ATLANTA-A special software program designed by Georgia Tech professors to detect cheating in students’ homework assignments turned up 186 possible violators last fall, school officials said Tuesday. The students who were enrolled last fall in either “Introduction to Computing”or “Object Oriented Programming”will be investigated by the dean of students’ office, Tech spokesman Bob Harty said.
Students who were guilty of cheating could face expulsion but most likely will be given failing grades in the classes, Harty said.
The students were told before taking the class that cheating-detection software would be used, said Kurt Eislet, director of undergraduate education in the College of Computing.
The software developed around 1993 detected similarities in the students’ work in three computer coding homework assignments, Eislet said. He said it isn’t likely that innocent students’ work was detected by the program.
“Out of 30 people on a given assignment that were detected, it’s possible that a small number of them have legitimate explanations for why those things are so similar,”he said.
“But for the most part, the degree of similarity that this program is looking for the commas are in the same place, the semicolons are in the same place, the spacing is the same, they’ve made the same mistakes the only explanation, and what most students will eventually concede, is they actually did it.”
“Introduction to Computing” is a core class for all students, while the second class is required for all computer science students, Harty said. Almost 1,700 students were enrolled in the two courses in the fall.