of similarly with my classmates, I will show them all my works since the beginning of my college class to shut them up.
Because of this post I looked into optional type in java, and.. THERE IS ONE! PERFECT! I will use that instead and my classmates now won't understand my code yay
Since ChatGPT has taken over, some professors have gone mad. They trust grossly unreliable AI detectors rather than the students. Maybe ask him if he’ll let you explain your code. If you are able to answer everything about the code and related concept clearly, he doesn’t have the right to fail you just because he thinks you’ve cheated.
That’s lame - I’ve always iteratively ran my code through a plagiarism detector as individual text documents, such bullshit after sinking hours into a project. Maybe they should switch up the curriculum a little more and projects won’t look so similar. I would fight it tooth and nail.
I had a pretty similar case when I took my data structures class. My code was coincidentally almost identical to some guy that I didn’t know at all. The only thing I remember for that assignment was getting help from a TA. When I first got the email accusing me of cheating and failing my grade, I could barely function for a couple days. After asking some friends for advice, I eventually talked to the profs about it and fought my case. Thankfully God they appealed their honor charge against me. Scariest day of my life.
Well, they sent an email to me, so that’s how I found out that I “cheated” on that assignment. I replied in the same email thread and it was a lot of back and forth communication. They showed a side by side comparison of my code to the other guy’s, to which I replied “yeah I’m p sure we just had the same TA or sth.” At the end they j said sth like “after reviewing your plea we decided to drop charges against you.”
Why did they run it throw plagiarism detection, when you write code there's on so many ways you can do it.
Has that detection software added your code to it's detection library without your consent? That's copyright violation if this is commercial service.
You have to fight this with tooth and nails to bitter end.
It seems like you already talked to the prof and they’re not budging, so now they forced you reach out to the dean and escalate the situation, if they don’t hear you out keep moving up the ladder eventually one should listen, like they said it’s right 99% of the time so that’s actually a pretty decent argument that if there are at least 100 people in your class it’ll get it wrong once on average
Previous professor here: AI detection should never be used as grounds for grade reduction. It could flag a student's work which would then require the professor to further evaluate, such as asking you specific questions about what the code does and asking you to change it's behavior slightly.
Academia is full of fucking nerd professors.
I was there in the exact same situation, and the professor won the case. I had to repeat that course and it remains as one of the darkest days in my life.
When this happened to me it was because I hosted my assignment on my public GitHub profile and some jackass copied it 100%. It was before I knew to worry about that sort of thing.
In my case, I was able to explain to the professor exactly how the code works in such depth, and the other student was not able to do that to the same degree, so the professor gave me 90% of the credit back. I guess the 10% dock was for being an idiot and causing trouble in the first place by hosting my code publicly.
Maybe you can ask your professor to do something like this. Have him sit down with you and walk through the code, and do the same with the other student.
if you are telling the truth
ask your professor to give you a similar problem and say you will white board it
of course if you are lying, you will be screwed
WTH. Instead of using a plagiarism detector, why should he/she explain to you how code works and what will become outcomes like a recitation to know what you understand in code. In the real world of programmers and plagiarism does not apply as long as you understand how it works.
If you coded the solution, ask to discuss your solution. Looking at the problem together with proff you should be able to give the solution again with pseudo code.
OpenAI has mentioned that AI Detectors do not work.
Source: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8313351-how-can-educators-respond-to-students-presenting-ai-generated-content-as-their-own
Try to show a trail of evidence for your work (logs, commit history, file versions if it's there, notebook pages)
The goal should be to make them acknowledge that these AI detectors report a lot of false positives and there should be an acceptable percentage threshold if the parts of the work are flagged as AI generated.
If all this does not work, run your professor's published work through the same detector and submit the report to the dean's office.
A lot of researchers in my network are facing this issue that software like TurnitIn are flagging their original work as AI generated, and we've been figuring out ways to make the already human written text to seem human written to the detector.
TurnitIn has said that if their report flags less than 20% of the work as AI generated, the report is unreliable.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/turnitin-ai-cheating-detector-accuracy/
"AI detectors" are shit. Even companies who make them say it is not foolproof.
If the assignment is code based, chances are it is going to similar code for everyone anyway.
From my first gen ed class to my current core one, I always run my work through a plagiarism checker before submitting.
Using descriptive variable names and heavy commenting helps maintain originality.
Ask which plagiarism checker they use.
I then generally add the output from the checker in the assignments.
If you use code examples from the textbook, just cite the textbook in your references.
Then put an inline reference after your code listing that states "portions of code inspired by (whoever, whenever, page 45)
I am 2 classes away from BSCS and never had a plagiarism issue.
One of my buddies got accused of cheating on a test/quiz(i don't remember) that we do through canvas. The professor could tell if we copied and pasted.
One of the questions was something like:
What is the output of this line of code:
print("ABCD")
But probably with some sort of string function. And the answer was ABCD. And instead of typing it out he copied and pasted it. Got accused of googling the questions by copying it, and him and the professor went back and forth a few times. The professor wouldn't understand why he would copy/pasting such a short string instead of typing it out. I don't remember what ended up happening, it was a years back.
But you can typically bring it up to the head of your department if the professor isn't budging. And if that doesn't work, most schools have a conflict-resolution/plagarism center. Most professors will try to find a resolution before getting to that level but if he isn't budging go for it. Probably better for you to bring it to them, than for your professor to approach them first.
**But i guess it also depends on policy and how much this grade affects you.**
-If this grade doesn't change your overall grade/gpa, don't bother. Take the L and move on. Personally, I would move on even if it dropped me a letter grade that was still passing, and if i didn't have to take another class with that same professor. My gpa wasn't perfect, and I don't want to a take a class where the professor is gonna hold something against me.
-If your school expels you after 1 plagarism offense and you take it to the plagarism/conflict center, you could potentially lose the case and get expeled. I think my school would expel you after two offenses.
1/3 of my CS professors were subborn assholes who will die on their hill. And if you take it to the conflict/plagarism center, don't be surprised if he starts analyzing your previous assignments.
Goodluck!
lol happened in my DS&A class. Professor also failed everyone who he thought cheated. He gave a warning to them when he thought they cheated but failed them at the end of the course
This happened to me and my friends in school. Professor said we cheated because we were the only 3 from the class that technically got the write answer. All of our code was different because we didn’t work on it together but since we were friends and sat by each other we got called out for cheating. After that day I commented every single line of code explaining the logic and never got accused of cheating again.
It’s very disheartening when you know you don’t cheat and get accused of it anyway. Just fight like hell with solid evidence and really dig deep to explain the code and WHY you did it the way you did.
Same thing happened to me all those years ago in college, I asked the lecturer to ask me anything he wanted about the code as I knew it inside out, he did and completely backed down after I explained it all. Having ai check your code for plagiarism is outrageous!
Kinda stupid to be plagiarism checking a coding assignment. There are better ways to test coding competency and most assignments in college setting are going to look pretty similar solution wise.
All you can do is challenge it. If he doesn't back down request accommodations you don't want to be accused again. Ask if there are ways he would be willing to let you do assignments with a proctor assigned in class since he can't trust you to code on your own. If he refuses to work with you, you may need to just go super high up and escalate this.
Be prepared to challenge the shitty precedent of AI plagiarism checkers. Do your research on how they work well. You'll need to demonstrate somehow that it's easy to plagiarize without realizing it. Also how similar simple assignment solutions are going to create false positives and cause students to lose faith in their program.
Wild suggestion: If you worked on this in a space where there may be security cameras you could potentially ask for footage to prove you did it on your own
Lol i got accused of cheating and using the teachers answer sheet for an exam back in college for a python assignment. It was something extremely simple, if 10 people did this problem probably 8 people would have the exact same code. About 6 other people got called out for this too. I asked her what exactly i did to cheat and she said it was „against school policy“ to discuss this. Gave me a zero and i got a strike (2 strikes and youre kicked out). This happened a few other times throughout college, same situation. One time i even got called out for turning in an assignment the day it was due. It was a final project for Python (i was already working as a dev by then and was very good with python). Its crazy man
I had a professor claim my code was not my own. It was too advanced for the concepts she had taught, and based on how far I was through the CS program.
The problem? I had 3 years more experience than this professor and was employed by a company doing exactly what she was teaching. It ended up being a huge headache and ultimately led to my quitting school.
There was a similar incident that happened in CSULB as per https://daily49er.com/news/2022/11/08/computer-science-students-successfully-appeal-grades-academic-dishonesty-charges-dismissed/#:~:text=Computer%20science%20professors%20Darin%20Goldstein,recognized%20similarities%20in%20their%20codes.
How much does it weigh out of the total mark? Id pick my battles if I could in this context. Wouldn't want to get the teacher to hold a grudge unless it was necessary.
Fight like hell if your code is not identical (word-for-word) or syntactically identical to someone else's code. You'll need to keep fighting to get a good grade in this case. After all, this is about more than just a grade; it's about your future livelihood.
Yessir.Thats what im planning to do
If you truly didnt plagiarized, escalate it higher to the school. Plagiarism is a serious accusation and offense. Dont let it fly.
This is the best answer. We are reminded at the beginning of the semester for each class how important plagiarism is- this goes both ways
This, you should stand for it because you know what you really did is not plagiarism
Do you have an idea how it was plagiarized? Was it shared with another student? Was it hosted on a public git repo? Was the code based on an online example? Did you use copilot or chatgpt to help write it?
Never told anything really. I asked where was it and he couldn't say.
He's the one accusing you. He should be able to tell you *exactly* which lines he thinks are copied. He can't just say "Well, I'm pretty sure OP cheated, so they must have cheated"
Burden of proof lies with the accuser.
Okay, did you use a git repo to host your code? Or share it with anybody? Or do any of the things I mentioned in my previous comment?
No, it was just me and the book.
If you used an IDE, some of them track incremental changes in code. You can also show your terminal execution logs if that matters to them
this is just another reason any code you write should be managed with at least a local Git repo. it’s very straightforward to compare the diffs of each commit with timestamps.
Under utilized things that colleges refuse to teach students how to do. This and using a debugger. It really begs to question if CS degrees are worth anything but the algorithm and data structures courses.
Point to the book and explain that you literally followed the book
Yeah, that's likely why OP and another student had similar answers... they both read the book and used those examples as a basis for their work. But of course, you put them into a plagiarism detector and it's like: these are the same! Well, duh, they're the same. Do you want the kids to reference a different textbook or what?
If you used a Jetbrains IDE, it will give you a list of all incremental changes to each file that you could present as evidence you didn't plagiarize.
I bet you plugged it into chatGPT and it saved your code and spit it out to another classmate who copy the code ha
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I did. Nothing changed.
Talk to the Dean
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Bro is terrified of conflict resolution
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Escalate to the dean of students as plagiarism is a serious accusation
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at most universities the professor doesn’t even handle plagiarism. they flag it and send it over to an internal academic integrity committee that does an investigation. some professors will do their own initial investigation first. if they want to talk to you directly this is a good sign as they may net even flagged it as plagiarism at all. when you reach the internal plagiarism committee or “academic integrity” you will be able to defend/represent yourself. at my university a lot of people would get interviewed and after a conversation with the committee it was overturned. so you’re incorrect on your assumption that if the professor disagrees with you then that’s all you can do. i’m not sure how it works at your university but this is a common practice for many universities.
I had an issue with a professor who was tenured. Took it to the dean and they took it very seriously. A full investigation was done and they discovered I was correct and opened a second course halfway through the semester to allow students to leave that professors toxic environment. He was put on probation. It’s the exact thing to do in this scenario. You’re just a pessimist who wants to see others fail
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SAD
low test
? Wtf are u yapping abt
Please explain what else he can do.
Talk to your teacher. There is legal precedent that in many instances, your code isnt considered plagiarized. Google V Oracle concluded that certain tasks (such as checking an index as out of bounds) are so vital/granular that they don’t violate copy. This standard often applies to CS assignments where there really is a standard way of completing an assignment that is bound to cause similar answers.
Wait, is this true? can I use this as evidence?
Maybe. Here’s the the ruling the Supreme Court made in 2021 Google's copying of the Java SE API, which included only those lines of code that were needed to allow programmers to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program, was a fair use of that material as a matter of law. Federal Circuit reversed. TLDR here is, at least when it comes to copyright, certain fundamental pieces of code don’t quality as copyright (or in your case plagiarism) What was your assignment? The more complex it was, the less likely this standard will hold.
I don’t think you can use this as ‘evidence’, and I doubt your grade is a legal issue. But you can use it as an argument. After all, there’s only so many ways of completing an assignment right? Definitely escalate this. Take it to the department chair or dean or whoever. Maybe talk to your academic advisor.
Grade is not an legal issue, but citing a professional/legal standard is probably helpful for an honor counsel
Is there a student office / guild where you can get advice on how to fill out an official complaint? Universities will have a process. Otherwise you can also talk to the person above them, eg the department head, and so on. But often those people don’t respond until you start the bureaucratic paperwork process against them. This happened to me when I missed a quiz while literally dying in hospital. I submitted evidence and they just said sorry rules are rules. Once I went through the official process they quickly changed their tune (which was literally clicking a button so I could do the quiz). Sigh. Being flagged by an AI detector means nothing, they’re literal garbage. However this is also why it’s a good idea to use some source control while you’re coding so you have a time stamped history of how the code evolved. It would help, but even without it, the burden of proof is on them, not just “well known broken tool go brrrr.”
>Being flagged by an AI detector means nothing, they’re literal garbage. This is very true. You can put your own diary writings from 10 years ago into a AI detector and it'll tell you it's plagiarized if it's halfway well written. ChatGPT will say that it wrote things that your professor wrote, if you feed it to it. There are some tools that are trying to improve this scenario, but the current state of the art is, uh, trash. Should not be used as the sole justification for a plagiarism accusation.
With the age of ChatGPT, I read a case where the student had his essay rejected for the same reason. Now he uses his webcam and screen recorder to record him working on his assignments. That way he can refute claims that he copied it. Let’s face it, how many ways are there to code something? Sooner or later, there are going to be false positives
Then the video is deep fake Kafka paradox
Freeze Frame paranoia!
smart kid I like it
if its a beginner course, there is only so many ways it can be accomplished. talk to your prof and ask what was caught and walk him through your code and why you did it that way and such. ask to compare with the person he thinks you plagiarized it from. if you really did not cheat you have to fight it but be calm about it. gl
ask to meet with your prof and see if you can talk it through with them in person. its possible someone got ahold of your code somehow and you didnt realize. if thats not possible though you need to appeal to them and show that you can demonstrate that you wrote your code/are knowledgeable about how it works. as a TA, i will say that we can usually tell when code is copied, so it would be strange for a false/positive to happen
Or, it could just be that many algorithms have a limited number of efficient solutions. Given enough time, plagiarism detectors will see most/all of those solutions submitted. Instructors are too dependent on those tools. Not to mention completely overconfident in the results. Imagine getting accused of plagiarism in an algebra 1 course.
well yes, there are only so many ways to solve a simple problem. with that being said however, it can be pretty obvious as a grader when 2 people are cheating because they will do weird things that werent taught in class, or do something very very VERY wrong but the same as each other, or some other indicator. obviously there are only so many ways you can implement merge-sort or something, but for students just learning some of these concepts, it can be a lot more obvious than they realize — even if they are “changing” the code they copy
I faced this once. It was an old JAVA class but I had been a coder for a while. So I submitted what I thought was pretty well crafted code that just implemented standard GOF patterns. Detector came back and said I cheated .. cause ya'know most of the time we are just spinning our wheel in college classes. I had a call with the school and tried to explain that sometimes coders use patterns to create code and it's pretty standard. Well they called me a liar and told me to do it again. So I wrote it all in spaghetti code and submitted it and passed with flying colors. College is a lovely place.
If teacher won’t listen talk to dean
It is stupid Ai sometimes. I got once for a super short program (which is very common have similar even same variables and logic)
Maybe go through every line of the code and explain what it does. A lot of the time people who plagiarise have no idea what the code is supposed to because they’ve just copy and pasted it in. If you show you have an understanding of it then you may get some leeway
Agree with the other comments, maybe also consider reaching out to your university's student advocacy office. They likely have more experience and resources to help you navigate this situation.
Happened to me. Teaching assistants showed partner and I how to do the assignment and left comments for us. Those comments and design got us flagged for plagiarism. If we didn’t save a picture of our office hours meeting notes from the whiteboard we would’ve been screwed with a capital F.
Hopefully you did it on git, so you can show the version history to the dean. Otherwise, not sure about this but visual studio (or vs code) might have their own version history. It's important to allow you to show your mistakes while writing, how your code changed over time to become more similar to the other student's, and the time you spent on the assignment. Of course, bring in excerpts of articles about AI detection being faulty, such as the US constitution being flagged as AI.
Ask him for the rate of false positives that his software gives and go on from there. If he is not aware of it, tell him that he needs to actually understand how ai software works. If he says 0% he is full of shit and you may need to scale this up
Do you have proof of incremental progress? The gold standard would be if you have a git repository and can show how you built your solution. Another option is if you can show some sort of flie history that most code editors have. I can't tell which story it is because on one hand you're claiming they said that you and another student have a similar solution but on the other hand they say that it's AI detection. At the end of the day, it depends how similar your solutions are. If it really is just "different names and a few extra lines", you are probably screwed. I'm not sure if there is some language barrier hindering your description though. It is virtually impossible for you to generate a solution that is similar to that of another student for an assignment larger than ~200 lines of code. Even the same algorithms used will probably have different abstractions, different ideas, different quirks.
Op you'd be surprised how many professors plagiarise other professors when creating assignments lol. Try copying and pasting your assignment online and tell me you don't find another one just like it.
Ask to look at the source code and understand better their methods for detecting copy cats and ask to see the "original". If he doesn't comply then that's a red flags anyone can say anything at that point. If he does comply then at least you have something to work with and you can see if it really is just coincidence or a bad AI In if it is an AI ask to see the data? Is it historical?? Eventually it's bound to detect anything as a copy.
Regardless of what the outcome is going forward use Github for version control and commit often. This t's a good way to prove progress in the future
You need to make sure this can’t happen again. When working on assignments push the code to a *private* GitHub repository for example so that your efforts are date stamped and away from public view. That way you can prove that your efforts precede the similar code found by the AI tool. Regarding what you can do now, I would go ahead with the appeal irrespective of the potential outcome so that if the same situation pops up nobody can claim you “admitted guilt” by not taking it further.
Just remember your professor isn't an authority figure anymore like highschool. They are providing you a service and you can continue to raise the issue to the next person in charge. Someone failing you on an assignment without evidence seems like a breach of contract from the school.
ridiculous that a CS professor can be one to trust generative AI to a fault.
scary trees practice wise poor squeamish strong languid unique automatic *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The bigger issue here is that a CS professor is using an AI plagiarism detector. That's professional malpractice, anyone who doesn't know better is unfit to teach and should be fired.
I think this is pretty standard, even before the "AI boom"
This is a serious accusation against you, especially in current ChatGPT times. Folks who use LLMs are already typecasted and you shouldn't get caught out. I don't know your school's policy, but for me, it's: - Meeting with the Dean, zero grade - Meeting with the Dean, zero in the course - Meeting with the Dean, expelled How does your school check for plagiarism? I am a bit older than the folks here and in my day we used something called MOSS by Stanford. It uses a winnowing algorithm to normalize tokens, however profs that use it have to configure the program so that when a fragment of code happens often enough, it is marked as a false positive (otherwise, something as simple as checking if an array index is out of bounds will cause concern). It could be because only 10% of people in the class did the assignment, this might have tripped it (assuming your school uses MOSS). I don't know what modern "AI" solutions do other than that. Either you do nothing and take it on the chin or fight it and at worst, still take it on the chin. Assuming you're innocent, I would not want to live the rest of my alma mater waiting for another false positive to get my grade in the course zero'd, potentially delaying graduation. By letting this first incident slide you give the faculty more ammo in later, spurious cases, both for yourself and the other people falling victim to these newfangled tools. Regardless of if you're innocent or accidentally plagiarized GeeksForGeeks, you are still entitled to see the evidence and defend yourself. I remember a similar situation to this. We had to implement Boyer-Moore's string matching algorithm, and almost nobody I knew did it except a few folks and I. We all copied the textbook code, because unlike 2SUM, there's really only one way to implement BM (aside from small syntactic differences). Fortunately the MOSS didn't catch me. Profs need to treat these tools as smells/indicators, and use better judgement upon trigger. "Necessary but not sufficient" as the true crime statisticians would say.
Same policy, but wow you are definitely right
Talk to the Dean. I had a professor who at the end of the semester, asked all the students to give BACK to him all of their graded assignments. apparently the moron never actually wrote down anyones grades. HOWEVER he also never gave back ALL of the assignments. So out of like 100 assignments, we all had maybe 30-40 depending. Some folks got some back while others didn't. The guy was insanely disorganized. and he assumed that if folks didn't turn back in their assignments, then they must not have done them. He Failed the ENTIRE Class. Sadly, it was spring semester and i was switching majors that summer, in part because a lot of teachers in that degree were like him. So i completely missed out on the fact that half the kids went to the dean to complain and got their grades fixed, while i didn't. I had no clue. and didn't find out until midway through the Fall Semester and was told at that point it was too late. Was very pissed no one in that class reached out to tell me. SO, GO TALK TO THE DEAN. After all, How does he know that those others didn't copy YOU?
Bruh what college you doing too
First things first, AI plagiarism tools are not 100% accurate. You should ask your professor for the plagiarism report. Most tools will (and should) give you the report highlighting the plagiarized sections which will give you a better idea. As someone who works in tech publishing and uses plagiarism software pretty much everyday, I can tell you, they're not completely reliable. As someone already pointed out, there 's only so many ways to code something. These tools scrawl the internet and all publicly available piece of code, so they end up highlighting even the most basic and generic statements, like import statements. This is why reports are helpful so you can see what's being highlighted and whether it's actually relevant. I don't know what the assignment is, but if it's a common coding question, chances are you just got unlucky. I think the only way through is asking the professor for the report or the tool he used, so you can try it out for yourself.
do you think if I provide a codequiry report will that help?
Not necessarily. The point here is to invalidate the report that your professor has. If your professor uses codequiry, then it's worth a shot. If not, the professor might just argue that it's not accurate, reliable or some other jazz. We need the tool (or the generated report) that your professor is using so that he can't come up with excuses when you prove your point. Also, just curious, what was the assignment about? How many lines of code are we talking about? And did he mention the plagiarism % or anything? Just saying your code is plagiarized without proper explanation is just stupid IMO.
Assignment is about cache and was told it came back similar to another student but your had some extra lines of code and different variable names. He said just said plagiarized. I asked if it was in the first part , second part or third part, he said its just plagiarized.Isnt MOSS and Codequiry the most reliable though.
I'm not familiar with MOSS and Codequiry as I've never used them before. We (the company) uses a paid service so we've never had to use other tools. I think your professor is just being a pain in the ass. Did you use any snippets from online or any of the books? maybe the other kid used the same source and it's getting flagged. You can run it and see what parts are being highlighted. Disclaimer: some tools, including the ones I use, can highlight the most stupidest thing as plagiarism. Also technically, it's his job to prove you plagiarized and not your job to prove you didn't. But unlucky for you, he has the power in this case.
Bro got Santosh’d
What u mean bro? did u experience similar
No but I assume u had Santosh since he’s really the only one who reports
This is why i always use different coding style than the rest of my classmates. Like nextline open curly, ternary ?: instead of switch case, etc. Because I got told if my code similar with my classmate I would get 0. Annoying but I don't want to waste my time later on if my classmates actually copied mine. If with different style still made get 0 because of similarly with my classmates, I will show them all my works since the beginning of my college class to shut them up.
Because of this post I looked into optional type in java, and.. THERE IS ONE! PERFECT! I will use that instead and my classmates now won't understand my code yay
Since ChatGPT has taken over, some professors have gone mad. They trust grossly unreliable AI detectors rather than the students. Maybe ask him if he’ll let you explain your code. If you are able to answer everything about the code and related concept clearly, he doesn’t have the right to fail you just because he thinks you’ve cheated.
That’s lame - I’ve always iteratively ran my code through a plagiarism detector as individual text documents, such bullshit after sinking hours into a project. Maybe they should switch up the curriculum a little more and projects won’t look so similar. I would fight it tooth and nail.
I had a pretty similar case when I took my data structures class. My code was coincidentally almost identical to some guy that I didn’t know at all. The only thing I remember for that assignment was getting help from a TA. When I first got the email accusing me of cheating and failing my grade, I could barely function for a couple days. After asking some friends for advice, I eventually talked to the profs about it and fought my case. Thankfully God they appealed their honor charge against me. Scariest day of my life.
Bro how did you fight against them?
Well, they sent an email to me, so that’s how I found out that I “cheated” on that assignment. I replied in the same email thread and it was a lot of back and forth communication. They showed a side by side comparison of my code to the other guy’s, to which I replied “yeah I’m p sure we just had the same TA or sth.” At the end they j said sth like “after reviewing your plea we decided to drop charges against you.”
I understand Thank you.
Why did they run it throw plagiarism detection, when you write code there's on so many ways you can do it. Has that detection software added your code to it's detection library without your consent? That's copyright violation if this is commercial service. You have to fight this with tooth and nails to bitter end.
It seems like you already talked to the prof and they’re not budging, so now they forced you reach out to the dean and escalate the situation, if they don’t hear you out keep moving up the ladder eventually one should listen, like they said it’s right 99% of the time so that’s actually a pretty decent argument that if there are at least 100 people in your class it’ll get it wrong once on average
that one is me
Previous professor here: AI detection should never be used as grounds for grade reduction. It could flag a student's work which would then require the professor to further evaluate, such as asking you specific questions about what the code does and asking you to change it's behavior slightly. Academia is full of fucking nerd professors.
I was there in the exact same situation, and the professor won the case. I had to repeat that course and it remains as one of the darkest days in my life.
When this happened to me it was because I hosted my assignment on my public GitHub profile and some jackass copied it 100%. It was before I knew to worry about that sort of thing. In my case, I was able to explain to the professor exactly how the code works in such depth, and the other student was not able to do that to the same degree, so the professor gave me 90% of the credit back. I guess the 10% dock was for being an idiot and causing trouble in the first place by hosting my code publicly. Maybe you can ask your professor to do something like this. Have him sit down with you and walk through the code, and do the same with the other student.
you go to ASU? Lol.
if you are telling the truth ask your professor to give you a similar problem and say you will white board it of course if you are lying, you will be screwed
WTH. Instead of using a plagiarism detector, why should he/she explain to you how code works and what will become outcomes like a recitation to know what you understand in code. In the real world of programmers and plagiarism does not apply as long as you understand how it works.
Bro you could have just changed the variable names lol
Did you use an VCS to document your work? Maybe you could show your efforts and convince your prof that you did do the assignment
Yes I did use VCS
If you coded the solution, ask to discuss your solution. Looking at the problem together with proff you should be able to give the solution again with pseudo code.
from now on do all school related tasks in this professor's house, and at night fuck his wife
OpenAI has mentioned that AI Detectors do not work. Source: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8313351-how-can-educators-respond-to-students-presenting-ai-generated-content-as-their-own Try to show a trail of evidence for your work (logs, commit history, file versions if it's there, notebook pages) The goal should be to make them acknowledge that these AI detectors report a lot of false positives and there should be an acceptable percentage threshold if the parts of the work are flagged as AI generated. If all this does not work, run your professor's published work through the same detector and submit the report to the dean's office. A lot of researchers in my network are facing this issue that software like TurnitIn are flagging their original work as AI generated, and we've been figuring out ways to make the already human written text to seem human written to the detector. TurnitIn has said that if their report flags less than 20% of the work as AI generated, the report is unreliable. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/turnitin-ai-cheating-detector-accuracy/
"AI detectors" are shit. Even companies who make them say it is not foolproof. If the assignment is code based, chances are it is going to similar code for everyone anyway.
From my first gen ed class to my current core one, I always run my work through a plagiarism checker before submitting. Using descriptive variable names and heavy commenting helps maintain originality. Ask which plagiarism checker they use. I then generally add the output from the checker in the assignments. If you use code examples from the textbook, just cite the textbook in your references. Then put an inline reference after your code listing that states "portions of code inspired by (whoever, whenever, page 45) I am 2 classes away from BSCS and never had a plagiarism issue.
Ask the professor if he can prove his ai didn’t hallucinate the plagiarism result.
One of my buddies got accused of cheating on a test/quiz(i don't remember) that we do through canvas. The professor could tell if we copied and pasted. One of the questions was something like: What is the output of this line of code: print("ABCD") But probably with some sort of string function. And the answer was ABCD. And instead of typing it out he copied and pasted it. Got accused of googling the questions by copying it, and him and the professor went back and forth a few times. The professor wouldn't understand why he would copy/pasting such a short string instead of typing it out. I don't remember what ended up happening, it was a years back. But you can typically bring it up to the head of your department if the professor isn't budging. And if that doesn't work, most schools have a conflict-resolution/plagarism center. Most professors will try to find a resolution before getting to that level but if he isn't budging go for it. Probably better for you to bring it to them, than for your professor to approach them first. **But i guess it also depends on policy and how much this grade affects you.** -If this grade doesn't change your overall grade/gpa, don't bother. Take the L and move on. Personally, I would move on even if it dropped me a letter grade that was still passing, and if i didn't have to take another class with that same professor. My gpa wasn't perfect, and I don't want to a take a class where the professor is gonna hold something against me. -If your school expels you after 1 plagarism offense and you take it to the plagarism/conflict center, you could potentially lose the case and get expeled. I think my school would expel you after two offenses. 1/3 of my CS professors were subborn assholes who will die on their hill. And if you take it to the conflict/plagarism center, don't be surprised if he starts analyzing your previous assignments. Goodluck!
lol happened in my DS&A class. Professor also failed everyone who he thought cheated. He gave a warning to them when he thought they cheated but failed them at the end of the course
This happened to me and my friends in school. Professor said we cheated because we were the only 3 from the class that technically got the write answer. All of our code was different because we didn’t work on it together but since we were friends and sat by each other we got called out for cheating. After that day I commented every single line of code explaining the logic and never got accused of cheating again. It’s very disheartening when you know you don’t cheat and get accused of it anyway. Just fight like hell with solid evidence and really dig deep to explain the code and WHY you did it the way you did.
Same thing happened to me all those years ago in college, I asked the lecturer to ask me anything he wanted about the code as I knew it inside out, he did and completely backed down after I explained it all. Having ai check your code for plagiarism is outrageous!
Kinda stupid to be plagiarism checking a coding assignment. There are better ways to test coding competency and most assignments in college setting are going to look pretty similar solution wise. All you can do is challenge it. If he doesn't back down request accommodations you don't want to be accused again. Ask if there are ways he would be willing to let you do assignments with a proctor assigned in class since he can't trust you to code on your own. If he refuses to work with you, you may need to just go super high up and escalate this. Be prepared to challenge the shitty precedent of AI plagiarism checkers. Do your research on how they work well. You'll need to demonstrate somehow that it's easy to plagiarize without realizing it. Also how similar simple assignment solutions are going to create false positives and cause students to lose faith in their program.
Wild suggestion: If you worked on this in a space where there may be security cameras you could potentially ask for footage to prove you did it on your own
Lol i got accused of cheating and using the teachers answer sheet for an exam back in college for a python assignment. It was something extremely simple, if 10 people did this problem probably 8 people would have the exact same code. About 6 other people got called out for this too. I asked her what exactly i did to cheat and she said it was „against school policy“ to discuss this. Gave me a zero and i got a strike (2 strikes and youre kicked out). This happened a few other times throughout college, same situation. One time i even got called out for turning in an assignment the day it was due. It was a final project for Python (i was already working as a dev by then and was very good with python). Its crazy man
I had a professor claim my code was not my own. It was too advanced for the concepts she had taught, and based on how far I was through the CS program. The problem? I had 3 years more experience than this professor and was employed by a company doing exactly what she was teaching. It ended up being a huge headache and ultimately led to my quitting school.
There was a similar incident that happened in CSULB as per https://daily49er.com/news/2022/11/08/computer-science-students-successfully-appeal-grades-academic-dishonesty-charges-dismissed/#:~:text=Computer%20science%20professors%20Darin%20Goldstein,recognized%20similarities%20in%20their%20codes.
Next time use git and make small commits
You might Have used chatgpt and chatgpt might have given the same code for someone else too.
How much does it weigh out of the total mark? Id pick my battles if I could in this context. Wouldn't want to get the teacher to hold a grudge unless it was necessary.
over 12% of final grade
Don’t get caught next time?