[Johnbot]

An example of a Mossad generated file would be the source file plus a bunch of dead code. The dead code consists of lines from the original file repeated in random locations (plus, if you are using an "entropy file", random lines of code that were successful mutations from previous generations of Mossad).

As it turns out, a lot of student code can look this way anyway. Something crazy like 70% of authentic student code can have dead code in assignment submissions.

[teruakohatu]

> As it turns out, a lot of student code can look this way anyway. Something crazy like 70% of authentic student code can have dead code in assignment submissions.

Having assessed student code this does not surprise me. Source code control late at night for students, especially non-CS majors, tends to be variations of "append a number to the end of the function name" eg. sum1(x, y) sum2(x, y) ... sumTHISREALLYWORKS(x, y).

That said, if dead code was being used to hide plagiarism, which is something I had not considered before, then telling students they would be marked down for dead code would probably be enough to stop it.

[withinboredom]

I mean. Should be doing that anyway. Code doesn’t just exist for the computer, but also for humans who have to maintain it.

[digging]

I'm surprised that large amounts of dead code is neither an obvious-to-machines nor an obvious-to-humans problem or demerit with submitted assignments -- regardless of plagiarism status. I'd especially have thought such a clunky approach should be caught be a decent plagiarism detection software. It makes me wonder if simply feeding a student's assignment into Claude would be more reliable these days by just asking it, "If you remove all the dead code, is the remaining code likely plagiarized?"

[diggan]

How would that pass in the user study? Did the people reviewing the code fail to see dead code scattered across random locations? Feels like it would be obvious as soon as you opened the file.

[michaelmior]

It would certainly depend to some degree on the complexity of the assignment. But it's also not that unusual for legitimate, non-plagiarized submissions to have dead code.